People tell me I should write a cookbook.

Just what this world needs, another cookbook.

There is a plethora of cookbooks - cooking almost anything by almost everybody.

The worst cookbook of all time was authored by my uncle George.

One of uncle George's more successful business ventures was a souvenir shop in famous, rockbound Peggy's Cove in Nova Scotia.

Peggy's Cove is a giant thumb of granite thrust out into the North Atlantic Ocean with a picturesque lighthouse at the end. Gigantic, 70-foot waves regularly bash into the massive rocks and sweep away people from New York.

Every May we lose two – regular as clock work.

It is a kind of ancient, pagan, ritual offering to Persephone, the goddess of spring.

Tourists love Peggy's Cove . They go there by the busload. George's brothers drove the buses. Uncle Clary and uncle Ed would bring by bus loads of tourists and unload them in front of George's souvenir shop. We called it uncle George's tourist trap.

George sold "authentic" lobster buoys that he imported from Taiwan.

He sold "locally crafted" knitted goods and souvenir scarves that were purloined from my aunts' closets and clotheslines. He sold old rocks and shells and pieces of wood he got us kids to pick up off the beach.

And he sold gazillions of his cookbooks, "Nova Scotian Cuisine."

Until he wrote that cookbook Nova Scotians didn't even know they had a cuisine.

Uncle George was blessed with neither culinary training nor culinary talent, but it would never occur to him that this might be an obstacle to writing a cookbook.

My dad owned a printing company.

George would write the book.

Dad would print the books.

George would sell them.

Selling the books was easy.

Uncle George was an astute student of human behavior.

He noticed that tourists never really tried to read cookbooks before they bought them. They just picked them up and checked them for heft.

George maintained that tourists bought their cookbooks by the pound.

The contents were irrelevant.

George's basic recipes read something like this:

Get a piece of fish – scallops, oysters, shrimp, lobster

Put it in a pan.

Add butter

Add a little salt.

Cook it.

Add more butter.

The cook book was a great financial success. George sold literally bus loads of them out of the tourist trap and never paid my father a farthing for the printing.

It is doubtful anyone ever actually opened that cookbook – it was finally just a hefty memory of a visit to rocky Peggy's Cove.

George regularly told patrons that the book was real handy to hang onto if you got swept off the rocks.

Uncle George got bored of the souvenir shop and the aunts got wise to him stealing their laundry, so he finally sold the shop to a New Yorker who had survived the rocks.

When the time came to clean out the place, there were cases of cookbooks left over, and uncle George owed uncle Ed a little commission money for bussing in all those tourists, so the cases of cookbooks got loaded onto uncle Ed's tour bus.

There are still cases of uncle George's cookbooks stacked at uncle Ed's fish camp.

Uncle Ed says the cookbooks do make a contribution to the culinary arts. He burns them in his cooking stove.

Uncle George says uncle Ed is an illiterate, damn, book-burning Nazi.