The Bad-For-You Cookbook

This spoof of a cookbook by zany satirists Maynard and Scheller ( Manifold Destiny ) is, in effect, a combination of radio talk-show banter and the best--and most bizarre--of Saturday Night Live. Devotees of lard, goose fat, butter and heavy cream (they actually recommend pouring heavy cream ``into a glass and drinking it down likesic you would a cold beer on a hot day''), the authors alternately bash yuppies (a common enough sport), Baptists, and our Puritan American ancestry for the sad state of food hedonism today. (Serious food for thought.) Illustrated with charts (e.g., the James Beard Index for rating cookbooks by cooking fat percentage per published page), the book contains some recipes that are genuinely good (Caesar salad with fried oysters, turkey gravy). But most--from consomme with suet balls to lard cake to crab cakes with caul fatsic --are guaranteed to sicken even those who laugh loud and long. If the fat per portion doesn't do us in, then the raw eggs in the ``killer nog''i.e., eggnog and the unboned chicken covered with batter for the chicken pudding will. Photos not seen by PW . (Feb.)