James Lileks has been running The Gallery of Regrettable Food for what appears to be over two decades now, and it is one of the finest things on the internet. The premise is simple: he collects old promotional recipe booklets from the 1930s through the 1970s, scans the pages, and writes commentary about them. The execution is anything but simple. This is some of the funniest writing I've encountered on the web, period.
The site is organized into dozens of sections, each dedicated to a different booklet or theme. You've got your Meat MEAT MEAT section, which Lileks himself warns may cause visitors to "vow to never buy any of my books." There's Eww La La, covering a thick French cookbook where the eggs look like "Alien-fetus skulls in butterscotch sauce" and a severed bird head sticking out of sweet potatoes appears to be "rolling his eyes and wearing a beret, so it's as French as they get." There's Gel-Cookery, described with clinical precision as "a process wherein simple foods were suspended in a chilled solution of horse-hoof powder."
What makes this site special isn't just the source material, though. Plenty of people have poked fun at old cookbooks. It's the voice. Lileks writes with this particular kind of midwestern wit that sneaks up on you. On the Young Adult Parties page, a section about teens throwing dinner parties suddenly veers into a paragraph about how their parents' parties end with "recriminations that went back ten years spilled out like a sack of rotten fish guts." The LaChoy page casually mentions that one of the company's co-founders "was killed by lightning in 1937" and then adds: "Sure. 'Lightning.'"
I spent an embarrassing amount of time clicking through this site. The Bran Plus section, covering a 1930s brochure about the wonders of dietary fiber, features Lileks describing the booklet's design as "a tidy little masterpiece" before noting that its real purpose is promoting "dense & dependable defecation." The 10 PM Cookery section imagines the scandalous lifestyle of someone entertaining guests at the "SINFUL hour of ten PM." The Cookies Galore page fixates on a cover illustration of a boy carrying a cookie container and asks whether a brown shape near his foot is evidence that "the dog just defecated in excitement" before concluding: "No, that is the boy's shoe."
The whole thing is built as plain HTML pages, one section flowing into the next, images and text laid out with care. No pop-ups, no newsletter sign-up modals, no infinite scroll. Just a guy with a scanner, a collection of terrible old cookbooks, and a gift for comedic writing. Some of these pages date back to around 2000, making them genuine artifacts of the early web themselves. He's still at it, too. There are menu cards being added in 2024, with promises of more in 2025.
There's something I really appreciate about the introduction on the main page, where Lileks talks about why he collects these booklets. He calls it "the Mom factor." These are "everyday relics of another time, my parents' time, and this gives them a poignancy they do not deserve, and do nothing to earn. But I love them anyway." That's such an honest, specific thing to say. He's not pretending these are important cultural documents. He just likes them, and he's good at making other people like them too.
Go pick any section that catches your eye. I'd suggest starting with the Meat page or the French Cuisine section, but honestly, you can't go wrong. Clear your schedule first, though. You're going to be there a while.