Charming Cookbooks, Underwhelming Disclosure Days

Has Emily Blunt's American accent ruined everything?

A few months ago, I conducted a vote to determine which vintage cookbook I should buy off Etsy and explore for our entertainment. The winner was Lovers, which we will tackle at a later date. Spoiler: The best part about it is its (AMAZING) cover and also the author is OBSESSED with French dressing. Thanks to a variety of delightful developments — including donations from the collections of a few generous Broads! — I actually ended up with several of those books.

Second place to Lovers was Betty Crocker’s Party Book, about which I said, “I’m tempted to buy this no matter what you tell me to do.” This is exactly what I did. Broads, it is CHARMING. It is one of the cutest cookbooks I’ve ever seen.

You can tell this copy was well loved. Look how cute!! This makes me want to make little turkey place cards.

Betty Crocker’s Party Book was published by Golden Press, also the publisher of Little Golden Books, and you can tell. The illustrators are Anne and Harlow Rockwell, who nailed it; the drawings in the book are delightful. The Rockwells were married, and seem primarily known for their work writing and illustrating children’s books, although Harlow was also an art director, which is how I assume they came to work on this project. The author of this book is credited as Betty Crocker, but given that she’s fictional, I assume this was the work of several people at General Mills to whom I wish I could give proper credit. (Agnes White Tizard wrote the classic Betty Crocker Cookbook but probably not this one.)

The Betty Crocker of Betty Crocker’s Party Book would absolutely be on board for Forced Fun Summer. This book has party suggestions for EVERYTHING, including Lincoln’s birthday, which does, as one might hope, have a lot of log-oriented recipes. Its suggestions for little children’s parties are extremely cute: a circus party where you make invitations that look like elephants; a “Space Age Adventure Party” where you serve “Sputnik cheeseburgers” because the moon landing hadn’t happened yet at the writing of this book. We will absolutely be returning to this well,¹ but today we’re diving into two of the tentpole summer holidays, Memorial Day and the 4th of July, which the book calls “a magic date in American history.” Technically, I suppose this is true.

I regret to report that both of the suggested menus for these events are VERY reasonable. Memorial Day offers hamburgers, grilled veggie kabobs, potato chips, and rhubarb pie; the 4th brings hot dogs, deviled eggs, chips, brownies, watermelon, and “tossed vegetable salad,” for which there is no recipe and I assume is just a regular garden salad. Extremely normal! (Although, as you will soon see, later there is an “Independence Day salad,” which is sadly not red, white and blue but is a slightly weird potato salad with ham.) There are, as you might imagine from Betty Crocker, various patriotic cake suggestions involving Yellow Cake Mix.² What I really want you to look at are the decor and tablescape suggestions, and some of these thematic illustrations. They’re a hoot.

Next Memorial Day, you’d better make this, uh, vegetable scarecrow for the table:

Honestly, this is so pleasantly silly. I love the idea of adding “make vegetable scarecrow” to my to-do list, complete with red construction paper lips I need to paste to a slice of cucumber. This is sweet! I worry it will really self-destruct over the course of the party, but still.³

I also enjoy that Betty wants me to cover my Tupperware with wallpaper to insure it is sufficiently gay for my picnic, for which I will also need to source some gay denim or sailcloth:

Again, though, how charming are these illustrations?! The dad rowing that boat is also smoking a pipe!⁴ You’re right! I do love picnics!

Also festive:

See? This is really fairly normal. And the line “pat dough around wieners” is downright poetic. Second, both of those hot dogs sound like they’d probably be pretty good. One of them is just a chili dog, the other… honestly sounds like great twist on a sausage roll? I officially want to come to this party. Give me a brownie s’more right now.

And look how cute this illustration is, in the segment with barbequing tips:

I want to cut this book up and frame it.

As promised, the aforementioned salad:

I don’t think that would turn out quite as weird as it sounds when you read it. And you’re right, Betty. I could use a star-shaped cookie cutter to make little star sandwiches! Or mini Jell-O salads! This is very cute! And little peppermints with cherries as drumsticks on a cake? Clever! Those folks in the Betty Crocker party department were really cooking with — well, I guess charcoal, technically, with this one.

I do want to know when we get to go to this luau:

I don’t know what’s in those coconuts, but I’m willing to test it out.

— Jessica

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I Must Disclose My (Non-Spoilery) Feelings About Disclosure Day

My niece came to L.A. on a solo girls’ trip last week — we took her to tea at the Huntington’s rose garden, which is a beautiful if sweltering setting; if you want to appreciate that gift shop twice as much, walk the grounds first on a sunny day — and we decided to venture to Steven Spielberg’s latest, which is playing at the legendary Chinese Theatre. Big blockbuster + big Hollywood tourist Mecca felt right, although Milk Duds do taste the same everywhere.

The more I think about Disclosure Day, the more I realized I sat through it rather than truly enjoyed it. I am pretty sure I can discuss it without being spoilery, partly because the movie drops you into the action quickly and it’s immediately clear what’s going on: Josh O’Connor stole alien tech and footage proving they exist, at the behest of Colman Domingo, and Colin Firth is the Big Bad trying to get it back. Emily Blunt gets drawn into it, for Reasons. The cast is fine, the director loves aliens, there’s a nun, and we get a genuinely tense scene involving Eve Hewson that is very well executed. But it wasn’t the fun summer romp I wanted it to be. That’s a me problem; I don’t get to decide what kind of movie Spielberg would like to make. In terms of the bar that a June release date sets, though, Disclosure Day feels like it should have come out in October.

I often wonder if people’s reverence for Spielberg makes them want to love every film so much that they kind of hold their noses and give it a B+. I had the same vibe with The Fabelmans. Which isn’t to say that nobody who likes this movie is sincere about it; I just wonder if it’d stand up to scrutiny later. I don’t have a particular feeling like that for Spielberg because, shh, I’m not a fan of ET, Jaws is not my jam, I haven’t seen Close Encounters, and I came late to Raiders of the Lost Ark and thought it was mid. (It’s true that if Indy did nothing, the story would have ended the same way — although Dylan argued that it might actually have been BETTER for the world because maybe if Indiana Jones wasn’t there, the Germans would have waited to open the Ark in front of Hitler and then HE would have melted.) Jurassic Park is unquestionably great, but now we’re getting into my teen years. The point being, my youth isn’t wrapped up in the magic of Spielberg the way it is for a lot of folks. Maybe that makes me a crankier viewer, I don’t know. But for me, Disclosure Day unfolds in a way that feels like Spielberg had a smattering of ideas for action and dramatic setpieces — one in particular is genuinely fun — but couldn’t figure out how to stitch them together without making everyone get in cars. There is SO MUCH of people driving from A to B, only to realize they need to redirect to C, and then possibly D, but oops, back to A, via a quick stop at E. There are also two instances of hiding in what should be plain sight, in which a person is huddled behind a) a fairly open two-rail fence, while surrounded by Nefarious Cop-Like Agents, and b) a rock, while surrounded by Nefarious Cop-Like Agents. It makes the aforementioned Nefarious Cop-Like Agents look incredibly stupid. And while I won’t reveal the ending, I will say that it all comes to a head with an attempted bang that turns into a real whimper, and somehow everything hinges upon using a TV station to disseminate information when most people would just drop it all on YouTube and/or TikTok at this point.

But here is my real petty beef with this movie: I don’t like Emily Blunt’s American voice. I say “voice” because the accent itself is tone; it’s the tone and timbre that bother me. She takes on a breathy, higher-pitched quality, and I don’t know if that’s how it always works when she puts on an American accent or if that’s a choice she made for this character, but it detracts from the acting because every line sounds a tad condescending or insincere. It also makes her character seem ditzy at times, but that might be intentional, given that her M.O. is that she doesn’t understand why certain things are happening to her or what they mean. But I am less interested in that character if she’s flaky and floaty all the time; the spark Emily has with her natural British accent would only have added to the movie and I not only missed it but actively may have enjoyed the movie less for it. I was not a fan of her work in Oppenheimer either, some of which was due to it being a poorly crafted character by Christopher Nolan, who seemed actively disinterested in making the women of the movie a rich tapestry. But maybe that was ALSO the accent. I am not sure I can bring myself to do an exhaustive study of Emily Blunt’s American Accent on Film. But between that and how much of the movie lives in close-ups on her face, and how correspondingly noticeable it is that her face does not move the way it once did, I found myself thinking too much about the logistics of her performance to be immersed in the plot or the character. John Williams signed on to compose the score — I had thought the last Indiana Jones movie was his swan song — and regrettably, I don’t remember a note of it. Is this, too, all Emily Blunt’s fault? Is her accent a destroyer of movie worlds?!?

Anyway, I would never tell anyone NOT to go see a movie; even things we don’t like can make for great discussions. I thought Disclosure Day was rather empty in the end, a jumble of ideas that ran out of gas, presumably like all those cars eventually would have. But maybe if Emily Blunt had jumped out from behind a tree and yelled, “WANKER,” at Colin Firth in her natural accent, everything could have been different. Tragically, we will never know.

— Heather

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ICYMI

Celebrity Wedding Super Edition!

"I'd Live Like Blazes"

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Last Call:

— No one will ever beat Victoria Beckham at her WAG height — twenty years ago! Can you even? Still, this is timely, important, and robust: Meet the 2026 World Cup WAGs You Should Be Following. — J

— Reminder that we are FINALLY continuing with the Heated Rivalry Book Club, which I know I should call the Game Changers Book Club but my brain doesn’t want to and keeps ignoring my attempts. Tomorrow, paid subscribers will tee off on Common Goal. You can upgrade your subscription here if you want to get in on that! — H

— RIP to Anne Schedeen, the mother from ALF, who sounded like a fun broad and whose obituary took pains to include her burning hatred for Trump. See? A fun broad. May her memory be a blessing. —H

— Only Murders In The Building is basically The White Lotus for lighthearted comedic fare. Look at the season six cast list: David Tennant, Nicola Coughlan, Jodie Whittaker, Jim Broadbent, Richard Ayoade, Jennifer Saunders, Simone Ashley, Sharon Horgan, Martin Freeman, Geri Halliwell, James Demetriou, Jane Horrocks, Derek Jacobi, and Jane Horrocks, and that’s just the people whose names I immediately recognize. (Photo-wise, I also ID’d Kathryn Hunter, most recently — to me — in Black Doves, as the assassin boss type with the gravelly voice.) I am guessing some of them might play themselves?!? I guess if we’re not going to be in the Arconia then we need a whole other passel of people in a whole other building. — H

— You know how much I love talking about packing and what people plan to wear on vacations. Look how cute these packing lists are!!! — J

1. Betty DOES want us to spray paint a pineapple for Thanksgiving. Who am I to argue?

2. No shame in that game; Betty makes a way better cake than I ever have. I have given up on not using boxed cake mix.

3. This would be a great, sad metaphor if it were for a July 4 party. —H

4. But the placement of the wife’s head in this illustration is SENDING ME. I will not make the “smoking” joke that is in my mind. —H