Inside Joke for People Who Bought Book

I am getting more emails about Eat What You Want and Die Like a Man – The World’s Unhealthiest Cookbook. I can’t get it through my head that people take this book seriously as a cookbook, because I wrote it to make readers laugh, but the recipes do work, and people seem to like them. This guy actually took the time to make the hash brown casserole! This one takes WORK.

I don’t name people who email me when I mention what they say, unless I’m sure they want to be named or won’t care. Here it is:

I cooked up the hashbrown casserole tonight. It was awesome. I needed to cook the bacon to get the grease, and I believe throwing bacon out is a felony (well, it should be), so I crumbled it up and sprinkled it between the layers of hashbrowns. You, sir, are a genius.

It warms my heart to read things like that. I hope people are cooking this stuff all over the US. But not too often. I need them alive so they can buy my next book.

More

I just got another one. I guess it will sound silly, considering the type of writing I do, but I can identify with this one on a special level.

I just got your book Monday and read it when I got home. The chapter written in Christopher Walken’s voice creeped me out, but then just looking at him creeps me out. I read the entire thing before bed. To say I loved it is damning it with faint praise. I loved the recipe for biscuits and I can’t wait to try them but I do have an addition. My mom used to make biscuits with ‘cracklin’s’. Cracklin’s were the left over little bits from rendering lard. She would get fat from the butcher (for some reason it was ground or she ground it, I don’t remember) and render the lard then take the little bits out and cook them a little more to brown up. She would make the biscuits and I don’t remember if she mixed the cracklin’s in or put them on top, but whichever way she did it she would take the biscuits and put them in bacon grease and turn them over so there was bacon grease top and bottom, then bake. When I was about eight or nine she started making Bisquik biscuits and never again did I have an honest-to-goodness biscuit with cracklin’s. Your book has inspired me to attempt to make them myself. Now to track down some place to buy hog fat.

As I have often said, one reason I started improving my cooking skills in the Nineties is that my mother had died, and I didn’t get to see my grandmother in Kentucky very often, and there were foods I missed. A lot of the things I put in the book are things I used to eat at their tables. Cornbread. Biscuits and gravy. Bean soup with ham hocks. I put chicken and dumplings in the original book.

In a less important way, I also missed decent pizza, which used to be all over North Miami when I was a kid, so I learned how to make better pizza than I had back then.

If you’re in the situation I was in, do yourself a favor, pick a few dishes you miss, and figure out how to make them. You’ll get it right eventually. I can tell you from experience, it’s like having an heirloom nobody can take away from you. And if you have kids, you can share it and pass it on to them, and they’ll know a little bit about what your life was like when you were growing up.