I'm sure during a particularly fallow patch of your average celebrity's career, there's an agent waiting in the wings with a cookbook proposal. From the unexpected, such as Cooking with Coolio (2009), a celebration by the rapper on "Ghetto Cooking"; to the try-hard such as The Romney Family Table (2013) from former US presidential candidate Mitt's wife Ann, many have succumbed to the lure of the cookbook, with varying levels of success and believability.
Apart from being an amateur race-car driver, dazzling movie star and philanthropist, Paul Newman was also a cookbook author. You might be aware of his Newman's Own salad dressing food company, but you may not know that the company gives 100 per cent of its profits to a host of charitable organisations, through the conduit of Newman Own's Foundation, with an estimated $400 million in donations since the company was founded in 1982. Newman's Own Cookbook was published in 1999, with recipes from Paul and his family, as well as from co-founder of Newman's Own, Paul's "longtime buddy" the novelist and playwright AE Hotchner.
Another philanthropist in the kitchen is Morgan Freeman. Freeman and Friends launched Caribbean Cooking for a Cause (2005) to help raise funds for hurricane-devastated island of Grenada.
The photos online of Sophia Loren's 1971 cookbook, In Cucina Con Amore, published as Eat With Me are tantalisingly kitsch. Loren is cooking slabs of meat over a grill in a Roman garden, while boasting a flawless double denim look complete with generously flared jeans. An intro to one recipe, a spaghetti with bay leaves, reads "I met this spaghetti at a friend's house when he gave a dinner to celebrate my Oscar in 1961 for Two Women. Instead of offering me a victor's laurel crown, he said he would much rather offer the laurel (known as bay leaves in the kitchen) at the table."
A Treasury of Great Recipes (1965), penned by horror icon Vincent Price and his second wife Mary, is considered a culinary classic today thanks to its camp and kitsch sensibilities, getting nods from esteemed sources such as New York's Saveur magazine. See cookingwithvincent.com.
More recently, Stanley Tucci and his wife Felicity Blunt (sister of Emily) have been showing their chops in the cookbook world with The Tucci Cookbook (2012) and The Tucci Table (2014). This relentlessly likeable actor seems to be the real deal when it comes to food, and his Italian cookbooks have been well received by critics.
Of all the retro Hollywood cookbooks, Eat This… It'll Make You Feel Better! (1988) the first of two cookbooks by Dom DeLuise, is the one I'm most drawn to. I'd love to have it in audiobook form to hear the voice of Charles B Barkin from All Dogs Go To Heaven give me tips on "Mamma's Italian home cooking".
One of the most sought-after celebrity cookbooks is Salvador Dali's rare Les Diner de Gala (1973). Glimpses of the cookbook online reveal alluring illustrations of food soaked in a surrealist aesthetic. Copies sell for upwards of €200 online, and would make a great addition to any cookbook collector's bookshelf.
"I know some people might think it odd – unworthy even – for me to have written a cookbook," wrote poet Maya Angelou in a 2011 Guardian piece, "but I make no apologies . . . Writing and cookery are just two different means of communication. Indeed, I feel cooking is a natural extension of my biography." Angelou published two cookbooks; Hallelujah! The Welcome Table: A Lifetime of Memories with Recipes (2004) and Great Food, All Day Long: Cook Splendidly, Eat Smart (2010). There's a short interview with her on NPR about her approach to food. "What was dinner like when you grew up?" the host asks. "Dinnertime was generally boiled," she replies. Find it at bit.ly/mayacookbook.
Boy George's Karma Cookbook (2001) and Sheryl Crow's If It Makes You Healthy (2011) are noteworthy if only for their droll titles. Kelis sums up her life as a chef (she trained at Le Cordon Bleu) and food lover in My Life On A Plate (2015). Liberace Cooks (1970) looks like a lot of laughs, but there is no other musician that I would rather have by my side in the kitchen than Dolly Parton. In 2006, Dolly's Dixie Fixin's: Love, Laughter and Lots of Good Food heralded Dolly's very first cookbook, featuring recipes from her mother Avie Lee Parton and her mother-in-law Mama "Ginny" Dean. "I still like to try new foods as often as I can," says Parton. "But when it comes to cooking for myself and my husband Carl and my great big extended family, which numbers into the multiple hundreds these days, what we really want to eat is what comforts us most: good, hearty food rooted in Mama's cooking and those country gatherings of my childhood."
Alas, my online searches for a Daniel O’Donnell cookbook and an Enya cookbook bore no fruit. Irish publishers, take note.
