Inquisitor 1436: My Diet by Gila

13 comments on “Inquisitor 1436: My Diet by Gila”

1. Got most of this one, save for DARNEL, which I figured was the answer but could not parse because I kept thinking TART was supposed to be deleted from the clue. I knew a tansy was a flower but was not aware of its pastry meaning. (And “ans”, the remainder after deleting “tart” is in Collins, as “something that may have happened but did not”. So that didn’t help.) Then I scoured the grid looking for some hidden message, but of course could not find one. NOCAKE? Really?

   Anyway, an example of a sentence that can interchange “that” with “how” is something along the lines of “I told him how I once ran a marathon.”/”I told him that I once ran a marathon.” It’s a bit of a stretch, but it works for me.

   Thanks Gila and HolyGhost!

2. I got everything other than the two words to go under grid. I too was considering either GLUTEN FREE, WHEAT FREE or even MAIZE FLOUR, but then had one big problem with all of them … PONE in 16d is deemed to be a forbidden item in Gila’s diet … BUT Chambers defines pone as bread or cake made from MAIZE FLOUR, with etym. Algonquian. If that is correct, why should PONE be unacceptable for Gila ?

   Would not NOCAKE, as the utra-arcane basis of the “dietary modification”, qualify PONE as an ideal comestible for him ?

   Brilliant, though, HG, for getting NOCAKE/NO CAKE … I wonder how many others were similarly “apprised” ?

   When ultimately frustrated by a puzzle, I am often inclined to snort and call it unsatisfactory, until I see the solution notes. In this case, I still regard it as an unsatisfactory puzzle because of the PONE dilemma.

3. Definitely on the trickier side. I had a full grid in the end, but failed on the final step, with an optimistic stab at GLUTEN FREE instead. Doh. Thanks though for an enjoyable puzzle.

4. @MurrayGlover

   I think you need to reread the preamble. Gila’s diet is ‘nocake’, not ‘no cake’. It’s the clues that have to avoid cake, not him. I really didn’t see any inconsistency.

   I thought this was at the easier end of the scale and actually very enjoyable with a lovely if not jaw dropping PDM

5. Like bingybing, I found this easier (no, less hard) than most of the recent puzzles. Perhaps nocake and Algonquian parched maize were, in all honesty, too obscure, but surely worth it for the lovely puzzle they allowed. I was working on ‘drop cakes’ for quite a while, but did eventually do the research to find nokakes and hence, after far too long, ‘no cakes’.

   I think my one remaining question was with 5D – I couldn’t find anywhere that listed B as an abbreviation for bastard, and had BA instead, as a ‘bastard being’ (the Egyptian god/being, having the head of human on the body of a bird), but this left me with too many As.

6. I did pretty well with this, and solved all but a handful of clues, though struggling to parse some of them fully. I now realise that it was the clues that needs to be modified rather than the answers and all becomes clear!
   Note to self “Read the preamble properly”!

7. Sorry, should be “needed” not “needs”.

8. #4 With due deference, bingybing, I have reread the preamble … you are right in that it is the CLUES that require modification, but the key words are “appropriate” and “dietary”. A maize product being removed from the clue is surely not appropriate, when maize is given as the key dietary ingredient?

   If I had been setting the puzzle, I might have started with a short list of “cakes” in Bradford … all the ones selected, except ROLL and DAMPER, are in my edition … and I might well have assumed that PONE was just another cake … but had I realised it was made from maize , I would have dropped it like a hot potato, and tried to fit in an ECCLES, SPONGE or ANGEL.

   You will of course argue that PONE is appropriate for NO CAKE … but if that was really the intention, then it would have been less ambiguous to have dropped “dietary” in the preamble to read merely “… remaining clues require a modification, a 2-word description of which should be written below the grid.”

   I am now Googling to see if I can find a recipe for SOUR GRAPE cake. Ho Hum !

9. Steve B. @1: your “how”/”that” example will do nicely. Thank you.

   OPatrick @5: I found “b” for “bastard” in my Chambers app which is based on the 13th edition.

   And I assumed that PONE had to excluded simply because it is a sort of cake (regardless of its actual ingredients).

10. Hi all,

    Many thanks for the comments so far.

    I can see that I’ve caused some confusion!

    It may (or may not) help to know that the cake removal idea was never originally conceived around it being a dietary restriction, but rather around the expression ‘take the cake’, which I noted has one potential origin in a play by Aristophanes. I could never make that idea work though (the link to Aristophanes is pretty scarce, even online), but one grid-fill that I got during that aborted process happened to have NOCAKE in, so I thought it worth persevering with the diet idea when I eventually came back to it (4 years later!) Yes, it’s an obscure word, but it’s ultimately just a conceit to provide an instruction; pretty standard thematic, erm, fare, I’d say.

    I can see both sides of the argument above. In my defence, all of the words used in the thematic clues are food products and have the word ‘cake’ in the Chambers definition. Using words like ANGEL or ECCLES would, to my mind at least, not be allowed as they are prefixes for -CAKE. In Chambers, you won’t find any reference to cake in the standalone entry for ANGEL for example, so by removing that word from a clue, I’d argue you wouldn’t strictly be removing a cake.

    I think bingybing’s point is valid. I’m eating NOCAKE and it’s the clues that are not allowed cake, not me. Murray Glover is equally right though. The use of PONE is potentially confusing as it has maize in the definition. Removing ‘dietary’ from the preamble would have probably made sense. Sorry for the confusion there.

    So, I’m sure by now you can guess that, no, I’m not gluten (or anything else) free/intolerant, and the idea that solvers might go down the route of thinking about the constituent ingredients of cakes and possible associated intolerances never crossed my mind. I wish the puzzle had been as clever as all that!

    Til the next time, thanks again for the comments and feedback, it’s much appreciated

    Ali/Gila

11. HG, thanks – it’s not in my 12th edition print version – I wonder what happened in the intervening years to make bastard more notable?!

12. I too found this at the less tricky end of the spectrum, and very enjoyable. Plus, it was one of those where, finally, every clue made sense (not always the case for me).

    Having solved, and with intention to submit, I must admit I wasn’t too worried about the final two words, lazily assuming them to be gluten-free. Googling Algonquian didn’t seem to help.

    Thanks to Gila and HolyGhost.

13. Almost filled the grid but failed to parse a couple of the answers and didn’t get NOCAKE. ALGONQUIAN PARCHED MAIZE would never have crossed my mind as a sensible phrase, so I’m not too sore about missing that.

    Thanks HG and Gila.

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