Vincent Leonard Price Jr. (May 27, 1911 – October 25, 1993) was an American actor, art historian, art collector, and gourmet cook. He appeared on stage, television, and radio, and in more than 100 films. Price has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for motion pictures and one for television.[1]
ART
BITES
Price was a gourmet cook, and he authored several cookbooks with his second wife, Mary. These include:
- A Treasury of Great Recipes (1965)
- Mary and Vincent Price present a National Treasury of Cookery (1967)
- Mary and Vincent Price’s Come into the Kitchen Cook Book: A Collector’s Treasury of America’s Great Recipes (1969)
- Cooking Price-Wise with Vincent Price (1971)
Mary and Vincent Price present a National Treasury of Cookery was a five-volume series, packaged in a boxed set and published by the Heirloom Publishing Company. These five books were combined into a single book two years later and published as Mary and Vincent Price’s Come into the Kitchen Cook Book: A Collector’s Treasury of America’s Great Recipes. Most of the Prices’ cookbooks remained in print throughout the 1970s. After being out of print for several decades, two of their books were reprinted; A Treasury of Great Recipes (in August 2015 by Calla Editions) and Mary and Vincent Price’s Come into the Kitchen Cook Book (in November 2016 by Calla Editions), both featuring new forewords by their daughter Victoria Price. Cooking Price-Wise with Vincent Price was scheduled to be reprinted by Dover Publishing in October 2017 under the updated title Cooking Price-Wise – The Original Foodie.
The movie His Kind of Woman has a comedic scene in which Price, having invited Jane Russell and Robert Mitchum to dinner, receives bad news. He plays the entire scene holding a duck in his hand, ready to be cooked “soaked in sherry with only salt, sage, and pepper.”
In 1971, Price hosted his own cooking program on British television, called Cooking Price-Wise produced for the ITV network by Thames Television, which was broadcast in April and May 1971. This show gave its name to Price’s fourth and final cookbook later that year. Price promoted his cookbooks on many talk shows, one of the most famous instances being the November 21, 1975, broadcast of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, when he demonstrated how to poach a fish in a dishwasher.
Price recorded a number of audio cooking tutorials titled International Cooking Course. These were titled Bounty of Paradise, Classical Spanish Cuisine, Cuisina Italiana, Delights from the Sultan’s Pantry, Dinner at the Casbah, Dining at Versailles, Exotic Delights from the Far East, Food of the Gods, Foods from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, La Cocina Mejicana, The Bard’s Board, and The Wok. In addition to those, he recorded an audio wine course titled Wine Is Elegance. These audio recordings were released on 33⅓ LPs by Nelson Industries in 1977 and were also packaged in a 12-cassette boxed set titled Beverly Hills Cookbook – Cookbook of the Rich and Famous, Your Host Mr. Vincent Price.[47]
In August 1982, he co-hosted A Taste of China for Thames Television over five episodes. He also prepared a fish recipe on Wolfgang Puck‘s Cooking with Wolfgang Puck VHS, released in October 1987 by Warner Home Video.
