The Wasp Cookbook

by Alexandra Wentworth

Actress and comedienne Alexandra Wentworth serves up some of her best WASP family recipes, spicing them up with humorous commentary on life. "After a lifetime of addiction to Italian food, I had no... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0446912107
• ISBN13: 9780446912105
• Release Date: October 1997
• Publisher: Warner Books (NY)
• Length: 111 Pages
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.2" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

a laugh on every page

This book made me laugh until I cried. Clearly the author has "been there." Forget about the recipes; it's the commentary that matters. I particularly liked the cookies sent to the child at boarding school with "love from Mummy" written in the cook's handwriting.

Very funny!

This is a great book. I bought it for myself - and I'm now buying them for my WASP girlfriends for their birthdays - a very funny book with some good (not great) recipes.

Right into the time capsule for future WASPs

Alexandra Wentworth isn't such a WASP that she'll say no to marrying for love (specifically, marrying former Clinton chief of staff George Stephanopoulos in 2001), but she's a WASP enough to have come up with a recipe collection that not only has pretty good food, but features the unmistakable ring of authenticity as well. Listen to these tidbits:"Every WASP must have a picnic basket that's at least sixty years old. If you don't have one, buy a new basket and bury it in the ground for a year.""WASPs relish an excuse to get bedecked from head to toe in Ralph Lauren wear--khaki jodhpurs (the classy answer to Spandex), tweed jackets, floral scarves, and burgundy calfskin gloves.""These elegant debutantes, in their Bergdorf white gowns and long white gloves, are presented by their fathers. After the brief ceremony, they are toasted as the paragons of fine breeding, good taste, and decorum. They then spend the rest of the evening getting drunk, smoking cigarettes, and giving new meaning to the term 'fine breeding.' "The recipes work, mostly because they're simple. Some have great names--Nummies, for one (dried apricots filled with Boursin), or Our Family's Eggnog. For the most part, though, look at this less as an honest-to-goodness culinary venture and more as a time capsule of WASPhood in a time when WASPs are no longer commemorated, lauded, made fun of and displayed as they were in John Cheever's heyday.

Absolutely hilarious, a GREAT gift

This is the perfect gift for any ocassion. It's humorous and the recipes are fun.