YUCKYLICIOUS
Today, food is a hot topic. Chefs are celebrities, cooking competitions have taken over prime time TV, and the books which showcase the culinary arts are big business. Cookbooks have benefitted from the loving attention of publishing professionals like never before — with good, clear, passionate descriptions and instructions, and mouth-watering photography. Reading a cookbook is like visiting an idea factory, for those who intend to cook the dishes or merely live vicariously through them.
But it’s taken a long time for this genre to live up to its promise. For many years, cookbooks suffered the indignity of poor conception, horrendous recipes, misguided directions, and above all, tragic illustrations which reduced, rather than whetted the appetite. Food styling was not yet a proud art practiced by people who know what they are doing, and the stories these books tell between the lines — about the times, about food, and our relationship to it — reveal more than the recipes themselves.
The enormous changes in the way food is produced, distributed and cooked in the last century has contributed to lifestyles our great grandparents could not have imagined. Family recipes that had been passed down for generations either on paper or as part of a general knowledge about home economics and culinary skills have been largely eschewed for the convenience of simply engaging in product assembly when it comes to food preparation.
As someone drawn to the disaster as my prime source of artistic and intellectual inspiration, I began to collect the worst cookbooks I could find. They were often being given away for free. Soon I had several bookshelves dedicated to culinary nightmares, all of which were published in good faith, rather than as gimmicks.
Yuckylicious is a place to explore the aesthetics of these cookbooks, to revel in their awfulness while providing an insightful critique. Each post features a recipe from any time in history, accompanied by different kinds of commentary on all aspects of the post. Sometimes the recipes are catalysts for a historical account of the ingredient, or the language, or the era in which they appeared. Sometimes they are purely fictional responses that point indirectly to the recipe at hand.
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© Micki Myers 2013