I am two things: a good cook and semi-neurotic. In the past, this combination of traits has served me well as a hostess: Usually, dinner at my place will be seasonal produce I picked up from specialty stores and the farmer’s market, several carefully chosen courses, and an elegantly set table. I’m not telling you this to impress you; I’m telling you this so you can understand how fundamentally different my approach to entertaining is from Scrounging.
Scrounging is the second cookbook published by the film production company A24, a compilation of “54 last-ditch recipes from the movies” like Parker Posey’s single chicken wing in Waiting for Guffman and Buddy’s maple-syrup-soaked spaghetti in Elf. Red-spiral bound and illustrated with delightfully unappetizing flash photos, the book contains recipes that swerve from completely inedible (an egg-and-snickers smoothie) to near-impossible (spear-cut sashimi) to plain delicious (carbonara in bed). An introduction by the chef Matty Matheson asserts: “Eating isn’t always glamorous. Sometimes it’s thrifty, idiosyncratic, messy, or weird–sometimes a little too weird.” Scrounging is decidedly not from the same universe as Alison Roman and her produce-forward, Instagram-ready ilk. It’s not stunningly sprinkled dill on thinly sliced fennel, it’s a hot dog inside of a Twinkie with Cheez Whiz on it.
Buddy’s Breakfast Spaghetti from Elf.
When I received a copy of the book, I knew I had to cook from it, and I knew I had to share the results with others. So I planned a Scrounging dinner party at my apartment. I wanted to serve food everyone would like to eat, so 80 percent of the recipes—like the baked potato from The Martian served with crushed-up valium and military grade protein—were a no-go. Drinks, however, were easy: watermelon juice from Tsai Ming-Liang’s The Wayward Cloud and midnight margaritas from Practical Magic. I was tempted to serve “Freddie Quell’s Processing Moonshine,” which the book describes as “only for the truly unhinged.” But while I identify as unhinged, I just couldn’t justify serving my friends paint thinner in the name of P.T. Anderson’s The Master.
I was instantly charmed by the idea of making “Mr. Thackery’s Science Class Salad with Almonds and Pineapples” from To Sir, With Love. If you’re unfamiliar with the movie, Sidney Poitier plays a teacher in London’s East End, and amongst many valuable lessons, he instills in his students the importance of being able to cook for yourself, regardless of what ingredients you have on hand. Thus this salad, with its seemingly disparate ingredients, gets tossed. For the main, I went with spaghetti and meatballs from The Apartment. Normally, this dish would garner instant yawns, except in The Apartment, Jack Lemmon strains his spaghetti on a tennis racket. I went big—nay, huge—for dessert with Kevin McCallister’s massive, drippy sundae from Home Alone. While happy with my menu, I felt I was missing the spirit of scrounging. I had to add something disgusting as a centerpiece: I decided on the cover recipe, Ally Sheedy’s bologna sandwich with Pixy Stix and Cap'n Crunch from The Breakfast Club.
Watermelon juice from Tsai Ming-Liang’s The Wayward Cloud.
A tennis racket colander inspired by The Apartment.
The week leading up to dinner was filled with me manically making and checking off lists and then reminding myself hourly to scrounge. I learned a lot about myself and processed foods. Par exemple, did you know that green mint chocolate chip ice cream is almost impossible to find? It seems we all got a little too scared of Yellow 5 and Blue 1. It took days of searching until I found a Baskin-Robbins, and even theirs was less green and more robin’s egg blue, a hue far too chic for the task at hand. They use spirulina. Cowards. I had to go to four different stores to find a loaf of Wonder Bread. Setting the table, I used paper towels as napkins, random hot pink plastic cups from a long-ago birthday, and a single red-taper candle because that was all I had. No problem, we were definitely going to have all the overhead lights on. The worse it looked, the cuter it was, like a church basement party. I’ll admit, I did some decidedly not scroungy things: infused the simple syrup for the margs, bought a tennis racket (I had to do it right), went to the fancy butcher for three different types of ground meat for the meatballs. Sue me! I’m setting the table and the scene.
The author recreates Scrounging’s cover recipe, an iconic sandwich from The Breakfast Club, as a centerpiece.
Saturday night rolls around, and it’s showtime. I don’t mean that figuratively, there is a lot of performance in these recipes. The margarita recipe calls for a recitation of Macbeth while the ingredients plop into the blender. For the centerpiece, one must “remove the sandwich from the plastic wrap and discard the meat, flamboyantly” before pouring the Pixy Stix. None of this was a problem for me; I went to theater camp, for god’s sake! The evening was a smash. The food looked like cartoons, a cat and a dog attended (very A24), and the salad was surprisingly delicious. The sundae, which I constructed using over one gallon of ice cream, was dressed table side with the works. Although it is a labor of love, this is the recipe I insist you make for your next party, if only because it is unbelievably cute to hear your 30-something friends ask you to “pass the marshmallows.”
After dinner parties, I usually feel proud but exhausted. A little drained and eager to get back to real life. The beauty of the cinematic recipes in Scrounging is that they are more akin to real life than most of the “lifestyle” content we consume on a daily basis. It was not an aesthetically pleasing evening, but it was raucously fun, which is why we have parties in the first place. Although we may sometimes forget this, their function is not to induce panic or blow the bank. In that way, Scrounging set me free. Everything was exactly how it should have been—because even if it wasn’t, that was the point.
This article was originally published on
