Cooking It Up With The Dead Celebrity Cookbook

Here’s a fun little piece of movie history for you foodies out there.

Inspired by a “Dead Celebrity Party” during his college years Frank DeCaro, radio host and movie critic for “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” spent the last few decades collecting recipes of the stars and compiling them into a new recipe book.

“The Dead Celebrity Cookbook: A Resurrection of Recipes from More Than 145 Stars of Stage and Screen” is an inspiring and entertaining collection from some of Hollywood’s biggest names such as Lucille Ball, Frank Sinatra, John Denver, Elizabeth Taylor, Andy Warhol, Alfred Hitchcock, Katherine Hepburn to name a few.  The way DeCaro authors his cookbook he leaves aspiring chefs with a bit of knowledge about the celebrity tied into their recipes.

For example, take a look at this blurb about talk show host, Mike Douglas, who died in the year 2006.

“An affably square family man who was married to the same woman for more than sixty years, Mike Douglas launched his talk show in Cleveland in 1961, moved it to Philadelphia four years later, and finally to Los Angeles where it ran from 1978 to 1982. The Mike Douglas Show” was the first syndicated program to win an Emmy Award.  At the height of the show’s popularity, TV Guide wrote, ‘Dishes go unwashed and shirts remain un-ironed when Mike Douglas comes on.’  His was the kind of show that would seat Gene Simmons of Kiss next to comedienne Totie Fields, whose Mish Mosh recipe appears in Chapter 20. The show set the tone for friendly modern chat shows like those hosted by Rosie O’Donnell and Ellen DeGeneres. In his home kitchen, Douglas was best known for his version of the classic Caesar Salad.

LAST BITES: At least two dozen of the dead celebrities whose recipes are in this book appeared on The Mike Douglas Show.  Of course, they were alive at the time.  The guest who logged the most appearances on the show was vaudevillian James Edmonson, known as Professor Backwards for his ability to read, write, and pronounce words in reserve. Sadly, Edmonson was “deredrum” in 1976.”

Following after this is the recipe for Douglas’s Casear Douglas Salad, which includes a list of ingredients, instructions, and an indicator of how many it serves.

You can learn more about The Dead Celebrity Cookbook on the official website. You can find a few more sample recipes, reviews of the book, and a bio of author Frank DeCaro.  Be sure to do a LIKE on the Facebook Fanpage and follow their Twitter.