Review
“This is easily the best cookbook of its type since the one put out by the Junior League of St. Louis in the heady Republican days of 1972. Susie Townsend deserves enormous credit for single-handedly impeaching the unfair culinary disrepute Republicans have suffered since the days of Teddy Roosevelt.” –Danny Meyer, Co-author of The Union Square Cafe Cookbook
“Even Democrats will enjoy this witty book and its cleverly named recipes.” –Nathalie Dupree, author of New Southern Cooking
“How to Eat Like a Republican is right up my alley–it’s full of belly laughs and belly-pleasing recipes.” -Paula Deen, bestselling author of The Lady & Sons Savannah Country Cookbook and The Lady & Sons, Too!
About the Author
Susanne Grayson Townsend is a New York City Republican and the author of How to Eat Like a Republican. Before becoming an author she was an advertising executive whose clients included Nestle, Bristol-Myers, Colgate, Anheuser-Busch, B.B. King, and Bart Simpson. She is the recipient of many awards, including several Clios, Andys, an Addy, and a Cannes lion.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
FOR THOSE WHO FEEL THEY HAVE RECEIVED THIS BOOK IN ERROR
Look, we who live to watch Peter Jennings’s election-night predictions accept that not everyone in America, let alone Florida, is a Republican. We realize you may have bought this book by accident, or perhaps even received it as a “gag” gift. To that end, I have prepared a useful guide to a more complete understanding and greater enjoyment of the book you now, even if inadvertently, hold in your hands.
Here then, some Frequently Asked Questions about How to Eat Like a Republican.
FAQ #1: What in the world is this book about?
How to Eat Like a Republican is part cookbook, part how-to for non-Republicans, part how-come (as in “how come we ever ate that????”), part payback (“thanks, Mom, for all the swell tricks with Lipton Onion Soup Mix”), and part sheer revenge, as in the horrible night a coven of New York Democrats invited innocent people to dinner under the pretext of a whole roasted prime tenderloin, and served instead a whole roasted baby tuna: “Great news! I was walking by Citarella, saw them carrying in this gorgeous thing, and raced home and froze the tenderloin!” My date, a Republican and a fish-hater (a Republican redundancy, by the way; see Chapter 3, “Fish”), memorably reacted by getting dead drunk and passing out at the table with his face in a plateful of the gorgeous thing.
Put another way, How to Eat Like a Republican is about food over frou-frou, life before balsamic vinegar, and a growing suspicion that, as a friend of mine once wrote in a heart-wrenching country-and-western anthem: “Just Outside Manhattan, There’s a Place Called USA.”
And there aren’t any New York Democrats there.
FAQ #2: Why on earth would anybody write this book?
I decided to write How to Eat Like a Republican because somebody had to, because food should be good, food should be fun, politics are funny, and Republicans are just plain funnier than Democrats. Unintentionally so, but so. We’re just so gosh-darned earnest.
Plus, now that they’ve pulled this campaign finance reform scam on us, Republicans need all the money they can get. Anybody wanna buy a cookbook?
FAQ #3: Speaking of which, who in Sam Hill would buy a book called
How to Eat Like a Republican? Other than the pervert who bought it for me. First of all, Republicans. The seven or eight who live in Manhattan, of course (civics lesson: even with Rudy and Mike, registered Democrats in New York City outnumber registered Republicans five to one, or roughly the ratio of women to men on any given Carnival cruise), and the others, the president-electing others, who live everywhere else.
And second, Democrats, especially the self-styled Northeast Cultural Elite, who keep Republicans around for amusement, much as the French kept small playful dogs around, right up to that unpleasant Marie-Antoinette–Louis the Whichever incident.
Both ways, everybody wins, except for anybody who voted for Ross Perot, which is a problem no cookbook can solve, not even mine.
FAQ #4: Where do these wonderful and wonderfully easy recipes come from?
Thanks—I knew you’d come around. The truth is, many of the delectable recipes in How to Eat Like a Republican could have come straight out of almost any community cookbook; in fact, I suspect many of them did. My own mother thinks her own Mother’s Company Ham Loaf might be from a local cookbook she bought forty years ago in Miami Beach (Miami Beach??? And that woman is a Republican!!!! ), but she’s not sure; it might be from Aunt Maxine. Either way, it is so sensational, nobody really cares.
And that’s the point. Republicans mostly grow up on food that, if it didn’t come off a Pillsbury box, somebody just made up one night, usually in a pinch and probably with the aid of a can opener. The family likes it; it gets scribbled down on the back of the telephone bill (or, if the Republican is also a Virgo—a truly troubling thought—tidily inscribed on a lined index card) and then passed around. Some of these recipes remain inviolable, the gospel according to Nobody Remembers Who; others pick up hitchhikers as they make their way around the country with each cook adding her own spin. However they arrive, the ones that survive have earned it, and several have earned their way into How to Eat Like a Republican. A dubious distinction perhaps, but this collection is a highly arbitrary one, with me doing all the arbitrating.
One last point: Very unlike community cookbooks, whose intentions are invariably virtuous, involving as they do the raising of sums for various charitable institutions (such as the Republican National Committee), How to Eat Like a Republican is not high-minded at all. In fact, it’s pretty low-minded, once you get into it. Deliciously low-minded, but low-minded just the same.
FAQ #5: I am a Democrat. Will I be insulted by this book?
I certainly hope so. As will some Republicans, as there are individuals on both sides (and You Know Who They Are) still bearing the scars from their Sense of Humorectomies—a sort of comic circumcision many Americans endure at birth. In other words, this book is an equal opportunity offender, albeit with a distinct leaning to the right. How to Eat Like a Republican is a celebration of good old-fashioned bipartisan mean-spiritedness, because isn’t that the American way, for Pete (Domenici’s) sake?
FAQ #6: I am a New Yorker. What does a Republican actually look like?
Hmm, this is a tough one. Because unless you accidentally attend a rally for George Pataki, George Bush, or Georgette Mosbacher, you could easily live a lifetime in the northeast corridor without ever setting eyes on one.
But let me try:
To begin with, while it is true many WASPs (and you do know what they look like, don’t you?) are Republicans, many, many more Republicans are not WASPs; Rudy Giuliani, Colin Powell, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, and Dr. Condoleezza Rice spring to mind. No, most of today’s Republicans do not regularly ride to the hounds; they ride to the next tee shot in their own EZ-Gos; or, in some parts of the country, in their Cadillac Escalades to the nearest neighbor, often several hundred thousand acres of good grazing land away.
So you have to be careful. It’s not as easy as it used to be, and first thing you know, your daughter comes home from Yale engaged to one, and just like that, The Nation won’t renew your subscription. Told you she should have gone to Bard.
But it’s a good question, and it has prompted me to prepare the following handbook, a special pull-out section to carry with you at all times. Actually, it’s more of a rip-out section, as perforations were too expensive for a book this cheap.
