The Thin Is In Cookbook: Classy Low-Cal Recipes Garnished with Rhyme

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

Insofar as dieting and calorie consciousness can be amusing (and one might venture to suggest that, to most of us, it’s no barrel of laughs), this combined collection of recipes and verse does its level best to keep the reader/feeder in a state of high spirits and low weight.

The sixty recipes included are inviting if not exactly luscious; each is specific about the number of servings provided and the number of calories per serving. The contents include listings under the headings Hors d’Oeuvres, Appetizers, Entrees, Vegetables, and Desserts, plus twelve complete menu plans, each under 650 calories. Facing every page of recipes is a self-conscious little scrap of doggerel verse on the themes of overweight and the irresistibility of food, generally projecting an attitude of ruefully amused resignation to the difficulties of domestic life. One or two such might fetch a chuckle, but 62 of them? Handsomely produced in hard covers, with a table of contents but no index. Measurements both imperial and metric.