Customer Reviews

The Gallery of Regrettable Food

5 star:		(95)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

While most of the material in this volume can be found on the Lileks Web site, this book is just too good to pass up! Mr. Lileks passion for rehashing some of the worst of mid-century pop culture results in brilliant humour. Though I grew up in the 70's, I recall seeing cookbooks very similar to these in our family library, and I thank God my parents did not use them.

The sheer volume of the material presented (and the cookbooks are just the tip of the iceberg on the Lileks website) would lead one to believe that people in the 30's - 60's had absolutely no (or bad) taste and were motivated by an entirely commercial culture. While the Gallery of Regrettable Food is funny in the extreme, once you've finished reading it and brushed the tears of laughter from your cheeks it's also interesting to contrast the (perhaps unjust) impression of an advertisement driven mid-20th century to the reality of today's highly commercialized society.

Even if you are already familiar with Lileks' Web site, I recommend this book because it will look great on your coffee table, and it may be the only way your Web-challenged friends (read: your parents) will be able to enjoy this outstanding brand of humour.

This is not a cookbook. If you cook from this book you should be shot, for indeed, that would be more merciful than eating the meal. But the truth is, thousands of moms in the 1950s and 1960s *did* cook from the cookbooks that James Lileks so hilariously skewers in "The Gallery of Regrettable Food," and if you ever remember your mom proudly plopping down a new recipe that had dad and the kids staring at each other in disbelief, then this book is for you.

"The Gallery of Regrettable Food" does for the cookbooks of yesteryear what the robots from "Mystery Science Theater 3000" do for bad movies. And hoo boy, is this *bad* food...bloated with lard, tasteless, shiny, and topped with some kind of sauce that you swear must be made from radioactive by-products. These "classic" dishes are shown in photos from the original cookbook, photographed in their various original shades of gray, mauve, and pink--just looking at this requires a strong stomach, and Lileks is to be commended for having the nerve to page through them all.

But most of all, Lileks is hilarious--his caustic commentary pulls no punches ("This is a meal. It is also a scene from "The Andromeda Strain." "Satan himself could not invent so fiendish a dish.") and he spares no sarcasm in his horror and contempt for the way America was "supposed" to cook. ("This is some of the most tortured, attenuated garnish a steak has ever had; it looks as if El Greco had attempted to paint the mask from the "Scream" movies.") and most of all, the bizarre and disturbing oddities of "classic" cookbooks (Why the Sam Hill is that cartoon chicken FRYING UP A CHICKEN LEG?!?!). The hilariously dated and macabre cookbooks include such "classics" as "You're Really Cooking When You're Cooking With Seven-Up!," "Cooking for a Man: Tested Recipes to Please Him!," and the infamous "How Famous Chefs Use Campfire Marshmallows." (Answer: to slap on any kind of dish from toast to (urp!) peppers.)

Buy it for your mom for Christmas...and be prepared to have her take down her hilarious collection of bad 1960s cookbooks to show around. Just, for God's sake, don't ever, *ever* let her cook from them.

When James Lileks unearthed an old recipe pamphlet from the back of his Mom's closet and viewed the culinary nightmares within, he made it his life's work to discover other such cookbooks and food company ads from the 40s, 50s, and 60s. The results of his tireless research are now brought together for your amusement and indigestion in "The Gallery of Regrettable Food."

Through photos and witty commentary, Lileks displays some of the most unappealing foods and recipes I have ever seen, and he does it with flair. Whether using the recipe names from the original cookbooks, with such labels as "pepper pups" and "liver spoon cakes," or providing his own descriptive phrases like "cross section of the Swamp Thing's brain" or "grubworms and lawnmower clippings," he kept me laughing. He presents a parade of incompatible foods thrown together into gastronomic horrors, such as peppers baked and stuffed with creamy marshmallow sauce, frankfurters in aspic, or tongue mousse. The photos illustrate a parade of dishes that are unidentifiable at best and nauseating at worst. There are pictures of gray, fat-shrouded mystery meats, objects drowned in cream sauce, and gelatin molds with bizarre foods suspended within. The pamphlets produced by food companies urge us to cook everything using their products, whether 7UP or ketchup - and I mean everything! I could go on and on about the gems here, but I don't want to spoil your appetite for dinner.

This book also provides a look at the days when advertisers depicted homemakers in dresses, pearls, and frilly aprons when serving meals to the family. This was the era when cholesterol and sodium were not yet flagged as health hazards, and where salmon usually came out of a can. It was a time when families at the dinner table were idealized and stereotyped to the extreme. Through a recipe booklet produced by Spry shortening and its spokesperson Aunt Jenny, we learn that a new bride's biggest worry is whether her biscuits are up to snuff or not. We learn that cooking man-pleasing meals is of the utmost importance to the homemaker. The only cooking a man does in this world is when he dons the barbecue apron and grills a steak. I recommend this as a great gift for anyone who loves collecting cookbooks or who enjoys a humorous look back at the good old days.

Eileen Rieback

In this book, James Lileks takes his readers back to a time when moms looked like June Cleaver and meals of creamed brains on toast were perfectly acceptable. Really - he's got the pictures to prove it!

Lileks was inspired to create The Gallery of Regrettable Food after a trip back to his parents' home in Fargo, North Dakota. That's where he found Specialties of the House, a cookbook that his mom had gotten from the Welcome Wagon when they moved into the house in the early 60s. The book contained all kinds of horrifying pictures that looked very little like edible dishes - but a lot like something out of a horror film. Lileks then began creating the Gallery online... and eventually turned it into a big, disturbing book.

The Gallery of Regrettable Food is 200 pages of absolutely disgusting pictures (taken straight from the cookbooks of the 30s through the 70s) - along with Lileks's crude commentary. It definitely makes me want to take a closer look at my mom's cookbook collection.

This book is absolutely pants-wetting-ly hilarious. Every once in a while, I'd read it during the evening, and I'd start making a sound that can best be described as a mix between laughing and gagging - and my husband would continually ask if I was okay.

I have a few tips for reading this book, though. First, don't read it all at once. I believe it could do permanent damage. Second, don't read it anywhere near mealtime. Read it before you eat, and you'll lose your appetite (note: it could, however, be used as a diet aid). Read it after you eat, and, well... never mind. Third, don't read it before bed. It will create nightmares unlike anything you've ever experienced. And, finally, whatever you do, don't try this at home!

Lileks' book is a clever ruse: constructed like a cookbook, it is instead a pastiche of bizarre recipies and "entertaining ideas" from actual, honest-to-god cookbooks of the time. Most of them appear to come from the '40s through the 1960s, but his website showcases an even broader range of 20th century eatery. God only knows if people actually did eat any of these things back then (I certainly hope not), but it makes those Edward Hopper diners a lot less appealing to me.

Divided into sections with names such as "Cooking With 7-Up", "Blur-B-Que", and "Horrors from the Briny Deep" The Gallery is leavened with the wit of our own burgeoning cynicism and mistrust, and that is what makes it so very, very funny. Lurid photographs of these terrible dishes beg for descriptions like "sneeze juice" and my favorite, "scones and Pepsodent in a banana placenta sauce". James Lileks brings our own desire for mockery out with his brilliant witticisms, and we wish we could be that off-the-cuff hilarious.

You get the impression a lot of the creations were merely marketing hopefulness: there is a series of A-1 Steak Sauce recipies that have celebrity names attached to them (don't worry; the celebrities are now mercifully long-dead). The 7-Up book prominently places The Uncola in every shot. Hopefully the guys and dolls of that Golden Age were immune to subliminal advertising, but...I suspect they felt that temptation, that desire to be just like the happy people in the Rockwell paintings. Or at least like the blithe cartoon bachelors exclaiming silent joy at yet another platter of meat.

The final thread of Lileks' three-pronged assault on our culinary senses is the people. He spends a great deal of time pointing out the implications behind cookbooks titled "How to Cook for a MAN!", and the very strange "10 PM Cookbook", a guide to cocktail-party cuisine that looks like someone threw it up in the bushes out front before the serious drinking got underway. I have never read something so unbelievably funny and yet unmistakably genuine: it's like Mystery Science Theater 3000 used to be, a great poke in the pompous eye of our past.

Reading through the website was what prompted me to buy this book. The two complement each other: there are book entries that are well worth the price, website listings that didn't make it into print (but are fun nonetheless), and very little overlap between. I have since donated to Lileks' bandwidth fund and purchased multiple copies to give to friends. Much as I hated using terms like "side-splitting" in this review, I had to: it was simply true that on more than one occasion I have been reduced to tears of laughter, eyes shut tight, gasping for breath as I try to recover from this fantastic book. Visit the website and see for yourself, but don't forget to buy a copy of this fantastic treasure of American history, the other coffee-table book that can sit opposite your copy of The Century and jeer at it.

Columnist James Lileks has hit a home run with this pungent assemblage of comestible horrors. Noted for his amusing website (www.lileks.com), the author has been collecting humorous bits of Americana for a while, and this is essentially the greatest hits of horrifying food that he has thus far uncovered. The book is very tongue in cheek and profusely illustrated with recipes for and photographs of hideous and disgusting real recipes that somebody thought were a good idea at the time, but in retrospect seem amazingly daft.

The book is divided into chapters largely by food type ("Poultry for the Glum", "All the Smart People Eat Toast", "Glop in a Pot!", etc.) but there a couple organized more by genre ("Swanson's Parade of Lost Identity", "Eat Brains and Whip Hitler!", etc.) All told there are 192 pages of revolting and hilarious monstrosities of the kitchen. Most are descriptions and photos of the dishes, while some include the actual recipes. I actually wish more of the recipes were included, as I can't imagine what ingredients make up some of these dishes, the sardine dish on p. 76, for instance, the appearance of which is accurately described as "piscine torsos in a vinyl sauce colored with melted peach crayons." Some of the recipes, on the other hand, find the reader wishing they knew a bit less about the contents of the dish, for instance on p. 31 under the heading 'Aspic Entrees', the recipes for "Tongue Mousse" and "Jellied Calf's Liver" spring to mind readily.

This book is a wonderful addition to any library; I plan on putting mine among my cookbooks for easy future reference! Highly recommended!

I inherited huge piles of recipe books and clippings from my female progenitors and this book makes me wish I had kept them all. Although my mother could be a marvelous cook, I do remember very strange articles sometimes appearing at dinner. Corned beef hash with a poached egg on top? Creamed chipped beef on toast? (Creamed anything mystified me.) Eggs a la goldenrod? Some very toxic tuna fish and noodle casseroles made Friday a day to fear. And we kids could never figure out how time was saved using "Instant Potato Buds" instead of just boiling potatoes. Mr. Lileks' book features the photos from some of those cookbooks, along with his caustic commentary. It is very funny if you have some of those memories of Jello with alien things in it. I did deduct one star because I think it would have been funnier had he included some of the recipes and cut down on his commentary, which did, at times seem rather redundant and juvenile. Speaking from experience, I can say that reading the ingredients and cooking instructions can induce shudders just as well as the photos can. Also, the '50s were not the beginning of strange American food ideas. Read "Perfection Salad" by Laura Shapiro, a very scholarly, but yet fascinating history of American women and cooking at the turn of the century. After reading "Perfection Salad", I finally understood why my grandmother and mother were addicted to smothering food with "white sauce". Ugh.

A paean to a time when creative uses for cabbage was considered a viable Research and Development project at any food company, this book is written with both affection and revulsion and in the inimitable Lileks style. More than an anti-cookbook (indeed, many of the "recipes" would be considered toxic by today's dietary standards), James Lileks has presented a look through cookbooks to what was in the minds of the people in this past era. By that I mean it asks, "What were they THINKING?" quite a bit.

An extremely entertaining read by a funny, funny man with an amicable cynic's eye, a historian's perspective and a cast-iron stomach.

James Lileks has been rummaging around in my mother's house! The stacks and stacks of moldy Woman's Day and Family Circle magazines in her storage chests are full of this stuff. Thankfully, my mother was not into experimental cooking, so we were spared the trauma of consumption.

Another reason this book is funny is because the photography in these magazines was so bad. The book preserves this.Thank you,James, for not stooping to Adobe Photoshopping these archival atrocities.

As an aspiring gourmet chef, I can easily say that this is my favorite cookbook. It proudly resides on the shelf next to my Culinary Institute Textbooks, and Larousse Gastranomique. Would I ever cook anything from within it's pages? Good God no! Well, not without a bet, anyways. While all other books will tell the reader what to do and how to do it, The Gallery of Regrettable Food stands as a stern warning of how NOT to cook.

Critically acclaimed columnist and blogger James Lileks focuses his rapier wit on the commerically produced food culture of the 50's and beyond. He skewers it up to make the most unappetizingly funny satire about a bland time when Jello was a main course, a few grains of black pepper made a meal spicey, and people feared getting touched in their bathing suit areas.

We currently live in a golden age of American cuisine. Gourmet cooking has its own cable network. Some chefs are as famous as movie stars. The best foods from the other side of the world are readily available just around the corner. The Gallery of Regrettable Food is a solemn reminder of just how far we as a culture have come.

If you have an interest in cooking and can laugh about it, this book is recommended. If you have an embarrassed sense of nostalgia for an American decade long past, this book is recommended. If you have trouble sticking to your diet, well, this book will work wonders for that too. Bon appetit, Mr. Lileks!