Book Review: The Spicy Cookbook

Title: The Spicy Cookbook

Author: none mentioned

Date: 1982

Publisher: Rand McNally

ISBN: none

Length: 32 pages

Illustrations: drawings and color photographs

Quote: "The Spicy Cookbook brings you recipes for 28 highly seasoned dishes...appetizers, soups, salads, entrees, desserts, breads, and beverages."

This book was created as an advertisement for Listerine. Seriously. Though Listerine is an antibiotic and we now know that daily use of it can harm our immune systems, the purpose of this book was to encourage people to cook and eat things after which they'd want to wash the spicy odors out of their mouths with Listerine.

Accordingly the recipes are arranged by the featured spice, and although the list does include caraway, clove, and ginger, this book features ways to use more pepper, chili, curry, garlic, horseradish, mustard, onions, and Worcestershire Sauce. 

The good news is that it's easy to taste as you go and correct the seasoning if you so choose. You don't have to put a whole teaspoon of pepper into a salad or stuff twenty garlic cloves under the skin of one baked chicken. You could use different spices, too, substituting for the ones you don't tolerate.

For cookbook collectors, this book marks a turning point in the history of American cookbooks. For a long time, though gourmet cooks had spice racks, many cooks seasoned food with salt, pepper, maybe a sprinkle of vinegar or lemon juice, and that was about all unless they baked gingerbread or pumpkin pie. Some doctors even warned that spices could irritate the digestive tract, which for some people is true. In the 1980s doctors began warning people to cut back on salt, and American cookbook writers discovered that food requires less salt if it's seasoned with other things. Some went overboard, perhaps, with the spices; I'd say that the writers of some of these recipes went too far, but this is where the fashion for spicy recipes really starts.