The Gallery of Regrettable Food
by James Lileks

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Book Reviews of The Gallery of Regrettable Food

Book Review: What the heck is Aspic, anyway?
Summary: 5 Stars

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.

Summary of The Gallery of Regrettable Food

History Books

• Subjects > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Gastronomy > History
• Humor & Entertainment > Humor