Initially Laurel Randolph was a food journalist, recipe tester and expert on Instant Pot cookbooks. But somewhere along with way she decided to take aim at our funny bones.
She started a “Cooking Simpsons” series for Paste magazine and later “The Joy of Cooking Milhouse” blog. Now she’s the author of “The Unofficial Simpsons Cookbook: From Krusty Burgers to Marge’s Pretzels, Famous Recipes from Your Favorite Cartoon Family.”
She’s gathered 70 silly and serious ones, from Marge’s Patented Happy Cracker Snack Platter to Forbidden Doughnuts and Moe’s Hobo Chicken Chili, and written whimsical, sometimes laugh-out-loud intros.
We needed to find out how this legit food writer devoted herself to America’s funniest animated family and how she curated a collection of dishes you’ll want to make again and again as you enjoy one of your favorite shows.
Q: So this book was inspired by your blog, right?
A: I wrote a series for Paste magazine called “Cooking Simpsons,” which was several years ago. I did it for two years and then Paste got rid of their food section and I started to miss it. And so I started putting them all up on a blog and then Instagram as well. I write cookbooks anyway. So it was always my pie-in-the-sky book that I wanted to write so I talked about it with my agent and I finally made it happen.
Q: Glad you did. One of my questions was going to be what kind of person gets obsessed with “The Simpsons.” But the more I thought about it, I thought, what kind of person doesn’t get obsessed with “The Simpsons”? It’s still wildly popular after 31 seasons.
A: The fans range in age, even in personality, and they’re from all over the world as well. People follow my Instagram in Australia, Venezuela, all these different countries. So it has this really amazing popularity.
Q: How did you decide which recipes made the final cut for the book?
A: I didn’t want all the recipes to come from, say, one season. And also I wanted to address what’s the most popular, like what do people reference all the time and what would they want to see in a book. So balancing all of that was very hard.
Q: It covered a lot of ground. And one of the things I liked about it was that it wasn’t super slick. That wouldn’t have been right for this subject. The visuals have a “Hey, you can do this at home” kind of look. Intentional?
A: Definitely intentional. Since it’s an unofficial book, we can’t use images from the show, but we wanted to capture the attitude of the show. And if someone saw it on a shelf or online, they would instantly know, that’s a Simpsons thing. The show’s playful, the show is very colorful, the show is very funny. And so, if the book wasn’t all of those things I don’t think it would have been a very good Simpsons cookbook.
Q: I don’t want to veer off into lawyer land, but why unofficial?
A: I received some good advice from some people close to the show to basically try the unofficial route. I’m kind of glad we did because it’s definitely more of a me cookbook than I think it would be if it was official. I had a lot more control over the book than I would have. I also think that it’s a more fun cookbook because we had to get creative.
Q: It could be creative for the whole family. I can imagine mom pulling the Marge’s Pork Chops out of the oven while the kids make the happy cracker snacks and dad mixes a “Supoib” Manhattan or a Flaming Moe. Did you make this book for families to cook together?
A: I definitely tried to make it an all ages, cookbook and whenever possible, if a recipe is a little complicated, I tried to do shortcuts so that if kids are involved families can make it together. I really envisioned people of all ages making these and then watching the episode together like that. That’s kind of my dream scenario.
Q: Well, I could definitely see that happen. And the other thing I appreciated is with your experience as a test kitchen whiz, the recipes are legit. There are explicit instructions for novice cooks and variations for experienced cooks.
A: It was really important to me that the recipes work really well. I think there’s kind of a bias about entertainment cookbooks that people buy them just because they like a thing or they want to give a gift to someone who likes that thing and the recipes aren’t very good. But these are extensively tested recipes and I tried to make them easy and fun and delicious.
Q: The Paul and Linda McCartney’s Lentil Soup recipe is delicious.
A: The fun thing about that lentil soup recipe is that it is verbatim in the episode. If you play the credits backwards, I think it’s Paul McCartney reading the recipe.
Q: That’s great! You even have stuff for the TikTok and Instagram crowd, like the nacho hat. Did your family and friends think you were completely insane spending hours engineering that?
A: Oh my God. Well, my husband definitely did because he was nearby watching me assemble all these different, weird configurations of pans and cover everything in aluminum foil…And then he had to take a picture for me of it on my head with cheese sauce in it.
Q: Did you feel good about writing a book on a show that’s a classic family sitcom? It kind of brings families together, right?
A. I grew up watching it when it aired, but I also watched it continuously in syndication and then it came out on DVD and now it’s streaming. So it has all of these new lives where new people can experience the show. It captures these different generations and it keeps people who were already fans continuing to be fans. So I do think that doing a cookbook from a show like that has a potential of more longevity because the show has already been so popular for so long. There are so many different kinds of fans from different walks of life. I think it probably is better fodder for a cookbook than some.
‘The Unofficial Simpsons Cookbook’
Author: Laurel Randolph has written and developed recipes for numerous publications, including EatingWell, Paste Magazine, The Spruce, Serious Eats, Kitchen Table Magazine, Table Matters, Los Angeles Magazine, and KCET. She lives in San Francisco.
Publisher: Adams Media, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Price: $21.99
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