What's The Strangest Food Book in Your Collection?

[fresco]

Have you tried shopping with a firearm?

[Suzanne F]

Not bizarre, but unusual --- "Lobscouse & Spotted Dog: Which It's a Gastronomic Companion to the Aubrey/Maturin Novels" by Anne Chotzinoff and Lisa Grossman Thomas. Aimed at reader's of, and tied directly to, Patrick O'Brien's British novels, it includes nineteenth century recipes for Burgoo, Ship's Biscuit, Skillygalee, Drowned Baby, Sea-Pie, Figgy-Dowdy, Soused Hog's Face, Solomomgundy and much, much more. And no, I have not tried any of it.

Yes, that one is quite nice, actually. Makes me want to read the novels.

Along a similar line: A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes by Charles Elme Francatelli, Late Maitre d"Hotel and Chief Cook to Her Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria. I just happened to open to recipe number 73, Belgian Faggots, which begins:

These may be prepard with sheep's pluck, or even with bullock's liver, and other similar parts of meat; but a pig's pluck is preferable for the purpose.  Chop up the heart, liver, lights, and the fat crow; season well . . .

The same friend who gave me the Cage Mud Book gave me this one. Says as much about her as it does about me.

[fimbul]

The strangest food book in my collection is easily the one written by Vincent Price and his wife. I forget its title... A Treasury of Great Recipes perhaps?

[fresco]

That's it. By Mary and Vincent Price

You have to admire the guy

a) for playing it perfectly straight

b) for giving his wife top billing

[sandra]

Quelque Chose Piquante - Acadian Meat and Fish Recipes, by Mercedes Vidrine, Baton Rouge, La.

Innocent enough title, the cover is bright hot pink with electric blue letters and design and inside we have recipes such as:

Armadillo Sauce Piquante

Squirrel Sauce Piquante

Braised Bear Steak

and something called "Stuffed Ponce" - it requires 1 small hog ponce to be cleaned well - note: Mrs Seale uses pliars (sic) to remove inner film -

Any clues??

Edited June 16, 2003 by sandra (log)

[srhcb]

I forget the exact title, but it's from the old Andy Griffith Show's Aunt Bee's Mayberry Cookbook.

It's done in the style of community cookbooks with references to the shows various characters and episodes. COntain some pretty good recipes too!

SB (love the way Aunt Bee used to say "Oh, Andy.")

[Carrot Top]

Probably The Decadent Cookbook by Medlar Lucan & Durian Gray.

[Waterzoy]

I have two contenders for this thread.

1. "Are you hungry tonight?" - a thoroughly entertaining book containing Elvis's favourite recipes, many of which are actually very tasty and easy. Only the 6-tier wedding cake looks particularly involved and daunting.

2. "The romance of food" by Barbara Cartland. I don't know how well Barbara Cartland is known outside of the UK but she was a writer who churned out hundreds of soppy romance novels. She always wore pink and was usually photographed holding some sort of pampered lapdog. The recipe book has one or two absolute gems in it but also a vast number of odd and unfashionable recipes that involve so much work that they would leave you far too exhausted for romance.

edited for spelling errors

Edited December 24, 2006 by Rachellindsay (log)

[GTO]

"How to be a better Foodie..." By ' Sudi Pigott. - It's an extremely good book, very useful with tons of information on quality ingredients. Although it's very, very outwardly pretencious and I sincerely hope that she is having a bit of a laugh.

For those not familiar with the book, it's basically a guide to the way that a "proper" Foodie eats, entertains, buys gifts and even raises their children.

[srhcb]

I forget the exact title, but it's from the old Andy Griffith Show's Aunt Bee's Mayberry Cookbook. 

It's done in the style of community cookbooks with references to the shows various characters and episodes.  Contains some pretty good recipes too!

SB (loves the way Aunt Bee used to say "Oh, Andy.")

←

Aunt Bee's book is still available!

One of the best parts are the little snippets of dialogue from the original tv show:

BARNEY (Don Knotts) in the diner: Let's see.I'm not too hungry this morning. I'll have uh ... orange juice, bowl of cereal, stack of wheats, three eggs over - make sure they ain't runny now Olive, bacon on the crisp side, white toast buttered, hash brown potatoes, and coffee - coffee and cream.

OLIVE: Does my heart good to see a thin person eat.

......

BARNEY: Did you know that knitters and crochetters seldom have stomach disorders?

......

ANDY: If I was a criminal and I was heading through the woods, I'd stop off at Emma Brand's house.

BARNEY: You would?

ANDY: For sure. Now you know there ain't a day goes by that Emma don't make a batch of pies and put 'em in the window to cool. Well, you know it's pretty hard on the average fellow to pass by without sniffin' and a-hunerin' for a slice of pie. You can just imagine what that's gonna do to a starvin' excapee. Yeah. Let's go over there.

.......

AUNT BEE: More pie, Mr Darling?

BRISCOE DARLING: I'm ample ma'am. Three cuts of pie is my high water mark.

......

ANDY: Oh, hi, Opie. You're just in time to join Barney and me for lunch. Aunt Bee made us some extra special baloney sandwiches.

......

STEVE: Imagine a person responding to their own three and one-half year old post?

AUNT BEE: I took the liberty of fixing you a little snack.

[The Old Foodie]

Extreme Cuisine, by Jerry Hopkins - similar idea to Unmentionable Cuisine (Calvin W. Schwabe).

He tells of taking the placenta home after his son was born, and making paté with it. The recipe for the paté is in the book, in case you are about to have an addition to the family.

Janet.

[k43]

Zemurray, One Hundred Unusual Dinners and How to Prepare Them, has a recipe for moose nose. I got this one from my mother, who never prepared it.

Larousse Gastronomique is full of weird stuff. I opened it at random to "agami," an African chicken-like bird. The first step of the recipe is "Choose as tender an agami as possible." Under "otter," it says, "its meat, which is stringy and oily, has a horrible taste."

[Sararwelch]

The Richard Simmons Dessert Cookbook. Yes, that Richard Simmons. It's a pretty hilarious book, I got it for really cheap a while ago. I haven't cooked anything from it in years.

[chickenlady]

"The Delightful Delicious Daylily" by Peter Gail. Includes soon-to-be-classic recipes*, such as Daylily Stuffed Tomatoes, Daylily Blueberry Pancakes, Aspic-Filled Daylily Blossoms. Unfortunately, after reading about the swollen testicles suffered by one Daylily gourmand, my husband has lost some enthusiasm for this cookbook.

*Yes, I know Daylilies are widely consumed in Asian Cuisine. An Asian cookbook about Daylilies would not be strange. Daylily Blueberry Pancakes? Strange!

[chardan]

I'd have to go with "Cooking With a Serial Killer: Recipes from Dorothea Puente", by Shane Bugbee.

"Extreme Cuisine" has much more unusual recipes, though.

_Jesse Williamson ;-};

[MomOfLittleFoodies]

I've got a couple of really "out there" food allergy cookbooks.

[ghostrider]

Although it's tame compared with many above, Cooking With Grass remains in my collection.

Good thing it's a very slim volume or it would have been donated to a book sale years ago.

[MaxH]

This is an interesting, unusual thread.

The question in the thread is a tough call for my collection because of several candidates. (The question being broader than just cookbooks opens important territory.)

10 or 20 years ago I might have named Marcell Rouff's Passionate Epicure (just cited in another thread under Food Literature, currently Here.) That book was familiar to the point of cliché in the US some decades ago but probably unfamiliar today.

But I have something more unusual, and until recently hard to find: Vicaire. More or less the principal reference book on food and cooking literature in the Western world, from Apicius forward. It's not useful for "recent" titles but that has little to do with its impact or sometimes exotic content. Vicaire was the great European bibliographer of vast scope and contacts, whose name surfaces in the book world on other subjects, but he was a food enthusiast also, and his Bibliographie Gastronomique may have been a labor of love. It was also the reference of Bitting (below), whose US counterpart book is the standard US historical food-book reference (and whose collection later started the US Library of Congress cookbook section). Vicaire is now, very helpfully, available in acid-free facsimile edition at moderate price from Martino Press as ISBN 1888262354; previously you had to find an original, which was more expensive, I assure you. (Before posting this, I checked for references to Vicaire on eGullet but found none, beyond a quotation from it that I posted in 2005.)

-- Max

“Real progress [in my collecting of books on gastronomy and allied subjects] was not made, however, until [i got] a copy of Vicaire’s _Bibliographie Gastronomique._ This masterpiece in its field was published in Paris in 1890 and covers the early European literature in a most satisfactory manner. Vicaire was librarian to the Bibliothèque nationale and correspondent to the Vatican Library, thus having access to unlimited works. . . .”

Katherine Golden Bitting, 1939 (San Francisco)

[ms. victoria]

By far the oddest one I have is "The Little Cyanide Cookbook: Delicious Recipes Rich in Vitamin B17" by June de Spain. It has a lovely faux cross-stitch cover that makes it all that much the weirder. Haven't cooked a thing from it.

The blurb on the inside of the front cover makes me chuckle: "If every family could enjoy meals from this book, we'd soon have no more cancer patients." I'm guessing that would be absolutely true if whole families got knocked off from cyanide poisoning.

BTW, the American Cancer Society lists the whole "B17" thing as a questionable cancer treatment.

[cfm]

Not bizarre, but unusual --- "Lobscouse & Spotted Dog: Which It's a Gastronomic Companion to the Aubrey/Maturin Novels" by Anne Chotzinoff and Lisa Grossman Thomas. Aimed at reader's of, and tied directly to, Patrick O'Brien's British novels, it includes nineteenth century recipes for Burgoo, Ship's Biscuit, Skillygalee, Drowned Baby, Sea-Pie, Figgy-Dowdy, Soused Hog's Face, Solomomgundy and much, much more. And no, I have not tried any of it.

Yes, that one is quite nice, actually. Makes me want to read the novels.

So true! I spotted this in a shop and thought that if someone had enjoyed the books enough to write this recipe collection then there had to be something in them. I went off and read them all, thought they were great, and duly bought my own copy of Lobscouse and Spotted Dog.

I don't seem to have many stranger books. "Cooking Weeds" is a contender partly because I feel sure that many people would have called it "Cooking WITH Weeds."

Catherine

[PaniniGuy]

Quelque Chose Piquante - Acadian Meat and Fish Recipes, by Mercedes Vidrine, Baton Rouge, La.

Innocent enough title, the cover is bright hot pink with electric blue letters and design and inside we have recipes such as:

Armadillo Sauce Piquante

Squirrel Sauce Piquante

Braised Bear Steak

and something called "Stuffed Ponce" - it requires 1 small hog ponce to be cleaned well - note: Mrs Seale uses pliars (sic) to remove inner film -

Any clues??

←

Wow - I have that book!

It's 3.5 years later, but if you still need to know, ponce = pig's stomach filled with sausage. Sort of a bayou haggis I suppose.

[insomniac]

'Kafka's Soup: A Complete History of World Literature in Fourteen Recipes'

forgot I had it til playing the 6 degrees of separation game

unique and brilliant

[JasonTrue]

I have a cookbook acquired in Germany that's hard to beat.

Jane Drews, "Haste Mopped, Kannste Kochen", or with dialect quirkiness ruined in translation, "Have bike, can cook."

This essential but slim volume, with a lobster attached to a tailpipe on the cover, offers practical advice on techniques for cooking with a motorcycle. Cooking times are generally given in kilometers, with some adjustments for engine size.

Among the essential tips include foil-wrapping techniques, methods for properly attaching foodstuffs to the bike, and how to adapt common household work gloves into a protective covering. Recipes include predictable items such as sausage and grilled fish, convenience foods such as fish sticks and frozen spring rolls, vegetarian options such as roasted mushrooms with parsley, and more ambitious fare such as coq au flens and one-pot stews. There's at least one suggested cocktail (a sidecar, of course).

The author indicates that she's tested the recipes.

Strangely, no longer in print. I can't imagine why not.

http://www.torpedo-emscher.de/wr/union/rak...oppedkochen.htm

[snowangel]

Peter came across it today. An early 60's supermarket pamphlet thing (the kind you get by the cash register). The "Joys of Jello." Did you know that they actually used to make celery flavoured Jello?

[srhcb]

'Kafka's Soup: A Complete History of World Literature in Fourteen Recipes'

forgot I had it til playing the 6 degrees of separation game

unique and brilliant

←

Talk about coincidence.

I just got this book from my sister today, and searched eGullet for a reference!

I plan to read it tonite.

Maybe I'll start a new thread?

SB