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The How Not To Cookbook
by Nicola
www.ediblegeography.com, London, September 3, 2009
Another interesting
new food publication is artist Aleksandra Mir’s How Not To
Cook. Her project, a commission from Edinburgh’s Collective
Gallery, is a sort of oral history of kitchen catastrophes:
Based on Aleksandra’s personal history of cooking disasters,
the project invites 1000 people from all around the world to give
their advice of how NOT to cook. With this volume, any reader will
be more than well equipped to avoid making the same mistakes in
their kitchen.
You can download the entire book as a pdf here: it is a lovely
mixture of the head-noddingly familiar and the head-shakingly idiotic,
with a tears-of-laughter-inducing tone of mournful, hard-earned
wisdom. Some of my favourites:
A cucumber is a poor substitute when making zucchini bread, no
matter how similar they appear.
Do not waste your time going through the whole process of mixing,
kneading and baking bread when you do not know what lukewarm is
really supposed to mean. When the water is too hot, you will kill
your yeast and end up using your hard-as-rock boule as a doorstop.
If you happen upon a large amount of fruit-and-nut-studded cheese,
and you do not like it, do not try to make a cheesecake out of
it by running it through a food processor with some milk and then
baking it. You still will not like it.
If you want to feed your date by cooking tomatoes mixed with eggs
take into account that after adding butter and oil do not also
add a jar of peanut butter. She will not feel like having sex after
eating this.
I could actually just cut-and-paste the whole thing, I enjoyed
it so much. Together, these tips transcend their status as funny
stories to form an alternative landscape of cooking – a direct
and refreshing contrast to the glossily perfect, celebrity-chef
food we consume so eagerly in books, magazines, and on TV. As the
book’s blurb suggests: “By making our guilty failures
public we may even be creating an original and subversive form
of art, rather than simply aspiring to obvious and repetitive results.”
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