Spit or Swallow! or The Weirdest Cookbooks Ever

Holy crow is that a euphemism or what? "Natural Harvest" is a collection of recipes for cooking with none other than manjuice. I believe we have ladies in the audience, so I'm too polite to use any other term. [Ed: Also, I don't want my adsense turned off again.] Y'all know what it is and y'all know how it's harvested. Of course, what harvest is unnatural? I think this book is more a humourous novelty than a serious book of recipes. It was designed to attract attention and make money; I'm sure it succeeded (pun not intended).

The backcover helpfully explains, "[The substance] is not only nutritious, but also has a wonderful texture and amazing cooking properties." No matter how many synonyms for 'wonderful' they come up with, I'm not convinced I want a cupcake made out of a little bit o' me. They also explain the many other advantages, like "inexpensive to produce." Hey, time is money! It takes a good twenty minutes to 'produce' this 'harvest.' "[A]n exciting ingredient that can give every dish you make an interesting twist." Every dish? This guy's ambitious! Well, if you're interested at all in the "complex and dynamic" flavour of this particular substance, just google yourself a copy of Natural Harvest and enjoy nature's new wonderfood.

Hey, remember that time you saw a raccoon splatted along the asphalt and really felt the urge to cook into a casserole? Didn't think so. Well, just in case there are any of you out there who really deplore the wastefulness of all that meat rotting on our nations' roads, the heroic Buck Peterson has come to your rescue with this lavishly-illustrated marvel. Although some consider it a joke--and certainly Peterson sees the humour in the subject--"Roadkill cuisine" is a serious Southern practice. The meat is fresh, nutritious, and free, so why not? And those crunchy maggots will only enhance the flavour. Eating Canadian beaver (mind out of the gutter, folks) is 25g of protein for every 5g of fat and a good ol' roo for you Aussies is 30g of protein for 1g of fat. So scrape Mr. Lucky off the bumper and bring him to the pot. And if you're going to eat it, you might as well have a good guide.

And the whimsy stops here! Ever want a totally impractical cookbook that exists just to show your goth friends how hardcore you are? Well this is it. Written by a self-proclaimed 'former cannibal', Nicolas Castelaux. Because that's just the name you expect a former cannibal to have, right? Not Zabooga of the Quapeepu tribe, but Nicolas Castelaux, programmer by day and cannibal by night. You kinda wonder where he was practicing and at the same time you kinda don't want to know. At any rate, he wrote this book. Like #1 on this list, it's self-published through Lulu. I didn't buy it, because it's obviously a waste of money, so I can't vouch for the tastiness of the recipes, which include "Ed Gein's Head Cheese," "Richard Chase's heart-shaped blood yoghurt," and "Armin Miewes German Sausage." The last one is genuinely witty. It sounds as though it may be recipes for normal food based off the cullinary habits of genuine cannibal serial-killers rather than a book about cooking humans. Either way, it is damn weird and it exists. So there you go. Next book.

Oh yes! Hey, you remember how I made fun of Star Trek culture in my article on Klingon Proverbs? And how I made fun of Star Trek nerddom in my article on dating single moms? Well, I'm at it again! Y'know why? 'cause they just make it so easy! What we have here is a Star Trek cookbook, a cookbook to bring all our made-up cultures together at last. Finally you'll have in your own hands the key to making the best "Rokeg Blood Pie a la Neelix." Well holy crow! And what about when mom comes to visit from across the country? You'll surely want her to sample your "Borg Tricorder Pie." Look, I've watched plenty of Star Trek, and nobody eats Borg tricorders--ever! I'm superciliously amused as a Jock and indignant as a Nerd. Anyway, for anyone who's a fan of any of the Star Trek series, the book purports to give the favourite recipes of all the major crew members--even Ro Laren. She likes Foraiga, Hasperat, and Green Tea, if that means anything to you. And you won't want to miss the amazing chapter "Afternoon Tea with Captain Picard," the hottest and steamiest pages on Star Trek cookery ever penned: "The Picard Cocktail," "Earl Grey, Hot," and--sorry, I can't go on: I'm just getting too aroused. Next book.

Ah well, we all knew a bug-eating book would have to be on this list, didn't we? The Eat-a-bug Cookbook, subtitled 33 Ways to Cook Grasshoppers, Ants, Waterbugs, Spiders, Centipedes, and Their Kin, written by David George Gordon is actually a pretty good book. By all accounts, the recipes within are tasty. One just has to get over one's initial antipathy to bug-eating and, of course, take the time to collect a bunch of grasshoppers. Want to hear some recipe titles? Of course you do!

• Chripy Chex Party Mix
• Chocolate Cricket Torte
• Cream of Katydid Soup
• Gregor Samsa's Samosas
• and, my favourite, this one's just baroque:
• Ant [sic] Jemima's Buckwheat-Bug Griddlecakes

The full title is, Eat What You Want and Die Like a Man: The World's Unhealthiest Cookbook. The back cover reads, "Why choke down bland, mushy steamed veggies and brown rice when there s so much fat-laden, calorie-rich, heart-bursting cuisine out there to be savored?" Why indeed! Albeit an intentionally humourous book, the recipes within are designed to make your arteries squeal and die an ignominious, grease-covered death. Not much else to say about it, really. If you want your heart to be a sputtering knot clinging to life in a sea of lipidous slime, indulge in this catalogue of genuinely unhealthy recipes. Of course, they're bound to be delicious, aren't they?

What a lot of people don't know about good ol' Vincent Price is that he loved cooking. In fact, he had a cooking television program. Yes, Vincent Price was one of the first TV chefs. He and his wife collected their favourite recipes into a book called Mary and Vincent Price's Come Into the Kitchen Cook Book. I believe it's long out of print, but crops up in used bookstores. The food is quite normal. Nothing macabre or out of the ordinary. But it's written by Vincent Price! Listen to the 'video' (it's just audio) on the right. It is truly surreal. "I love mushrooms! They are so delicate, so light, so close to being nothing, but emphatically something!" Are you sophisticated enough to appreciate Vincent Price's pickled mushroom? I think that gets us back to Natural Harvest territory.

On that note, I leave you, my friends, to ponder the wonder of human culinary variety--we'll put just about anything in our mouths, won't we?