If you’re planning to get together for a holiday meal with family or friends over the next week or two, and would love to incorporate some food from a classic holiday movie, a new cookbook has you covered.
"The Unofficial Elf Cookbook" includes some recipes you’d expect, like plates of spaghetti doused in maple syrup. But there are also dishes based not on food from the movie, but rather lines from it — think Cotton Headed Ninny Muffins and You Smell Like Beef and Cheese … Steak.
Jackie Alpers, a food photographer and author of "The Unofficial Elf Cookbook," as well as other cookbooks, joined The Show to discuss what led her to think she should write a cookbook based on this movie.
Full conversation
JACKIE ALPERS: Well, actually, I was asked to write the, the book by my,by my editors who had, were really excited about this. And I love “Elf.” I just hadn't really thought about “Elf,” in the past couple of years. And, as soon as they mentioned it, I, I, I just knew it was the perfect project for me, for a lot of different reasons. One is that it's just so much fun and it was really such a, a funny and, and cute and uplifting movie that has a really good message, but there's also a lot of like really great visual references and quotes that I could make funny recipes from, which is something that I find enjoyable.
MARK BRODIE: Yeah, so how did you try to do that? Because as you point out in the book, it's not like there's a ton of eating that goes on or food specifically in the movie itself. So you had to, I would imagine, get kind of creative with what recipes you were going to offer people here.
ALPERS: Yes. So, what I did is I watched the movie several times and I took pictures of everything that I saw them eating. And then I also made notes about everything that they kind of referenced that was food-related. And then I also just kind of took notes about scenes that I thought were funny, that I could, or just memorable, that I could be inspired by to make recipes kind of about.
So, for example, we had talked about wanting to do something with Narwhal. And I thought, well, and they, and my editors were like, maybe you should do a fish sandwich. And I was like, no, narwhals are so cute. We have to do, I, I wanna do like something that's like Arctic and like cold-looking and still kind of cute. So I did a narwhal ice cream float.
But then I was like, well, I also like the idea of doing a fish sandwich because there, and then teach people a little bit about the flora and fauna of the North Pole, because the North Pole was definitely an inspiration for this book as well as New York City.
BRODIE: Yeah. Well, what's so interesting is that when I first saw that, that this was a thing. The only thing I could think of was a plate of spaghetti with maple syrup on it and just a ton of candy on top of it and like crumbled up Poptarts. And, and to be clear, you have a recipe for that in the book, but as you reference, it's a lot more than that.
ALPERS: Yeah, because I saw that other people had, were intrigued by this recipe. And so I really wanted to do right by the recipe and right by the movie. So I did some, I, like I said, I took screenshots of, of the scene and, and, and I watched him in great detail as he constructed that spaghetti.
And then I was like, wait a second. I see that there's like pink M&Ms. And then my kind of way my brain works is like, I kind of don't think there were pink and M&Ms when this movie came out in 2003. So I did a little research and, and they didn't. But what existed was Smarties.
And then I saw, yeah, I saw that he had the Smarties and I saw the little mini marshmallows and the Snow Caps and the, the syrup. And I think it was maybe even a little bit of butter in there. I can't remember off the top of my head, but when I made it, it actually wasn't terrible.
BRODIE: A ringing endorsement from a cookbook author.
ALPERS: It was way better than I thought. I, you know, I, I wanted this book to also be not just sweets, and I wanted it to be recipes that people could make any time of the year, just because they like the recipes because they're all pretty solid. There's, you know, there is an element of sweetness throughout because, of course, it's elf, but not everything is like a sugar rush.
BRODIE: Well, I wonder if in some ways for someone who is a cookbook author, this movie was maybe a a good choice for you because you weren't just sort of interpreting dishes or meals that people ate in the movie, but you really got to be creative, you really got to sort of, as you say, take scenes and take lines from the movie and try to figure out how to incorporate those. I would think that would be maybe a more rewarding, a more creative experience than just saying, OK, they ate this dish in the movies, so we're gonna recreate that for the cookbook.
ALPERS: Oh yeah, so the most fun was to like take lines and then like make funny recipes based on lines. Like, there was, I'm looking at the book right now, and there was, the cover of the book, and there's one line where, where Walter Hobbs, the, the dad is, he was, he wasn't gonna be on the, he was on the naughty list because he was cold and selfish. And I thought, I'm gonna make a cold shellfish whatever. And I thought that was very funny. And then, and it's in there.
But I really tried to have there be a balance between, you know, cute, fun stuff for kids and like food that, that, that's really, really solid recipes that you could put in your repertoire and, you know, use in your everyday life. I mean, cause the whole idea is treat everyday like Christmas, that's kind of the theme of “Elf,” and that's kind of the theme of the, the book as well, where we, we wanna add a little bit more joy into everybody's lives.
BRODIE: I have to ask, were any cotton balls consumed during the production of this book?
ALPERS: No, but I, there's a lot written about that scene, and what, what they did in the movie was they had, Will Ferrell was eating, was actually eating white cotton candy. And so I did the same thing. I found, I, it took me a little while to find white cotton candy last year. Now it's everywhere. But that's also really a funny little thing anybody could do.
So if, especially if you want to have like a little “Elf” party, or even if you just wanna do like a funny, like one-off reference to “Elf”, it's kind of a fun, I think it'd be kind of a fun Christmas, you know, gag.
