Few things can strike the heart with fear quite like 1970s cuisine. Who better, then, than the Master of Menace, Vincent Price, to instruct us in the wonders of cheese soufflé, novelty party snacks and Manhattan Vichyssoise? The actor was also a celebrated gourmet, who had published several bestselling cookery books with his wife Mary by the time he came to film Cooking Price-Wise, a six-part series made for Thames Television. Filmed over a couple of days in 1970 while the actor was in the UK filming Robert Fuest’s The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Cooking Price-Wise is clearly a labour of love made by a man who loves to eat and then tell you all about it. But for all its retro-kitsch aesthetics, the show takes its directive – to open the minds of British housewives to “foreign food” – quite seriously … Cooking Price-Wise is both a cookery crash-course and a whistle-stop tour of the history of common ingredients like potatoes and cream.
Wearing his customary dandy’s neck-tie, Price is a natural host, with easy quips and helpful asides. There are remarkably few references to his horror career, until we arrive at the cheese episode. Price is going to create a monster, something he is familiar with: “That is, if I’m not playing the monster myself”. The result is the cucumber crocodile, a dish I hope to see blowing up on Instagram, and which I can only describe as the party goth’s answer to the cheese and pineapple hedgehog. Party snacks aside, the closest we get in this show to heart-stopping fear is the epic quantities of cream and butter Price uses.

Sophia Satchell Baeza, “Sight and Sound”, vol. 35, n. 1, Winter 2024.