In Love with the Food Stamp Gourmet

It only took one look at The Food Stamp Gourmet: Patrician Eating on a Proletarian Budget (Wm Brown, illustrated by Gilbert Sheldon, Greg Irons, and David Sheridan, 1971) for me to know I needed this book. Just look at the cover!

How could I not be in love with that underground comix style? Just look at the fat hippie on the cover in his overalls and chef's hat, freshly-plucked chicken in one hand and comically undersized skillet in the other! His friendly mutton chops blend so seamlessly with his hair it seems almost like he's being enveloped in a cloud of smoke. This is a style that I just can't get enough of. 😻

The book has that '70s power to the people vibe too, insisting that even poor people can eat quality food, stating, "Most of these recipes come from Europe, where even the relatively poor care a lot about what they eat. Because they do care, but don't have much money, they've developed many succulent dishes that use cheap ingredients. It's basically peasant food, but it's so good that even the rich sometimes eat it in preference to more expensive dishes." The opening has a mini-tutorial on how to try to get food stamps, and the back cover advertises other books from the same press, including the upcoming plan to ease one's money troubles: How to Stop the Corporation [sic] Polluters and Make Money Doing It. I cannot express how much I love this '70s style.

The recipes, as advertised, tend to call for pretty simple ingredients. My real interest, however, is in the comics that accompany them...

...like the steer tapping a keg, presumably in preparation for becoming a Carbonade de Boeuf. I thought he was pretty stoic about the whole situation, but...

...it looks like he was only stoic until he learned he was on the menu. By the end, he's passed out and the keg is empty-- so I guess it's time to start dinner?

The chicken for the G.I.'s Hungry Visitors' Chicken Breasts is much more proactive than the steer, hopping around and flapping wildly as it attempts to scare off the slightly-crazed looking G.I.

I like that the recipe starts with a personal story of trying to figure out what to make visiting friends for dinner because "the food in that particular town was wretched."

I'm not sure why the actual recipe is illustrated by a hippie showing off a platter lavishly bedecked with a single bean, but I love his enormous teeth and hair frizzing out in all directions. Maybe the chicken actually did manage to outsmart the guy with the gun this time, and so everyone pretended the single-bean dinner was a revelation of the satisfying power of simple ingredients.

Speaking of funny hippies, I also love the fire breather illustrating the Beef Curry recipe (and its story about the yogurt accompaniment having been surreptitiously spiced so that it was even hotter than the meal it was meant to cool).

And finally, a recipe I love both for its title and the accompanying illustrations:

Yes, it's Starving Poets' Pork Chops. You've got to love the illustration showing why the poets were starving-- their tiny fellowships went to beer, poker, and cigarettes of one sort or another. Looks like there wasn't even enough money to heat their living space, if (as Joe Bob says) you know what I mean, and I think you do!

And from the look of it, maybe sometimes they forgot that the pig should be dead before it's put on a platter, but hey, you can't expect poets to be too practical!

I am soooooooooooooo happy I found this book, and it must have been for a good price. I can't remember now and there is no tag on it, so it must have been $5 or less, as I have to do some serious soul- (and Amazon/ Etsy/ eBay) searching to decide whether I'm willing to pay more than that for an old cookbook. It looks like this one usually goes for somewhere in the $20-$50 range, though some extremely optimistic person was trying to sell a copy on Amazon for $948.05 plus tax and $3.84 shipping and handling when I checked prior to writing this post! Anyone willing and able to spend that much is clearly not in the primary audience and does not deserve this amazing book.