While seated in a restaurant or at your host’s dinner table, do you ever think yourself, “Right now one of those dishes from U.S. Air would really hit the spot?” Well, if you haven’t yet enjoyed this day dream, the sentiment has been anticipated.
American Airlines has just published a cookbook so that we can all enjoy those delicate flavors right in our own homes. I called all the airlines to fact check but no one was admitting to anything so we’ll just have to rely on my scant memory.
Apparently this new culinary handbook gives us the airline way to prepare lobster fajitas, peanut butter chicken, and in-flight ice cream sundaes. Well this is all well and good, even besides the fact that I’ve never received any of these things in the air, but I think some airline executive is all wrong about what in flight food is for. You got a meal to pass the time. The meal is the oral equivalent of the magazine rack (it often tastes like magazine’s too) Also notice that on most flights the crew is outnumbered 30+ to one so they have to keep the natives well occupied before this fact is discovered and used.
So why publish a cookbook? The royalties certainly can’t help pay the unions. My hope is that it’s a poke-fun-at-ones-self thing or in the spirit of “Are you Hungry Tonight?,” the book that shows how to eat and die like Elvis. Maybe it’s an ego thing like “The Recipes of Five Old Women Who Are Still Mad That They’ve Never Won the Ninth Baptist Church Calla-Lily Contest Cookbook.” Maybe one day we’ll get an answer, but while we wait, fell free to dish up flat omelets and cups of what seems almost but not quite like fruit. You can get the recipes.
This whole thing now opens the door for future new and exciting cookbooks that my visions have made clear to me.
“Amtrak: Not Just Any Sandwich.”
This book is just the thing for preparing squashed dry little sandwiches for travel. But, hey, enjoy the experience right now in your own home. The secret of egg salad and grade “c” bologna are shared here. You also get the bar tending guide to cheap bourbon and watery drinks. With the classic chapter “Seven hours on one ice cube” the Brits find new respect for Americans.
“Ladies Supper.”
This is really a collection of menus published by the A.O.P. sorority of Washington College. The highlight is “Week night Lite” A step by step peer pressure guide to getting 30 young women to dine on fat free salad and iced tea at 5 p.m. Included is a treatment on Equal, Nutrasweet, and the fastest and best way to get extra large triple everything pizzas at 10 p.m. Because of being the number one best seller for three years, Procolino’s pizza on M.D.213 becomes a huge national chain.
“N.Y.C. Cabbies Guide to Day-Old, Half-Eaten Chili Dogs” is not a success but the perfume line is. Offered are scents from every culture world wide; each available in Ellis Island and stale vinyl. Unfortunately “month old road kill dipped in sock juice” (named by a Columbia College professor) becomes a favorite of teenage pranksters and gets used for evil.
One Richmond contractor does become famous for his recipes especially on college campuses. C.J.’s “Day-Old, Half-Eaten” is a complete guide to curing hangovers with cold pizza and Chinese food. His frozen food line of half filled boxes of Kung Pao chicken and pre-cooked pizzas are meant to merely be defrosted to a gelled consistency. All dishes contain meat as C. J. knows that vegetarians can’t cure hangovers.
So you see the cookbook world will be increasingly diverse, like the Internet without pornography. Even I could co-write one with Jeff and Paul — assuming they stop throwing snow balls at me.