Racquet Club Gazpacho — A Treasury of Great Recipes (1965)

Vincent Price, country club arson, and the first celebrity cookbook

My father liked to say, “A man who limits his interests limits his life.” Although his interest in cooking initially came about because he loved to eat, his appetite for food really just reflected his omnivorous appetite for life. And my father’s greatest joy was in sharing his love of life with others. Whether sitting down with a friend for a meal, going to a museum with his family, telling a story to a colleague, encouraging the creativity of a young artist, or chatting with a total stranger in a waiting room, my father’s open-hearted élan made the mundane extraordinary. — Victoria Price

The purpose of this book is to invite you to dine, wine, break bread with us, to partake with us of our favorite dishes gleaned from kitchens all over the world. We have gone straight to the source, to the great chefs and to those dedicated to seeing to it that the world eats well. Mary and I have accepted not only their invitation to eat, but also the challenge of trying to find out what we were eating, why it was so good, and how it got that way. Behind the scenes we’ve met the alchemists in tall white hats who have initiated us into their mysteries. So far they’ve all been wonderful to us, and not a skillet has been raised in high dudgeon when we invaded their domain. Somehow it has gotten around that we are collectors of everything, all the arts, folk art, decorative art, fine art and the art of enjoying food—and preparing it. — Vincent and Mary Price

With most celebrity cookbooks, suspension of disbelief requires us to go through the charade of pretending the celebrity is actually in the kitchen developing their own recipes. Some (Gwyneth, ahem) give off the vibe of being a little more skilled than, say, Kris Jenner or Regis and Kathie Lee (who, to their credit, list cookbook author Barbara Albright in teeny tiny letters at the bottom of the cover of 1993’s seminal Cooking With Regis & Kathie Lee: Quick & Easy Recipes From America's Favorite TV Personalities.) But I wish more actors, musicians, or other non-food people wanting in on the cookbook game took Vincent and Mary Price’s approach and just published a collection of their favorite restaurant dishes. Most celebrities don’t cook; they’re busy! But they travel all the time, and they get to go to a lot of nice restaurants. A book comprised of the food that they actually eat, even if it’s the off-menu orthorexic steamed halibut (no rice, no oil) from their go-to Brentwood bistro or the randomly good pizza they had at the Grand Hyatt Bucharest while filming Holly Jolly Princess Christmas, would fascinate me, even if the celebrity themself is hardly fascinating. I have no interest in learning which recipes Taylor Swift, for instance, pretends to cook, and that would surely be rejects her extremely expensive hypothetical ghostwriter didn’t want to include in her own critically admired but commercially ignored Ten Speed Press release. But I do want to know exactly what Taylor orders at Via Carota or whatever Kansas City 2011-coded global shared-plate speakeasy gastropub Travis is constantly dragging her to. This is what we want from our famous people, to peek into their jetset lifestyles and to critique their (inevitably poor) taste. Restaurant orders can be just as personal and revealing as what one makes in the privacy of one's own kitchen, and if Kristen Doute always got the crispy eggplant quinoa salad at Soulmate on Robertson, I would like a cookbook to tell me how to recreate that unique experience at home.

No one in Hollywood was better traveled than Vincent Price, and according to contemporaneous reports, he had “exquisite” (at least 4 on the Kinsey scale) taste. A Treasury of Great Recipes, written with his wife Mary (poor Mary) and published in 1965, is widely considered the first celebrity cookbook. It includes over 200 recipes (and complete vintage menus) from almost 70 of the chicest restaurants of the day. The Prices were world travelers, and we get to go everywhere from Oslo to Maui, discovering the dishes that the sophisticated, monied classes were going crazy over sixty years ago. Though Price was an accidental historian, giving us a snapshot of this specific moment in time, he was not, it turns out, a geographer. Two of the three restaurants in the “Mexico” chapter are located in Puerto Rico.

These recipes are not specifically adapted for the home cook, but most of them are relatively simple to make, with few esoteric ingredients or techniques. Even dishes from the great Parisian restaurants, like “Croustade de Barbue Lagrene” (Fish with Soufflé Sauce) from Tour d’Argent, are very doable for an enthusiastic amateur. Poach some fish, grate some cheese, mash some potatoes, beat a few eggs — done. Whether you’re jonesing for a flounder and cheese soufflé encased in mashed potatoes and béchamel sauce is another thing altogether.

Lucky for you (and me), I’m attempting a flounder-free, more seasonally appropriate dish. Not from Paris, but from somewhere a little closer to home, Palm Springs. I love Palm Springs even in the scorching summer off-season, when you can spend pennies for a shabby but comfortable hotel room, have the pool to yourself, and sip a few mai tais before retreating back to the blasting AC.

The Prices weren’t staying at my fleabag of choice, the Caliente Tropics ($86 a night as I’m typing this). They were, of course, at the Racquet Club, the center of the desert social scene in the 1960s.

When our Southern California neighbors say they’re going to spend the weekend in the desert, they generally mean that blooming oasis, Palm Springs. And Palm Springs for most of the motion picture crowd means The Racquet Club. Charlie Farrell and Ralph Bellamy built a few tennis courts out in the middle of the sand about thirty years ago, and now look at it! These days tennis is just a small part of The Racquet Club, though a lot of people who never set foot on the courts amble about carrying a tennis racquet for posh.

Posh as a noun, can you believe it? “I put Chevron Supreme in my 2006 Prius for posh.” “I bought the $4.99 Ezekiel bread instead of the $4.49 Trader Joe’s Sprouted Multigrain for posh.” Well, that’s never leaving my vocabulary. I googled the Racquet Club to see if I could compare the current menu to Price’s 1965 version, and I’m saddened to report that this desert Shangri-La burnt to the ground in 2014 after decades of decline. A couple of the newspaper articles at the time mention a suspicious fire. And the owners (who, I guess, just got away with felony insurance fraud) have dragged their feet redeveloping it, even though it was designated a historic site in 2021. So it’s been a wasteland for the past decade, with no plans to rebuild anytime soon.

The current state of the Palm Springs Racquet Club

The 1965 “luncheon” menu lists mostly salads and sandwiches, everything from a pineapple boat (filled with cottage cheese and sherbet) to a “sloppy Moe,” a pointedly goyish Reuben made with Danish ham. The soups include a vichyssoise, a jellied consomme, and today’s special, “cold gaspacho [sic] en supréme [sic sic sic].” I guess the dude who wrote the menu didn’t take Spanish or French in high school. (Probably one of those German Class freaks).

Luckily Vincent Price was a worldly man who knew how to spell Gazpacho.

I knew this wasn’t going to be a universally beloved hit in my house, so I 2/3rd’sed the recipe, still producing enough cold soup to overflow my most giant mixing bowl. I get panicky when a recipe tells me to chop “very fine,” so I attempted to pulse everything in my ancient Cuisinart food processor. Unfortunately, the logistics of operating a complicated machine occasionally elude me, or maybe the little plastic part that triggers the motor chipped off, who knows? Anyway, I had to use my mini chopper, putting one slightly out-of-season cucumber in at a time, until I eventually got something the consistency of salsa and the color of Russian dressing, which is nowhere to be found on the anti-Semitic (((Sloppy Moe))) dog whistle. Of course I didn’t use beef consommé, subbing a cube and a half of Edward & Sons “Not-Beef” bouillon after I couldn’t find my preferred Better than Bouillon “No-Beef” goo at Lazy Acres. Everything else I did as written, save the optional croutons. I paired the soup with a panko-laden ChiQin Caesar wrap, so any additional crunch would have been excessive.

The gazpacho was cold (I included the ice cube centerpiece, see!?!) and moderately refreshing, though I was thinking it could have used more lemon and some goddamned chile flakes or Tabasco, really anything spicy. Then I saw an entire bunch of radishes hidden in the back of my vegetable crisper. I literally cannot believe I forgot another ingredient after the eggless crusty cheesy pie fiasco of a few weeks ago. So, we’ll have to imagine the peppery bite the radishes would have added.

Is this my ideal Racquet Club luncheon? No, I would have definitely ordered the crab Louie and a grilled cheese. Then I would have taken my racquet (not just for posh) over to Court 2, and me and Vincent would have kicked the shit out of Tab Hunter and Tony Perkins at doubles. Then, back to the club for mai tais and meringue glace. Then to the pool to watch the sun set over the San Jacintos. Then, well… the night is young.