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I have one called Man-up Your Meals, Snoop Dogg's recent cookbook. I also have cookbooks for particular foods, such as marshmallows, popcorn, whoopie pies.

My 1950s cookbooks almost feel like a novelty when you look at some of the recipes from back then. (Carrots and mayonaise in lemon jello?)

I have The White House Cookbook that was originally published in the 1880s, and mine is copywrite from 1920s. It's very near crumbling, but really fun to look at with care.

Originally Posted by: bittrette

I'm surprised they were underwhelming, because Michele Scicolone is an accomplished cookbook author, and this seemed to be her project in Italian-American cookery, dressed up in show-biz pizazz.

It may be that I'm not so big on Italian-American cooking vs. non-hyphenated Italian cooking. And not many recipes were in the Sopranos book I didn't already have multiple variants of in other books that I've liked better.

I do use and like several of her slow-cooker cookbooks (especially the French Slow-Cooker), so this might be a one-off miss for me.

I love novelty cookbooks and try to pick them up when I can. From celebrities and TV shows, movies, to things like the Twinkies cookbook (and hey, I made the Twinkie Tiramisu and it was actually good lol). Current favorite is the Liberace cookbook I picked up in Vegas years ago. Or maybe the Dr. Suess one. Just so many!

I was in Barnes & Noble yesterday, looking for Tin Can Cook, which I didn't find. However, I did come across Eat What You Watch: A Cookbook for Movie Lovers and WWE: The Official Cookbook and thought of this thread.

I'm hoping to ride out the self-quarantine period by doing a lot of cooking and cleaning, and I finally unearthed a small booklet that is definitely a novelty cookbook. There is no date on it but I think it's from the 1980's. It's from Beatrice-Hunt-Wesson and it's a small collection of recipes for Manwich sloppy-Joe sauce. Yes, Manwich sloppy-Joe sauce.

Its title is Dinnertime Dramas, and it's about five women in Manwich Valley and their trusty cans of Manwich sauce. Each chapter is a story about one of these women, with 3 to 5 recipes per story.

(continued)

The introduction is written in soap-opera suspense style, e.g. "Tracy Wagner, newlywed. Her new life as a housewife was crumblng before her eyes. Was she powerless to stop it?"

In every case, the solution is a can of Manwich sauce and the know-how to turn it into something other than sloppy Joes. And because this is Manwich Valley, women cook and men and boys enjoy what women cook. The two exceptions to this pattern are Tracy's husband's boss's wife, and the college boy who is learning to cook.

One reason I'm focusing  on Tracy's story is that the intro calls her Tracy Wagner, but her mother is called Mrs. Wagner. A Lucy Stone? An Eleanor Roosevelt? If the former, then the times they are a-changin', even in Manwich Valley.

I'm bumping this thread, partly to see if anyone has any thoughts about Manwich Valley, and partly to register my bemusement over a Dr. Seuss cookbook.

An obvious item in a Dr. Seuss cookbook would be green eggs and ham, either from green-shelled eggs such as those of the quail or the Araucana hen, or from eggs whose insides have been colored green. A book of techniques (Jacques Pépin? James Peterson?) gives instructions for extracting the green color from spinach. In any case the green eggs can come from RL birds, including "just a common old hen."

The other foods I remember without thinking (other than the ham served with the green eggs) are the eggs or meat of imaginary birds: Scrambled Eggs Super, or the Nizzards fed to Lord Droon in The King's Stilts.

On second thought, there's the Truffula fruit in The Lorax, the bread and butter fought over in The Butter Battle Book, and the Who hash and roast beast that had something to do with the Grinch.

Anyone remember any other foods in the works of Dr. Seuss? And what's really in the Dr. Seuss cookbook?

Originally Posted by: bittrette

Anyone remember any other foods in the works of Dr. Seuss, especially foods of non-avian origin?

The Better Butter War comes to mind, but butter side up vs. butter side down doesn't exactly equate to distinct recipes.

I have a Game of Thrones one... I think they decided not to bother paying for a license and just called it Game of Scones. It was a gift. I'm too serious about cookbooks to buy a novelty one.

At the height of the "Fifty Shades" craze I saw a "50 Shades of Chicken" one in a store with an extremely suggestive trussed roasted chicken on the cover.

Yes, battling bread and butter occurred  to me as I was editing my post.

I think the butter-up people won. Who in **** eats bread with the buttered side down? The Moo-Lacka-Moo must have finished them all off.

Now, any thoughts about Manwich Valley? I tried one recipe in that book, the spaghetti sauce with meat that the college boy made. It tasted like 1) meat sauce that tasted like a sloppy Joe, and 2) the Sixties.

Oh! I have the two Outlander cookbooks based on the Outlander series of historic fantasy romance novels and TV series (romance in the classical literature sense of romance as opposed to in the bodice ripper sense), by Diana Gabaldon.

I must confess I have not made any of the recipes yet. But they are entertaining and informative reads about period dishes and pracices. Recipes are accompanied by book excerpts.

I once saw The Blondie Cookbook (Blondie Bumstead, not the singer) in a store - probably a secondhand cookbook - but when I saw a recipe for angelemono soup (you read that right) I put it down in disgust. So I never found out if it had any recipes for Dagwood sandwiches.

There are also the accidental novelty cookbooks. For example, Ceylon Daily News Cookery Book which I gave my niece for a particular recipe that I didn't know another English language source for. She and her cousin spent a very late night laughing at the odd ingredients - think snout to tail - and the late colonial mentality of the "native" foods in a colonial language paper. Hey, I still think it's a great cookbook and had missed the humorous side.