JF Ptak Science Books   Post 807  Blog Bookstore

In the excitable, pulsing pile that is my collection of Naively Bizarre Literature–some 5,000 items now pushing themselves around like a 750-pound bad idea–comes this lovely, “what the  ____!?” title:  Let’s Serve Something New. 53 Selected Recipes for the use of Liver, Heart, Kidney, Sweetbreads, Tongue and other Meat Specialties.

Now, once I got the tongue part out of my 18-year-long vegetarian brain, I wondered about what on earth the other part of the ripping title and what “specialties” there might be.

But before I could get there I was stopped by these unique cartoon illustrations romping their way through the text with spectacular word balloons   There are SO many more words that could be injected into these balloons than the ones that were used, and so much more expected. But the zombie texts was inserted by the publisher, which was the American Institute of Meat Packers, whop no doubt were trying to force every last penny of profit out of whatever was left in the sluice sieves of the chopping room floor. 

If these cartoons were extracted from this source, and their balloons left blank, and if people were asked to supply new text, the original words would be the very last in a very long list of possible fillers.  

Removed from context, the illustrations are unexpected and hysterical; placed back into context, and well, they are a little wince-y. 

The recipes that decorate this pamphlet are no less unbelievable, at least from where I’m sitting, and I’m sitting hard:  stuffed baked liver with vegetables in liver dressing, pork liver fermiere, liver with brown liver gravy, liver Pasadena (liver and butter and broiled bacon swimming in bacon fat), liver dumplings stuffed with liver, creamed sweetbreads, kidney omlettes, baked stuffed heart with rice border, heart chop suey, scrambled brains, sauteed brains, creamed calves brains, cold jellied tongue, tongue omlette, tripe roll, baked pig’s feet, and, not last, Tripe a la Mussolini (which is 1.5 pounds ogf tripe, bread crumbs, and tomato sauce).  (Spam stuffed with spam and spam jelly, braised in a light spam sauce, and covered in crackled spam.)

After everything was said and done, the other surprise meats didn’t seem so surprising anymore, what with running up on the heals of delicacies like stuffed tongue and parboiled sumpin’s: tails, feet and oysters (a la Waldorf) seemed as harmless as a Sunday Slider. 

Spam.