By Daniel Neman | St. Louis Post-Dispatch (TNS)
I was fully prepared to hate this cookbook. And while “loathe” is a word I am loath to use, I was even expecting to loathe it.
After all, it was written by an influencer. And not just an influencer, but an influencer who thinks of himself as an influencer. The sort of influencer who, if you met him at a party and asked what he does for a living, he’d say, “I’m an influencer.” And then he wouldn’t ask you what you do.
Gianluca Conte is the influencer in question. He’s 24, and his cookbook is called “Italian/American: It’s a QCP Cookbook, Betch!”
Let’s parse that title. He says in the book’s introduction that although his name is Gianluca, he is better known as QCP. But he doesn’t say what QCP stands for, leading, naturally, to our own speculation.
Quality Control Programmer? Queen Charlotte’s Prisoner? Questionably Colored Pterodactyl?
And then there’s that last word, “Betch.” He is famous, he says with his customary lack of modesty, for using the word “betch” a lot. And indeed, it appears at the bottom of every recipe where he writes, “Buon appetito, Betch!”
I assume he says “betch” instead of another word that uses four of those same letters, and I am not talking about “fetch.” His grammar is fairly atrocious, so maybe he is just bad at spelling, too, but I assume he thinks “betch” is funny for some reason.
I don’t even have to tell you that he has a smirking, handsome face that you instantly want to punch. And although a New York Post story last fall reported that he can make nearly $100,000 for a single TikTok post, he somehow doesn’t seem to be able to afford a shirt.
Seriously, he never wears a shirt. In dozens and dozens of photographs, and who knows how many social media posts, he goes shirtless. He must think it makes him look sexy, but as a cook, I worry about hot sauces splashing up onto his bare skin.
And that’s another thing. I just called myself a cook. He calls himself a chef. He is not a chef. Chefs runs restaurant kitchens and have reached a high level of achievement in their field. Daniel Boulud is a chef. Thomas Keller is a chef. Auguste Escoffier was a chef. Gianluca Conte is a smirking cook who doesn’t know enough to put on a shirt.
At least he wears an apron. He wears dozens of aprons, a different one in every picture. Each one has the word “betch” on it.
The book is written with an unlikable mixture of attitude, ego and immaturity. It is everything you would expect a cookbook by an influencer to be.
I was fully prepared to hate it.
But here’s the thing, and it hurts me to admit it: The recipes aren’t bad. They’re a bit simplistic, but they aren’t bad for what they are.
That is, they are recipes for people who are just learning how to cook. They are for people who do not know about cooking so they turn for instruction and guidance to an influencer.
Conte’s Italian-born father runs some Italian restaurants in Charlotte, North Carolina, and apparently Conte has learned enough through osmosis that he can explain the basics.
And it is just the basics. Every recipe he runs could be improved with the addition of an extra ingredient or two or three — a bit of nutmeg in the Alfredo sauce, perhaps, or parsley, flour and especially Parmesan cheese in the veal Milanese.
But they’re not bad as a place to begin. Once his followers become comfortable with the process of cooking, they are likely to expand their horizons a bit and seek out recipes with a more subtle blend of flavors and techniques.
At the very least, the cookbook may keep them from trying to learn how to cook from his videos.
I just watched a few of them. I was joking before about wanting to punch him in the face, but now I’m serious.
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