Chef's Kiss Emoji

There’s a nice little scene in ‘The Godfather’ where Clemenza teaches Michael (and therefore the audience) how to make an authentic Italian American tomato sauce. “And a little bit a wine… an’ a little bit a sugar… and that’s my trick.”


“At this point in my career I thought all my films should have a good recipe,” Francis Ford Coppola explains in his director’s commentary. “At least if the film didn’t turn out so well there’d always be a useful recipe in there.”


This sage piece of filmmaking advice was apparently taken to heart by Coppola Sr.’s son Roman. This particular Coppola directed the video for Daft Punk’s ‘Revolution 909’ which shows the life of a tomato from seedling to forkful as a raver imagines how a red stain landed on a police officer’s shirt. However, the tomato sauce made here by the cop’s elderly mother looks far blander than the deliciously rich sauce stirred up in ‘The Godfather’. Perhaps the secret ingredient is crime after all.


As someone with a total aversion to cookery books and blogs, a piece of pop culture containing a usable recipe can be a gamechanger. There’s a big Youtube channel called ‘Binging with Babish’ that’s dedicated to recreating foods from films, TV and video games. Most of these foods are cooked offscreen in their source material, so Babish uses his impressive cooking skillage to fill in the blanks. Although this lets him crank out content, it does mean his recipes are seldom canonical. There are some nice exceptions though, like the episode where filmmaker Jon Favreau makes the chocolate lava cake from his own film ‘Chef’.


‘Chef’ is about fancy food and internet virality and it’s extremely watchable. It’s great how the behind-the-scenes story of Favreau making a low-budget passion project to bounce back after his previous film ‘Cowboys & Aliens’ bombed pleasingly mirrors the titular chef’s character arc. And there are some great lines in there like “There was no word for hater when I was growing up. The most you would say is that somebody was like jealous, which didn't really capture it.”

But yes, ‘Binging with Babish’ is a cool channel although for me, the real sport is finding movie recipes that are follow throughable with almost no cooking ability.


Recently I recreated Grimes’ infamous ‘Sludge’ recipe (like the trashy BuzzFeed writer I wish I was) which is couscous, “a ton of veganaise, a ton of sriracha,” celery and various other vegetables all smooshed together. The incredibly lipid-rich couscous salad that resulted was actually really bland and I think I only thought it would be fun because Grimes is obviously a massive weirdo and also a god tier producer.


Whilst many of my friends are keen home brewers and Francis Ford Coppola himself now spends his days making wine, I have been meaning to concoct my own Dr Pepper (or Dr Purbrick if you will) for months. Although my flat refusal to read any recipes on or offline has prevented me cracking the formula of this mysterious drink, my prayers were answered in a recent group project meeting when my friend Jack O’Connor orally recounted a video he saw where someone poured root beer (another of my favourite beverages) into their humidifier to create a root beer cloud in their home. Muting my microphone lest my cries of ‘Eureka!’ disrupt the MS Teams webinar, I immediately ordered a humidifier from Argos and thanks to the brutal dystopian nightmare that is same-day delivery I was able to start brewing my Dr Purbrick that very evening.


By filling the humidifier with lovely store-bought Pepper and placing it directly next to my housemate’s dehumidifier, I was able to effortlessly fulfil my long held cola-making fantasies. Although the resulting liquid was warm, flat and had a weird aftertaste (not to mention how it made me extremely ill), it was certainly more chemically similar to the secret Dr Pepper formula than any recipe on the net. When I gave my neighbours a couple of bottles as a thank you present for cat-sitting, they said it tasted interesting and were very impressed I’d made it all by myself although I didn’t want to bore them by explaining my system.

By Matt Purbrick

Originally written in May 2021 for a Union Music Library zine