What happens when the authors know that nobody is really here for the recipes

I'm pretty sure I never posted a cookbook from the 2000s before, but when I saw today's featured cookbook at the New Orleans Museum of Death on a long-ago vacation, I realized I had to get my own copy someday. So today, we are Cooking with a Serial Killer: Recipes from Dorothea Puente (edited by Shane Bugbee, second printing, 2004). 

Puente ran a boarding house for people with disabilities. Though the book quotes her protesting her innocence ("Why would I spend money fattening [my boarders] up if I was going to kill them?"), the fact that they continued to cash social security checks after they were buried on the property-- mostly dosed with similar drugs before their deaths-- leads me to disbelieve her.

Obviously, the draw of the book is that you get a bunch of recipes that Puente may well have fed to the people she killed. The recipes occasionally mention how many people she cooked for, such as the end of the recipe for "Mexican Chicken & Chard Calzones." (Also note that every page with a recipe has that same weird, distracting flowery border, I guess to help drive home the idea that Puente was just a nice old grandma-type person.)

I can't help thinking there is little of Mexico in this recipe, what with the Swiss cheese, Italian seasoning, and pizza dough. There's not even an attempt to make the dipping sauce interesting with a bit of chili powder or a dash of hot sauce. And then at the end of the recipe, a reminder that Puente cooked in quantity for her charges: "This recipe may be doubled, had to 8 times for my people." (Also, if you read this book, you really better be able to let comma splices slide, or it will drive you crazy.)

This collection is an effort of someone who clearly had about 100 pages to fill and no real idea of how to accomplish it. Some pages are taken up by full-page quotes from Puente, like this one:

This is across from the recipe for Vegetarian Lentil Loaf. Before I get to the actual recipe, I want to appreciate the end of the quote: "You can take the nuts or the vegetables out and add meat with the lentils, it becomes really tasty." Not only is this recommendation taking away what the title seems to suggest is the main attraction (It's vegetarian!) by adding meat, but it also seems to suggest the vegetarian version isn't so great to begin with. You gotta add meat to make it tasty. And should you wish to follow the recommendation, good luck!

There are conspicuously NO nuts in this recipe to replace. While it does have veggies, they're the kinds of aromatics that people tend to cook with meat to give it some flavor anyway, so I'm not sure how good an idea it would be to take them out considering that the only other seasonings are salt, pepper, and garlic salt. And this reinforces the theme I noticed throughout the book: Bugbee and Puente seem to realize that no one is likely to be that serious about the recipes. They just want the title. That made it pretty easy to shit out a book without even a cursory proofreading. Take, for example, the ingredient list for Dorothea's Homemade Tamales.

I'm assuming the "Maza" is "masa," and that "caniender" is supposed to be "coriander." I'm more amused by the formatting errors, like "2-1/2 cups water that meat has." (I'm assuming that it's supposed to pair with "been cooked in," but that phrase follows "1 tablespoon chili powder"-- which, it is important to note-- has also been preceded for instructions to add 1-1/2 tablespoons of chili powder.) And then the ingredients list ends with "2-1/2 lbs pork roast boiled in 3 quarts           Corn husks/ water to which the following has been added:"

And it just ends with that colon to nowhere. If you think the instructions will help make sense of this mess, you are clearly not understanding just how few fucks Puente and Bugbee gave.

Let's say you want to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume the double-listed chili powder was perhaps meant to suggest it was divided and part was used in one portion of the preparation and part in another-- sure! Maybe! But don't expect the instructions to help you figure it out. Instead, they casually recommend out of nowhere that "You may use beef or chicken, also" and offer such helpful advice as "Fold over so there are about 3 husks."

If this is all too complicated for you, well, just make Tamales Prison Style (as, I'm assuming, Puente eventually resorted to).

The last third-or-so of the book gives up on recipes entirely and includes some photographs, letters, incredibly trite poetry written by Puente (and a slightly modified version of this "classic" that Puente claims a friend sent her because apparently she couldn't be bothered to crank out enough drivel to fill out the last few pages). Plus, there's an "INTERVIEW EXCLUSIVE!!" advertised on the back of the book that includes such shocking and revealing exchanges as this:

Shane: Hi, is this Dorothea.

Dorothea: Yes it is.

Shane: Hi, this is Shane.

Dorothea: How are you?

Shane: Okay. How are you?

Dorothea: Pretty good.

Such insights into the mind of a killer! That's worth the price of admission alone.

So, in short, I was very amused by this purchase (though probably not in the way Puente and Bugbee may have hoped) and happy that I bought it secondhand so my money did not go to these losers. (Well, Puente is long dead, but the sentiment remains.)