Jenny Hammerton's Silver Screen Suppers: The Recipe Archive Hollywood Never Kept
Jenny Hammerton of Silver Screen Suppers with Pola Negri's banana trifle at High Barnet, the first stop of her Great Bear Project. Photo courtesy of silverscreensuppers.com
Silver Screen Suppers Twenty years of cooking the recipes the film stars gave away silverscreensuppers.com
Jenny
In 2006 Jenny Hammerton bought a second-hand recipe book in a collector's shop, the sort of thing that surfaces in a box of other people's memories. It was full of dishes attributed to film stars. She took it home to a houseboat on the Thames, where the cooker had to be switched on with a pair of pliers, and started cooking. The first dish she wrote up, on 21 May 2006, was Bette Davis's Boston baked beans.
Twenty years later she is still going, and the collection behind the blog has grown to more than eight thousand dishes recommended by the people she calls her Hollywood idols. She is working through them at the pace of a lifetime, which is the only pace that would ever finish the job.
What she is really doing is keeping something nobody else thought worth keeping. Film star recipes were publicity. They went out on cigarette cards, in fan magazines, in charity collections and studio handouts, printed to be glanced at once and thrown out with the wrapping. Marlene Dietrich's lamb chops en casserole, Vincent Price's chicken in vermouth, Ida Lupino's lemon mousse. None of it was meant to survive as a record of how people cooked in the middle of the last century, and all of it now is.
An Archive You Have to Cook
Collecting is the easy half. What makes Silver Screen Suppers useful is that she cooks the things, because that is where the gaps show. Bette Davis's beans call for fat salt pork, and Hammerton's butcher told her no butcher in Britain stocks it any more, so she worked out a substitution of belly pork with pancetta for the saltiness and wrote down how it went. A quart of dried beans, she also notes, will feed about twenty people. Neither fact is in the original recipe. Both exist because somebody stood in a kitchen and found out.
That instinct puts her closer to the food historians than to fan writing. She treats a piece of discarded print as evidence and then tests it, in the way The Food Historian reads American foodways out of archives rather than assertions. It also puts her in company with Lisa McLean, who has spent forty years cooking her way through Marcella Hazan's complete works, on the shared understanding that a body of recipes is not really known until it has been made.
Then there is the streak of English silliness that stops the whole project from turning academic. In 1992 the artist Simon Patterson redrew the London Underground map as The Great Bear, replacing every station name with philosophers, saints, Italian artists, comedians and film stars. The Northern Line came out as the film star line. Hammerton, whose local stop is Highgate and therefore Groucho, decided to eat her way along it. One star's recipe cooked for each of the twenty one stations, carried to the platform, presented to the roundel and eaten there, with her husband supplying a fact about the station. It took from 2018 until April 2026 to reach the end of the line.
Two Pieces Worth Exploring
Pola Negri's Banana Trifle, High Barnet, The Great Bear Project Stop 1
Jenny
Pola Negri's Banana Trifle The dessert that launched an eight year journey up the Northern Line silverscreensuppers.com
The opening move of the Great Bear Project, and the clearest short statement of what the blog is. She explains the artwork, sets herself the rules, rides the line to its northern end and eats trifle on the platform in a palm print maxi dress. The cooking notes are brief and honest: she expected not to like it, found salty pockets among the sweetness and loved it. Before making it, she admits, all she knew about Pola Negri was that she made a scene at Rudolph Valentino's funeral. By the end of the post she knows the woman could also make a mean trifle, which is the small, specific kind of knowledge this blog exists to produce.
Bette Davis's Boston Baked Beans
Jenny
Bette Davis's Boston Baked Beans The dish that opened the blog in 2006, cooked again for its twentieth birthday silverscreensuppers.com
For the blog's twentieth birthday she planned to spend the day alone making the first recipe again. Then she broke her wrist peeling potatoes, so her husband cooked while she directed, bossing him about, by her own account, like nobody's business. The result is a good demonstration of what twenty years of practice adds to a nine-decade-old recipe. There is the salt pork substitution, the warning that a quart of beans is a great many beans, the note that they freeze well, and the bean pot bought in 2019 for this single dish and now used for the second time. The recipe has not changed. Everything around it has.
Why It Matters
Food writing tends to treat celebrity recipes as a punchline, and often they deserve it. They are also one of the few surviving records of what domestic cooking looked like when it was being sold to the public as glamour, and the joke wears thin the moment somebody takes them seriously enough to cook them properly. Hammerton has never been sniffy about the material and never solemn about it either, which is a harder balance to hold than it looks. Like Food in Books, which follows meals out of novels and back into a real kitchen, she uses an unlikely doorway to arrive somewhere genuinely historical.
Twenty years is the whole point. Anyone can start a collection. Very few people keep at one long enough for it to turn into an archive, and fewer still keep cooking from it once it has, which is the part that costs evenings and wrists. Eight thousand dishes sit in her files waiting their turn. She is going through them at roughly the rate the stars themselves would have wanted, which is to say slowly, with a drink, and with somebody else doing the washing up.
Explore Silver Screen Suppers: https://www.silverscreensuppers.com
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