What do you cook when you're alone? The lazy snack or meal you would never serve others, but are content to enjoy on your own? Off the back of its horror-inspired cookbook, Horror Caviar, A24 goes gourmand once more with its latest book full of recipes dubbed Scrounging.
As the name suggests, Scrounging is no glossy tome instructing you on how to ferment koji or handle offal. Rather, it's a cookbook that encourages resourcefulness, invented for the times when your groceries, bank account and spirits are depleted. Stacked with stoner snacks and meals that accurately represent what it's like to cook under the current cost of living crisis, every recipe links back to a memorable movie scene.
Scounging includes recipes from Babette's Feast and Home Alone, Practical Magic and Elf. Granted, a portion of them are inedible. I'm thinking specifically of Freddie Quell's Processing Moonshine plucked from The Master, which calls for paint thinner, a can of scrubbing power and a day-old baguette; or Jericho Cane's Pizza Smoothie from End of Days which blends 2 containers of day-old Chinese takeout, a bottle of Pepto Bismol and 1 cup of Bodega coffee. Eat at your own risk, I guess?
However, the scales are balanced with additions like the carbonara from Heartburn, the mouth-watering Ram-Don noodles from Parasite (sans the Hanwoo steak), and the morning-after omelette taken from Big Night, where Stanley Tucci's character Secondo breaks bread with his brothers.
Spiral bound and coming in at 128 pages, the A24 cookbook is organised into six sections: beverages, breakfast, appetisers and snacks, sandwiches, dinner and dessert. It also features an introduction from beloved chef and The Bear actor, Matty Matheson, who discusses how "food is a tool in film, the same as lighting, costumes, or anything else..." Matheson also talks about his own favoured recipe for desperate times.
"Because this sandwich – this stupid, steaming Fluffernutter sandwich – comes from me being a fat kid trying to figure out how to make a peanut butter sandwich even sweeter by adding the chocolate chips and Fluff my parents kept around," Matheson writes.
You can secure a copy of Scrounging, along with its other cookbook Horror Caviar, from the A24 website.
