| From time to time when I'm rummaging through used bookstores, I'll wander over to the cooking section to see if I can find any books from the postwar era. I'm fascinated by the poorly rendered illustrations and puzzling food combinations that are badly photographed. Ideas we would normally seek counselling for, like cooking with soda pop and incorporating Jello and meat into every aspect of a meal, are celebrated with fervid adjectives.
James Lileks has taken this same fascination further by compiling a book with a companion site at lileks.com/institute/gallery. The Gallery of Regrettable Food gleefully chronicles cookbooks from the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, with their thinly disguised advertising campaigns and reinforced stereotypes. Lileks provides a wealth of disturbing yet undeniably funny images of men with meat wearing cartoon dog aprons and manic children surveying house cake displays.
There are galleries included on the site that you won’t find in Lilek’s book, like BBQ Ages Men Before Your Eyes, Jello Confronts the Depression and The Unbearable Sadness of Vegetables. If you’re not drawn to the photo of erect wieners in a pan full of beans, you’ll surely be haunted by dishes with titles like Benedictish Frankwiches and Corned Beef Salad Loaf.
The last thing you’ll be is hungry. |
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