cover image Cooking for Mr. Right: More Than 100 Recipes to Land Your Man: More Than 150 Recipes to Land Your Man

Cooking for Mr. Right: More Than 100 Recipes to Land Your Man: More Than 150 Recipes to Land Your Man

Mimi Bean, Rebecca Chastenet Gery, Rebecca Chastenet De Gery. Citadel Press, $14.95 (240pp) ISBN 978-0-8065-2702-4

Bean and co-author de Gery offer up a fistful of menus for landing different types of men in this jejune cookbook that reads as if Sex and the City were set during the Eisenhower administration. The premise is recipes (and table settings, music, drinks, behavior and home decor) have been tailored to appeal to different male personality stereotypes: there's Mr. Magnate, a ""Daddy Warbucks who's a catch on two fronts"" and responds to dishes like Swordfish Au Poivre with Cognac Mustard Sauce. Then there's Mr. All-Nighter, a boozehound fueled by carb-heavy food like pizza, fried calamari and tiramisu. The recipes are varied, complex and well-balanced, yet are probably beyond the scope of the intended audience. The Key West Key Lime Pie, for example, calls for actual key limes, yet offers no tips on how to juice the gumball-sized limes (though readers can substitute bottled key lime juice if they can find it). The Swordfish Au Poivre requires clarified butter, a relatively simple but maddening technique for those unfamiliar with it. The recipes and menus are inventive and challenging (much more so than the men they're designed to attract), but they're unfortunately paired with advice that alternates between the sophomoric and pedantic. With a lighter hand, the book could have been fun, but a current of desperation and neediness undermines the text.