British Sugarcraft Guild "Exotic Sugar Flowers for Cakes" Seminal Food Porn
Here is an utterly off-the-wall and completely beyond comprehension "Sugarcrafting" guide from the incomparable Alan Dunn. This stunning book is, in its own right, gorgeous, and it is fabulously illustrated with full color glossy photos presenting evidence of an obsession that is rare in this world. And, he includes instructions for DIY! I will let you decide if Mr. Dunn is a culinary genius or an absolute bat-crazy-wack-a-doodle... My idea of sugar is that you put it on Capt. Crunch or Wheaties for breakfast; Mr. Dunn is in a whole different universe of thinking... Sugar (in Mr. Dunn's mind) is for creating incredibly detailed flowers that will eventually rest upon cakes! And, the more complicated, complex, strange and detailed those flowers are, the better for him. See the photos. My words cannot do justice to the phantasmagoria of manipulated sugar this book holds.
I was married to a pastry chef for many years who twiddled around with piping sugar flowers on to wedding cakes for fun and profit. Nothing she did remotely compares to what this book beholds. Mr. Dunn herein teaches us how to actually create and build flowers with sugar rather than just squirting them out of a pastry tube… It's a whole different ball game that only a few will ever participate in, I'm sure. I really don't know what else to say, just look at the pictures and I think you'll get the idea. This is a hardbound book from Merehurst Publishing with the original dust cover in a 9" x 11" format featuring 158 pages of stunning full color glossy photos and all kinds of encouragement for you to give it a try, along with how-to charts, in a time capsule. This book is in near mint condition; someone probably bought it, opened it, took a deep breath, and then shut it for good… their loss is (possibly) your gain.
Allan Dunn's Sugarcraft: Genius or Wacko?
The Mid-Century Origins of Food Pornography
When I was flipping hotcakes at a Sambo's Pancake House back in the mid-century era my manager (I'm looking at you Leon) sometimes tried to impart restaurant food wisdom to my foggy mind. One of his firmly held beliefs was that we were first and foremost "Selling the Sizzle" rather than the actual food we served. A 1938 New Yorker article attributes that bit of sublime wordsmanship to a Mr. Elmer Wheeler: "In the 1930's Mr. Wheeler adopted the profession of seducing people in the mass with words including Wheelerpoint No. 1: 'Don’t Sell the Steak—Sell the Sizzle! ....the sizzle has sold more steaks than the cow ever has, although the cow is, of course, mighty important."
Up to that point cookbooks were created with the intent to produce a meal of some reliability and variety. However, around the mid-century a whole new kind of cookbook started popping up that was made for Looking, rather than Cooking! This nascent industry was first documented by Alexander Cockburn in 1979: "True Gastro Porn heightens the excitement and also the sense of unattainability by proffering colored photographs of various completed recipes." Cockburn defined Gastro Porn as a glamorized presentation of food using forms of photography and styling that presents food provocatively, similar to pornographic photography. More importantly he noted that the photographs in this genre "always repress the production process of the meal and are always beautifully lit and touched up." Soon the market was flooded with this new style of cookbook featuring glamor shots of gleaming meals for an audience of eaters who coincidentally seemed to no longer have the time, or desire, to actually cook. This was a generational shift which eventually led to the current norm for younger generations to routinely post visually appealing videos and photos of food and drink across social media: Food Porn was Born and Normalized.
Most of what we have in our Vintage Food Porn section is the early-on-mid-century work of professional pornographers. Better Homes and Gardens was a major contributor to this trend (whether they knew it or not) and we have a constant supply of their myriad iterations of this work along with many other examples. So, pull down the shades, take the phone off the hook, and find a comfortable nook to stretch out in while you browse along with us: https://www.ebay.com/str/portlandpandemonium/Vintage-Food-Porn/_i.html?store_cat=38704219017
We Will Scratch Your Vintage Itch
