Most fans know that Vincent Price was a gourmet chef. This passion led to multiple cookbooks, including Cooking Price-Wise, which was a spin-off of a six-episode British television series from the early seventies. The main goal was to provide recipes with ingredients that could be found in local supermarkets.
Daz Lawrence over at horrorpedia shared the introduction from the cookbook. Since I don’t own a copy, I loved getting to read it:
“Hello, I’m Vincent Price. There are three things which really turn me on, as the current saying goes, one is work – I’m never really happy when I’m not working, another is art and the third is food. This book is the follow-up to the television series I made recently, which was all about food. I didn’t invent the recipes in the book, or in the series. I collected them…
“People always seem afraid of food from other countries – they’ll eat spaghetti, for instance, if it comes out of a tin, chopped up short and smothered in tomato sauce, but the real thing, no matter how available it is, is quite beyond them. Then, of course, you get the folk who think that foreign food is full of things that you can only get on special order from Harrod’s and I must admit that the way some cookery books are written, you’d think that was so. So, I was glad to accept the challenge when the producers of the series “Cooking Price-Wise” asked me to do the shows. The one condition was that all the ingredients in all the recipes must be readily available in any group of food shops or supermarket.
“We spent hours arguing as to whether a particular item was available in the local shops – in fact, one of the producers even rang up a Bolton supermarket to ask whether they stocked tins of bean-shoots. They did. We also found that soy sauce was available in Oban, Scotland.
“I must warn you, though, that some of the recipes come from a rather far-away place called Britain! Now, the people of this country have rather strange eating habits. Instead of washing their hands very thoroughly and eating with their clean fingers, they use what they call “Knives and Forks” – which they get from a drawer where they’ve been lying collecting dust for up to several days since being washed – these implements are not washed again before they’re used! However, I assure the squeamish among you that I have only chosen the cleanest recipes from this unfortunate land…”
I’ve been searching for this book for a while now in random thrift stores. It has been on Amazon before for the hefty sum of $50.
VINCENT PRICE MANIA 