The Seducer’s Cookbook: A Vintage Guide to the Lost Art of Seduction

As a lover of unusual cookbooks and inventive recipes — from The Artists’ and Writers’ Cookbook to Modern Art Desserts to the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook to Patti Smith’s lettuce soup for starving artists — I was delighted to come upon The Seducer’s Cookbook (public library). This amusing 1962 gem by legendary food critic Mimi Sheraton, which falls somewhere between Esquire’s Handbook for Hosts and The Art of Kissing, presents a collection of “helpful and hilarious hints for situations into which men may lure women and vice versa,” including drink and dining menus, décor, dress, and dialogue. Gracing the book’s pages are illustrations by the great Paul Coker, who contributed to iconic counterculture magazine MAD and illustrated the wonderful 1968 volume MAD Better or Verse.