Which Vintage Cookbook Should Be Up Next?

Plus, Streep and Short, and Women of the Hour.

Last week, we dug into one of my vintage cookbooks and took a look at a menu that, in retrospect, was probably for a swingers’ brunch. Today, I’m asking you to enable me to expand my collection. After spending a truly bonkers amount of time on Etsy’s selection of vintage cookbooks, I’ve narrowed down my next potential purchase to five items. I’m going to put this choice up to a vote and whichever one wins, I’ll buy and explore for my fellow Broads. Democracy in action!! I selected each of these options using just two guidelines: (a) the book seems like it might amuse us, and (b) it costs $50 or less. ¹

Please behold our options:

1. The Glamour Magazine After Five Cookbook by Beverly Pepper. This 1952 cookbook was designed for “the working girl, the busy housewife, and the harassed but hungry bachelor,” and really appears to go the extra mile for these exasperated cooks, giving the reader literal shopping lists and menus for EVERY WEEK OF THE YEAR. I am generally delighted by a menu! Tell me what to serve with my chicken a la king or whatever! Related: I do not need a vote to tell me to buy 1965’s The Glamour Magazine Party Book: How to Give a Successful Party the Way We Live Today Whatever the Occasion. Just that trippy cover alone sells it! I need to see what this book says about drugs.

2. The Original Preppy Cookbook by D. J. Arneson. First of all, some copies of this book are selling for nearly $100, which seems nuts to me. Don’t fall for this! You can absolutely get this cheaper if you just Google it. Anyway, this is not the same author as the folks who did The Original Preppy Handbook, but I assume it’s part of the same universe and that — like Handbook — it’s meant to be at least partially, if not wholly, tongue-in-cheek. But I certainly want to read their take on “lawn parties” and “hangover remedies.” As a sidebar as we head toward the holidays, I feel very confident that this would make a good gift for someone any of you knows and that whoever it is would find this hilarious. Just make a mental note.

3. The 1949 publication is really more of a pamphlet — much like my copy of 500 Snacks! — but I cannot resist the title: Husband Tested Recipes. Please note that every husband on the cover looks exactly alike. Perhaps people were not actually swingers back in the day; they just couldn’t pick their spouse out of the crowd. This, like many of these cooking pamphlets, is technically a promotional tie-in, this time for something called PET Milk, which is evaporated milk and which still exists. (It has quite a storied history. Teddy Roosevelt is involved. Who knew we’d be learning anything today.) As a note to perhaps influence your vote, in addition to that timeless graphical work of art on the cover, the recipes in this brochure appear to be laid out in a needlessly confusing manner, and I suspect will be including milk in places it doesn’t need to go.

4. Our spendiest item at $50 — and copies in better shape are selling for more than double that, although, again, a little bit of noodling around online will nab you a much better deal — is Fashions in Foods in Beverly Hills, copyright 1931. This is the handiwork of the “book section” of the Beverly Hills Women’s Club, and it appears to have ads inside it, like a magazine, which might interest me more than the recipes, to be honest. Recipe contributors include Joan Crawford, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Norma Shearer, and other famous faces of early Hollywood — or, at the very least, their hardworking publicist(s).

5. Finally, and perhaps related: 1992’s Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous Cookbook: Recipes and Entertaining Secrets from the Most Extraordinary People in the World, “by” Robin Leach. First, I love this title: Are the secrets themselves entertaining, or are they secrets about entertaining? Or both? I guess I’d have to buy it to find out. Said Extraordinary People reportedly include Kris Jenner (freshly married to Caitlyn), Elizabeth Taylor (freshly married to Larry Fortensky), Prince Albert (freshly married to no one), and Kathie Lee Gifford (middle of her marriage to Frank). I would be extremely surprised if Ivana Trump didn’t somehow make an appearance in this thing. There’s only one way to find out!

Time to exercise those voting muscles:

My fate is in your hands.

— Jessica

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Woman of the Hour

After Serial keyed an explosion of true crime — podcasts, documentaries, adaptations — I backed away from the genre a bit. For me, it sometimes felt like trauma tourism, especially for projects where the victims’ families were not involved, but still had to relive their personal tragedies again and again at someone else’s behest, and often without adding much to the conversation. But I deviated this weekend to watch Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut, Woman of the Hour, on Netflix. I will skate around anything I consider a spoiler, even though it’s a mostly true story.

Woman of the Hour is the story of a Dating Game contestant whose choice, Bachelor No. 3, turned out to have been a serial killer of women. It’s very loosely based on the real Cheryl Bradshaw; details of her life and her episode were changed quite a bit, as were the names of the killer’s victims. The movie intercuts the fictionalized story of aspiring actress Cheryl — forced onto The Dating Game by her agent, who says she needs the exposure — with time jumps forward and backward to the fates of three other women Rodney Alcala attacked, in service of a larger statement about how women were (are!) commodified, dismissed, and preyed upon in ways the men around them refused to take seriously. The Dating Game itself provides a buzzy elevator pitch, yes, but it’s mostly a helpful change of pace — a break in tension, until it isn’t — and a little necessary levity, never misplaced because it’s always at the expense of the men: the hapless doof, the sexist egomaniac, the psychopath, and the dipshit host played by Tony Hale (also a character change, so they could really go to town without defaming Jim Lange). The women on that sound stage are, to varying degrees, aware of and annoyed by the power dynamics and that they’re consistently let down by the men around them. It’s a relevant anchor point for all the bigger ways we see institutions failing victims. Especially when you actually dig into his Wikipedia page and learn Rodney Alcala, by the time he appeared on The Dating Game, had already appeared on an FBI Watchlist and been arrested twice and convicted of child molestation. IN LOS ANGELES! The site of the game show that obviously did not vet its contestants!!!!

Directorially, Kendrick did a super job. The film looks great, and feels firmly grounded in the 1970s without ever being kitschy or overly winky. It’s taut, and at a brisk 94 minutes, also very efficient. She doesn’t go ham just because she can, and she doesn’t waste a single shot. She got great performances out of her cast, most of them unknowns, but with the occasional appearance of someone you might recognize (Hale, Kathryn Gallagher, Pete Holmes, Nicolette Robinson, and Kendrick herself as Cheryl). And it’s interesting to see a story like this shot through a woman’s lens. Kendrick has to make it clear that Alcala is a monster, but while you can’t skirt the facts of what he did to these women, she mercifully stops short of sensationalizing or fetishizing the actual crimes; nothing felt gratuitous or graphic. She and the screenwriter tried to flesh out the victims as much as possible to give us a sense of them as human beings and not merely a body count. There’s a sensitivity to the film that you don’t always find behind the camera.²

I still don’t know how to square projects like these with worries about re-traumatizing the surviving families. The cost of unearthing a story like this is complex, and sometimes I think my willingness to tolerate it lies in the execution, and the tone and intent of each project. Woman of the Hour felt like an indignant treatise on how disregarded women were — and still are — and how easily violence against us was (and often still is) brushed off as our hysteria. This is not a gross-out serial killer movie, but it is profoundly disturbing from that perspective. It’s a film that you’ll finish and want to shout, “Ugggggh, fuck everyone.” That’s the correct reaction.

— Heather

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Only Lovers in the Building

Rumored paramours Meryl Streep and Martin Short were photographed looking very joyous and blissful leaving Giorgio Baldi in Santa Monica together over the weekend. Giorgio Baldi is absolutely one of those places that celebs go when they want to be photographed, or at least know they will be, so this cannot have been an accident. Nor can this: A day or two later, Steve Martin posted a shot of the three of them on his Instagram, with the Universal No symbol stamped over his own face. This has to be them finally launching this romance publicly, right?

Obviously, Meryl and Martin³ are entitled to their privacy as a couple — although again, there are a bajillion places you can eat in Los Angeles whose TripAdvisor reviews do not say, “Out of 7 main courses 2 were tasty,” or regularly call out the experience of eating while flashbulbs are going off. (The truly good restaurants don’t need the attention.) And I’m sure it’s hard to navigate finding love at any stage in your life with Reddit detectives sniffing around your every move, or people filming you holding hands on your way into the afterparty for your show’s premiere. Hopefully our collective enthusiasm for them as a couple does not force them into public view before they are ready. We’re just excited! Love LIVES! Martin had to grieve his beloved wife, and Meryl is freshly divorced and also lost a great love in John Cazale from which she herself said she never truly recovered. The idea of two wounded souls falling for each other on the Only Murders set, two national treasures discovering they treasure each other, is delicious. It’s the good parts of watching The Golden Bachelor/ette — people bonding over actual life and death moments — but without producers forcing anyone to try on clothes and then slow dance in a hotel room while Wayne Newton struggles to sing “Danke Schoen.”⁴

We apologize, M&M, for putting pressure on you, and we know it’s not about all of us. But everything is a mess right now, and as Loretta would sing, we want to look for the light, and right now YOU’RE IT.

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ICYMI…

Speaking of! Last week, paid subscribers got a fresh new recap of Only Murders in the Building:

Dead Men Don't Send Ham

And! Did you know there’s new DORITOS RESTAURANT? Plus, we complain about Grey’s Anatomy and discuss Nobody Wants This:

A Dorito Experience, A Grey's Dilemma, and an Update from the Costner Desk

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Last Call

— Over the weekend, Ariana DeBose told Variety’s Marc Malkin that she is not going to be hosting the 2025 Tonys: “I know when to exit gracefully, and now’s the time,” she said. This is probably a savvy move; you never want people to get sick of you and as we noted of Ariana in our Tonys coverage, “As competent as she is, her energy is beginning to feel a little bit samey…. Maybe let’s mix it up a bit in 2025.” The ceremony isn’t until June, so they have some time to percolate who might step into Ariana’s shoes. If you have any suggestions, lay them on us in the comments. — J

— Cheryl Hines told Us Weekly that she’s writing a book, and I can’t tell if she’s serious or just joking in the way that people do about these things. Having said that: She SHOULD write a book, but should also probably wait until after the divorce is final. She and RFK Jr. are not yet divorcing, to be clear, but it seems inevitable. She seems pretty upbeat about everything, actually! God give me the relaxed vibe of Cheryl Hines. — J

— Tom Holland made built-ins for Zendaya’s guest room. Just because he loves her. Is Tom Holland a perfect person? — H

— You need to see this UNHINGED video made with AI that imagines Donald Trump working at McDonald’s. It’s… such an experience. Periodically you can see the body or head of the actual person they pasted Trump’s face over, and I swear at one point he briefly morphs into Putin? But not in an intentional kind of way??? This was served to my husband somewhere and he was like, “I am conflicted because I hate AI, but this might be fantastic.” — H

1. I also vetoed The Anita Bryant Family Cookbook — as amazing as that book’s very existence may be — because she is a militant homophobe and imagine if you discovered that you secretly loved a bigot’s chili recipe? Terrible.

2. Kendrick gave a really thoughtful interview to The Guardian about this, including discussing how much her own life played into her artistic choices here.

3. Mertin? Maryl? Sheryl Meep? Shortyl Streetin? These are terrible portmanteaux choices. Olivetta is better. — H

4. Yes, this happened. She was on a date with the friendly French metrosexual who took over the closet and pays another of the contestants $100 to do his laundry (because he doesn’t know how). That show is full of delights, and like The Golden Bachelor before it, they mostly come from how the contestants interact with each other at the mansion. Two of them went and bought earplugs for everyone at a local drugstore because they all snore. — H