I spend a lot of time reading cookbooks. I've amassed a good-sized collection, of them, too. Way too many to actually cook even a tiny percentage of the recipes from them.
In general, my favorite cookbooks aren't pretty coffee-table type tomes. No, they're either extremely well-written, with a high text-to-recipe ratio, (think M.F.K. Fisher) or they're historical (James Beard American Cooking; The White House Cookbook; The Picayune Creole Cookbook) or funny (Plain Jane's Thrill of Very Fattening Foods Cookbook and the works of Peg Bracken.) I also adore community cookbooks, like the ones published by various Junior Leagues. And I love the really really old and weird ones, like The Modern Priscilla Cookbook, circa 1920 something.
Basically, my outlook is the weirder and more disgusting the food sounds, the better. My favorite cookbooks are full of recipes that are either way too unhealthy or way too full of disgusting processed-food ingredients for me to actually cook them. I'm a sucker for recipes that use canned soup, Jello, Cool-Whip, Velveeta and/or Ro-Tel tomatoes.
The thing is, although I love the idea of these recipes, I'd have to be insane to actually cook and eat this kind of crap. So mostly I sit around at breakfast and lunch (two meals which through the grace of God I usually get to eat alone) eating my healthy, South Beach Diet meals while reading cookbooks, mainly about regional American, non-foodie type food. (Recipes featuring liberal amounts of bacon grease are big favorites at the moment.)
Over many solitary lunches I've found myself zeroing in on the most disgusting recipes I can find. "This is it!" I'll think to myself--"the most disgusting concoction I've ever heard of!" But then the next day I'll find one just as horrifying.
I couldn't bear to be the only one to get a huge vicarious thrill over what dumb, probably mostly dead people used to eat. So I thought I'd start a blog in order to introduce these appalling recipes to a deserving audience. Naturally, I'm going to spare you what these recipes actually taste like. I have no intention of turning this blog into a recipe review. I don't want to know. And neither do you. Don't even bother emailing to ask.
So anyway, this blog will be about recipes I'll probably never cook, and the many reasons why I wouldn't want to.
--P.
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4 comments:
Here's a bad one for you. My grandmother's most infamous dish was (drum roll here) TUNA TAPIOCA.
I was reading a church supper cookbook last night and came across a recipe for Corned Beef Salad Mold, featuring canned corned beef, lemon jello, onions, peppers, and Miracle Whip.
I can't help but think that tomatoe soup of 1924 can hadly compare to the tomatoe soup of today, especially Campbell's. Back then I bet the soup made some great tasting spaghetti sauce!
I sincerely suggest that you take a long hard look at Icelandic and Norwegian cuisine. From what I am aware, no cuisine is quite so existentially revolting as these two.
I mean, who eats a washed up shark carcass that has been peed on by a household and buried in a tarp for 3 months ?
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