Rating: 
Summary: Give it a read, then give it to your Web-challenged friends
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Wish he had included the recipes
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: What the heck is Aspic, anyway?
Review: The salad days of the 1950s might be long behind us now, but we can remember back to a simpler time. Drugs and race violence had only just been invented, Joseph 'Tail Gunner Joe' McCarthy and his sidekick, Richard Nixon, were finding Communist treachery and treason everywhere, even in a pumpkin. Everyone in a America was middle class and drove a Buick. Every day Dad would wake up, put on his black suit and go to the office while the kids went off to school, leaving Mom at home to contemplate suicide as a way out of her life of quiet desperation. But she had a weapon of course, because if this was to be her lot in life, she would get her revenge by cooking the most vile meals in the history of creation. Presented in stomach churning color is James Lileks' book entitled, "The Gallery of Regrettable Food." This book is full of pictures that will make you wonder, "Did John Romero make this dish?". I'm a huge fan of food, I love to eat, yet I keep my girlish figure with a steady regimen of watching TV and playing video games. This book almost made me tear up my PETA card, (That's the People for Eating Tasty Animals), when I saw how they brutalized otherwise choice cuts on meat. Cook books are supposed to display their recipes as images of gastronomic delight, not the leavings of the family dog after it's been through the wood chipper. Some of my favorites include 'Monday Pie', which Lileks describes as "This is called Monday Pie. The recipe calls for lamb, gravy and MSG. What an excellent start to the week, eh? Fried strips of albino flesh, cunningly blended with parboiled Scottish terrier testicles." Mmmm, thems good eatin'! Most of the foods pictured in this book look as though they were based on a dare. Some of the choicer sections include, and I nor Mr. Lileks is making this up, "Cooking with 7-Up"- and no kidding, they recommend basting lamb, pork or beef with the fizzy carbonated sugar water. And what was it with the 50's where everything was sealed in aspic? For those of you who have no clue what aspic is, don't worry, no one uses this colorless, odorless gelatin any more. At least no one sane, at any rate. But there it is, big as Yeltzin's liver-wieners frozen in mid hot dog like fish frozen in ice. And from aspic we move to molds- again, the 50's near fetish desire to make everything into a loaf, my favorite being the canned salmon and cucumbers in the flaccid colorless gelatin. This book has recipes by famous people, including Ellery Queen and what resembles brains in a stew pot. Makes sense since Ellery Queen wasn't a real person anyway. Famous chefs cooking with marshmallows and producing normal desserts that they hastily placed marshmallows on top of. Cooking with canned salmon and how to make it look like severed sheep's legs, and the picture of several salmon cocktails with caption "'Salmon Cocktail - a delicious way to start a dinner" - but look at the photograph 1.) Isn't salmon...pink? 2.) Could this possibly be bloody cauliflower masquerading as salmon.'" "It's the 1950's and everyone's human but Mom! Oh, it surely is dessert time. The whole family strains to get a peek at what's in store. They have get a peek, because Jell-O has no scent, and therefore cannot be detected by their olfactory apparatuses. What will it be? Surely Mom had time to whip up something between all four well-spaced pregnancies. Perhaps she won't come out for a while- and when Dad goes to investigate, he finds her bent over the sink, weeping. They all look like YOU!, she sobs." Which brings us to the Jell-O portion of the book. Radishes in Jell-O? Why, it sure looks that way, doesn't it? Tomatoes, cauliflower, red peppers, and cucumbers, too! Remember, kids, Jell-O is aspic with artificial falvors. You can also, apparently, cook with ketchup. Silly me, here I was putting on my burgers and fries, and occasionally on eggs when the mood took me, but Heinz tried to convince the world that drowning large, whole onions in ketchup would make something approaching a meal. Or that slathering a perfectly good steak in gallons of the red salty goop and adding a few hard boiled egg slices would bring you closer to god. Or that you could bake a cake with ketchup. Oh, there are pictures that would make you swear off food for life, and every section seems to have something sealed in either Jell-O or aspic, as though it were lucite and needed preserving for posterity. And then there's Aunt Jenny and her ads telling housewives to cook with SPRY brand lard. Aunt Jenny obviously wears a wig and doped out of her mind on Valium, how else could they have gotten model to pose for the ridiculous pictures? Yes, it's all here and more in James Lileks' book entitled, "The Gallery of Regrettable Food." This book reminded me of L.A. Bizarro. It made me laugh just as surely as it made me wince when gazing at its turgid photographs. For a good laugh at the way things used to be, get this book. And I'll see you in thirty years when James writes the same book, but this time looking back on the 80s, 90s, and 2000s- Photos of Big Macs and just about anything from Taco Bell.
Rating:
Summary: Hilariously unappetizing
Review: 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
Rating:
Summary: Mystery Science Cookbooks 1950!
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Warning: Don't Read Right After Dinner!
Review: 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!
Rating:
Summary: The Little Book of Gastronomic Nightmares!
Review: 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!
Rating:
Summary: Great gift for Newlyweds with a sense of humor
Review: Apparently, the 50's and 60's were a time when dried onion flakes and pimentoes went into every recipe. But believe you me, that's just the tip of the iceberg... "Gallery of Regretable Foods" is a list of horrific foods from the past, mainly involving fatty meat cylinders and everything imaginable suspended in Jell-O. In short, all the stuff our parents were likely forced to consume (my Dad once told me that his Grandmother always threatened to put their disgusting dinner food into the next days pancakes if they didn't clear their plates. Urgh!) From dishes that necessitate locating a "cow's elbow" to anything (usually fish) "rolled" and slathered in chopped nuts, Lileks' humor is the only thing that makes this book palatable. It certainly isn't the garish pictures of this stuff our ancestors dared to call "food". A fabulous anti-cookbook gift for a bride-to-be who either hates to cook, or is just sick of getting regular cookbooks. Also makes a great gift for parents and grandparents.
Rating:
Summary: Hilarious.
Review: This is one of the funniest things I have ever read. My mother-in-law bought the book for me for Christmas. I read it all in one afternoon and I was in tears at some parts. It's that funny. If you have a sense of humor, you will like this book. That's all there is to it.
Rating:
Summary: Gallery of Gastronomic Horrors
Review: The Gallery of Regrettable Food brought back fond memories, made me laugh out loud, and was truly disgusting. Everything about this book, down to the boomerang patterns on the cover (under the dust jacket), says Boomer Childhood. About the only thing missing from Gallery is Velveeta and Sloppy Joes. I loved the chapter on Jell-O, and was amazed at what people thought to suspend in a Jell-O mold. Ecch. And those hard-boiled egg and sliced olive penguins! Lileks makes up just enough in here so that you have to seriously consider whether a dish is real or if he made it up. Unfortunately, he only made up a few. This is a great book to spend a few hours with, especially if you are on a diet. Nothing to tempt you here. It brings back the days when a meal wasn't a meal if there wasn't meat in it, when meat wasn't meat unless it had a layer of fat on it, and when nothing said "sophisticated" like a can of salmon.
|
