From the Standard Cyclopedia of Recipes

B.C. Edwards (Goodreads Author)

4.29 · Rating details · 14 ratings · 5 reviews

Adapted from a collection of household instructions originally published in 1901, From the Standard Cyclopedia of Recipes bastardizes everyday tasks such as dyeing silks, brewing beer, fabricating paint and, of course, curing small pox and twists them into odd, dark poems. The pains of adolescence, the simple failure of love, the thrill of newfound lust—this collection out ...more

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Paperback, 90 pages

Published June 11th 2014 by Black Lawrence Press (first published December 17th 2013)

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Oct 02, 2020 Andrea Blythe rated it it was amazing

Shelves: poetry

Medicinal shows once toured Europe and America. So called doctors would drive wagons from town to town, offering miracle elixers and other entertainments. My knowledge of medicine shows come from pop culture, the image of a man more entertainer than doctor purporting to sell cures. The man stands on his box or makeshift stage and with a flourish presents a bottle with some strange liquid inside. Is it medicine, a placebo, or poison?

B.C. Edwards’ From the Standard Cyclopedia of Recipes has the sa ...more

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Mar 22, 2021 Julian rated it really liked it

I read a lot of 19th century medical and scientific texts, including snake oil advertisement pamphlets and endorsements on archive.org and Project Gutenberg, so I definitely get the appeal of appropriating recipe how-tos from obsolete tasks and aesthetics. The language from that time is so evocative—"hog cholera" and "black inclining to purple" dye, even the repetitious "again".

Some of these adaptations excite me. In their specificity, they seem to match the recipe, encouraging us to follow a s I read a lot of 19th century medical and scientific texts, including snake oil advertisement pamphlets and endorsements on archive.org and Project Gutenberg, so I definitely get the appeal of appropriating recipe how-tos from obsolete tasks and aesthetics. The language from that time is so evocative—"hog cholera" and "black inclining to purple" dye, even the repetitious "again".

Some of these adaptations excite me. In their specificity, they seem to match the recipe, encouraging us to follow a series of steps and accomplish something. In "How to make Coffee extract," we're asked to consider extract as concentrative and volatile: "This is an instinct/of ours—to assume that to have/a thing, first it must be made/ then derived." Thwarted from its instincts, later it will "attempt a coup." I loved this image of segregation, separation, and oppression emerging from the power dynamic between a distiller and his extract. It succeeds in recontextualizing the recipe.

When the "you" of the recipe-user/reader gives way to a specific character-you, I thought the appropriative techniques weren't as compelling. In "Abscess," the speaker/instructor addresses a biographical second person as they navigate a relationship, hoping to find advice for removing a swelling, a tumor.

By accretion, I liked how the unmet needs of a hundred years ago intersected with new unmet needs, like "homogeny incarnate" as a cure for difference, when originally it would have helped with photography. It gives a sense of always being on the verge of a breakthrough, of a solution, then being thwarted. Questioning whether, through processes understood or misunderstood, change is possible. "There are borders/to our world that we built and they are small but absolute." Crossing these borders is one of the concerns of the recipe-maker.

One place I would have loved to see more experimentalism was in the index. Although some of the entries might be suggestive or humorous, most of the ones I tested were straight-forward. Pumpkin seeds leads to a reference to pumpkin seeds. It would have been a potent place to play with referentiality, orientation, or simply give suggestions for themes, like an entry for colonialism. It's inspiring to see an index even printed at all -- maybe my expectations to always push things to the brink of comprehension aren't worth sacrificing readability. ...more

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Aug 25, 2014 Lisa Eckstein rated it really liked it

Shelves: read-2014

I'm not a frequent poetry reader, but these poems appealed to me, with their playful language and relatable emotions. While the situations described in the poems are strange and fantastical, the truths behind them concern love and childhood and difficult relationships, and I found them more understandable than poetry often is. Many of the poems take the form of an odd set of instructions, and that's because each one is inspired by an item in a 1901 book, The Standard Cyclopedia of Recipes. It's ...more

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Aug 04, 2014 Dennis Sweeney rated it it was amazing

Off the wall poems partially appropriated from a book of old time remedies and recipes. The mix of Edwards' Brooklyn with the mechanistic instructions from the original text makes this really interesting interplay between sincere confessional language and earnest but sort of arms-length imagery about process. It's hard to know what to do with these faux-instructions, but that's how poems should be. They left me feeling wrenched, if that makes any sense. Like sense is bigger than I thought it was ...more

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