If you’ve ever browsed the cookbook section at a sufficiently large bookstore, you’ve seen examples of this phenomenon: there’s some cultural object with a culinary component, so an associated cookbook is written and released.
For example:
That one’s official. But they don’t have to be:
Sometimes it makes perfect sense:
And sometimes it makes no sense at all:
So this is our challenge: what is the strangest, most tenuously justified cookbook published in association with a TV show, movie, game, or other creative property?
Here are a couple of pages listing more examples, to get you started:
My contribution: this is not at all tenuous, it makes some sense in the context of the show, but it certainly made me do a hard double-take, and it’s the thing that prompted the thread.
(By the way, I’m not talking about something like Binging with Babish, who made a career out of replicating on-screen dishes. He ranged all over various sources for inspiration in his episodes. The prompt here is for cookbooks that are focused on one specific inspirational source.)
It’s not a cookbook, but a video. The Smithsonian Institution once made an instructional video entitled Julia Child Shows You How to Make Primordial Soup. And they really did get “The French Chef” Julia Child to star, and she really did show you how to make Primordial Soup.
The first time I saw this at the Boston Museum of Science I was amazed. Later it showed up on a VHS collection of weird government videos called Federal Follies. I showed it at one of my Bad Film Festivals. Then it dropped out of circulation for years, but now you can find it on YouTube.
It’s not really a “folly” or a “Bad Film”, it’s just weird. It’s actually a nifty way to tell people about the concept. The only real problem now is that it’s dated. Thinking about the origins of life have progressed, but public education about it is still stuck in the Julia Child era. Maybe we need an update with Emeril Lagasse (“We kick it up a notch with volcanic vent gases and Bam!”)
Kinda weird that it HASN’T been made yet - a podcast I listen to that recaps episodes of the David Suchet version of Poirot has been working on a Poirot cookbook. There’s food and drink in almost every episode/story, from the fancy stuff Poirot eats and cooks, to the stuff he’s subject to when Japp and Hastings are in charge of meals. Should be interesting!
I’m only putting ones I can see on the shelf from where I’m sitting. There may be more on other shelves. If you want a picture, ISBN, or sample recipes, let me know.
Star Wars Wookiee Cookies Cookbook
Star Wars Cookbook II Darth Malt and more Galactic Recipes
I don’t recall ever cooking anything from any of these, but I’m pretty sure my marriage vows had some line about allowing her to buy odd cookbooks from thrift stores. That is also only the ones with media tie ins. There are others.
We have this one and it’s actually very good, and not so weird. Food played a big part in the show. The recipe for Maggie’s potato salad became our standard (and, yes, it’s safe to eat).
I ought to mention a logical cookbook tie-in – The Nero Wolfe Cookbook. It features some recipes referred to in the series (including Wolfe’s way of making scrambled eggs, referred to in The Mother Hunt, and which Stout doesn’t recommend), and was written by Rex Stout himself, after testing the recipes.
We have the Iron Chef book that the OP references. If memory serves (I haven’t looked at it in years), it’s not really a cookbook; it’s more a compendium on the show itself (the original Japanese iteration) – the chefs, the competitions, etc.
This is the Neelix cookbook. It has lots of Klingon stuff, including Gagh (udon noodles), heart of targ (veal hearts), Rokeg blood pie (cherry pie), another Rokeg blood pie (kidney pie), and some kind of organ meat stew.
The recipes seem to bounce between completely normal stuff from the human crew, simulated stuff from the aliens (udon in sesame dressing), and alien stuff heavy on the organ meat.
There’s also the more recent Hero’s Feast D&D cookbook which is kind of weird in that there’s not enough notable “lore” foods like Otik’s Spiced Potatoes to fill out a book and they don’t attempt to lean into anything silly-fantasical like “Owlbear Cutlets (pssst, it’s really pork, wink wink)”. So you just wind up with mundane recipes like “Elf Trail Mix” which is just trail mix with the word elf in front and “Halfling Peach Cobbler” which… you know.
