Whilst I've never generally been a fan of 'theme' restaurants, I do adore Tim Burton and whimsy along with the Gothic aesthetic. This cookbook is full of all of the above along with genuinely delicious recipes for appealingly presented food with a lot of humor.
I tried one of the very first recipes in the book, Edward Sauce, and it's wonderful. It's a sour cream and mayo based dipping sauce with a fair bit of kick from the sriracha and other ingredients. Really delicious.
A lot of restaurant based cookbooks, and indeed quite a percentage of restaurants are unbelievably pretentious and recreating the recipes takes a lot of specialist ingredients which are difficult to source alongside a lot of eye-wateringly expensive equipment. This cookbook is afflicted with neither problem. The ingredients are easy to find and the equipment is likely to be had in any home kitchen.
The chapters are roughly arranged in meal order: sauces & dips, appetizers, soups & salads, main courses, desserts, drinks, with a chapter of fun theme menus at the end.
The author has included tips for making the dishes vegan friendly (mostly consisting of using vegan friendly ingredients). All these dishes could easily be 'tamed down' somewhat and incorporated into a regular meny that wouldn't scandalize your elderly auntie. There are a number of dishes with a decidedly spicy twist, chipotle, cayenne, and sriracha sauce figure large in many of the recipes, so proceed with caution if you have a guest who doesn't tolerate a bit of heat in their foods.
Appealing, irreverent, funny, and tasty. As an example... here are the how-to instructions for the abovementioned Edward Sauce:
To Make It
1. Place all the ingredients in a bowl and whisk the shit
out of them. Your finished sauce should have the
consistency of mayonnaise.
Four stars, I'll be making a lot more of these recipes regularly.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes
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