While it is possible to make every recipe in the new A24 cookbook Scrounging, there are a few you probably should not undertake.
Among them: crackers topped with Silly String (from 2005’s Son of the Mask, a sequel to The Mask) and the moonshine concocted from paint thinner in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. “I really cannot endorse trying the jet-fuel cocktail,” warns the book’s editor, Margaret Rhodes, “although technically that is a way people have made hooch for a long time. That being said, I simply cannot handle that liability.”
As the title suggests, the cookbook, the indie studio’s second after 2021’s horror-film-inspired Horror Caviar, features 54 recipes based on memorable scenes of film characters cooking or eating when they don’t have the time, resources, or will for a proper meal. The idea stemmed from Rhodes wondering what the protagonists of the A24 films would prepare for themselves: “What is Connie from Good Time making?”
The result is a book inspired by how people actually prepare and consume meals. “The realest way people eat is when you get home late from being out or working and you just start scrounging through your cupboard or refrigerator and making whatever you can out of whatever you have,” she observes. (Today’s foodfluencers may call them kitchen-sink meals or refrigerator salads.)
The recipes are drawn from movies that run a wide gamut, from famous blockbusters (Tom Cruise’s peanut-butter sandwich in 2005’s War of the Worlds) to indie favorites (Kip’s cheesy nachos from Napoleon Dynamite) and arthouse classics (the omurice from Tampopo). Some were produced by A24 (Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow and its star oily cakes), while others were made long before the studio was founded (1955’s Pather Panchali and its kitchari from the children’s picnic). Celebrity chef Matty Matheson—who has appeared on the TV show The Bear—penned the introduction, sharing the microwaved Fluffernutter sandwich he occasionally makes for himself.
The first recipe that sprung to Rhodes’s mind at the start of the project was Adam Sandler’s late-night sandwich from Spanglish. “This makes me sound like I’m so not a cinephile,” she smiles. “But all I want is that sandwich!” It’s a mouthwatering egg BLT that his chef character makes when he gets home from working at his high-end restaurant. (Turns out star chef Thomas Keller developed it specifically for the 2004 film and James L. Brooks, its director, called it “the world’s greatest sandwich.”) Another early idea that clearly illustrates the title comes from Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal (2004): Tom Hanks, whose character lives in an airport, cobbles together saltine-cracker sandwiches layered with various single-serving condiments.
But identifying many such “underdog food moments in movies,” as Rhodes calls them, proved more challenging than you might think. “I was deep in Reddit threads and still not finding anything,” Rhodes recalls. “The food scenes that people talk about are really grandiose or super sexy or over-the-top: the food in Marie Antoinette or the prawns in I Am Love. But we’re looking for the disgusting sandwich that someone makes because they have five minutes to send their kids to school and also have amnesia and have been abducted by Kurt Russell.” (Sandwiches were by far the most common food that met her criteria, it turns out, with many left out for fear of predominating. “Scrounging 2.0 is just gonna be sandwiches,” Rhodes notes.)
She also found inspiration in vintage cookbooks, notably 1967’s Singers and Swingers in the Kitchen, whose cover promises “dozens of nutty turned-on easy-to-prepare recipes from the grooviest gourmets happening.” “It’s basically, like, how the Rolling Stones like their hot dogs,” Rhodes says. (Over mashed potatoes and swimming in baked beans, if you’re wondering; there’s also Barbra Streisand’s instant-coffee ice cream and Simon and Garfunkel’s latkes.)
The decidedly anti-aspirational vibe of the recipes is reflected in the book’s delightfully ’80s-inspired design—featuring red spiral binding, retro fonts, and lo-fi clip art, as if produced at a Kinko’s—which Rhodes describes as “small-town church cookbook or one that PTA moms pass around.” Ditto the flash-heavy photography, which is less food-porn perfect and more “someone’s left a mess on the kitchen table,” as she puts it.
One of Rhodes’s personal favorites from the book is the postcoital fondue Gene Hackman enjoys in 1975’s Night Moves (“It doesn’t make sense that he has a fondue pot at the foot of the bed, and I love it for that,” she says), and the titular and endlessly customizable ochazuke from Yasujiro Ozu’s The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952) comes closest to a scrounging meal from her own life.
But some recipes are only for a select few. “If you’re really lucky in life,” Rhodes suggests, “you get to try the Erotic From-the-Fridge Sampler.” That’s from 9 1/2 Weeks (1986), and it includes a single fusilli, a spoonful of drippy maraschino cherries, one jalapeño, “something slippery, like honey or olive oil,” and a sip of Champagne, served to someone blindfolded, on the kitchen floor, and “seated before the cold blast of an open refrigerator door,” per the recipe. “It’s not not BDSM,” the book describes. Who says the back of the fridge isn’t sexy?
