The Gallery of Regrettable Food

Customer Reviews

Give it a read, then give it to your Web-challenged friends

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.

The Little Book of Gastronomic Nightmares!

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!

Americana Stewed in its Own Juices

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.