Sunday Times Clue Writing Competition 2032: Stir Fry

Good advice

Hedley Russell, Mersham, Kent
Food provided by juvenile offenders?
This clue tells a different story about potentially unexpected cooks. It’s a double meaning, with “stir fry” being interpreted as “locked up children.” I quite often mention phrases in clues that you have to break down and find a meaning for each word. This clue probably presents you with the opposite challenge, as you may spend quite a while looking for short synonyms for “young” and “delinquent.”

Anthony Nannini, Raunds, Northamptonshire
Can whitefish make a quick meal?
The other fallacy in this clue is the assumption that the meal we’re after contains fish. While there are fish stir-fries, heartier meats seem to be more common when meat is involved. Whitebait, at least in its most common meaning, is not a specific species of fish, but “the (cooked) juveniles of herrings, sprats, etc.” Thus, catching a whitebait is as likely as seeing a fir tree, and “whitebait” is an appropriate definition, with “fry” not needing to be just a species of fish. We have to count “can” and “whitebait” as separate things to justify “gets” rather than “get,” which is more on the “permissible than ideal” side.

Richard Warren, Coventry
Before the end on the electric chair, it is your last cooked meal
This clue has a grim content, probably grimmer than I really want to print, but as a tricky cryptic clue it works very well. The grim part is the meaning of “fry” to “die by execution in the electric chair,” with “fry” following an anagram of (it’s ~R). The superficial reading suggests the idea of ​​a death row inmate eating a hearty breakfast, or apparently in an American prison choosing his final dish.

Graham Wild, Brighton
Cook strikes first, the limit is four times over
One of the oldest ideas in crosswords seems to be that for every answer you can write a clue about cricket, or at least that in a competition like this someone will try to do so. That’s understandable, considering how many cricket terms have other meanings, and how many famous players have useful names. Besides Alastair Cook, people with names like Butcher, Cork, Key, Onions, Tudor and Stokes have played Test matches for England since 1990. In this clue we also have “bats” as an anagram indicator and “over” as a reversal indicator – after an anagram of “first”, the endings of “boundary” and “four” are reversed. The definition is the first use of “stir-fry” as a verb in this report.

Elizabeth Manning, Malvern, Worcestershire
First cook bananas, add some rum and finally honey
After another use of the verbal version of “stir-fry,” a very different surface story begins with another anagram indicator for “first,” adding R~ and ~Y as individual letters.

Ross Harrison, Dechmont, West Lothian
Cooking without much effort, without having to buy expensive accessories before cooking
The definition in this clue is a noun – cooking means “cooked food” as in “authentic Italian cooking”. After the linking word “that is”, STIR is indicated by “fuss”, followed by “free, requires no expensive equipment”, indicating FR(ee) which comes before Y = “you start” as the beginning of “you”. This clue takes advantage of my willingness to accept a hyphen as a separator between words like a space, which is as close as I’m comfortable with having something like “in fact” interpreted as “in fact”. Since woks are relatively inexpensive appliances and stir-frying is a fairly simple process, the entire clue is an extended definition, thus a “semi-&lit”.

Keith Campbell, Collingtree, Northants
Prison chef cooks delicious dish!
Terry Neale, Orton, Cumbria
Prison chef serves fast food
These clues are probably not very difficult, but using “cook” as both a verb and a noun invites a certain amount of deception, and combining “prison cook” with a definition that points directly to “food” produces a convincing superficial reading on a plate.

Some comments on other notes

Will little Molly get something to eat?
A molly is a freshwater fish, so “young molly” can, with acceptable miscapitalization, mean a person rather than a fish in the superficial reading. Fish is a plural noun, so “molly” must mean more than one fish. Since a whole range of fish have invariant plurals, this seems to be OK, but in this case both of our reference dictionaries say “plural ‘mollies'”, and I can’t imagine that “fry” means the same as “tiddler” – I can’t remember ever seeing “a fry” for this type of fry.

Porridge from Quaker for a quick warm meal
This clue tells the story of a food brand—the product commonly called “Quaker Oats” comes in a packet with the single word “Quaker,” and both the stir-fry and the porridge are hot, or at least warm, meals. But “porridge” doesn’t mean “prison”—it means “time served in prison.” In this pun, “Quaker” refers to Joseph Storrs Fry, the founder of a former chocolate company who was a Quaker. (So were the founders of Cadbury and Rowntree.) In principle, “Quaker” could refer to many surnames, but “famous example” justifies “actor,” which suggests “tree,” and “novel” can still indicate “you.” And the fact that prison reformer Elizabeth Fry was also a Quaker may be known to some people without them having to look it up.

Hard first year as a prison cook
This clue uses an anagram similar to some other clues, with “year” converted to “yr.” The rest of the clue points to STIR and FRY as separate words, so the clue has no definition.

After a mix-up during the race, he came first in the season finale
The definition in this clue is “a mix-up in the heat.” A stir-fry is a mix-up in the sense of a “combination of things,” and I’m happy with “in the heat” as a helpful description that fits an intended superficial reading. I fear too much of the rest of the superficial reading is achieved in ways I would not allow. A significant one is the use of “after,” based on (in the entrant’s words) its meanings “in the pursuit of” and “in the manner of.” I fail to see the pun being in the pursuit of or in the manner of the definition. The pun is an anagram of “first, R” followed by Y, which stretches “final” too far—a season finale is not the last part of a season, but the last of a series of seasons. And the word “in” doesn’t indicate any part of the pun, and since “in” can mean several different things in cryptic clues, it seems much more unfair to have it as a meaningless extra word than the strictly unnecessary “gets.”

Clue Writing Contest 2035 Referee

You are invited to write an original cryptic clue for the word above in our cryptic crossword style. Email your entry to [email protected]. The competition closes on Monday 2 September and the best entry will win a £25 Waterstones voucher.

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