Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 5, 1993 TAG: 9305050197
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOHN LEHNDORFF KNIGHT-RIDDER TRIBUNE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
From The Worst Cookbook in America.
Each year thousands of books about food get published, from charming regional American cookbooks to revealing international tomes to practical, low-fat, quick, easy guides to microwave living.
Ever since I started cooking, I've loved perusing volumes on food. It's not that I need the recipes, since I don't often cook using them. I devour cookbooks to find out what makes people tick. That's why the cookbooks I cherish most are the weird, funny volumes that slip by the guardians of good taste.
Luckily, in the past year a veritable plethora of good "bad" food books have made their appearance.
Some might view the recent publication of books such as "Critter Cuisine," "The Surreal Gourmet," "Fit for a King" and "The Worst Cookbook in America" as decisive evidence of the decline of American culture.
I prefer to see it as evidence that food is funny, that eating is intrinsically silly and that our life in the kitchen is captivating and encompasses everything that is magnificent and ludicrous about being human.
If there's one room in our homes that needs a little levity, it's the kitchen. Kitchens used to be fun places. Now, every cookbook is so gosh-darn serious about nutrition, weight control and using culinarily correct ingredients that it gives me a tummy ache.
If nothing else, the following odd, silly, inventive and sometimes unintentionally goofy cookbooks pierce our gustatory pretensions.
When good cooks go bad
The ephemeral quality of taste is never more evident than in "The Worst Cookbook in America," by Mike D. Nelson (Neworld Communications, $9.95).
Imagine your family's surprise if you served Pig's Ear Salad, Wiener Water Soup, Lung Stew, Squid Balls Diablo, Peanut Butter & Jelly Swordfish Timbale, Hamburger Jell-O, Czechoslovakian Brain Pancakes or Fruit Bat in Coconut Milk.
The recipes in "The Worst Cookbook" are scarily real. The book exposes the suppressed fact that there are a lot of folks in this great country of ours who are exceptionally bad cooks, and that on any given day, any of us can whip up something absolutely revolting.
"I'm a bad cook and I admit it freely," writes Nelson, who collected the recipes from all over the nation.
Especially delectable is the Bad Casseroles chapter. The author notes:
"Every Friday it was the same thing: tuna and pea casserole with soggy potato chips on top. I learned to hate Fridays."
"The Worst Cookbook" continues a bad cookbook subgenre that includes the classic "Really Rotten Recipes," by Norma Ewalt, which includes real, published recipes for such classics as Jellied Stuffed Prunes and Frankfurter Pancakes.
Besides a fine foreword, the spiral-bound, 93-page book includes an index, a quiz to determine how bad a cook you are and an entry form for readers to submit their worst recipes for inclusion in the next volume.
This book provides clear proof that when the cooking gets strange, the strange write cookbooks.
A surreal dinner
Art, cooking and music cross paths in a thoroughly miraculous manner in "The Surreal Gourmet: Real Food for Pretend Chefs" (Chronicle Books, $14.95), by Bob Blumer.
The easy-to-use recipes for such yummy dishes as Cream of Carrot Soup and Banana French Toast in this entertaining and unorthodox volume are accompanied by Blumer's wonderful, surrealistic paintings and cool photos. Magritte-inspired carrots float in the sky, an ear of corn replaces the grill on a car, and bananas pop out of a toaster.
Blumer is an artist and manager for the eclectic new wave singer-songwriter Jane Siberry, and recognizes in this entertaining book the critical relationship between food and music. Besides offering recommendations on wines, garnishes and alternative ingredients, each recipe suggests appropriate cooking/eating music.
Los Lobos' excellent "La Pistola y el Corazon" is a natural while making guacamole, for Chez Bob's Caesar Salad it's Leonard Cohen's "I'm Your Man," and for Chicken Kiev it's the irresistible harmonies of the Bulgarian State Female Vocal Choir.
As Blumer says: "Food isn't only what it is, it's what you make it."
Tadpole Consomme
I love watching people's faces as they thumb through "Critter Cuisine" (Longstreet Press, S15.95). At first, folks chuckle because they think it's a joke. Soon, though, they gasp as they realize that yes, that really is a dead armadillo filled with guacamole in that photo. And those really are mice on that kebob, and bats on that festive burger.
It's confusing because the chicken heads, worms, frogs, snakes, lizards, beetles, opossum, lizards and armadillo are so beautifully presented and photographed by Al and Mary Ann Clayton of Atlanta.
One day a few years back, the couple (he's a photographer, she a noted food stylist) got a little punchy from primping pretentious produce.
The result is this bizarre collection of recipes that impeccably parody those terribly serious, glamorous color-coordinated coffee-table food books the Claytons are famous for.
I like "Critter Cuisine" because it's an ideal, stomach-churning, litmus test about our food prejudices. Who are we to disdain worm and tadpole delicacies in other cultures while claiming to relish escargots and frogs' legs?
By the way, the Claytons note they used only critters who arrived at their doorstep in a deceased condition.
"Critter Cuisine" does include recipes for such regional favorites as Beak and Claw Surprise, Great Balls of Fire, Tadpole Consomme and Snake and Eggs in the Grass.
Some books are meant to be looked at - not cooked from.
Eating like Elvis
The stamp is nice, but if you really want to reincarnate Elvis, you need to eat like him. Just try some of the recipes in "Fit for a King: the Elvis Presley Cookbook" (Rutledge Hill Press, S12.95), by Elizabeth McKeon, Ralph Gevirtz and Julie Bandy.
The maelstrom of kitsch, class, talent and profoundly bad American taste that swirled around Presley in life and death fills the pages of this quintessentially American cookbook. "Fit for a King" collects recipes for Elvis' favorites, or dishes were popular at Graceland, or that his longtime cook, Alvena Roy, collected.
Scattered throughout are pictures of Elvis with his co-stars, family, friends, fans and girlfriends, and a list of what always had to be on hand in the Graceland pantry. Most fascinating are the references to Elvis' eating habits: what he ate on dates, what his grandmother cooked for him and such.
At Christmas dinner gatherings he "served the traditional turkey with stuffing, but for himself, Elvis preferred ham salad, potato salad, meat loaf and monkey bead." And we learn that when the Beatles visited Graceland, Elvis served broiled chicken livers, deviled eggs, and sweet and sour meatballs.
by CNB