Review
BOOTY FOOD
by Jacqui Malouf with Liz Gumbrinner
Bloomsbury (Raincoast), 262 pp.
Review
TONGUE TWISTERS: SEXY FOOD FROM BIN 941 AND BIN 942
by Gord Martin
Arsenal Pulp Press, 198 pp.
Spring has now definitely arrived and, as the poet Tennyson once put it, it is the time of year when a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love. So, too, do the fancies of the flirtatious radishes, courtesan-like lettuce, frigid peas and eagerly persistent carrots in Victoria poet Lorna Crozier’s collection of poems about the sex lives of vegetables. And her poems are but one example of the well-developed link between food and love that extends to the realm of literature – and cookbooks.
Comedian and food writer Jacqui Malouf has taken the pairing a step further with Booty Food, her new cookbook-cum-relationship and dating guide. The presence of a connecting narrative is what takes this beyond the realm of a simple cookbook into something else. Suggested meals and recipes are provided as well as tips for how to handle the various stages of a relationship, from the initial dates to lusty affair to the moment when the bloom is off the rose and you turn to macaroni and cheese or chocolate to heal the inevitable broken heart.
It’s not an upscale Dating for Dummies, but it may as well be. The tips are the same type of common sense platitudinous advice that columnists dispense on a regular basis. The food, likewise, is simple – you might say classic – and relatively accessible. It’s the kind of food that you would be able to prepare quickly when you had other things on your mind. Things like getting lucky. Often.
As one key claim of the book is that this food will help you in your amorous goal, it is meant to be seductive and enchanting – like an ideal date. It is, the author contends, not meant to help you realize a one-night stand but instead to develop a more meaningful and intimate relationship with your chosen partner. As such, it is sensuous and messy and meant to be shared. If nothing else, the pictures will leave you tingling with excitement and wanting to try out the recipes. It’s too bad that there are so few of them for such a long book, but I suppose that is to be expected when the emphasis is more on presentation than on the meat and potatoes of the issue. Rather like dating and relationships – at least initially. Funny how that works.
Gord Martin is a chef and restaurateur from Vancouver who has apparently acquired an international reputation as a talented and exciting innovator known for skilfully blending seemingly incongruous flavours and ingredients. Unlike Booty Food, his Tongue Twisters is a traditional cookbook with recipes and little else except for plating (presentation) tips and suggested wine pairings.
There are useful bits of information, especially for someone who wouldn’t know a Cabernet Sauvignon from a Riesling, let alone how well they would go with a particular dish. But with all the emphasis that Martin places on presentation, I was disappointed that the book didn’t have many pictures in it. Everyone knows that the popularity of these types of books is linked as much to the images of food looking so incredibly delectable as to be almost sinful as it is to the actual recipes – indeed, the term "food porn" has entered common usage to describe them.
Apparently, Martin wants to be judged by the recipes themselves and not by the production values of the book. Fair enough. We’ll do it his way. I was a bit surprised to see this type of cookbook is still being released, as I had thought that the current trend is away from blending and back towards the use of locally grown products and authentic regional flavours. I was also put off by the complexity of the recipes. Martin apparently assumes that his reader is more than your average cook. And even when the recipes left me virtually salivating at the prospect of trying them out, I was discouraged by the fact that they required ingredients unlikely to be found in the pantries of anyone but the most dedicated foodie. That’s OK, provided that said ingredients can be easily obtained. I doubt, however, that Panko Flakes are readily available at your neighbourhood Co-op. And any recipe that requires me to make a trip to the lumberyard to purchase slabs of untreated cedar veneer in order to cook a fish is, quite frankly, going to remain untested in my kitchen.
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