Did you ever buy a used cookbook at a yard sale and then later find a treasure trove of little handwritten recipes on scraps of faded paper secreted between its pages? Well, something like that happened to me.
I had bought a job lot of mostly antiquated books at a flea market from a scraggly, tall dude who told me he cleans out old houses to make money on the side. He was younger and admitted he doesn’t enjoy reading, that he prefers video games, and that he doesn’t really even look at books when he finds them. He just boxes them up and tries to unload them as quickly as possible. I figured I would flip them, sell the best of them online for a markup. I bought several boxes. Because the prices he gave me really were a steal, true flea market prices.
When I finally got a chance to examine the books, little recipes began falling out of one of the mustier volumes. I bent to retrieve the faded little, irregular scraps of scissors-cut paper from the floor and put on my glasses to scrutinize them. They were yellowed and stained recipes written in cursive ink. As I was reading the first recipe, my eyes darted over to the book from which the scraps of paper had escaped. I hadn’t realized until that very moment that the book from which they had tumbled was titled Secret Recipes of Fiji. It was a book on cannibalism and the descriptions of “food preparation,” which I scanned only briefly, had my stomach doing gyrations in no time.
I slammed the book shut and looked at the small sheaf of recipes which had fallen out. The most disturbing thing wasn’t the fact that each recipe included a mystery ingredient which was not named. For example, one read “2 pounds X meat” and another “macerated liver of X.” The worst part is that a different name appeared in cursive ink at the bottom of each recipe. I Googled these names. The common names turned up nothing. But the first uncommon name which I looked up online turned out to be a young man of twenty-three who had gone missing in 1938 and had never been found. Ditto the girl of seventeen who vanished in 1942.
But it went on and on. I really hate to tell you that the book held nearly two dozen recipes. Twenty-three, to be specific. All of the disappearances had occurred in the greater Philadelphia area with the exception of two disappearances from New Jersey in the late forties. The appropriate authorities now have the book, but the chances that this will result in any arrest are slim to none.
I looked for the seller again at the flea market I frequent, but he never returned. I even asked other sellers if they knew him from the circuit, but it appears he was a one-off visitor. Nobody knew him. I still wonder if he will ever be located, and if so, if he will remember the house where he found that particular grim book. The odds are looking slimmer and slimmer.
America’s top cannibal chef is almost certainly dead and probably buried somewhere in New Jersey. I would like to say that I believe that this was a prank pulled by some dark-souled individual. That somebody jotted down the names of missing people on recipes that were pure fiction. But my heart knows how dark this world is in places. So I think the “prank scenario” is just wishful thinking. Justice was not served. But I suspect dinner was. And I sincerely hope (but seriously doubt) that he (or could it be she?) always dined alone.
(If you enjoy creepy pasta type fiction, I am on Medium.com under my name, William Keckler.)
