Overview

If you’re a bloke with barely a pinch of kitchen knowledge (or with an overdose of indolence), Beat Heat Eat might be your cup of tea. Dean Lahn has created a slim, very visual cookbook for the unreconstructed male. The recipes are short and quite novel in their low-effort approach, presented with fine engineer-like graphics that are mostly useful. Textual instructions are clear and the introductions and asides for each recipe could make you laugh or cringe, depending on your temperament. It’s fun. At times it’s brilliant. It will irritate many experienced cooks. And women.

Full review

“Yeah. I’ll be the first to admit that some, most, of these recipes need a little time to get your head around. That’s okay. It’s just you’ve never heard someone say it’s okay to ram a beer can up a chicken’s clacker, or simmer your dinner in Coke. Relax. Leave the cooking to the experts. Here you’re just going to fix something to eat and kick back. Nobody’s going to judge you. It’s just you, me, and the chicken.”

A great way to introduce a cookbook and it gives a pretty clear idea of the tone throughout. The author, graphic designer Dean Lahn, successfully writes in this blokey style without it feeling artificial. Contrived, sure, but not unnatural, if you can see what I mean. When Lahn suggests cooking eggs on the hotplate of a toasted sandwich maker a good cook might cringe, but it doesn’t feel like he’s patronising the audience. Stuffing a banana skin with all manner of lollies and baking it in the oven is totally gross, yet simultaneously fun. And some practical tips like boiling a bowl of vinegar solution in a microwave to clean it or how to extinguish a fat fire are seriously valuable. The book is complemented by a website for readers to share ideas and ask questions – an innovative idea. It’ll be interesting to see if www.beatheateat.com is a useful tool for the target audience.

Beat Heat Eat contains 37 recipes. They’re heavy on prepared items, from “Boy Burgers” containing beef soup mix and tomato sauce (ketchup), to the “Meatballs”: a casserole with sausage meat, tomato soup, canned spaghetti and more. Fresh vegetables get few mentions. The dessert/sweet items are excruciatingly sweet. The creative novelty is entertaining, from encasing a can’s worth of braised steak and onion in puff pastry, to a fruitcake made with dried fruit, self-raising flour and iced-coffee flavoured milk.

It would be fascinating to see how a professional home economist would rework the recipes to present more balanced dishes without compromising the concept of this book. Most recipes are easy to follow, though Lahn sometimes shows he’s not a food educator: there’s a pizza dough recipe, but absolutely no guidance about how to judge whether it’s too dry/wet; the burger recipe says “salt to taste” – a common and useless/dangerous piece of advice for burgers, depending on how the cook reacts; he describes a 200C oven as “REALLY hot”.

Beat Heat Eat is a book for the guys. Lahn doesn’t hold back on the men-vs-women shtick: “She’ll be impressed you made the effort”, “show Her how considerate you are and give Her a napkin”, “Make these if you’ve had a blue with the Missus. They’ll bake themselves into a handle bar shape, but tell Her they’re heart shaped and you’re off the hook.” You have been warned!

I liked the goal of Beat Heat Eat. I can see that it’ll work for a narrow group of readers. It might even be kinda cool for teenage males sharing a house. The visual and textual style is innovative and enjoyable. Just remember that it isn’t a book that embraces the idea of “cooking”. I’d have preferred to see just a little more effort to make it a launchpad for more skill and understanding in the kitchen, enabling the non-cook cook’s transition to more cookbooks, but it might have made this lighthearted work less engaging for the target audience.