Tags: books, celebrities, lists, top 10
October 10, 2008 | lists
As we noted in Part I of The Top 10 Least Appetizing Cookbooks Money Can Buy, nobody it seems, has the time to cook anymore. Yet somehow, cooking shows have seen a surge in popularity and have spread across the expanding cable universe like a grease inferno at a fireworks factory cook-off.
This undermines the claim by some that they cannot find time in their hectic lives to prepare meals for themselves, not to mention a few spare minutes to actually sit through one of those deadening phone surveys to say as much (and then voluntarily sounding off about their Tri-athlete prowess in the boudoir)
If aliens based their impressions of humanity solely on our viewing habits, they’d think mankind was populated by stay-at-home gourmands who’d make Gordon Ramsay look like a short-order cook at Maury’s Messy House of Meat. [Editor's note, for those of you moved to culinary space exploration by the Dining with the Stars tome, stay tuned for the Top 5 of this list]
Luckily for the tanking publishing business, there are people who actually do find the time to prepare meals, to offset that more common, grim reality: couples sitting on a couch with a microwavable Kung Pao chicken testing government suggestions on just how long food can be safely stored left in a greasy box in the fridge.
Whether they’re purchased as last-ditch attempts to impress the in-laws or as the first step in a diet that was abandoned in a Dairy Queen parking lot, the consumer appetite for fancy or celebrity-penned cookbooks remains far from sated, even if a common outcome is a lamb shank that has to be rolled in a blanket and stomped out.
Average Joes and Janes soon come to appreciate that the only thing they might have in common with a reality TV chef is a foul mouth and a fondness for the cooking sherry.
These days it seems that just like children’s books, anyone with a keyboard, a finger on each hand (or a sufficiently pointy nose), spousal income and a dream is penning a cookbook, and certain volumes, possibly because of afternoon naps taken during editorial meetings, have graced the market that have absolutely no business being there.
So on that note, kick back, neutralize that stomach acidity, grab that asbestos-lined Kiss the Cook apron, hit mute on that gabby person on the Food Network and check out Part II of our Top 10 Least Appetizing Cookbooks Money Can Buy, none of which will be reviewed in the pages of Fine Cooking Magazine any time soon!
5) Fanboy Cooking — Star Trek Cookbook, Wookie Cookies: a Star Wars Cookbook, Regional Cooking from Middle Earth: Recipes of the Third Age etc.: These works of varying artistic quality share certain commonalities. They all include otherworldly themes, unearthly locales and phantasmagorical characters, but what they really have in common, at least as far as the recipes are concerned: is a “serves one” portion size, as articulating any interest whatsoever in the above is akin to nose-hair curling BO when it comes to attracting a significant other (or at least a significant other who is not the mother the monthly rent check is made out to). They are for fanboys, a breed best exemplified by The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy character, and people so far into the alternate reality provided by these franchises that they show an interest in exactly how an elf would season a plate of ribs.
It’s well known that knowledge of kitchen topography beyond a direct arc to the fridge door to swill milk from the carton is a sure-fire way to impress the fairer sex. However, any apron-clad battle of the sexes advantage that might be accrued is unfortunately, completely neutralized by name-dropping a Romulan, Orc or a Wookie in casual conversation. 
Regional Cooking from Middle Earth has an Amazon product description that is, well, of Tolkien length. It offers gems like “Mince meat pie is nicknamed for the Balrog because that’s probably what would go through your mind that you might become if you ran into him in the Mines of Moria” — references which if made in a bar, would have your interlocutor reaching for the mace in her purse.
In The Star Trek Cookbook, the question “Is there one food that humans, Klingons, Bajorans, and Vulcans would like?” is posed. If your eyelids droop at that question, welcome to the majority of the world, if not, you likely own this book, are speaking from the Klingon dictionary and are barbecuing outdoors wearing Captain Kirk’s new summer line.
4) Spam: The Cookbook Schopenhauer, the thinker, not the guy who might have tended goal for Germany in the last World Cup, once remarked, “If pigeons flew around already roasted, people would die of boredom or else hang themselves”, a remark that has yet to be adopted as the official slogan for the Food Network. While there is much joy inherent in having produced something yourself, even if it is roasting a pigeon, (a beast those of us who live in high rise apartment buildings were sad to see fall out of favor as an entrée), we’re fairly certain no good can come out of preparing any sort of repast using spam, or canned ham.
To the uninitiated, i.e., those of you who have not contributed to dotting landfills with what in 2002 amounted to 6 billion cans sold, the stuff is processed pork and so widespread, pun definitely intended, that it is even sold in a halal version permissible under Islamic law. The law it does violate though, is one of good taste and its presence here, ranked higher than both testicles and Wonderbread testifies to that.
Just Missed the Cut: Marmite: The Cookbook. Marmite, a British spread that resembles hot asphalt except that it doesn’t smell as good, has thankfully yet to find a home in cupboards on these shores—even cockroaches are put off by the stuff (Its Aussie cousin, Vegemite, has, to the best of our knowledge, yet to disgrace a cookbook and Shark Guy Chris Lombardo is currently rejecting offers to translate the Nutella Cookbook from Italian into English). According to the description, The Marmite Cookbook is chalk full of “Hilarious Marmite-related anecdotes”, which ranks somewhere slightly above “Droll orphanage fire wordplay.”
3) The What Would Jesus Eat Cookbook: A bizarre mixture of religious pandering (the S’s in Jesus’s name translate nicely into dollar signs as those who have found the right mix of piety and profit know) and the strangely popular theory that we somehow ate better 2,000 years ago when food preparation techniques consisted of some guy with lice wiping off a piece of fish on his filthy robe and handing it to you.
The book is a proponent of the belief that with heavily processed food not resembling anything remotely like food (see various items on this very list), that we would all be much better off eating the way people did in simpler, more plague-y times. While the idea that people should up the veggies and decrease the spam in their diets is generally accepted among those who can fit through their front doors, even the most devout Christians would likely balk at the diet actually observed in New Testament times, one that was equal parts starvation, intestinal parasites, and a grave before your 25th birthday.
To make up for this fatal flaw in his book’s premise, the author instead cherry-picks from all times of foods that have more to do with modern Mediterranean cuisine than anything that was likely to have been passed around at the last supper. A more interesting premise would have been, “What would you eat if you were Jesus?” We’re not sure but we’d definitely be making hay with that water-into-wine bit.
2) Cooking with a Serial Killer: Recipes From Dorothea Puente: Dorothea Puente rented out rooms – both in a boarding house and in a home she owned – throughout the 1960s through to the 1980s. She was known to keep a clean house, buy the good stuff when it came to the toilet paper, and above all she was a tremendous cook. According to the product description of her book, one of her former tenants said that “Every meal she made was like a Thanksgiving dinner,” and much like after a Thanksgiving dinner, some of her tenants would fall asleep once the meal was complete. But these were not cranberry-debauched holiday slumbers; they were the kind from which you never wake up, i.e. death. Dorothea poisoned – or is alleged to have poisoned – at least nine people, and those are mostly just the ones dug up from her front yard.
While in prison, Dorothea began corresponding with an, ahem, journalist, telling him her life story and sending him her favorite recipes – sans poison we believe. The results were compiled in a collection that could only be surpassed if the Jeffrey Dahmer estate releases a posthumous tome containing his thoughts on proper refrigeration techniques.
1) Depression Era Recipes: Need a little something to nosh on while you watch the financial markets collapse? Well prepare to lick your chops as the author takes you back to the culinary highlights of an era when everything did turn to shit.
Who could this book appeal to? Those in the post-average life expectancy demographic perhaps, though they are unlikely to hold fond memories of times when the pet rabbit went into the supper pot – and they would certainly know the value of a dollar too well to sink 20 of them into the purchase of this book.
Choice Recipes: Not surprisingly, the recipes in this one are pretty basic – pickled fish, meatballs, government gruel (well, we’re not sure about that one but the other two were mentioned in reviews of the book) etc. The author decided not go with thematically named dishes such as Boxcar Rapist Ron’s Oil-Drum Top Surprise, and “That which is handed to you by a scraggly looking man with the fingers cut out of his gloves.”
An Amazon reviewer writes: “Many of the recipes don’t look appealing but it contains a lot of interesting facts about lifestyles in the 30s.” So, don’t look to this for recommendations on things to eat, but if you want to relive the highlights of one of the darkest periods in modern history, then this is the book for you. A new edition featuring “Sub-prime mortgage cheese melt,” and “Ben Bernake Baba Ganoush” may soon be in the offing.
Just Missed the Cut: Last Dinner on the Titanic: Menus and Recipes from the Great Liner: Another book turning the page back to misery and asking the question: “But, like, were they eating anything good?” From its pages: “On the evening of April 14, 1912, few of the diners in the Titanic a la carte restaurant noticed that the vibrations of the ship’s engines had noticeably increased over the last few hours.”…Since the definitive ‘Light Snack Hors d’œuvres Aboard the Hindenburg’ has yet to be penned, you can go down with your own ship if your cooking doesn’t pass muster [Best avoided if you’ve hired a band for your party].
CLICK HERE TO RETURN TO PART ONE OF THE LEAST APPETIZING COOKBOOKS MONEY CAN BUY!
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Sadly missing from this list is the WWF Cookbook where wrestling fans could literally smell what the Rock is cookin’.
What’s even worse is I own a copy of that book – and I know someone else who does too. Creepy.
I think we both know who owns that one! Unfortunately, the WWE Cookbook, along with Cooking with Cher, Cooking for Cats and the I Can’t Chew cookbooks JUST missed the cut…
These really are the worst cookbooks ever…