Yes, the man who played most of the famous monsters of filmland (see what I did there, Forry Ackerman fans?) was “Mad About Mexican Food,” and really, who isn’t?

This piece, from an unknown newspaper isn’t dated, but it’s apparently from a time when you had to explain guacamole to readers. (It’s “an avocado-based sauce.”)

2 avocados

1 med. tomato, chopped fine

1 small onion, minced

1 tbsp. chopped canned green chiles

1 tbsp. lemon juice

1 tsp sherry

Dash cayenne, optional

Salt, pepper

Peel and mash avocados. Add onion, tomato and chiles, then stir in lemon juice, sherry and seasonings to taste, blending well. Serve as a dip for tortilla pieces or corn chips or as a canape spread. Makes 10 to 12 appetizer servings.

The consummate English gentleman, Karloff apparently imbued his cosmopolitan dishes with a bit of refinement—I’ve never heard of adding sherry to guacamole, but I am so, so into it.

Via Badass Digest

 
Nutella + banana = ‘nuff said.
 

 
Old Black Witch is a well-loved children’s book from the husband and wife duo of Harry and Wende Devlin that was originally published in 1962. The plot involves a widow and her young son who buy an old house and start a tea room. What they didn’t bargain for is the witch who’s been living there for over 300 years.

Eventually it all works out and the Old Black Witch’s “magic” blueberry pancakes make the tea room a smashing success.

Part of the fun of the book is making the blueberry pancakes recipe, something my grandmother would often do for my sister and me:
 

 
There was also a short filmed version of the book, “Winter of the Witch” made in 1969 by the publisher, Parent’s Magazine, who paid NYU film student Gerald Herman $500 to direct it.

It starred English actress Hermione Gingold as Old Black Witch and Anna Strasberg (wife of famed acting coach Lee Strasberg) as the mother. Burgess Meredith did the narration. When the tea room patrons are eating the magic happiness pancakes, you’d think they were made with nitrous oxide and pure LSD.

“Even the meanest and most unhappy people…ONE BITE and they’re not unhappy anymore,” Old Black Witch says. “I just reversed an old recipe…”

Yes, psychedelic magic pancakes. Here’s a genius YouTube comment:

They cut out the part where the DEA raid the place and the area Fundamentlists stage pancake burnings.

 

 
Perhaps you might recall seeing this during a Halloween school assembly? I’d think that at least half of Americans over the age of say, 38, have seen “Winter of the Witch.”
 

 
Thank you kindly, Melissa Kosmicki!

 
CheeseburgerOs, the first new flavor for the SpaghettiOs brand in more than twenty years, contain approx. 750 pieces of pasta with the taste of cheesburger. Grassfed beef? I doubt it. Non-GMO? Who knows? Low in sodium? You got to be kidding. This is fast food for people who really don’t give a shit about their health. Eat it up. Guilt trip later.

I’m putting this on pizza.

 
The 1968 Peter Sellers comedy I Love You Alice B. Toklas is about Harold, an uptight, engaged lawyer (Sellers), who falls in love with a beautiful, free-spirited hippie girl, Nancy (Leigh Taylor-Young). Of course, she makes him question all the major decisions about his life he’s made so far. One of the ways she accomplishes this is by making him pot brownies, supposedly using a recipe from The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, published in 1954. What Nancy actually does is take a boxed brownie mix, which Harold happens to have on hand, and add copious amounts of marijuana to the batter.

Alice B. Toklas was writer Gertrude Stein’s long-time lover and companion, with whom she lived in Paris for almost forty years. Toklas’ own memoir, published after Stein’s death, contained memories of their lives together, amusing stories, and favorite recipes. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas had actually been written by Stein. 

Contrary to modern folklore, Toklas’ cookbook doesn’t actually contain a recipe for pot brownies, per se. It does, however, contain a recipe for “Haschich Fudge” from Brion Gysin, listed under “Cold Desserts.” This is the recipe the cookbook is best known for, but it does contain many other excellent dishes, including very easy French onion soup.

Here is the actual notorious recipe (which doesn’t really sound like fudge, closer to majoun):

Haschich Fudge (which anyone could whip up on a rainy day)

This is the food of Paradise—of Baudelaire’s Artificial Paradises: it might provide an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies’ Bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the DAR. In Morocco it is thought to be good for warding off the common cold in damp winter weather and is, indeed, more effective if taken with large quantities of hot mint tea. Euphoria and brilliant storms of laughter; ecstatic reveries and extension of one’s personality on several simultaneous planes are to be complacently expected. Almost anything Saint Theresa did, you can do better if you can bear to be ravished by ‘un évanouissement reveillé.’

Take 1 teaspoon black peppercorns, 1 whole nutmeg, 4 average sticks of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon coriander. These should all be pulverised in a mortar. About a handful each of stoned dates, dried figs, shelled almonds and peanuts: chop these and mix them together. A bunch of canibus sativa can be pulverised. This along with the spices should be dusted over the mixed fruit and nuts, kneaded together. About a cup of sugar dissolved in a big pat of butter. Rolled into a cake and cut into pieces or made into balls about the size of a walnut, it should be eaten with care. Two pieces are quite sufficient.

Obtaining the canibus may present certain difficulties, but the variety known as canibus sativa grows as a common weed, often unrecognized, everywhere in Europe, Asia and parts of Africa; besides being cultivated as a crop for the manufacture of rope. In the Americas, while often discouraged, its cousin, called canibus indica, has been observed even in city window boxes. It should be picked and dried as soon as it has gone to seed and while the plant is still green.

Below, the pivital brownie scene from ‘I Love You Alice B. Toklas’

 
Cornettos are similar to the American Drumstick ice creams, only better. Though it would be more entertaining if there had been photographs, one can still picture the scene as customers, at this local supermarket, tampered with the frozen goods in an effort to give their best Madonna in that pointy bra impersonation.

Along with being a D.I.Y. Jean-Paul Gaultier bra, Cornettos are a favorite confection across Europe, and are the linking motif for the Simon Pegg-Nick Frost-Edgar Wright “Three Flavors Cornetto Trilogy”: Shaun of the Dead (strawberry Cornetto), Hot Fuzz (original Cornetto)  and The World’s End (mint Cornetto).
 

 
H/T ‘The Daily Edge’
 
Bonus: poster for the Simon Pegg-Nick Frost-Edgar Wright ‘Three Flavors Cornetto Trilogy’ ice creams, after the jump…
 

 
From a 1996 article in Sassy.

Ingredients:

• 1 can chunk white dolphin-safe tuna in springwater
• 1 glob mayo (as you like it)
• 1 green onion (scallion) chopped
• 1/2 lemon squeezed
• 1 or 2 finely chopped jalapenos or small green chilies
• 4 as-fresh-as-you-can-find corn tortillas
• butter
• watercress

Mix tuna, mayo, lemon onion and chilies in a bowl. Sprinkle water on tortillas, then heat one at a time on open low flame (gas stove only) or in a skillet, 15 to 30 seconds on each side. Remove while still soft and smear with butter. Put tuna in the middle, top with sprigs of watercress, fold and chow.

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:

Allen Ginsberg’s recipe for Cold Summer Borscht

‘Twin Peaks’ Cherry Pie recipe

Kind of Spicy: Miles Davis’ recipe for ‘South Side Chicago Chili Mack’

George Orwell’s recipe for Christmas pudding

The Freddie Mercury Chicken Dhansak

Via Suicide Watch

 
An impressive confectionery tribute to Dexter‘s eighth and final season by Miss Cakehead and Annabel de Vetten aka Conjurer’s Kitchen. Whoa!

The entire cake Took over 100 hours to make and weighed over 105 kilograms. 24 eggs, 25 kilograms of flour, 16 kilograms of butter cream, 18 kilograms of sugar, 20 kilograms of sugar paste and marzipan, and 15 kilograms of butter cream were used in the creation of the edible masterpiece. So 20 blood oranges were used, the cake flavor inspired by the iconic titles of the series.

You can read all about the cake here.

 

 
Via Nerdcore

 
As becomes increasingly obvious with every passing day since the news of her past use of the “N word” was heard ‘round the world, the career of TV chef Paula Deen has been deep-fried. Burnt to a crisp, beyond all hope of redemption. Just today the former longtime Food Network star was dropped by Target, Home Depot and Novo Nordisk, the pharmaceutical company who had idiotically hired the sugar and butter-loving Deen to be the spokesperson for a new drug for diabetics last year.

Let me be clear: I personally don’t give a flying fuck about Paula Deen. I view her as a vaguely preposterous person, I would never be interested in her recipes or any of the products that she endorses (or rather endorsed, past tense). I have never paid the slightest bit of attention to her, other than when it was revealed that Deen, the high priestess of America’s shitty high-sugar, high-salt, high-fat dietary habits had diabetes herself and yet had hypocritically signed on to promote the very diet that caused her own ill health for profit! (Novo Nordisk didn’t exactly get the right profile from Deen’s involvement in their “Diabetes in a New Light” campaign, did they?)

No, Paula Deen’s past use of the racial epithet—reported as cavalier by the media, but not characterized that way by Deen herself in her deposition—didn’t surprise me, even with my limited knowledge, but then again who was shocked by it?

Were you personally shocked that a 66-year-old rich white woman raised in Georgia could have used that word? Puh-leeze. It’s distasteful sure, but were you shocked? Of course not, no one was. And because no one was really surprised by this flap in any way shape, or form, it’s difficult to imagine anyone truly outraged by it either. Did you see the line of people waiting to get into one of Deen’s restaurants on CNN over the weekend? A fair number of them were African-Americans. Many were willing to stick up for Paula Deen on camera. That may seen counter-intuitive at first glance, but it’s not: They simply did not care.

Bearing that in mind, I think it’s fair to say that most people don’t give a shit about Paula Deen using the “N-word” or even her ridiculously oblivious plans for an antebellum plantation-themed wedding for her younger brother Bubba. So if no one is really getting all that worked up over it, then how to explain the media furor and her instantly lifeless career if Deen’s use of a racial epithet is not really the issue?

Personally, I think it’s because Paula Deen represents willful ignorance and gluttony, specifically the particularly vile intersection of someone who has deliberately made a career of consciously promoting morbid obesity—if Deen isn’t the avatar for every blubbery hoarder riding around Wal-Mart on a scooter, I don’t know who would be—and then double-dipping by taking money to endorse a diabetes medication. With those big pharma dollars rollin’ in, you butter believe it, ole Paula Deen’s got ‘em comin’ and goin’!

She’s a walkin’, talkin’, sobbin’ on the Today show metaphor for rapacious late-stage capitalism. Karl Marx in his most cynical moment couldn’t have imagined a creature as obscene or as avaricious as Paula Deen. I think this is the primary factor in why the Internet wants to tear this human centipede limb from limb.

Marx, no, but Paula Deen does most certainly seem like a character who could have been dreamed up by William S. Burroughs. Talk about a “naked lunch” I would never want to eat: Paula Deen’s very own fans are the pork on her fork. Ultimately Deen’s no better than Nestlé‘s Peter Brabek, the asshole who wants to privatize water in Third World countries.

With her personal brand in tatters, the real Paula Deen has been revealed, and if not the woman herself, at least the corporate Ouroboros that she now so starkly represents. Not in an abstract sense, either, but literally—Deen’s personal gravy train has sopped up millions upon millions of dollars for her and for her investors by clogging the arteries of her most ardent followers, encouraging over-indulgence and driving up the costs of private healthcare, all done while partaking herself in the very same things that will eventually kill her, too.

In Dante’s Purgatorio, the gluttonous penitents were tied-up and made to lie face down for their pursuit of earthly goals. If the Italian poet were alive today, perhaps he’d come up with a more nightmarishly appropriate 21st century vision: Today’s Wall Street tycoons and media barons—the ones who enabled the Paula Deen empire of shit in the first place with millions and millions of investment dollars—being force fed Ooey Gooey Butter Layer Cake at The Lady and Her Sons until each, deservingly, became a Mr. Creosote, purging their karmic guts out in buckets and then repeatedly stuffing their pie holes to the point of puking over and over again for all of eternity.

 
Just days after the Food Network decided to drop Paula Deen, QVC may now follow suit:

“QVC does not tolerate discriminatory behavior. We are closely monitoring these events and the ongoing litigation. We are reviewing our business relationship with Ms. Deen, and in the meantime, we have no immediate plans to have her appear on QVC,” they said.

I wonder if the LOL video below going viral might hasten QVC’s decision?

 
With thanks to Carl Hamm!