Eating Vincent Price is a Passion Project

Eating Vincent Price is a book about a dinner about a book about dinners.

But wait, there’s more

{Eating Vincent Price is not back because 2020 is still here, but the blog is back—3/1/2021}

This is an old post, reposted because the blog and the dinner and the book have started up anew, in order, with like 1099 forms and stuff.

Cuevas sold Clandestino and moved to L.A. where he opened a few restaurants and now makes ceramic owls. Parton convinced me to hire Chef Aram Reed who sneered at our previous family-style serving method and replaced it with beautifully plated dishes prepared to the highest standards (his team has Michelin bibs on their resumes, people; he’s not kidding around). Parton suggested (insisted, ordered) us to look for luxurious venues.

Vincent’s daughter, the incomparable Victoria Price, reached out to see if we’d help her promote her wine label. We booked the Keith House Mansion and 65 people showed up. The meal was extraordinary. The cocktails were legendary. What a night. Obviously, we were on to something.

So we’ve revamped the whole process, the whole idea, and I feel we’ve gotten closer to the spirit of the book than ever before. It’s about luxurious dinners served in a beautiful setting. It’s about Vincent Price. It’s about the Treasury. It’s about the food.

It’s always about the food.

And . . . it’s about the book. Eating Vincent Price is about the Treasury in the most obsessive way. It is an exegesis of this wonderous book and in that capacity acts as a deep dive into the world’s culinary culture in the years leading up to its publication in 1965.

So please, stick around. Come back. Tell your friends about Eating Vincent Price. Comment. Share. I promise it will be worth it.

Published in 1965, the Treasury contains recipes from the greatest Michelin-starred restaurants of the world at the beginning of the 60s, all collected by American horror icon, Vincent Price.

Eating Vincent Price, this blog, the podcast, the videos, the dinner series, and the book are all part of my exploration of this incredible book, how it formed the foundation of my life as a writer and a cook, and how it introduced me to the world of flavor and culture beyond the good booth at Red Lobster.

It Starts With a Baby

This project started in 1965. I was one year old. My parents lived in Little Five Points, the Soho of Birmingham, AL. My dad, Bull, was a master plumber. My mom, Libby, was a hospital receptionist. They would go out to eat then visit bookstores and one day Bull saw this gorgeous cookbook: A Treasury of Great Recipes.

It was red, bound in padded silk, with gilt pages. When Bull Sr. picked the book up he saw the clincher: it was written by Vincent Price.

As I grew older, I became aware of this book and would sit at the counter and thumb through it, grooving on the pictures, digging the recipes, and wondering what it must be like to have the money to eat like that. Only once did Bull cook anything from the book: Venitian peas and rice. Otherwise, the book sat in a cabinet, and then through the convolutions of life, through divorce and resettlement, through me growing up and out, I never saw it again.

Years later, after my father passed away, I inherited this book and kept it with my other cookbooks. But I never took it down. I never cooked from it. Probably for the same reason Bull never cooked from it: kids, job, career, etc., etc.

Then Julia and Julia came out and my wife wanted to go see it because we maintain a strict 1:100 chick flick-to-actual movie ratio in our house. For every single actual good movie I take us to, we have to see 100 sappy films about relationships where there is not a solitary explosion.

Frequently, when a character in a film is doing something heinous, or wonderful, or hilarious, my wife will smack me in the shoulder. In J&J she did it, bruising me, and whisper-screaming:

You should do that!

But we’re watching the movie they made about the person who actually did that.

Oh so what.

So it’s been done.

Your’s would be funny.

Yeah, because it would involve plagiarism.

Go get me more popcorn.

I let that idea drop. But later on, I was going through my books looking for a recipe when I pulled down the Vincent Price. I got lost in it again, lost in the luxury of it, in the richness of the food, in the arch celebrity of name-dropping. And I realized maybe my wife was on to something.

So here we are. A book, a cook, and a hook.

The Treasury of Great Recipes is not a cookbook. It is a recipe book. There are hardly any instructions in it. And those that do exist are insane (freeze your bechamel sauce for later, how to use powdered peas). Any cook goes into it blind because you are expected to understand how to cook the dishes presented, how to follow the barest instructions.

And I need more than the barest instructions. I can cook all of two things well: gumbo and guacamole. I would say I can grill alright but I’m still not convinced grilling counts as cooking since most people will eat anything that comes off a grill as long as it’s coated in enough barbeque sauce or it’s on a stick. I cannot, for instance, properly poach an egg. I’ve been working on this every morning for a week and I got one good poach. All the others looked like discarded alien babies. Even the dogs wouldn’t eat them. I made gazpacho twice yesterday—TWICE—and it tasted like wet carpet both times.

Great People Rush to My Aid

When I went into Eating Vincent Price my usual way, with no planning and feet first, like a guy jumping off a cliff because he heard there was a lake at the bottom, well, I didn’t think about this whole can’t-make-gazpacho thing. I just decided to try and cook some world-class menus from some of the world’s most revered restaurants for my friends. What could possibly go wrong?

Fortunately, I also feet-firsted a bunch of letters to local chefs, and one of them, Chef Efrain Cuevas, of Clandestino fame, responded with the clarity and eloquence of a man who knows what he’s capable of: he wrote back “I’m in.”

Cuevas and I met at the Hopleaf and he looked through the book with an eye for foody detail I don’t have, came up with some fantastic ideas, and we agreed to do some dinners. Then we met with his partner, Chef Lauren Parton, who very eloquently and very diplomatically and very carefully agreed with me that people who would be paying for dinner would not want it cooked by a guy who can’t poach an egg.

“Maybe a little training is in order,” she said. Actually, I think she said Are you ^^%$! crazy!? But I’m paraphrasing.

Originally, I was going to wing it and cook a meal. Once in the company of actual chefs, however, I realized this was a terrible idea for a couple of reasons. First, and I have to be clear here, chefs are cool. I don’t mean that in the rock star sense (not entirely, though having spent a lot of time with musicians, I can tell you they’re eerily similar) but in that they exude the kind of confidence in their skills we all wish we had. They don’t have to sell it. They radiate it. Where I look at a recipe for lobster bisque and blanche in fear, they start adding things. More, they were cool in the sense that they are not yellers. They are not sellers. They are not agitates. We see Gordon Ramsey screaming at people and we buy it, we believe chefs are like that, and that it’s ok to toat such titanic arrogance in the kitchen. But Cuevas and Parton were the opposite of Ramsey. They’re calm. They’re quiet. They’re polite and I sense they wouldn’t yell at you if you were on fire. And within that centered zen quiet, is a total lack of arrogance.

Secondly, they speak in code. And by code, I mean they speak French. They speak the language of culinaria. They don’t just cook, they live through food. They think through food. They exist through food.

They both said it there in the quiet heat under the brickwork of an abandoned convent where we will be serving dinner: it’s about the food.

I suspect all great chefs are like this and I suddenly realized that for me to cook these cherished recipes, to wing it, was arrogance of the highest order. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t just step in and give it a whirl. That would be about me. This is not about me.

It’s about the food.

Instead, I started like any decent cook: at the bottom. I began my journey at the beginning of every chef’s journey: as the kitchen boy. Peeling, turning, mashing, scraping, and washing the ingredients they will turn into the magnificent dishes from this magnificent book. From there, I moved up the ladder as my skills improved until I finally made my way to the stove. Chef Cuevas told me when I got done with it, I’d be fearless.

He was right.