Weirdly, there are no recipes from The Whale in A24’s new cookbook. Which is a shame, because Charlie’s mayo pizza and hot-chip-and-jelly sandwich would be right at home in the pages of Scrounging, a collection of 54 “last-ditch recipes from the movies.” Among these are some A24 properties, like the First Cow oily cakes (you can find our recipe here), fart-inducing salt-cod slop from The Lighthouse, and the sad microwave dinner from the Lady Bird scene where Laurie Metcalf melts your heart and goes “Well, happy Thanksgiving. We missed you, Lady Bird.” But mostly, this cookbook is a tribute to the great shitty meals of cinema history. In the introduction, The Bear comic relief and real-life chef Matty Matheson lays out his theory of culinary scrounging on film, wherein a character’s desperation-eating reveals an “underbelly or a slightly deranged element” of the character and their situation.
A meal for when you want to feel the pain of breaking your mother’s heart.Some of the book’s recipes look delicious, like the ram-don with sirloin from Parasite and the carbonara from Heartburn. There are some tasty and more importantly achievable-looking omelet recipes from Tampopo, Big Night, and even Phantom Thread, the latter substituting edible wood blewit mushrooms for Alma’s poisonous ones. Full disclosure that Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri is credited in the book as a “film consultant,” accounting for the wide range of movies and time periods represented. But please, for the love of God, no matter how big a cinephile or brand loyalist you are, do not try to Julie & Julia yourself through all 54 recipes in the book, because there is a not-zero chance you will die. There are some very detailed entries instructing you how to trap and eat a gopher (O Brother, Where Art Thou?), how to grow a potato in your own own feces (like Matt Damon in The Martian) and then coat it in crushed-up Vicodin, and straight up how to drink paint thinner (inspired by Joaquin Phoenix in The Master). For the hungry boy!
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A24 Wants You to Cook and Eat Unspeakable ThingsncG1vNJzZmivp6x7t8HLrayrnV6YvK57kWlpbGdga3yifpNmmqinm5e8sLeMq5ycoaCawG65zq%2BgnqtencGuuA%3D%3D