Cooking with the Bears

In the past several years, the ever-expanding sea of cookbooks has become quickly polluted by the flotsam of unnecessarily niche titles. Are you looking for cookbooks on flavored butters, semen, or Haylie Duff? What about recipes for white LA hipster vegans who style themselves "thugs"? Indeed, they're out there. But now there is a cookbook that rises above the junk--and it's specifically designed for a subculture of hirsute, hyper-masculine homosexuals. That's right: Bears just got their very own cookbook. Photographer Angelo Sindaco's Cooking with the Bears: Healthy Recipes by Hairy Men (published by Drago) is dedicated to these furry fellows and the food they love to eat, and I'll be damned if it isn't delightful. The 32 recipes in the book--covering everything from tagliatelle alla Bolognese to "Chumbo Cupcakes"--come directly from Italian bears themselves, photographed in their own home kitchens. And even though many of the bears included in the project were shot in various states of undress, this isn't a just coffee table tome for fetishists. Writing in the book's foreword, AccidentalBear.com founder Mike Enders notes: "By my own observation, bears love to cook, and eat, hence their voluptuous, sexy, furry curves. Viewing the bear scene in a different way, not necessarily related to sex or erotica, leather, or cigars is quite refreshing. I'm told that they thought those themes had long been exploited and played out." While there is plenty of testosterone on display in Cooking with the Bears (the sheer size some of those biceps make me blanch with envy) there is also tenderness. Consider Enzo, a fast-food worker who has collected over 400 Barbie dolls. There's also Flavio, a "Queer Mountaineer" who never leaves the house without his leather braces, but still dreams of being photographed naked like Mena Suvari in that iconic image from American Beauty--but covered in tortellini rather than rose petals.
The Italian "Cooking with the Bears" book may be most Intriguing Gay Cookbook on Earth "Cooking with the Bears -- Healthy Recipes by Hairy Men "claims to be the first cookbook in the world dedicated to all of the men who identifying as being a part of the bear community. Created by Angelo Sindaco, the cookbook contains a number of sexy images of bears creating unique Italian meals and all of the book's recipes informed by the different regional dishes throughout Italy.
Angelo Sindaco is a photographer from Bologna, Italy.
The book has stunning images of just the kind of men we love. Whether the book ever makes it into the kitchen, or just lives on the living room coffee table, Cooking with the Bears will be the talk of the town.--Satellite Magazine