When Jean-Baptiste Troisgros asked his son, Pierre, to take over their restaurant in Roanne, France, Pierre refused. Roanne is for my brother, Jean, he said. I wish to be Parisian. Which he was. Decidedly. Troisgros cheffed at Maxim’s, the iconic Parisian restaurant. It was here he learned the trick of flattening salmon to cook evenly. It may be here where he also learned to cook the salmon until it is just set, still pink and not overdone or dried out. It was here, at Maxim’s that Troisgros learned techniques which led him to stray off the well-worn footpath of Escoffier’s school and so, perhaps, it is here where we may insert a pin in the map at 3 Rue Royale as the point of origin of Nouvelle Cuisine.

At least in spirit.

For the material origin, we have to follow Troisgros back to Roanne, back to the restaurant in the Hotel Moderne across from the train station, purchased by his parents when he was two years old, after they sold Café des Négociants in Chalon-sur-Saône in 1928, the year he was born.

I can imagine Pierre, having acquiesced to his father’s plea and taken over the restaurant, standing in the kitchen bathed in the steam of a stock pot, longing for the business and the prestige of his former joint. I can imagine him looking at the day’s catch of salmon from the river Loire, thinking about the cuisine bourgeoise cooked by his mother, Marie. Braises, roasts, gratins—the kind of hearty, genuine fare preferred by French travelers. It was stick-to-your-ribs food, Sunday roast dinners, elevated only slightly above common roadside cafe dishes and a whole two or three steps below haute cuisine. The kind of food every French chef was trained to cook. The kind of dishes they could cook with their eyes closed because they came from their bones, from their blood, from their whole life and it made Pierre want to throw a pot at the wall.

And so there he is, a brace of salmon filets on hand,

the small common plates stacked high and waiting for sauce-heavy food, bored out of his mind. Then he remembered how they flattened the fish in Paris so he attacks a filet until it spread so wide it fell over the edges of the house plates (they had to commission special plates at 32cm diameter to accommodate the plating). He’d seared the fish only ten seconds per side. It was fresh, moist, pink—and undercooked.

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Every Tuesday, my wife and I either host a dinner with friends or attend one. It’s the same friends, every Tuesday. I’ll call them Oscar and Matilda because that is definitely not their names and privacy matters. Every Tuesday, unless we’re all out of town. It’s my favorite day of the week.

This standing date was born from a new friendship that had, from the very start, from the first five minutes, an extraordinary vibe. Oscar and Matilda match us perfectly. They’re a rock-solid balance of rock-and-roll and linen-and-champagne. Sometimes Oscar invites me over for a nightcap and jazz when Matilda’s out of town. Sometimes I invite them over when my wife is absent.

Tuesday was their idea and it was brilliant. Since then it’s become a meaningful rhythm, a vibe we look forward to. I need that vibe. I need that kind of space with others, with the handful of people I can call on when I need a ride. When I need to move a couch. People I count on. People that count on me. People that see me and dig me and here’s the thing: you need that space too. Everyone does. We all need the right vibe.

Friendships are tricky and in the bizarro timeline we’ve been kicked into, they’re even trickier. Is a zoom call really hanging out? Is yelling at each other through our game controllers really a conversation? Friendships are tricky because friendships are valuable. They are, perhaps, the most valuable relationships after our immediate fam and I know, for some of you, even more valuable than your fam. So how do you really burrow into fellowship? How do you maintain it, and enhance it, and grow it? How do you take care of those rare alliances that you treasure?

There’s no hack for this. No step-by-step tutorial because a friendship is a kind of love and love is numinous and weird and magical and resists logic like it’s a poem. It is a poem. It is a thing that only exists when you’re doing it. The way you keep it going is to keep it going which means being in each other’s company which means sitting in the same room. Breathing the same air. Eating the same food.

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To entertain means inviting someone to your table then giving them time and space to be themselves. Which, if you have good friends like Oscar and Matilda, is a little like running your fingers through a terrine of emeralds. Of diamonds. Rubies. Treasure.

To entertain is to invite the vibe, that original spark, to reignite and flare. It means to welcome someone into a place where they know, without any equivocation, they belong.

This blog is about a book. Not a cookbook, though it contains recipes. The unspoken purpose of A Treasury of Great Recipes is not merely to cook, but to cook for others. It’s about entertaining. Which doesn’t mean putting on a show. To entertain is to sit with. To listen. To see. To live a few hours of your life together. The food is secondary.

Eating Vincent Price has a great effect, a tongue-in-cheek energy–you are consuming a horror icon. How macabre! But here’s a secret…it’s not. Eating Vincent Price bears a vestigial thought, an invisible word hanging off the end of the title, sort of like a silent letter: style. Like dining al fresco. Like eating Chinese. When you invite people you adore who bring the vibe that is your northern star with them every time, when you also bear that light, and you cook for them and you labor over which wine to serve and you light candles and polish the silver because they deserve it–because you deserve it–then you’re eating Vincent Price.

I hope you do so often.

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A Treasury of Great Recipes

It’s almost three inches thick. The edges of the pages are stained the same red as fresh blood. It has a silk ribbon. The cover is padded satin and dead center is its gold inlayed title: A Treasury of Great Recipes.

Maybe you’ve seen it. Hell, maybe you have one. You may have inherited it; it’s the one on top of a stack of cookbooks from a cherished uncle, an old friend, your mom. On top because there’s no way it gets shuffled down under other, dusty, tattered recipe books. Not the Treasury.

Between its covers is a strange lens into a peculiar moment in history. America’s recovery from the second world war had propelled it into the Atomic age. We were flush. Clusters of skyscrapers shot up in every major city. Interstate highways were carved from New York to Los Angeles. Grocery chains emerged in the suburbs like toadstools after a rain.

American dinners were shifting from the decidedly domestic to more exotic fare. Julia Child was chortling the joy of French cooking from living room Zeniths. The cookbooks stacks on kitchen counters were all about step-by-step efficiency, meal planning for families, and easy entertaining. They were normal books. They had a dust cover. They were affordable.

The Treasury was different. No cover. It looked like a bible. It sold in a slipcase. The Small Business Bibliography, written by Dr. Jeremiah J. Wanderstock and published by the Small Business Administration, listed it on page 12 at $20 or $196 in contemporary dollars. That’s more than a week’s salary for a union pipe fitter of the time, like my father, who probably brought this book home much to the consternation of my mother who was busy caring for me, a newborn. Dropping that kind of cash on a cookbook was insane for a working man.

This book wasn’t aimed at the blue collar crowd. It was meant for the middle class suburban housewife, a woman with live-in help, a woman who vacationed in the Hamptons and had a pied-à-terre in Tuscany. Her husband was a name partner. She was married to Don Draper. She entertained with a staff. She lived in the new America.

Cooking and dining in 1965

Shopping for supper was different. It was different from how we shop now, but it was also increasingly different from how housewives had shopped before. Through the 50s, you’d go to the butcher for meat, to the fishmonger for shrimp, to the baker for bread and pick up the dairy at their front doorstep. You might get truffles if you knew about Maison Glass, but they would be canned in truffle oil and nothing at all like the more or less fresh Périgord truffles you can have shaved over your omelette today.

As shops like Kroger and Piggly Wiggly and Winn Dixie grew into networks, their buying power meant they could put international ingredients onto the shelves. But not much. A store in 1965 may have had as many as 8000 SKUs. Today that’s closer to 40 grand–and most of that is specialty items and international ingredients.

Shoppers were limited by more than selection. How did the tomato chosen on a Wednesday morning by a housewife in a Kroger in Burlington, Vermont, get there? Imagine a tomato hanging off the vine in Homestead Florida. Florida supplied 90% of ‘fresh’ tomatoes in winter for the Eastern half of North America in 1965. But this is not the bright red tomato you’re used to. Someone picks this tomato at its ‘mature green’ state, meaning the seed cavities have formed but ripening hasn’t begun. It’s still deep green. Still hard. They were sent through the packing house where they were washed and waxed then packed into wooden crates which were loaded into a refrigerated truck or train car.

That tomato then travelled 1400 miles to Vermont along, perhaps, US1, a busy highway with a top speed of maybe 50 miles an hour if the driver was blessed. if a snowstorm or a freeze didn’t stop him, the driver might take 35 hours–with rest stops built-in–to get there. And it wasn’t the small town in Vermont, the driver pulled into a terminal market in Albany or Boston. Then they were repacked and shipped twice a week to grocers, to Burlington.

By this time the tomato’s been on the road for nearly ten days. Refrigeration–if it didn’t break down–has kept it from ripening, but inside the fruit it is aging, deteriorating. What it’s not doing is developing sugars, flavor compounds, or breaking down cell walls. Or turning red. The last step before a Homestead or a Walter varietal hit the produce aisle was sitting in a room pumped full of ethylene gas–the same gas produced naturally by ripening fruit–that magically transformed this waxed, dead fruit into a bright red ‘tomato’.

The Treasury was written for cooks locked into this logistics chain. For people who only got fresh grapes once a year. Who rarely saw a lemon or an orange. They cooked out of cans, boxes, and bags-and sometimes from the freezer.

The flavor of the dishes they cooked from the Treasury surely suffered, surely wasn’t anything like the fresh bright nouvelle cuisine it was meant to emulate.

Vincent and Mary Price: The People Behind the Treasury

Price made some terrible movies, but Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine is arguably the nadir of a career that never came close to Oscar territory. It was in theaters, drawing everyone’s brow all the way down to the floor with a labored and awful story about a mad scientist making robot women in a bid to steal all the money in the world. At the same time, Price launched the Treasury, a distinctly high-brow collectible.

Price was a strange combination. He earned an English degree with a minor in art history from Yale. He collected art–in fact he curated a collection of reprints of classic paintings for Sears. Most people only know Price from his voice in the Thriller video, or from Edward Scissorhands or from old movies. In most of his films, certainly during the middle 60s, he was the eldritch ghoul, debonair and deadly. That part of him defined his public face. Off set, he was a curious and vibrant intellectual. A champion of good causes. A globe hopping gourmand.

The second name on the Treasury, Mary Price may have less real estate in the public eye, but her career as a designer spanned more than 30 years. Between 1943 and 1972 she designed costumes for fourteen films. Her visual intelligence was surely brought to bear in the production of the book—she is, after all, listed as an editor. It is also her talent for entertaining, that informed the selection of recipes it contains.

The Restaurants of A Treasury of Great Recipes

The domain of the Treasury seems to be food, but in truth it’s about travel. When I was growing up, I read my father’s copy as a world-book, a picture book that took me out of rural Florida across the Atlantic to Spain, England, and France. In each of those countries, through the rich, lavish photographs and the menus, I visited the great restaurants of Europe: La Pyramide, Hotel de la Poste, Sobrino de Botín, Lasserre, The Blue Fox, and Antoine’s.

Fortunately, many of those great houses are still open. You can book a table at La Tour d’Argent. You can still be seated in Restaurante Horcher. You can make you way down the narrow stairwell of Sobrino de Botín and even slip into its ancient wine cellar, cool and dim and dusty with mold.

As much as the Treasury is about the places and dishes enjoyed by the Price’s it is also about people. Not only chefs, but friends and associates, fellow movie stars, and writers. He mentions Bela Lugosi. He mentions Sarah Bernhardt. And more.

Fritz Kredel, Bela Lugosi, Fernand Point and people mentioned on nearly every page

I’ve been living with this book for 61 years and yet I still discover people mentioned that I didn’t recognize on previous readings. Currently, I’ve tracked 24 celebrities, intellectuals, and chefs mentioned in its crimson deckled pages, but I’m sure there are more.

The Prices knew everybody. With Mary’s career in design and Vincent’s fame and their insatiable curiosity, the Prices met and dined with hundreds of historic people. The name dropping is constant: Picasso, Lugosi, Carl Sandburg, Gertrude Lawrence, The Harvey Girls and more.

One of the great joys of pouring over this book is assembling the cast of marquee names and superluminaries that passed through the Prices’ life and thoughts.

Eating Vincent Price: an invitation and a promise:

Page by page. Dish by dish. Chef by chef. I promise to take you on a culinary journey from today 60 or more years into the past, to the Mad Men era of fine dining, into the b-list fringe of old Hollywood, into the birth of nouvelle cuisine, and the emergence of the every day gourmand. Join me as I cook, read, research, and entertain out of this rare, bizarre, remarkable book.

Sources:

Wikipedia contributors. 2026. “Mary Grant Price.” Wikipedia. Last modified May 13, 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Grant_Price.

Oliver, Myrna. 2002. “Mary Grant Price, 85; Designed Costumes for Film and Stage.” Los Angeles Times, March 7, 2002.

Wikipedia contributors. 2026. “Vincent Price.” Wikipedia. Last modified [current]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Price.

Ayankojo, Ibukun T., and Kelly T. Morgan. 2020. “Increasing Air Temperatures and Its Effects on Growth and Productivity of Tomato in South Florida.” Plants 9 (9): 1245. https://doi.org/10.3390/plants9091245.

Florida Tomato Committee. n.d. “History, Cultivation and Harvesting.” Accessed July 2026. https://www.floridatomatoes.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/PART-I-History-Cultivation-and-Harvesting.pdf.

Rural Migration News. 1996. “Vegetables: Mexico, Florida.” Rural Migration News, University of California, Davis. https://migration.ucdavis.edu/rmn/more.php?id=159_0_5_0.

Yale University Library. 2015. “The ‘King of Horror’ as Arts Advocate: The Vincent Price Papers at Yale.” Yale News, October 29, 2015. https://news.yale.edu/2015/10/29/king-horror-arts-advocate-vincent-price-papers-yale.

Wanderstock, Jeremiah J. Small Business Bibliography, no. 17. Restaurants and Catering. Washington, DC: U.S. Small Business Administration, 1965. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Small_Business_Bibliography/UR_YPAxH6cgC.

On a crisp morning in November 1942, a large man sat in a chair on the terrace of a restaurant in Vienne, France, with a glass of champagne getting a shave. The barber finished, snapped his towel and departed. A gorgeous woman, the man’s wife, tied a silk cravat around his neck. The man proceeded to open the restaurant, the acclaimed La Pyramide. His first customers were a band of Nazis who demanded service. The man ignored them, walked to the window, pulled down the shade, turned off his stoves, then informed the fascists that France’s most esteemed restaurant was closed and would remain so until France was liberated.

That was Chef Fernand Point. Along with a handful of French chefs, Point reinvented French cuisine—already considered the standard—into French nouvelle, launching an exciting new food movement in the center of the Western gastronomic world and defining technique, procurement, management, and formulae well into the 21^st century.

Point was a happy man. He was a man made entirely of stories, a legendary prankster, six feet and 300 pounds of appetite. He loved champagne, oysters, people, dinner, and laughter and his sense of bonhomie was as much a part of nouvelle cuisine as salmon with sorrel sauce (by Jean and Pierre Troisgros at Maison Troisgros, in Roanne).

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More truffle work. This time you’re shoving it up under the skin of a dead chicken. With butter. And look, this is an easy one and if you don’t have any truffles, well, shame on you for not being French.

Price instructs us to add leeks and carrots to a pan then lay the chicken on top of them and cook until lightly browned and I’m wondering what the fuck happens to the leeks and carrots. Do they caramelize? Do they burn? Will the chicken even brown? This might be a question for an actual chef but they’re all busy yelling at their saucier so I’ll just let you stew in confusion and do as providence advises.

Also, regarding a half teaspoon of salt and a half teaspoon of peppercorns—what the hell, Price? That’s like 7 peppercorns and a smidgen of salt. Look, home chef, you do you.

(Volaille means ‘poultry’)

This is the very first recipe in A Treasury of Great Recipes, Vincent Price's 1965 cookbook, a gorgeous stuffed trout by Chef Fernand Point from Restaurant de la Pyramide in Vienne, France. La Pyramide is still open, now headed by Chef Patrick Henriroux.

You really need the freshest trout you can find. Look for a fishmonger in your area (yes, they exist). In Chicago, you might try Elston Fish Guy. If you can’t find trout, any whole fish will do, though Branzino should be your first choice.

This is the very first recipe in the Treasury, a gorgeous dish by Chef Fernand Point from Restaurant de la Pyramide. Pyramide is still open. It is headed by Chef Patrick Henriroux.

This maddening cooking method by Vincent Price

This is a faithful recreation of the recipe in the book. Please look at the picture provided, so you can appreciate the fury experienced by the author—and anyone cooking from Price’s diabolical recipes. They are in some weird 19th century format, the ingredients are listed by name only, with amounts buried in the narrative. BTW ‘farcie’ means stuffed.

Le Grand Succès Réserve is a Grand Marnier ice cream dessert from A Treasury of Great Recipes — Vincent Price's 1965 cookbook — and it comes from the menu of Réserve, a Beaulieu-sur-Mer restaurant the Prices visited on the French Riviera. I have reservations about my effort to cook a dessert from Réserve.

Notes from the Kitchen: What Went Wrong and What to Do Instead

Don’t get confused, or cocky; don’t think you know more than the chef who designed this recipe and decide the chocolate should go on the outside of the molds. It does not.

This recipe is a template you can customize. For instance, I added a simple sugar glaze to my fruit which made it stand out and look glossy and beautiful. I wish I had considered making a rhubarb glaze, or a mint glaze. Just a hint would have elevated the dish.

I’m committed to cooking these recipes as presented and in the spirit of the 1960s so I used a crappy store-bought vanilla ice cream. But you could make your own, and not just vanilla. I would caution you against straying too far from the flavor profile. The creaminess of the ice cream is the foil for the chocolate and the Gran Marnier. It carries everything so replace it with care.

Finally, don’t freak out if you want to make this on the fly and discover you’re out of Grand Marnier. Use Cointreau. Use a brandy. Get weird: use bourbon.

On a sunny Sunday afternoon in Nogales, Mexico, Silverio Perez slowly withdrew his blade from the neck of a young, exhausted bull. Around him, a thousand people twirled handkerchiefs and screamed the name bestowed upon him, El Faraón de Texcoco—the Pharoah. He was beloved for the extraordinary elegance of his signature, the trincherazo. Slowly, gently, Perez would sweep his cape around his hips, drawing the charging animal around him to study its energy, to exhaust and therefore relax the muscles of its neck, and to determine, as if dancing to a graceful paso dobles, when to administer the estocada—the kill. Now, as the animal died, as his name was roared over the high desert sand in the rustic carrida, he sliced off the bull’s ear, his token reward. In the stands, close to the rail, close to Perez, a furious Harvard man aimed a seat cushion at his head.

He was more used to aiming a gun. Freshly out of military intelligence, Cleveland Amory was working as a reporter for The Arizona Daily Star. It didn’t make his family happy. An old, storied Boston Brahmin family, they believed Cleveland was destined for the more genteel life, for quiet wealth management, golf, and charity balls. But Amory was to cool to lounge in luxury which was why he was in Nogales to cover the bullfight, his first—and his last.

Bullfighting was a big deal in the middle of the last century.

Especially in Nogales, bordering Arizona with its Army bases and its working towns, bullfighting was exciting, cheap, and only a short drive south. The Star’s readers followed it like football. Mexicans treated matador’s like royalty and bullfighting was the national sport. Every Sunday at three o’clock, thousands of Catholics gathered to watch an ornately clothed man dispatch a charging bull. The blood of Christ in the morning, the blood of a bull in the afternoon.

The severed ear was a thing. Matadors took ears, hooves, tails and horns from their kills. Perez wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary—in a time when the ordinary had all the animal protection of an abattoir. Maybe less.

Hemingway, America’s favorite manly man, adored bullfighting.

He glorified it in Death in the Afternoon. Ceramic figurines of bullfighters were common cheap fare in southwest gas stations. America had put itself through a horrendous meat grinder of a war. Bullfighting let them blow off steam. Or that’s what the period’s alpha male analog would tell you.

Not Amory. Amory saw, in the entire spectacle, but most clearly in that moment when Perez severed the dead animal’s ear, that it was explicitly and luridly cruel. Within spitting distance of Perez, Amory—six foot four and pissed off—hurled his seat cushion and knocked the savage son-of-a-bitch into the dirt.

America in the middle years of the 20^th century was meat forward.

Butchers were stand-alone shops with a line out the door. People ate almost 70 pounds of beef, 50 pounds of pork, and 8 pounds of veal every year. Today, we’re barely hitting 60.

The landscape for a vegetarian was as precarious as the bullring for a cow. Most people thought vegetarians were just another brand of addled weirdos, not too far from being a communist. Forget adjusted menus—that was a dream. Even eating at home wasn’t easy since food delivery was local. You got what was growing, a little wilted, and you were happy with it. Anything else, anything exotic like artichokes or leeks was canned or frozen or (please take a deep breath) powdered.

The Treasury reflects this time with the first serious mention of a vegetable on page 35.

It doesn’t have a lot of vegetable dishes, not a single vegetarian dish, and never uses the word. Which makes the introduction by our Seat Cushion wielding Boston Brahmin kind of weird.

But strategic for sales. By 1964, when Amory presumably delivered the introduction to A Treasury of Great Recipes, he was a big star. He was only two years into being on the Board of the Humane Society of the United States, and it was not long after he’d been fired from his role on NBC’s Today Show for suggesting they form a club to hunt hunters. He was committed to the cause.

And yet, he introduces a cookbook that will surely sell, given its author was a horror and culture icon. A book that will promote creature cadaver casseroles. A massive tome of nearly 500 pages, bound in a soft satin cover, the edges of its pages stained a deep crimson, the color of dried blood. A book with full-bleed, full-color photos of the world’s most revered meat dishes. Why would Amory even be part of it?

One can only surmise. Speculate. I believe it was born out of his professionalism, out of his bonhomie toward Price, and that he was in it for the long fight. Also, we’re talking about the era depicted with such fierce, unfettered clarity in Mad Men, a time when people smoked between courses—even during. There were many, many culture wars being fought on every social front, from the civil rights movement to feminism to anti-redlining campaigns. Amory fought for the welfare of living animals, not his dietary choice.

Over the following decades, Amory continued working hard for animal welfare.

In 1979, he learned of several hundred wild burros living in the bottom of the Grand Canyon. They were destroying the native habitat and the government’s solution was to shoot them. Amory’s Fund for Animals said no, proposing removing the burros so they may be adopted. The government was dubious. After all, who wants a feral burro?

Amory sent helicopters 7,000 feet below the rim of the canyon, airlifting about 580 terrified burros out, alive, safely. A nationwide adoption campaign found homes for some, the rest were moved to the Black Beauty Ranch, established just for them.

This lifelong dedication to protecting animals began that day Amory rose in furious indignation from his rickety seat in a rickety old carrida to throw his cushion at cruelty. It is interesting that he opens this book with such grace and warmth: a vegetarian promoting veal parmigiana.

—Bull Garlington

Sources:

Freakonomics. “Beef or Chicken? A Look at U.S. Meat Trends in the Last Century.” Freakonomics.com, December 9, 2010. https://freakonomics.com/2010/12/beef-or-chicken-a-look-at-u-s-meat-trends-in-the-last-century/

Feedlot Magazine. “How We Got Here: A Brief History of Cattle and Beef Markets.” FeedlotMagazine.com, January 3, 2022. https://www.feedlotmagazine.com/news/industry_news/how-we-got-here-a-brief-history-of-cattle-and-beef-markets/article_1fe3c56c-6739-11ec-a5bb-2b72c548a8a4.html

Kuck, Gretchen, and Gary Schnitkey. “An Overview of Meat Consumption in the United States.” farmdoc daily, University of Illinois, May 12, 2021. https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2021/05/an-overview-of-meat-consumption-in-the-united-states.html

Modern Retro Woman. “Food for Thought: Meat Consumption Then and Now.” ModernRetroWoman.com, January 12, 2023. https://www.modernretrowoman.com/food-for-thought-meat-consumption-then-and-now/

United States Department of Agriculture. Agriculture Factbook 2001–2002. Washington, D.C.: USDA Office of Communications, 2003. https://www.usda.gov/factbook

AgWeb/Farm Journal. “Drivers of U.S. Per Capita Meat Consumption over the Last Century.” AgWeb.com, October 31, 2024. https://www.agweb.com/opinion/drivers-u-s-capita-meat-consumption-over-last-century

Sentient Media. “Meat Consumption in the U.S.: Is It Increasing or Decreasing?” SentientMedia.org, December 22, 2023. https://sentientmedia.org/meat-consumption-in-the-us/

United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service. “Livestock and Meat Domestic Data.” USDA ERS, updated monthly. https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/livestock-and-meat-domestic-data

Animal People News. “Cleveland Amory.” Animal People, November 1, 1998. https://newspaper.animalpeopleforum.org/1998/11/01/cleveland-amory/

EBSCO Research Starters. “Cleveland Amory.” EBSCO Research. Accessed June 2026. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/biography/cleveland-amory

Wikipedia. “Cleveland Amory.” Last modified 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_Amory

The Vegan Blog. “Honoring Our Founders: Cleveland Amory.” TheVeganBlog.org, April 27, 2021. https://theveganblog.org/46-honoring-our-founders-cleveland-amory

Encyclopedia.com. “Cleveland Amory.” Encyclopedia.com. Accessed June 2026. https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/historians-and-chronicles/historians-miscellaneous-biographies/cleveland-amory

American Heritage. “Cleveland Amory.” AmericanHeritage.com. Accessed June 2026. https://www.americanheritage.com/users/cleveland-amory

Greenwald, Marilyn S. Cleveland Amory: Media Curmudgeon and Animal Rights Crusader. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2009.

Eating Vincent Price publishes no written content generated by artificial intelligence. All art, even when altered in Photoshop, is attributed to the artist who first captured the image and linked to their socials, when possible.

Artificial intelligence should never be used to generate art because a program is not an entity. It has no stakes, no skin in the game, cannot struggle, cannot yearn, cannot ruminate nor speculate; it cannot despise, nor can it desire and it never, ever suffers. It is inhuman and therefore incapable of creation.

Bull Garlington is unmistakably human, struggles endlessly over the value difference between fragmentary appositives and actual appositives, makes and publishes teribel mitsakes, and did not know how to pronounce ennui until he was 34.

The em dashes readers encounter are an artifact of having been writing since before the internet was a thing—seriously.

Generation ≠ Creation.

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The Treasury is not overly concerned with vegetables. In the 1960s the star of the show at any restaurant was the meat. I don’t think a vegetable forward recipe appears in the Treasury until page thirty-five.

If you are vegan or vegetarian, welcome. I say welcome because you are, of course, encouraged to explore Eating Vincent Price. But it is primarily a site about a book. I offer a lot of recipes and occasionally a live dinner—but I never lose sight that this blog is an exegesis of a cookbook.

That book, A Treasury of Great Recipes, was first published in 1965—the edition I use for my research, a book that’s been in my life, in my kitchen, or on my desk for 61 years. The book and the period I’m exploring were not supportive of the wise and thoughtful moral and dietary choices made by vegans and vegetarians.

That means the content of this blog, which reflects and comments on the contents of the Treasury, does not currently offer any culinary value for those people who don’t eat meat.

If you’re into history, however, or Vincent Price—who was supportive—then you will find plenty to enjoy outside of the recipes. And maybe don’t look too closely at the menus reproduced from the book.

The Prices were moral people, artists with the disposition of artists, with the sensitivity of people steeped in the liberal arts. They were progressives in their time and though they did not include any actual vegan dishes, if they were around today they would probably publish an edition just for our non-carnivorous friends.

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This book is 61 years old—it can apply for early retirement. It is a product of the early 60s, the same period as MadMen. It was written in a time when there were ashtrays on every table. It’s author name drops like a used car salesman. There is an entire chapter sponsored by an RV company. It’s recipes are impenetrable and infuriating, dumbed down for American housewives who’s access to fresh ingredients was slowly eroding away as local grocers were replaced by chain supermarkets taking advantage of the interstate highway system, still in its toddler years, which allowed for transportation of produce from more temperate states to the snow-bound suburbs of major cities.

The advice and techniques in the original book that would make today’s foodie snort with derision and make a contemporary chef throw the book in a fire. Powdered peas? Canned grapes? Frozen béchamel? It’s all in there.

But unlike his contemporary, Julia Child, Price took the aproned house-wife further than Paris. His recipes weren’t so much about the cuisine as they were about the top-dollar restaurants in major cities that served their cuisine. Yes, you will learn some recipes from France but they’re not really about France, they’re about La Tour Argent or La Poste. They’re about the established and emerging culinary stars as the position of chef was advancing from the kitchen to the cover of a magazine, or TV.

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But there is a fascinating history captured in this book. In the gilded pages of the Treasury, you’ll meet Fernand Point, Pierre Descreux, and Rene Hure. You’ll visit the great houses: La Tour d’Argent, Hostellerie de la Poste, Tre Scalini, and Luchow’s. You’ll eat your way across Europe the way only a beloved mid-century horror icon could, dining in the very best restaurants of England, Spain, France, Norway, Mexico, and Italy. You’ll visit historic restaurants in the United States like The Pump Room, the Blue Fox, The Pierre Grille, and Sardi’s and sit at the table with Price. You’ll pour over the menus from these restaurants and drill down into the geography of the cuisine they represent.

And then, I hope, you’ll download a dinner card and throw your own soiree because the Treasury was about entertaining. The Price’s were legends of entertaining, nerding over not just the food they cooked, but the tiniest details of presentation. They threw endless dinner parties, attended by Hollywood legends like Boris Karloff.

Most of all, I hope you enjoy yourself. That’s what dinner is all about: good friends, good food, and good times. So, please, you’re invited to join me for dinner. See you there.

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Fourteen years ago, I had a great idea. I’d inherited A Treasury of Great Recipes from my late father. I grew up with this book. It was published the year I was born and I remember lying on the living room floor, nestled in the olive-green pile carpet, the sound of a ballgame rattling in the background, surrounded by my own treasury: Tarzan and the Ant Men, Savage Pullcidar, Doc Savage and the Quest of the Spider, The Tree of Knowledge, and always, front and center, my guide to the world: A Treasury of Great Recipes.

A lot of writers will list the literary greats as their inspiration, their north star authors: Hemingway, Twain, R.L. Stein, J.R.R. Martin, or Bradbury. For me it was Vincent Price. Specifically, his book of recipes (seen above) which was as exotic, as distant, and as fantastic as any spider-filled air-pirate dinosaur teeming hollow-earth kingdom from any pulp novel could muster.

Being a blue-collar kid in suburban Central Florida, my experience with geography, culture, and cuisine began and ended pretty much on the short section of Highway 50 that was home to Red Lobster, The Golden Pagoda, and Fat Boy’s Barbecue. My days oscillated between school and swamp exploration punctuated by trips to the library. I’d spend my afternoons raising hell around Ocoee with my friends, Mark and Tim. We spent out time jumping ramps, vandalizing new construction, stealing candy, hunting wild boar with bb guns, and working on our menagerie of snakes. But my dad whistled me home for dinner, I turned my adventurous spirit to books, to Vincent Price’s priceless tome.

The Treasury took me around the world through food. I read about eating in Madrid, Paris, London, Mexico City and Scandinavia. Even the American cities were exotic. New York? Los Angeles? Chicago? Might as well have been Opar, Castrum Mare, or Mars.

In 2012, after working on The Beat Cop’s Guide to Chicago Eats, with my partner in crime, Lt. David Haynes (now retired), I was looking for a new project. My wife and I saw Julia & Julia which inspired her to hit me repeatedly in the arm while whispering you should do this with the Vincent Price book! Which was a damn fine idea. So I did.

Kind of.

I started a blog. It was good. I had the idea to cook the dinners, then invite a real chef to cook them and compare the results. I thought hilarity would ensue and I’d get some good dinners and maybe a book deal. Only, it went weird—in a good way. Over the next four years, I worked with a handful of amateur and professional chefs on a pop-up dinner series. We cooked entire meals based on the recipes in the Treasury. Our dinners were sold out, highly Instagramable, and exhausting.

I met some amazing people.

Lauren Parton, a fierce and capable chef turned mixologist who regularly beat me to death in the kitchen and regaled me with strange imprecations like DON’T YOU FUCK UP MY OYSTERS! which was weird cause we were breaking down chicken. Her patient (really) instructions behind the scenes became my best cooking school and her own pop-ups put mine to shame.

Lorenzo Tassone, the estimable blind photographer who’s background as a respected waiter and team leader kept our own service proper, well-staffed, and brilliantly photographed. Also, he is funny as hell which sometimes made all the difference at the tail end of an exhausting day.

Aram Reed, private chef to the stars who took our gig into some of the most well-respected restaurant teams in Chicago. It was Reed who insisted we change from family style to plated dinners and it was a game changer.

Victoria Price, Vincent and Mary Price’s extraordinarily talented daughter, a photographer and interior designer of some renown who visited one of our dinners to talk about her dad, to talk about wine, and to add a new level of class to our game.

Then, it just, kind of … stopped. Part of it was that throwing a successful pop-up dinner where the tickets are in the $$$ range, and the food is delicious and gorgeous, for 50 to 100 people is exhausting. I mean, ex haust ting. I don’t know how chefs do it, how they go year after year on their feet hammering away. It literally hurts. Also, and this is the important part, pop-up dinners are expensive.

Fourteen years later, I find myself in a strange place. I have just finished a rigorous undergraduate degree in creative writing at Oxford. I’m 20,000 words into my third novel, and my memories of that time, of those people, and those dinners is suddenly and vibrantly front of mind. The dinners were meant to market a book I never wrote. I got distracted by cos-playing a restauranteur. The Treasury, in all it’s luxurious over-the-top MadMen era goodness, remained unexplored.

Until now.