Eat, Play, Ugh: The Delights of 'All Star Feast,' the 1997 Sports Cookbook

Thrift stores are a great place to find meaning in the meaningless, and a slightly less great place to find clothing and gently used media. In pursuit of the latter, I wandered into my local Goodwill, where I seriously considered buying Michael Jordan: To the Max on DVD, and most definitely bought All Star Feast, a cookbook that is so thoroughly 1997 that all the meals should have been photographed on Princess Diana commemorative plates alongside a glass of Surge. In short, it was exactly the sort of garbage that makes going to the garbage store worthwhile. Then, like a dope, I decided to cook some things from it.

Wendy Diamond compiled the recipes in All Star Feast after creating a similarly celebrity-themed cookbook with famous musicians. She is now a pet mogul and celebrity philanthropist, focusing mainly on pet activism. It is clear that she has a unique skill at getting celebrities together for a good cause, and All Star Feast is proof that she has had it for decades. If you decide to buy this book for one cent (plus $3.99 shipping and handling) on Amazon, you should at the very least consider donating a few bucks to one of the charities that benefited from its sales during its life as a thing that could be purchased firsthand: the Special Olympics, say, or the Women's Sports Foundation or the Buoniconti Fund to Cure Paralysis. Whatever you give, and however much you pay for the book, it will be worth it—the day-glo Clinton-era nuttiness more than pays for itself.

To cook any of these recipes, or to discern whether these athletes' recipes are actually theirs, seems beside the point. Alexi Lalas's recipe, for instance, is literally the instructions for making cherry Jell-O. Bob Costas manages to achieve Peak Bob Costas not once but twice in the course of 144 pages, through his dual recipes for dolmathes (page 124) and Calling the Pizza Man and Giving Him a Big-A-Spicy Tip (also on page 124), and then with a back cover blurb reading, "Move over, Julia Child, here comes Steve Young." Bob Costas is nothing if not committed to the act of being Bob Costas.

The entire cookbook is at war with itself, oscillating jarringly between the earnest stories behind family recipes and half-hearted branding; it's hamstrung, in both cases, by the baseline artificiality of the sports personalities that contributed and the limits of the Celebrity Posse Cookbook form. These complicating factors converge most memorably in Caitlyn Jenner's entry, All-Around Brownies, which comes with the story of how Kris Jenner made these brownies when they first met. Compare this to Bounce Pass Lambs A La Cousy, where you can almost hear Bob Cousy's thick, raspy Blue Chips–era Queens accent in his introduction. In both cases, the recipes are delivered around and over some well-established personal brands, and each inevitably reflects what we see in each legendary athlete.

A distinct high-school-yearbook aesthetic reigns in All Star Feast. All the hallmarks of Retrospecticus are there, from the weird choice of photography to the random placement of advertisements throughout. On page 71, you may get a really sad photo of Ken Caminiti alone in his kitchen, while on page 72, you see Mike Piazza and Eric Karros try to spoon-feed pasta to a cardboard cutout of Tommy Lasorda. There is also the occasional addition of a chef's hat drawn on top of Andre Agassi or Joe Frazier's heads, which is frankly just as sad as the Caminiti photo.

Unless you like eating chicken, pasta, and a bunch of desserts every day, you may find the choice of recipes somewhat restrictive. Most of the entrees are crafted for those with a great deal of time on their hands and not too much discernment; those who have some crayfish that is about to spoil, and who also only trust NFL legend Brett Favre to craft the resulting étouffée. There also seems to be the sense that sugar was some sort of supernutrient back in the late 20th century, so the rampant abuse of simple carbohydrates goes unchecked in these pages. The 1990s were weird, and not only because sugar cookie expert Dave Brown was pegged as the New York Giants' quarterback of the future.

I decided to make two recipes from All Star Feast, both of which were relatively easy—especially compared to Cris Carter's oxtail soup and Pat O'Brien's fucking grilled amberjack—from two sports legends about whom I am ambivalent at best. It seemed important to separate the artist from the art, and also I like desserts.

Pat Riley's Championship Chocolate Cake comes from a darker place than its title suggests. According to the accompanying anecdote, Riley was winding down his playing career with the mid-1970s Phoenix Suns, where he would only make it to the NBA Finals, and not win, bringing shame to the Riley brand. With retirement—or, anyway, the non-playing part of his career in which Riley would win eight NBA championships as a coach and executive—Pat and his wife took solace in the chocolate cake that their retirement-age neighbor would always make for them.

I had never made a cake from scratch before, but most of the directions were easy enough to follow without hassle. One minor snag came when the directions called for combining the granulated sugar with flour, which the ingredients list omitted. After a quick consultation with The Google, I resumed my quest to create the Early Thirties Pat Riley Eats His Feelings experience. The end result was actually rather good, if a little dry. I probably should have let the cake cool off longer before putting on the icing, which is the sort of mistake that explains why I have not won even a single NBA championship. But it tasted good, especially with milk.

Knowing just how much sugar I had to use in making this cake put me off from eating too much of it. The term "healthy" is bandied about in All Star Feast, but there is no nutritional information to be found for any of these recipes, and the book was born in a time before "low-carb" and "gluten-free" were common phrases. Sticks, not tablespoons, of butter are used as units of measurement, and Rafael Palmeiro's "RBI Wash Dry Cake" literally asks you to commit an entire box of confectioner's sugar to the cause.

Having conquered Pat Riley's early thirties malaise through chocolate cake, I moved on to a less challenging, if more mind-boggling dish. Tim McCarver's Mixed Vegetables is deceptive in both its preparation and its execution, which is surprising given McCarver's tendency to explain everything three or four times. My father liked it, although when I asked him to guess whose recipe it was, he said Pat Riley.

The easy part of making McCarver's mixed veggies is in combining the green beans, peas, and lima beans, although I skipped a step by mixing them before cooking. You add a lot of things that don't sound appetizing on their own—a big ol' cup of mayo, grated onions, and hard boiled eggs with worcestershire sauce and mustard—but it tasted OK, and the sauce overwhelmed the vegetables in all the right ways.

My stomach felt a little uneasy after consuming the vegetable medley. I had no idea whether it was because I left the mayonnaise out a little too long or if my body's defense mechanisms were just trying to reject a recipe suggested by Mr. Tim McCarver. Even though the end result was delicious, it could not undo my years of deeply held contempt for the Ratso Rizzo to Joe Buck's Joe Buck. The guy knows his way around legumes, though, so credit where it's due.

Nineteen years is at once a very long and a very short period of time. Out of the dozens of athletes featured in All Star Feast, only Jaromir Jagr and Kobe Bryant are still active; at least three who were active at the time (Junior Seau, Arturo Gatti, and Ken Caminiti) are dead. Other participants, such as Amy Van Dyken, Irving Fryar, and Jayson Williams, have seen their lives drastically changed over the past few decades. All Star Feast is more artifact than cookbook, although every dish save for perhaps Mike Ditka's Recipe For Savings—a 1-800-COLLECT ad featured in the very back of the book—is exactly as manageable as it was in 1997.

Celebrity cookbooks are a great way for our more famous Americans to accomplish something with minimal effort, which looks like an insult but is not. We consumers get to know these folks a little more by cooking their (spouse's/parent's/press agent's/uncopyrighted cookbook's) meals, and famous people reaffirm their humanity by reminding us that, despite their superhuman skills (or Alexi Lalas–level skills, anyway) they still do human things like make salty casseroles.

All Star Feast lets us dig beneath the artifice that fame enforces, if only to another level of artifice, by doing something that Pat Riley or Tim McCarver have done themselves. If we can't fire Stan Van Gundy or derail a television broadcast with a tiresome monologue on the importance of hitting with runners in scoring position, we can at least make and eat their desserts.