Book of the Day: "Mother's Day Lunch is when WASP children thank their others for a fine, repressed upbringing."

Alexandra Wentworth, The WASP Cookbook (Warner Treasures, 1st ed. 1st printing stated, October, 1997). ISBN 0-446-91210-7, 110 pp., hardcover, navy felt cover with gilt titling. Published without dust jacket. Good condition. HBB Price: $25 obo.

One of the more famous unrecognizable comics of the last century’s last decade (she was in the Soup Nazi episode of Seinfeld- his annoying girlfriend Schmoopy- and appeared on In Living Color impersonating Cher, Cindy Crawford and Sharon Stone), Wentworth fell back on her blue-blood ancestry to produce this tribute to all the things one can do with mayonnaise.

”I was this,” she confesses, clad in a pink cashmere twinset, over high tea at Manhattan’s Carlyle Hotel. ”I ate this food. I was a debutante. I went to Cape Cod for the summer. My mother’s name is Muffy.” Covering her wedding in 2001, The New York Times related her WASP cred:

Ms. Wentworth, 36, is from a long line of well-connected Yankee stock. Her mother, Muffie Brandon Cabot, was the social secretary to Nancy Reagan and is married to Louis Wellington Cabot, a former chairman of the Cabot Corporation, the Boston chemical company, and of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. In that tradition, Ms. Wentworth has a couple of nicknames -- Dabber or Dabs -- the origins of which always remain unknown.

But back to the book. As Entertainment Weekly asked,

So why return to the Docksider fold and document the finer points of … toast points? "It had never been done,” says Wentworth. ”Mostly because the food is so bad.” Not that the recipes she culled from prep-school chums’ mums — and their cooks — don’t work. ”It’s just that some of them are not so good. WASPs don’t use spices, they don’t use garlic, they don’t use any of that stuff … People that aren’t that familiar with WASPdom say to me, ‘God, you have a lot of recipes for cocktails.”’

In 2001 she married outside her caste, wedding the ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos.

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