Don’t Try This At Home

Culinary Catastrophes from the World’s Greatest Chefs

By Caroline Cummins

January 29, 2007

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Title

• Don’t Try This At Home

Authors

• Andrew Friedman and Kimberly Witherspoon

Publisher

• Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

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The first book in Witherspoon’s annual take on the food-memoir compendium, Don’t Try This At Home collects short essays from chefs (and a few home cooks) on their biggest, most embarrassing, or funniest screwups. Best of the bunch, predictably, are the knife-wielders who are also professional pen-slingers, chiefly the vulgarly energetic Anthony Bourdain and the delicately wry Tamasin Day-Lewis. (Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger’s memoir of a sauce gone very, very wrong is also irresistibly giggly.) You won’t learn much new about any of the authors (and you may shake your head at their need to spin good PR out of a mishap), but Don’t Try This At Home makes for a tasty tapas spread.

Caroline Cummins is the managing editor of Culinate.