Book Review: The Gallery of Regrettable Food
Tanya A. Brown

"Boy, I'm going to fix you something GOOD!"

These words, accompanied by a coy oily smile on the part of my grandmother, invariably spelled trouble during my father's childhood. Grandma had been at the women's magazines again. Dinner would be a writhing horror concocted from an article entitled "Organ Meats: Surprisingly Edible", greatly resembling a prop from a mid-century B movie. In the absence of a family dog, there was nothing to do but gag it down and hope for a quick, relatively painless death.

Unlike my grandmother, James Lileks' mother had the sense to bury the loathsome recipes of the time in a closet time capsule for thirty four years. This precautionary measure had the happy result of preserving the books' "florid, gorge-tweaking abominations" so that Lileks might someday unearth them and share them with us, the residents of the Far Distant Future. Inspired, he embarked on a lengthy research project, leaving no antique store bin unturned in his quest to understand postwar culinary trends.

Thanks to Lileks' careful garage sale research and strong stomach, we too can enjoy photos from likes of The National Pork Snout Council house organ. He has generously peppered the photos with his own prose, which is likely the only seasoning these dishes ever saw:

"The introduction to Specialties of the House states the case with blunt honesty: 'The basic appeal of Durum macaroni foods is their chewy texture and bland flavor.' And you could say the same thing about old wet newspapers."

Each recipe photo inspires him to new lows of praise. Of a particularly ghastly molded mystery meat dish, he writes "You know, most guests really don't like it when the dinner loaf has a spinal column." A seafood dish invites the observation "Note the shrimp, arranged to resemble a Caucasian tarantula extricating itself from a glass." The frightening thing is that these comments are quite well deserved.

While one would correctly suspect that corporate cookbooks spawned some of the most offensive dishes, Lileks also finds time to ridicule mainstream books. A pan of beanie-wienies in a Good Housekeeping party cookbook receives the description "To remind them that they're men, make sure to embed a batch of wriggling, erect wieners in a sea of beans."

As wildly humorous as Lileks' comments are, they're also unfortunately thought provoking. "Why?!", one begins to ask oneself after thumbing through page after page of awfulness. "Did people actually make Ketchup-Pistachio Cake? And if so, why? Why would someone serve a molded loaf, much less one that looks like it has a spinal column?"

Lileks maintains that "even then, no one believed something just because the corporate cookbook said so." However, my experience - and that of my father - says otherwise. I distinctly remember browsing the pages of Joys of Jell-O, a book prominently featured in Lileks' tome, and being wowed by the dazzling array of Jell-O concoctions. Just imagine - happiness could be yours if you bought suitable colors of gelatin and beat, whipped, cubed, and chilled them. My father specialized in layering different colors of Jell-O in stemware, tilting the glasses at odd angles as the Jell-O set up so the resulting concoction would have the look of an abstract painting. Occasionally a glass would tip over in the fridge. I absorbed the resulting curses as a ritual as necessary to the cooking process as reading a recipe.

No, we mustn't dismiss these cookbooks so lightly. After all, if they were an aberration, why were there so many of them? Looking at the meat photos alone makes it apparent that the aesthetic has changed greatly: these days we simply don't consider huge globs of slimy, glistening fat as a feature to highlight in a recipe photo.

An image of a pork roast suffocating under a vast polar ice cap of fat reminds us that not only do people not eat that way anymore, in many cases they can't. Pork was re-engineered as "The Other White Meat" and made drastically leaner. You couldn't buy a roast like that now even if you wanted to. The old cookbooks have become a time capsule, capturing an era that lives only in our memory.

Perhaps, in the end, one of the most valuable lessons Lileks' book delivers is that we humans are endearingly funny, even when we're engaging in as basic a pastime as cooking and eating. Those are the past tastes of us or our kin represented in those cookbooks, no matter how much we'd like to deny it. True, the distance and perspective of years make it easier to laugh at things and in another fifty years, the era we live in now will also seem wildly funny. But why wait? Let's laugh at ourselves right now.

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