Apologies up front — this post is possibly a little more unhinged than what you usually get around here. (Unless you’ve been around here long enough, I suppose.)
When the call came out for anyone interested in review copies of Family Movie Night Menus, coming from TCM and Running Press this month from the auspices of the Leonard and Jessie Maltin brand, I eagerly asked for a copy. I have a family! I love to cook! I am a big movie night guy!
So I’ll give you some background first. I’ve had this blog on 1930s movies for well over a decade now and children for exactly a decade. I always wanted to be sure that my kids would be familiar with and connected to classic cinema, so whenever it is my pick for our weekly movie nights at my house, my choices have ranged from Sherlock Jr. to Monkey Business to The Music Man. My kids both love big, bright musicals, and also freaking out watching Harold Lloyd climb the department store in Safety Last. In fact, during the pandemic, my daughter’s love for “Harold” (thanks in no small part to his permanent space on the Criterion Channel) got me to order a book about him from Larry Edmund’s bookstore. The store included a still from Girl Crazy which is still hanging up on her wall, across from a very large poster for Steamboat Bill Jr. we snagged from La Cinémathèque Française last time we were there.
So my family is more predisposed than most to watching old movies. Adding to that is that I wanted to be sure my children knew their way around the kitchen, and have been baking and cooking regularly with my daughter for the last five years. (My son, god bless him, is yet to be trusted with sharp objects.) For several of the recipes below, she worked under my supervision, practicing her knife skills on onions and doing much of the measuring and stirring herself.
Family Movie Night Menus is TCM and Running Press’s second cookbook following Movie Night Menus by Tenaya and Andre Darlington, which I have not read. This book from the Maltins cover 25 films ranging from The Kid (1921) to Enchanted (2007), with a number of surprising suggestions included. The duo chooses not to cover any animated films, Disney or otherwise, which is surprising given Maltin’s history with the studio. There is also only one silent film included, with the introduction explaining that the writers felt that including the Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd would be too big of a topic to cover.
(There are no pre-Codes in this book. I’m sorry it took me this long to get to it, but there is Bride of Frankenstein which is a sequel to a pre-Code, and we take what we can get around here.)
Besides the book’s introduction, each movie gets a 4-5 page discussion of the movie’s background with details and trivia. It’s very easy to read in Maltin’s voice, though the book sometimes slips into his direct first-person with a direct “I (Leonard)” which, unfortunately, made me think of I, Claudius and then Leonard Maltin writing this book adorned in a toga. There are worse things to picture, I guess.
The passages themselves aren’t written as aimed at families or children but at the adults who are introducing the films, which seems like a missed opportunity. It’s a big colorful book, and sometimes feels aimed almost too broadly. Some of the movies covered are To Kill a Mockingbird and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which are not the type of fare my youngest would jump into by any stretch of the imagination.
Calam’s Biscuits
Saturday night I picked out a favorite of my mother’s, Calamity Jane with Dorris Day and Howard Keel, as the movie night pick. My daughter helped before the movie to make the jam, which requires a bit of reducing and prep and was time consuming but worth it.
The recipe itself was easy to make, though not without its bumps. First, the recipe doesn’t specify how many biscuits you’re supposed to make, which left me with a few big ones and too many nickel sized biscuits. (I thought they’d grow!) Also, since no one in their right mind just fries up a handful of bacon for the bacon grease, I used the remainder to make some garlic potatoes. Also (not pictured) a plate of scrambled eggs finished up the rustic ‘breakfast for dinner’ vibes.
I’d never made jam before and it turned out quite well, very sweet with a nice salty texture. The biscuits were good, too, and gone very quickly. My family were happy with both the movie and the meal and thanked me on the hard work to get everything to completion.
“Don’t thank me, thank legendary film critic and Mystery Science Theater 3000 guest star Leonard Maltin,” I said.
They stared at me, but it was true.
Harper Lee’s Crackling Cornbread
Attached to Maltin’s entry on To Kill a Mockingbird is the recipe for Harper Lee’s own Crackling Cornbread. I was optimistic for this one, as my family is wild for cornbread, and the promise of a new recipe from a person who was played by Catherine Keener in 2005’s true Best Picture, Capote, seemed enticing.
Unfortunately, there were a couple of issues with the recipe. First is the fact that I could not find pork cracklings for sale anywhere here in Germany. Perhaps they use a different word for it that I couldn’t grasp, perhaps cracklings are less popular in the Rhineland than one might imagine, but I was immediately out of the recipe’s most unique selling point.
Undeterred, my daughter still mixed up the ingredients we had. One thing we noticed was odd; the picture included in the book showed corn kernels clearly in the sliced up cornbread. The recipe included no such thing, which was odd, until I looked into the front of the book and found that all of the pictures of food here are from stock image sites. We added some corn kernels in on our own for texture, but it didn’t seem to make much of a difference since the cornbread turned out flat and dry. Another factor may have been, reviewing the recipe, the addition of flour which is not in Harper Lee’s original directions. (Mind you, Lee’s original directions, published in a cookbook collaboration by various authors in 1961 and reprinted by the Smithsonian and in the recent collection of her short writings, does suggest you purchase a whole pig for the recipe, which I also notably did not do.) My family dutifully ate a few bites and moved on with our lives.
When I return to the States, my highest priority is to find some cracklings and make this recipe correctly. But still with the corn kernels, because that’s just how I like it.
Doggone Good Gumbo
The Gumbo was another trick. Once again the image of the completed recipe is a stock image, and here contains okra, which is very recognizable and not in the recipe. (I love okra, so it was kind of a bummer to see it missing.) I had to make some adjustments for my family, namely omitting the shrimp and jalapeno as getting my kids to even eat plain smoked sausage can somehow still elicit complaints of ‘too spicy’.
The recipe was a little confusing again, with a weird inconsistency where the ingredients section called for ‘chicken broth’ but within the recipe referred to it as ‘chicken stock’. These are two different ingredients, and I ended up using the broth which may have been my error, and didn’t help with the roux, which I think I undercooked simply because it looked pretty chunky and dry.
Essentially, I ended up making gravy with veggies, sausage, chicken, and perhaps too much garlic. (I put too much garlic in everything though.) With a scoop of white rice on the side, it still ended up tasting pretty good. I wish the instructions had suggested saving some green onions as garnish, as they disappear in the mixture without a trace otherwise.
Of the three recipes of I tried, the biscuits and jam turned out the best, with the other two leaving me wanting to return to them with experience gained and some better ingredients. My daughter got to practice her knife skills and learned how to make rice, while my son got to eat a lot of bacon. It was a fun few days, if not time-consuming at that.
Overall, Family Movie Night Menus looks nice, and the Maltins have a fun, charming authorial voice. That’s what I’ve got.
