Nancy Drew Cookbook

By JULIETTE ROSSANT With the release Friday, June 15 of Nancy Drew (the movie), Super Chef decided to take a look at Carolyn Keene's Nancy Drew Cookbook (Grosset & Dunlap 2007), one of the many products that will, no doubt, be snapped up by tweens and teens and their parents. It takes Nancy's spirit – independence, resourcefulness, and intelligence albeit constrained by the 1950s – to be a good cook; so maybe Nancy's cookbook can encourage that in girls. (Never mind that Nancy didn't cook; her family had a cook). The cover of the spiral bound book shows Nancy flipping through a recipe book wearing a yellow sleeveless dress and bobbed red hair. (In the movie, actress Emma Roberts has long light brown locks, but the fictional Nancy wavered between blonde and titian, straight to buffont in her various incarnations from the 1930s onwards.) The book's background is baby blue check with a magnifying glass revealing the hidden subtitle: Clues to Good Cooking. It's all very faux 1950s, even the author is fictitious, as most Nancy fans will no doubt know. Mildred Wirt Benson and Harriet Stratemeyer Adams as well as a team of ghost writers were responsible for this formidable heroine. For more on the history of Nancy Drew, check out Melanie Rehak's Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her (Harvest Books 2006) As for the recipes, think Brady Bunch meets Betty Crocker -- a double dipping of nostalgia that falls vaguely in the 1950s-1970s. There is a list of safety instructions to start, good for a child who is already a little familiar with cooking, since there are no diagrams or illustrations. There are fun names for recipes that refer to characters or like 99 Steps French Toast (p. 17) (very simple French toast) and Crumbling Wall Coffee Cake (p. 18) (made with dry bread crumbs and pancake mix) taken from titles of her books or other themes. It is too bad there are no recipe heads that to remind the reader about the story or why a character would eat a particular dish. There are a couple of pages of a Nancy story to go with each section. The first is describes a breakfast party where Nancy and her pals try out recipes for the cookbook to be. The next story for the Time for Lunch chapter is about helping a certain Mrs. Russo find a heirloom ring she accidentally lost while making blueberry muffins (oops, sorry to spoil that one). The recipe for Blackwood Hall Muffins (p. 19) is back in the breakfast section. Maybe only a true Nancy fan would appreciate recipes like Casserole Treasure (p. 51) which is a mixture of frozen green beans, canned mushroom soup, Worcestershire sauce and some cheese or Leaning Chimney Cones (p. 61) which is bologna wrapped around a cottage cheese-radish filling. Surely Nancy (or the family cook) is a better cook than this! It would have been fun to have reprints of old Nancy Drew book covers and Nancy Drew memorabilia. Instead, the recipes come with naïve pen and ink drawings of ingredients or utensils – often having nothing to do with the recipe on the page. Burt's Pizza (p. 39) has a salt and pepper grinder but there isn't any called for in the recipe. Likewise, Shadow Ranch Barbecued Beans has a picture of a bag of sugar – but the recipe calls for brown sugar not white. It is so 1950s. Old fashioned doesn't have to mean out of a box and unappetizing. No doubt, Nancy would concur that Nancy's fans deserve better than this unappetizing cookbook. Video: Nancy Drew: Get a Clue (release date: June 15, 2008) Audio: Nancy Drew: Get a Clue (CD) Previous articles: [Children's Cookbook Reviews - complete] [Cookbook Reviews - complete] Technorati Tags: superchefblog, Juliette Rossant, super chef, celebrities, chefs, food, restaurants, cooking, branding, cuisine, blogging, food blogging, cookbook reviews, Nancy Drew --> back to Super Chef