Trap Kitchen

February 5, 2018
Jenkins and Smith, who once belonged to rival L.A. gangs, became friends and started a catering business marketed solely on Instagram. Media outlets took notice, as did Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart, paving the way for their debut cookbook, an underwhelming volume of three dozen recipes written in obscenity-riddled slang. They begin with two gravy recipes—one with apple, the other with cranberry—before moving on to side dishes featuring chicken, turkey, seafood, steak, and pork. The directions are entertaining but can be tricky to follow, not just because they are all set in italics. The apple cinnamon corn bread is just sautéed apples stirred into a store-bought mix, but the instructions fail to mention what to do with the cinnamon or why there is sour cream in the list of ingredients. The Chicken Curry in a Pot, Boy calls for potatoes, Jamaican curry powder, and bottled scotch bonnet; as for the accompanying rice, “y’all should know how to cook that shit if you’re already using a cookbook.” Having found a winning formula on Instagram, the authors lean heavily on eye-catching photographs by Teddy Wolff to fill out a book more notable for its novelty than its utility.

December 6, 2021
Norms are upended while elbows are tossed in this satisfying new work by the soul food cooks from Compton who hit it big with their Trap Kitchen enterprise. Their famous L.A. trap mac recipe brings down the proverbial house with its four-cheese blend and copious amounts of condensed cream of mushroom and cheddar cheese soup. The more than 50 other variations of cheese-drenched pasta scour the earth for inspiration, unencumbered by chapter breaks or organizing principles. Each, though, has at its base one of two types of sauce to which shredded cheese is added: a roux, or else a flourless sauce thickened with cream cheese. The former turns up in such savory options as Spanish chorizo mac, and Maine lobster mac with mild white cheddar (for “when you tryin to flex with all this lobster and shit”), while the latter goes to work in a Buffalo chicken mac as well as a Cuban medianoche mac with Swiss cheese, orecchiette, and marinated pork. Sporadically, the geographic theme will give way to rewarding risks such as Kraft dinner mac, which seeks to imitate the classic while thinking outside the box with the addition of ground beef seasoned with onion and garlic. No ounce of cheese or expletive is wasted in these deliciously outrageous recipes.