“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” – Mark Twain

In the late 90s the Nieman Marcus $250 Cookie Recipe hoax was making its rounds via email. At that time, I was on a cookbook writer’s e-list and it came through, without any disclaimer that it wasn’t true.

I immediately sent it along to my friends at that time, including a radio producer I was working on a documentary with. After I hit the button, I had a little niggling sensation that this may be an urban legend, and of course, it was. It’s still making the rounds today.

I was embarassed and a little ticked that I had fallen for it. To make matters worse, the cookie recipe in that original email was bad, as hoaxy as the email it was forwarded with.

So I started to accumulate urban legends and folklore connected to food, created a few characters (the Urban family) to tell the stories through and created and tested some good recipes to go with them. I figured I could create a cookbook filled with real recipes, stories that go with the food and help bust some myths and perhaps create a cookbook for truly foolproof cooking.”

This was the original concept cover I had for this project about a decade ago (2000).

The project (cookbook) is about 85 per cent complete and has been in a big bin for too long. Recently, I figured I should toss it and move on to other things but have had a change of heart. I figure I can blog it in the spirit of Monkey Burger Mondays or Folklore Fridays. In other words, I won’t be adding to this blog everyday, probably just Mondays and Fridays, bookends to the workweek (and probably not every Monday or Friday either).

So stay tuned, I’ll update this page and add to this site as time permits.

And to all those who I forwarded that original urban legend cookie recipe to, click here for a link to Nieman Marcus’ site, where they extend their wonderful (real) recipe. Enjoy!

Mary Ann