- Lileks, James.
Gastroanomalies.
New York: Crown Publishers, 2007.
ISBN 0-307-38307-5.
-
Should you find this delightful book under your tree this
Christmas Day, let me offer you this simple plea. Do not curl
up with it late at night after the festivities are over and you're
winding down for the night. If you do:
- You will not get to sleep until you've
finished it.
- Your hearty guffaws will keep everybody else
awake as well.
- And finally, when you do drift off to sleep, visions of the
culinary concoctions collected here may impede digestion
of your holiday repast.
This sequel to
The
Gallery of Regrettable Food (April 2004) presents
hundreds of examples of tasty treats from cookbooks and
popular magazines from the 1930s through the 1960s. Perusal
of these execrable entrées will make it immediately obvious
why the advertising of the era featured so many patent remedies
for each and every part of the alimentary canal. Most illustrations
are in ghastly colour, with a few in merciful black and white.
It wasn't just Americans who outdid themselves crafting dishes in the
kitchen to do themselves in at the dinner table—a chapter is
devoted to Australian delicacies, including some
of the myriad ways to consume “baiycun”. There's
something for everybody: mathematicians will savour the
countably infinite beans-and-franks open-face sandwich (p. 95),
goths will delight in discovering the dish Satan always brings
to the pot luck (p. 21), political wonks need no longer
wonder which appetiser won the personal endorsement of Earl
Warren (p. 23), movie buffs will finally learn
the favourite Bisquick recipes of Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Bing
Crosby, and Bette Davis (pp. 149–153),
and all of the rest of us who've spent
hours in the kitchen trying to replicate grandma's chicken
feet soup will find the secret revealed here (p. 41).
Revel in the rediscovery of aspic: the lost secret of turning
unidentifiable food fragments into a gourmet treat by
entombing them in jiggly meat-flavoured Jello-O.
Bon appétit!
Many other vintage images of all kinds are available on
the author's Web site.
December 2007 