The How Not to Cookbook: Lessons Learned the Hard Way

by Aleksandra Mir

Learn what not to do in the kitchen from this hilarious collection of real advice by real people. Sometimes the best way to learn is to make mistakes. That’s the premise of this book—a sort of anti-cookbook. Fed up with our prevailing food culture of patronizing celebrity chefs with their rigid and often impossible instructions, Aleksandra Mir started a website to invite real people to send in their kitchen disaster stories, so that the rest of us could benefit from their experience. The result was a viral Internet phenomenon. Home cooks from around the world streamed in with advice. One thousand of their tips were then collected in this humorous and ultimately heartening and cathartic book. The packaging is as funny as the content too; it tricks you into thinking you’ve come across a vintage workhorse cookbook that’s seen its share of abuse. Don’t look here for recipes to be followed slavishly. Instead, this is a book to dip in and out of, choosing from among the wide variety of little gems that are always idiosyncratic, often opinionated, and never boring. Many will spark debate. Some may not be so practical but are wickedly funny. But the best part of the book is its reassurance that it’s okay to be human, to make mistakes.

320 pages, Hardcover

First published September 14, 2010

Reviews

[Charmainia · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a TERRIBLE book! Honestly halfway through I began to wonder if it was supposed to be humor. There are very few "paragraphs" or funny stories about kitchen disasters, which is what I expected from the book jacket. Nearly all of the book's chapters are filled with tips that are 1 or 2 sentences long, and are scattered all around the pages in several different fonts. Many of the lines are repeated verbatim in different chapters. There is also a plethora of conflicting advice, usually grouped together. (As in "You should always cook with electric, it's much safer" followed by "Only cook over gas, electric cooking is EVIL!") Some of the advice is ridiculously simple- "Do not microwave metal objects." (Which is then repeated several times, but with different fonts. And in the "contributors" section, four and a half pages are filled with "Anonymous". Can you say filler?

[Kristen]

Hilarious paragraphs and bits of advice from folks who learned the hard way. Advice often includes a brief yet side-splitting story about what went wrong when the cook did things the wrong way. Explosions. Fumes. Smells. Cracked dishes. Spice where there aren't supposed to be any.