Cooking

Henry Beard remains one of the better satirists out there. Never high-profile, but always digging in at the edges and providing consistently funny material to keep the shelves of the nation's bookstores' Humor sections stocked, Beard and illustrator Roy McKie wrote this series over the course of the 80s and early 90s in the tradition of Ambrose Bierce to provide humor for many hobbies. Clever, yes -- Beard is one of the greats in his field -- but... The problem is that to properly channel Ambrose Bierce, one must not only be talented. One must also be relevant. Beard and McKie didn't quite hit it on this one. The target audience for this book would seem to be people who enjoy cooking. For those people, many of the frustrations in this book are a little obscure or irrelevant -- for the most part, people who like to cook don't find it a particularly frustrating experience. Which is not to take away from the humor level -- if you take it from the perspective of someone who truly hates to cook (and, unfortunately, wouldn't really have much interest in this book), the humor is actually pretty good. Beard has a distinct talent for wordplay (especially as regards dialect), and McKie's art (here, very similar stylistically to that of Quentin Blake, Hilary Price, and John Callahan) shows an equally well-developed talent for matter-of-fact sight gags of the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker style. All that makes for a very well-crafted, quite enjoyable, yet somewhat irrelevant read. After 22 years, this book remains in print for good reason -- Beard's work in general has stood the test of time over the years, and hopefully there will be much more from him showing his unique twist on reality. But this particular book has a limited audience -- cooks who also happen to be fans of Bierce, Richard Lederer, and other wordplay specialists will like this book, but those who don't so much care about such writers will find it odd at best.