APRIL FOOL’S DAY: It’s A Box Of Pasta (Or Maybe A Book)
| Reminiscent of Cosmo Kramer’s coffee table book on Seinfeld,* Carla Bardi has published a book of spaghetti recipes that looks like a box of spaghetti.
At first glance it seems to be a spaghetti package from a supermarket shelf. If you hand it to someone, they’ll think you’re giving them a box of spaghetti. But look again: It’s a spaghetti cookbook with more than 130 ways to prepare a plain box of spaghetti. The recipes are divided into five separate sections, each one named for the main ingredients:
The recipes are creative and generally easy; the photos are tempting. The pasta is varied—not just spaghetti but bucatini, linguine and ziti. The gimmick is cuter-than-cute. *If you didn’t see the episode, Kramer authors a book on coffee tables that looks like a coffee table. The “table legs” pull out of the four corners of the book, and the book can stand on its legs. He showed this as a guest on “Regis and Kelly” (who were fascinated).
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April Fool’s: It’s a book about spaghetti. |
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| The only problem is that reading the book—much less keeping it open as you cook the recipe—is like trying to read the newspaper when it’s folded into quarters. People who commute via the New York City subway have mastered this system (as there’s no place to unfold your paper in a packed subway car). It isn’t the optimal way to read, but it is what it is. People who want to use this cookbook will have to develop their own system.
But, the incentive might be recipes such as spaghetti with fried meatballs in a sauce of onions and chopped tomatoes, or an exotic spaghetti with red rose and sunflower petals in a basil-wine sauce. A red ribbon place marker is bound into the spine, but perhaps the publishers should have taken a tip from Kramer and made the covers bend back into a cookbook stand. Still, the book sold out on Amazon. You can place an order for the new shipment, arriving soon, or head to your nearest bookstore.
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