Jul 152 min read

Laura La Plante's Hot Dog Malibu

Silent film star Laura La Plante offers up recipes for summer entertaining.

Laura La Plante began her screen career in 1919 and rose to become a popular leading lady at Universal in the 1920s. She appeared in a variety of genres including westerns, comedies, dramas and is best remembered for her role in the 1927 horror thriller "The Cat and the Canary".

Recipe

There were many recipes to choose from, but we settled on some recipes from this article featured in Motion Picture Magazine from August 1931.

Hot Dog Malibu

Ingredients

bran roll or bun

frankfurter (can be beef, turkey or plant based)

butter

mustard

leaf of lettuce

2 tomato slices

salt

onion

pickle

Directions

Cream butter and mustard and spread on the roll / bun. Add lettuce, two wafer thin slices of tomato and sprinkle with salt. Split the frankfurter and scoop a little of the inside to make room for finely chopped onion and minced pickle. Press frankfurter together, put in roll, press roll together.

Potato Salad a la Plante

Ingredients

potatoes

celery

onion

parsley

garlic clove

celery salt

tabasco sauce

1 1/2 cups of cream, mixed with mayonaise, half and half.

Directions

Dice and boil potatoes and allow then to cool. Mix with one half cup of finely-diced celery, one onion sliced paper-thin and add shredded parsley. Put in a bow that has been rubbed with garlic, and mix with cream, mayonnaise and add half & half. Add a dash of celery salt and a sprinkle of tabasco sauce.

*I was worried that the cream and half & half would make this more like soup. Instead we just used the mayo and a potato masher to blend it all together. It worked and turned out well.

Special Guest

Laura Jerrolds is the author of Laura La Plante: Silent Cinderella, the first full-length biography on the silent star. She is also a middle-grade fiction author of a time-travel trilogy series with titles including Help...! It's 1928!, Wait...! It's 1884!, and most recently, Look...! It's 1955!. Jerrolds works at Florida State University in Human Resources Management.

Angie Schneider is a board member and curator of the Hollywood Heritage Museum and collects memorabilia on Mary Pickford and Theda Bara. She blogs at “Tinsel and Stars" and is currently writing a cookbook on the recipes of Pickfair.