Last year I read Heat (as did my colleague Richard) by Bill Buford, a former columnist for The New Yorker.  Bradford goes to work in the kitchen of a restaurant owned by celebrity chef Mario Batali and learns the extreme nature of high end commercial cooking.  I felt this book perfectly captured what a food memoir should be:  the day in and day out slog of working in a commercial kitchen mixed with an exotic adventure to learn the roots of your craft all told with well-crafted prose.  Find Heat, and 49 more Food Memoirs in our list of the…

The Fifty Best Food Memoirs

Yes, there is a parody cookbook called Fifty Shades of Chicken by F.L. Fowler (apparently).

There is even a suitably sexy and tantalizing trailer for 50 Shades of Chicken. Behold.

While we were there, we heard tell of a Gladys Knight cookbook, as well. But why, I wondered, would a singer have a cookbook? Who cares what a musician eats for dinner? Well, as it turns out, a lot of people do. Celebrity has sway.

If you’re wondering what to take to your next potluck, why not ask a likely expert, like Patricia Cornwell, Dolly Parton or Vincent Price? Wait. What?

Yes, it’s true, all of those people have written cookbooks. There are plenty of weird celebrity cookbooks. It seems cookbooks allow for a broad bandwagon, and all kinds of celebrities are jumping aboard to publish their own tasty tomes. And while some might clearly be appealing for the novelty, others sound legitimately delicious. Maya Angelou’s California Green Chile and Cheese Pie, for instance, or Sheryl Crow’s Fried Green Tomato BLT. From Cookin’ With Will Rogers, to Cooking with Kenny Rogers, enjoy this list of cookbooks from the unlikeliest celebrities.

We do not have any copies of Cooking with Poo:

But we have several copies of Cooking with Pooh:

That is all. Carry on.

And if you’d like, you can read about even more weird cookbooks.

“The proper way is to cook over coals. Have several cans of Crisco or Cotosuet or one of the vegetable shortenings along that are as good as lard and excellent for all kinds of shortening. Put the bacon in and when it is about half cooked lay the trout in the hot grease, dipping them in cornmeal first. Then put the bacon on top of the trout and it will baste them as it slowly cooks….

The trout are crisp outside and firm and pink inside and the bacon is well done — but not too done. If there is anything better than that combination the writer has yet to taste it in a lifetime devoted largely and studiously to eating.”

And F. Scott Fitzgerald’s turkey “Recipes” made me laugh:

“TURKEY REMAINS AND HOW TO INTER THEM WITH NUMEROUS SCARCE RECIPES

At this post holiday season, the refrigerators of the nation are overstuffed with large masses of turkey, the sight of which is calculated to give an adult an attack of dizziness. It seems, therefore, an appropriate time to give the owners the benefit of my experience as an old gourmet, in using this surplus material. Some of the recipes have been in my family for generations. (This usually occurs when rigor mortis sets in.) They were collected over years, from old cook books, yellowed diaries of the Pilgrim Fathers, mail order catalogues, golf-bags and trash cans. Not one but has been tried and proven—there are headstones all over America to testify to the fact.

Very well then. Here goes:

1. Turkey Cocktail: To one large turkey add one gallon of vermouth and a demijohn of angostura bitters. Shake.

2. Turkey à la Francais: Take a large ripe turkey, prepare as for basting and stuff with old watches and chains and monkey meat. Proceed as with cottage pudding.

3. Turkey and Water: Take one turkey and one pan of water. Heat the latter to the boiling point and then put in the refrigerator. When it has jelled, drown the turkey in it. Eat. In preparing this recipe it is best to have a few ham sandwiches around in case things go wrong.

4. Turkey Mongole: Take three butts of salami and a large turkey skeleton, from which the feathers and natural stuffing have been removed. Lay them out on the table and call up some Mongole in the neighborhood to tell you how to proceed from there.

5. Turkey Mousse: Seed a large prone turkey, being careful to remove the bones, flesh, fins, gravy, etc. Blow up with a bicycle pump. Mount in becoming style and hang in the front hall.

6. Stolen Turkey: Walk quickly from the market, and, if accosted, remark with a laugh that it had just flown into your arms and you hadn’t noticed it. Then drop the turkey with the white of one egg—well, anyhow, beat it.

7. Turkey à la Crême: Prepare the crême a day in advance. Deluge the turkey with it and cook for six days over a blast furnace. Wrap in fly paper and serve.”

And all of it reminded me that despite my best intentions, time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’ into the future, and as a result I still have yet to make Louisa May Alcott’s Apple Slump recipe.

Isabella Beeton, Alice B. Toklas, Samuel Pepys, Calvin Trillin and Elizabeth David are just some of the writers featured in the series. Satisfy your hunger for great food literature.

In the case of these amazing, fantastic, I-can’t-stop-raving-about-them examples, there is also flour and sugar, presumably. Yes, a creative genius whose friend I would very much like to be, over at the luminarium blog, made a batch of illumination cookies for his friend. He chose historiated initials from a variety of manuscripts and created what looks to be 24 letters of the alphabet (not sure whether Y and Z are just missing from the photo for symmetry, or they did not get created) using edible paper attached to square cookies, and then piped on edible gold edging. I really think the result is so gorgeous. I wonder if they were tasty, too.

I love when people combine food and literature. It’s like the world gets brighter, just for a moment. *happy sigh*

Read our illuminated manuscript feature to learn more about illuminations, historiated initials, and medieval books of hours.

via BoingBoing.

One of my favourite, televised guilty pleasures is the BBC’s The Supersizers Go…, which was rebroadcast on The Food Network in Canada.

The show combines my love of cooking, history, and humour into several episodes of gastronomical adventure and hilarity.

In the spirit of Morgan Spurlock’s ‘Supersize Me’, the two hosts immerse themselves in the spirit of a particular era for one week, and then analyze the effect on their health.

Hosts Giles Coren and Sue Perkins dress and try to act the part as they eat their way through different eras from Elizabethan to 1970s England.

Sue and Giles dressed for a 1970s party

Many fascinating and rare reference books and manuals are used for the research behind these episodes.

One of my favourite episodes features the diet and lifestyle of ‘homefront’ England during World War II with food prepared by Chef Allegra McEvedy.

The stark differences between the average person’s rations and Winston Churchill’s feasts are highlighted.  Staples such as National Loaf, Special Margarine, Woolton Pie, Skilly, and Ersatz Coffee are also discussed.

Pamphlets and books on the importance of eating well and exercise to maintain health were made readily available to the general public.  One of the main references was Eating For Victory.

Another entertaining episode featured 1970s England.  Alcohol appears to be a key factor in almost every era featured, none more so than in the 1970s.  In his Action Cook Book, novelist Len Deighton gives instruction for liquor dispensation and consumption at a standard cocktail party.  The host was meant to ensure that enough hard liquor was available so that each person might have half a bottle for the first two hours and three quarters of a bottle for each subsequent two-hour period.

Of course, a trip back to the 1970s would not have been complete without many references to TV chef Fanny Cradock and her culinary influence during that time.

Each time I watch an episode, I can’t help but find myself drawn in to the romance of each period, the charm of the hosts, and the interesting differences and surprising similarities between these culinary eras and modern times.