Celebrity Recipes Archives - Retro Food For Modern Times

Tag: Celebrity Recipes

22
Sep
2024

Caliph of Baghdad

categories: Celebrity Cookbooks, Celebrity Recipes, Drinks, Rum

Hello friends! Today, I’m sharing a “twofer” post. First up, a cocktail called the Caliph of Baghdad. This recipe is from a 1933 book, Del Monte – Cocktail Recipes Mixed by Famous People for a Famous Hotel. I chose it because of its connection to this month’s Dining with The Dame book, They Came To Baghdad. This book was originally published in 1933 for the Del Monte Hotel but has been brought back into circulation by my old pal, Jenny of Silver Screen Suppers and Dinner and A Movie.

The Book

The book was inspired in 1933 around the same time as the the repeal of Prohibition.

“John Caitlin, the eccentric Mayor of Carmel-By-The-Sea in California, established the Association for the Advancement of the Fine Art of Drinking and invited the great and good of the stage, screen and typewriter to submit their concoctions for consideration”

Submissions were evaluated at the Del Monte Hotel in Monterey in December 1933, leading to the creation of the book.

Ernest Hemingway, Marlene Dietrich, W.C. Fields, and the Marx Brothers were but a few of the great and the good to submit recipes. I will definitely be featuring the Marlene Dietrich cocktail down the track, it sounds amazing!

The Hotel

The Hotel Del Monte still exists and it looks beautiful!!!! And, the rates are not exorbitant. I have never been to America, but my best friend lives in California so it is high on my list of places to go! I wonder if we could have a night or two in the Del Monte when I am there so we can pay homage to the Association for the Advancement of the Fine Art of Drinking!

The Caliph of Baghdad – The Drink

There is a warning that this drink packs a punch. And it certainly does! This is one that you want to sip slowly all night and / or add a lot of ice! Having said that, savouring one of these over a evening is quite pleasant because the sweet / sour of the brown sugar and the lime combined with the rum is delicious!

I can absolutely recommend the Del Monte Cocktail book! There are many delicious sounding cocktails from so many famous names! It is truly a little piece of history!

Have a great week!

18
Dec
2023

Christmas Adelaide Pecan Pie

categories: 1960's recipes, Baking, Celebrity Cookbooks, Celebrity Recipes, Pie

Hello friends and greetings of the season! Today’s Christmas Adelaide Pecan Pie comes from Singers and Swingers in the Kitchen. I last visited that book in 2013! The recipe comes from Eva Marie Saint, star of On The Waterfront, North by Northwest and many other films. The Christmas Adelaide Pecan Pie is so called because it was a pecan pie, made every Christmas by Eva Marie’s sister Adelaide.

You’ll see from the above that a made little pies rather than one big pie. I had some mini pie crusts in the freezer from another cooking project so I decided to use them up instead of buying a big pastry shell. Cooking time on the small tarts was 30 minutes. I also could not find dark corn syrup in my local supermarket. I subbed in a mix of 2/3 golden syrup and 1/3 maple syrup.

Is pecan pie served traditionally at Christmas? I would love for one of my American readers to tell me? It feels like it should be – it certainly makes sense when Christmas falls in winter and fresh fruit is in shorter supply than in the summer months.

Chrismas Adelaide Pecan Pie Recipe

If you wanted to double down on recipes from this book, the Christmas Adelaide Pecan Pie would be divine with a scoop of Barbra Streisand’s Coffee Ice Cream. This might also come in handy if you need a snack while reading Barbra’s nearly 1000-page memoir!

Singers and Swingers in The Kitchen The Book

This little book is so much fun! As well as Eva and Barbra, it also includes recipes from The Rolling Stones, Jane Fonda, Don Adams and Barbara Feldman from Get Smart, The Mamas and The Papas, The Monkees and a host more “scene makers”and “groovy gourmets”. My records…well Amazon’s records show I bought this back in 2012 for a measly $15. It now regularly sells for over a hundred!!! If you don’t want to be spending that kind of money, please feel free to browse the archives here for the recipes I’ve already shared. I’m also sure this won’t be the last time I dip into this book.

Have a great week!

13
Dec
2020

Arrivederci Made In Italy

categories: Italy, Made In Italy, Tasty Reads

It seems like only the other day that I was writing that I had finished cooking through Cantina and now here I am also having finished Made in Italy by Silvia Colloca! Admittedly I only had eleven recipes left to cook when I started but I am still pretty proud of myself! The cover claims “more than 80 authentic recipes from the heart of Italy”. Of the…I’m not going to count them, so let’s just call it 80 recipes, I made 34 so I’ve cooked 42.5% of the recipes contained therein.

Made in Italy – The Summary

Made in Italy contains fairly standard Italian fare, which is probably the reason why a) I cooked so many recipes from it and b) why I was able to do the last few quite quickly – the ingredients and the techniques are familiar to most home cooks. The dishes include pastas, pizza, breads, cakes, salads, and seafood. Not to mention delicious little snacks/appetisers like these Olives All ‘Ascolana!

It also contains gorgeous photos of the areas in Italy that the book covers (Marche, Abruzzo and Molise so would also make a lovely gift for armchair travellers!

I also liked that many of the recipes were really quick and easy to prepare. This was particularly refreshing coming on the tails of Cantina where pretty much every recipe was either incredibly elaborate to cook or had had to come by ingredients.

My Favourite Recipes

These were the recipes that got over 4.7 (out of 5) in my personal rating scale. The ones marked with an asterisk are my absolute favourites.

Sides, Salads and Appetisers

Broccolini cooked with chilli and garlic
Crostini with lemon, ricotta and spinach
Grilled primo sale and vegetable salad (The primo sale is homemade cheese and was delicious)*
Olives All’ascolana*

Main Meals

Calamari with tomatoes and wine
Fresh pasta strips with slow-cooked goat sauce
Lasagna, Marche style*
Chard Tart*
Herb frittata with Goat’s curd

Desserts

Celebration sponge cake
Apricot and olive oil cake*
Bear’s cake

Made in Italy – My least Favourite things

The St Martin Rolls were not good at all – I suspect this was due to the use of self-raising flour rather than plain flour. I didn’t rate any of Silvia’s slices of bread but these were by far the worst.

And, whilst the landscape and food photography was beautiful there were a few too many pictures of Silvia looking impossibly thin. Then again, if I looked that good, I would want to be showing my perfect figure off in many photos too!

Overall, I would rate this book 4.5 stars out of 5. It is a very nice addition to the genre of Italian cookbooks and one that I know I will cook from over and over!

If you are looking for a last-minute gift idea for a friend who has been to Italy I can recommend Made in Italy as both a lovely souvenir of a trip and a great cookbook. Be prepared to pay though. Even used copies on Amazon are selling for upwards of $50! Let me know if you want any of the recipes listed above, I can scan them through for you.

Next Tasty Reads book I will be cooking through is Hugh Fearnley Whitingstall’s River Cottage Light and Easy – this will be a welcome counterbalance to the rich food after Christmas so I am looking forward to it! I have 33 recipes left to cook so it is likely to be a full year effort!

And tell me…what is your favourite Italian cookbook?

Have a wonderful week!

01
Oct
2020

Vincent Price’s House Bread

categories: Bread, Celebrity Cookbooks, Vincent Price

I have been waiting to cook the Vincent Price’s House Bread for months! Jenny (from Silver Screen Suppers) sent me the recipe AGES go, possibly even pre-pandemic. Then, there was no yeast for months on end. And so, last weekend, I finally made it. Worth the wait? You bet! This is literally straight out of the oven. It was burn your fingers hot but damn it was good!!!!

I am not a very confident bread baker at all so whenever a loaf turns out well, I am absolutely delighted! And this one had me turning cartwheels!

I’m not surprised Vincent Price made this his house bread. It may well become mine! It has everything I love in a bread – a crusty outside, a nice soft middle, the crumb is fine, it’s great for sandwiches, it toasts well…it is a really good all-purpose bread!

I love this photo because it looks like I have photobombed myself with a plate of toast! It gives a whole new twist on the term breadhead!

At first, I wasn’t sure about the ground ginger in the recipe. I was worried that it may have made the bread taste a bit more like a sweet loaf than an everyday bread. Not to worry though, you can’t even hardly taste the ginger. You might not be able to taste it at all. I thought I could detect it but I knew it was there and so might have imagined it.

“It tastes like proper shop-bought bread “said the fussiest eater in the world when I asked for his opinion. High praise!

You can click through here to find the recipe on Silver Screen Suppers.

And here’s a special Spooktober message from the man himself!

Happy October and have a great week!

03
Jul
2020

John Hillerman’s Paella

categories: Celebrity Recipes, Rice, Spain

Does anyone know / remember The Libertines song “Music When The Lights Go Out”? The hook line in this piece of indie-pop boy love runs “All the highs and the lows and the to’s and fro’s, they left me dizzy”. That is exactly how I felt when making John Hillerman’s Paella. No doubt about it, this was a tough cook. But oh boy did it pay off!

The Lows

Converted rice? Not available for love or money.
Clams in clam juice ? Nada.
Bottled clam juice? No, nay, never.
Polish Sausage…probably could have bought some but I had chorizo in the freezer which seemed more paella-ish anyway

I made this during the height of the ‘rona lockdown. But I honestly feel that my inability to get hold of these ingredients were not limited to that insane time of food shortages.

So, had this been one of my recipes? I would have ripped it up and we would have never more heard of it. But this was was not my recipe, this was John Hillerman’s Paella recipe that I was testing for Jenny for her Murder She Wrote Cookbook so onward and upward it was.

The To’s and And The Fro’s

I didn’t have converted rice. I didn’t have clam juice. Which meant I could not follow the first step of the recipe.

I had:

Bomba paella rice.
Fresh clams.
Frozen fish stock.

This meant that if I found another recipe that got me through that first step of cooking the rice, then the rest should fall into place like one of those Rube Goldberg machines I have become obsessed with during lockdown.

The recipe I used was this one. I followed all the directions for cooking the rice per that recipe. But then switched back to John Hillerman’s Paella recipe from the step where he says to “saute the chicken in olive oil”.

Here is John’s recipe:

I was literally toing and froing between the two recipes and the pan and the ingredients, making sure everything cooked properly!

The Highs

Have you seen the photos? This dish was lush!!! It was so pretty, so colourful, so full of joy!

It looked gorgeous, smelled like heaven and tasted even better.

John Hillerman’s Paella brought the smell and taste of Spain into a very grey wintery Melbourne day. It was seriously like a ray of sunshine!

I LOVED this!!!! So, so, so good!!!!! The end result made it all worthwhile!!!

Thank you Jenny for the recipe! This is the best paella I have ever made and I will be sure to make it again! When travel opens up and we can spend time together again, this definitely needs to be on our menu! In my imagination, we are sitting in your garden with Mr R and Battenberg Belle and having a lovely long lunch of paella, great conversation, lots of vino, and some great tunes courtesy of Mr Rathbone. Some ’60’s bossa nova maybe?

Oh, also for those of you like me who do not know who John Hillerman was? His best-known role was as the incredibly suave Higgins In Magnum PI but he also appeared in Blazing Saddles, Chinatown (high on my must-see list), Murder She Wrote (obvs), and A Very Brady Sequal among many, many other films and tv shows!

Have a fabulous week friends!

Stay safe, eat paella, watch John Hillerman on the tv and listen to The Libertines!

Sounds like a pretty good way to spend the weekend to me!