Die and 10 million dollars of damage is caused as a result of deep-frying a turkey. This appears to be a festive tradition among bearded flag-draped men with hunting knives and baggy shorts, men for whom freedom’s just another word for caramelising your own arteries and shouting a lot on YouTube.
But freedom comes at a cost. Each deep-fried turkey takes seven gallons of superheated fat. A special chain is required to lower it into its hell-cauldron. Moisture is the key issue: a pocket of concealed water inside the turkey can cause it to explode into a roiling spume of flames and fat.All things considered it would probably be more sensible to cook these turkeys in the oven, to play it straight. But then, you don’t get a special chain. You don’t get seven gallons of oil, or great melting mouthfuls of face-scalding fat-soaked bird, so tangy and moist and crispy-skinned you’re already salivating over it now.
Bad ideas that look delicious. Delicious ideas that are – despite being delicious – also clearly very bad. Ideas that end up with everyone catching salmonella, the house on fire and England 86 for eight on a nibbly green seamer. There was a note of this in the first sight of England’s squad for the Lord’s Test against Pakistan next week; with specific reference to the gripping, oddly decadent selection of Jos Buttler as a specialist No 7 batsman, given licence to wander out, sniff the air and basically make the game up in front of him.
There is a degree of natural resistance to this, a sense that to pick Buttler is to devalue decisively the proving grounds of county cricket. Buttler averages 17 in four red‑ball games over the past year. His selection is at odds with all we have heard about the informed methods of Ed Smith, out there crunching his data curves, occasionally emitting a clank of excitement over some outstanding first-innings metrics from the strangely overlooked Cakebread-Thomas of Derbyshire seconds.
Instead we have this. Faced with an ailing team and a general anxiety about how to make all forms of cricket more instantly comestible the selectors have reached for the most more-ish option; have decided, basically, to just give up and deep-fry the turkey.And yet it is undeniably the right thing to do. Not playing Buttler when you have the chance to play Buttler: that really would be weird. “He hasn’t been picked because of the IPL,” Smith said this week. But he clearly has. Buttler has been picked, in part, because he is famous, because right now he is among the top three hottest, most luminously attractive cricketers in the current edition of the sixth biggest sporting league in the world.
This is simply the truth and everyone involved should embrace it, because it’s both entirely sensible and entirely consistent with the England and Wales Cricket Board’s more gimmicky attempts to popularise the game. If we’re willing to junk the basic robustness of the sport via the Hundred, to introduce the new colts cricket rules trailed this week – ditch the lbw law, double-run maxi zones in the field – then it looks like old-school good sense to pick the most pop-famous cricketer in the country as often as possible.
The fact is Buttler stands outside the normal rules and numbers. This has been said before about other cricketers. But in this case it’s actually true. He was a ludicrous spectacle in the IPL this year, driving and cuffing and gliding his way to 389 runs off 258 balls at an average of 97, with that familiar, beautifully delicate kind of violence in those whip-crack wrists.