{"id":8,"date":"2007-08-24T16:38:33","date_gmt":"2007-08-24T20:38:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gastropoda.com\/readings\/2007\/08\/too-bad-the-author-is-now-a-nutcase\/"},"modified":"2007-09-03T13:48:04","modified_gmt":"2007-09-03T17:48:04","slug":"too-bad-the-author-is-now-a-nutcase","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gastropoda.com\/readings\/2007\/08\/too-bad-the-author-is-now-a-nutcase\/","title":{"rendered":"Too bad the author is now a nutcase"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>\u201cThe Gallery of Regrettable Food\u201d<br \/>\nJames Lileks (Crown)<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>This book is so fabulously snarky it would be easy to write it off as a one-gag wonder: retro recipes can be pretty scary. Read deeper and you realize it actually has surprising insight buried among the gruesome photographs and over-the-top copy (\u201cI don\u2019t know what this is,\u201d the caption with barbecued apples in foil reads, \u201cbut pour enough liquor in a frat boy and he\u2019d try to have sex with it\u201d).<\/p>\n<p>Lileks collected promotional cookbooks from the Fifties and Sixties, culled the most staggeringly hideous examples of Jell-O salads and mystery meats and turned his sinister imagination loose. Along with the jokes about \u201cburned wieners in a drunken scrum\u201d and \u201cthe Swamp Thing\u2019s brain,\u201d he illuminates an era when only men were chefs, women were housewives and children were captives to creative cooking as dictated by manufacturers of major manufactured foods, Spry shortening and 7-Up chief among them.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cRegrettable Cuisine\u201d is a rather tasty answer to all the pretentious food books emerging from academia lately, now that American cooking has become the deep scholars\u2019 answer to Madonna. Reading it, you realize it\u2019s okay to acknowledge: Sometimes a congealed salad is just a congealed salad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cThe Gallery of Regrettable Food\u201d James Lileks (Crown) This book is so fabulously snarky it would be easy to write it off as a one-gag wonder: retro recipes can be pretty scary. Read deeper and you realize it actually has surprising insight buried among the gruesome photographs and over-the-top copy (\u201cI don\u2019t know what this&#8230; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/gastropoda.com\/readings\/2007\/08\/too-bad-the-author-is-now-a-nutcase\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&#8594;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-laffs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gastropoda.com\/readings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gastropoda.com\/readings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gastropoda.com\/readings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gastropoda.com\/readings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gastropoda.com\/readings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gastropoda.com\/readings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gastropoda.com\/readings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gastropoda.com\/readings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gastropoda.com\/readings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}