I’ve never been much of a chef…I didn’t grow up in a home that cooked very often, and so the kitchen and I have never been real good friends. I’ve been trying to change that recently, as well as work to reduce plastic waste in our home. I figured a really good way to keep me more involved in the kitchen is to cook from someone who inspires me, so I settled upon Vincent Price. Yes, horror icon Vincent Price.

Perhaps some of you know that Vincent Price adored food, and loved to cook. He even briefly had a cooking show on British television, and one of my favorite TV moments is him showing how to cook fish in a dishwasher on Johnny Carson.

Price had a long list of his favorite restaurants both in the US and foreign countries, and put recipes from his favorite restaurants along with some of his own in A Treasury of Great Recipes, just one of a handful of cookbooks he wrote. Not long ago I was lucky enough to score a first edition copy of A Treasury of Great Recipes at a flea market for a mere $3 and I finally got around to making something out of it… Brown and White Cookies.

We opted to halve the recipe, as we didn’t need the eight dozen cookies the recipe said it made.

Overall, this is a really basic recipe, and was simple to make, beginning with creaming together butter and sugar, followed by adding vanilla, and flour.

To make half of the dough brown, the dough is separated and half receives cocoa. Then the dough is rolled into two sections.

This is where it got kind of odd. After mixing the dough and separating it to have a regular sugar half, and a cocoa half, you split it again to make half and half cookies and stripe cookies. The half and half cookies are made by cutting the dough and then putting it back together. The stripe cookies are made by rolling, cutting, and stacking the dough.

After being wrapped in wax paper and placed in the fridge for a few hours, the dough is taken out and cut to be baked.

After baking for around ten minutes the cookies were ready!

This was a pretty easy recipe, but sadly, I felt the cookies were a bit bland, which is what one of you mentioned in the comment section of my last post with regards to vintage cookbooks. They weren’t terrible or inedible, just lacking in flavor…they kind of fell along the lines of those Royal Dansk Butter Cookies. Perhaps they would go well with a cup of tea.

A Treasury of Great Recipes is full of a wide range of dishes, so who knows what I’ll whip up next! Stay tuned!

You can purchase A Treasury of Great Recipes new on Amazon here, used on Ebay or Etsy.

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