The day before my dinner party, I sway around the living room in Scooby-Doo pyjamas and high heels, talking to myself. My cat, perched on the couch, puffs out its coat in alarm. I have been reading Joan Crawford's 1971 book, My Way of Life - in particular her chapter, The Pleasure of Company. Here, the late Hollywood actor shares her thoughts on entertaining. "Prepare a simple meal," she declares. "You may hire a maid to help with serving and clearing away, but don't pretend she's permanent help. It's a silly kind of lie. Don't talk too much, and above all, don't drink too much."
I have already failed in one respect. Had I read Crawford's advice earlier, I would have realised it was quite wrong to invite fellow journalists to my party: "there's nothing duller than a gathering of people who are in the same business." I hope the situation can be salvaged by following her suggestion that a hostess can benefit by rehearsing - "walking around her living room chatting with imaginary guests".
My party will consist of two feminist activists, three journalists and a teacher. What should I say to the feminist activists? "Have you," I pause - talking to myself aloud seems slightly odd. "Have you," I repeat, my voice rising to a nervous squeak, "had any luck in confronting the p*rn industry lately?" The cat flicks its tail and scampers away.
I have turned to Joan Crawford because my confidence as a hostess is at a low ebb. It hasn't always been this way. At university, I worked as a cook, and there followed years of dishing up food for friends on a regular basis. Recently, though, between the demands of my job and the fact that I am supposed to be on a diet, these shindigs have petered out. Every time I think of reviving them, I am beset by nerves.
When I discovered that such a dizzying array of Hollywood stars had published their own cookbooks, I knew this would get me out of my fug. I love old Hollywood. I love food. So I started making forays into the used-books pages of Amazon, amassing the finest cookery advice that dead and ageing celebrities have to offer.
I soon found that Hollywood stars are not necessarily as warm and encouraging as you might expect. Leafing through Crawford's book, for instance, I began to doubt I could ever meet her exacting standards. "I have some strict rules about how food is presented" she writes. "A red vegetable next to a yellow one looks unappetising. Two white ones, like celery and cauliflower, look awful."
I am on firmer ground with Liberace. The famously understated pianist was brought up by a mother who worked in a cookie factory, and as the pictures of him in his piano-themed kitchen suggest, he went on to become a keen chef. In Joy of Liberace: Retro Recipes from America's Kitschiest Kitchen, we learn that all the dishes "are designed for flawless execution of the axiom that anything worth doing is well worth overdoing".
As soon as I set eyes on Liberace's Salamiami Bouquet, I know it is a must. His flowers are made of rolled up salami, filled with softened, blue-dyed cream cheese. This looks both fantastic, and fantastically inedible. I take some skewers, wrap salami around them (fastened with a toothpick), and ditch the idea of cream cheese in favour of stamens fashioned from wrinkled cocktail sausages. I arrange my meat flowers among a spray of real roses. Beautiful.
For dessert, I select Liberace's Big Brazen Brownies, which seem pretty simple. But the recipe involves US measurements, which need converting, and I want to make double the amount. In the midst of the necessary multiplications and divisions, I lose my nerve. "I don't know if I'm doing it right," I shout to my boyfriend. He looks at the mixture. "That looks fine." "But how do I know?" He shrugs. "I'm sure it'll be fine." "But if it doesn't work," I say, my voice rising, vein pulsing hard in my neck "there won't be any pudding AT ALL!" My boyfriend squints at me. "You need to calm down," he says.
The starter goes more smoothly. I choose Sophia Loren's minestrone soup, from her 1971 Italian recipe book, Eat With Me, and, while I haven't found any lima beans in Sainsbury's, flageolets work just as well in the mix of potato, courgettes, peas and tomato. Loren advises that "the ideal - well-known, but rather expensive - is, of course, to accompany your food exclusively with champagne". I buy a couple of bottles of prosecco, and have done with it.
For the main course I was hoping to make something from A Treasury of Great Recipes, published by Vincent Price and his wife Mary in 1965. As well as being a celebrated horror actor, Price was, by all accounts, an enthusiastic cook. But I soon realise that the book is a compendium of dishes collected from "wherever in the world we have enjoyed good food". Recipes include shrimp in sherry cream sauce from The Royal Danieli restaurant, Venice and frogs' legs polonaise from Sardi's, New York. I try another book that Price published, Cooking Price-Wise, which accompanied a TV show for Thames television in the early 1970s, in which he starred as the ultimate celebrity chef. I am charmed by a photograph of a cucumber crocodile, the scales along its back made from squares of cheese and glace cherries. I decide that this will be Price's contribution to my dinner party, and begin the surprisingly delicate construction process.
Still in search of a main course, I turn to Paul Newman. In 1999, having established his salad-dressing empire, the actor published Newman's Own Cookbook, a collection of recipes both by him and "his Hollywood friends". I eschew Holly Hunter's courgette pancakes, Robert Redford's lamb chilli with black beans, and Matthew Broderick's grilled T-bone steak, in favour of Newman's own Italian-baked cod recipe. It is very easy - you put some cod in a baking dish, cover it with onions, tomatoes, olives, basil, parsley, and garlic, and bake for 20 minutes at gas mark 5.
My guests arrive, and I whisk the bacon-wrapped olives that Crawford suggests as an appetiser from the oven. They are delicious. There is much appreciation of the meat bouquet (although the person sitting beside it does ask to be moved - the mingling of salami and roses apparently not as appealing an aroma as one might suppose). Everyone happily digs into the cheddar scales that line the crocodile's back. And the soup and cod are both simple, but effective. There is one problem. The brownies are slightly overdone. But isn't that exactly what Liberace would have wanted?
^
She looks amazing!
