3 Bonus Recipes You Won't Find in Anthony Bourdain's New Cookbook (2024)

In 2014, Tony Bourdain recruited me to help him write “a dysfunctional family cookbook,” an endeavor that resulted in the just-published Appetites. It features a photo of a pig’s bladder made to look like a disturbingly veiny child’s balloon; angry manifestos about chicken Caesar, club sandwiches, and breakfast potatoes; and a pile of turkey wishbones on fire. The dessert chapter opens with the instruction, “f*ck dessert.” The cover illustration, by Ralph Steadman, is so gorgeously grotesque that certain retailers insisted it be obscured by a modesty jacket before they would place their orders. It is an aggressive thing of beauty.

Tony is clearly a skilled writer with a distinctive voice, but his aforementioned world travels leave little time for all of the research, development, testing, art-directing, and writing required to create a cookbook. I got the job because we’d worked well together on his first cookbook, back in the early aughts, and I’ve been employed as his right hand (wo)man since 2009, a time when this very website declared ginger the new mint, and Pumpkin Spice Lattes hadn't yet morphed into a dubious cultural touchstone.

We held our first and all subsequent book meetings at his massive dining room table, surrounded by spooky, faceless grappling dummies, disembodied rubber fingers, and an impressive collection of fake plastic food from Tokyo, all of which would become bit players in the book’s photography. In these meetings, we devised the master recipe list, established a series of chapter deadlines, and consulted on every detail, from how to bring a “violent note” to co*cktail sauce (replace the horseradish with shrimp paste sambal), to what constitutes “blood libel against the burger” (a fancy brioche bun), to whether we should shame people for using truffle oil (we should).

It took us 10 months of solid work to create the first draft of the manuscript, and another year of edits and supplemental photography before we got to hold the finished product in hand. As with any book, some things had to be cut from the final draft. There were a few photo concepts, involving bloodied bandages and cigarette butts, that were funny in theory but too revolting, even for us, once executed. In the initial manuscript, each recipe included an exhaustive equipment list that started to feel redundant and took up too much room. And, though it pained us, we had to let a few recipes go. Here are three of my favorites that didn’t make it into the book.

Matzo Ball Soup: We’re Not That Kind of Family

I spent many cold winter afternoons in my kitchen in Queens developing soup recipes, including a slightly unorthodox matzo ball soup that made use of panko and turkey stock. I emailed the soup chapter to Tony for feedback—he was shooting in Maui at the time and may or may not have been, as he wrote for the "Parts Unknown" website, “paddling about in a sarong, smoking extravagantly good weed, eating pig in many, many delicious forms.” Within a few hours, he’d replied, “Everything’s great—though I actually forgot how much I hate matzo ball soup. It’s too nurturing. Cut it.”

Lobster Can’t-alan

There are a handful of recipes in Appetites that have been adapted from Tony’s televised travels, among them po’ boy sandwiches, Kuching-style laksa, and buddae jjigae, a spicy Korean stew of kimchi, ramen, hot dogs, spam, and ground pork, which he describes as “a seemingly-revolting combination that’s actually so goddamn delicious, especially after a night of vigorous drinking.”

One of these road recipes was lobster Catalan, which had been prepared on camera for Tony on a Sardinian beach, the lobsters cooked over a roaring wood fire, doused with a piquant roe- and tomalley-enhanced dressing and eaten messily, happily, outdoors. Prepared inside a Manhattan apartment on a gas stove and served on plates, with utensils, the dish failed to spark the same measure of joy, despite being delicious, so we gave it the ax.

Ruth Rips the Ripper’s Pasta

And then there was the spaghetti with uni and caviar, an outrageously luxurious off-menu item at Le Bernardin, the recipe for which Tony convinced chef Eric Ripert to share with us. We even staged and photographed a weird role-reversal scene, in which Tony wore Eric’s monogrammed chef coat and force-fed the pasta to Eric, who was wearing one of Tony’s unsettling t-shirts. Unfortunately, the recipe became a victim of its own popularity and we had to cut it, after realizing that Ruth Reichl had included a version of it in her cookbook, My Kitchen Year. Fortunately, we were able to repurpose the photo as a pasta chapter opener, and to share the recipe, along with the matzo ball soup and lobster Catalan, here.