Hosting an Orgy? This 1970s Cookbook Has You Covered
Hosting a dinner party can be scary. It can feel like there’s pressure to be perfect, to set up some elaborate “tablescape” or make food so extravagant, complicated, or Instagrammable that it verges on the absurd.
Now there is a significant food writing movement working to counteract that aspirational image. But before Alison Roman’s Nothing Fancy philosophy took the Internet by storm, long before the rise of overnight oats, mason jar salads, and electric pressure cookers, a couple of self-described Hollywood bachelors published a book explaining how to have a stress-free evening with friends, serve impressive but uncomplicated, inexpensive food, and generally improve your life and everyone else’s in the process.
Oh, and they also encouraged you to have sex with your guests.
They were Daud Alani and Jack S. Margolis, and they believed that their bawdy book, Cooking for Orgies and Other Large Parties, could not only teach you to make “fabulous six-course dinners for ten to thirty people in one hour for $1 per person,” but that the book would reveal, “a secret on par with the mysteries of the Rosicrucians.”
Published in 1972, Cooking for Orgies and Other Large Parties is primarily comprised of costed-out, multi-course dinners broken down using what its authors call the Integrated Recipe System and paired, a bit incongruously, with illustrations of astronauts with bare breasts and Dionysian dudes reclining with piles of fresh fruit. It frames Middle Eastern staples like tabbouleh and rice pilaf as gourmet, placing them in the same breath as trendy 70s dishes like ham with pineapple and stuffed mushrooms. Adjusted for inflation, each of the seven set menus presented in the book works out to cost less than $10 per guest, so you could have ten people over, serve them an overwhelming spread featuring fancifully named dishes like Scallop Fantasia, Mrs. Ernie Lundquist Memorial Okra, and Avocado Symphony, and only spend $100. It’s dedicated to Graham Kerr and Julia Child, who are invited to, “come to our house next week, sit around naked, and have some really good food for a change.”
From Cooking for Orgies and Other Large Parties
Initially, a dinner party and an orgy might seem to be a strange combination. But if you were to find a copy of the book on eBay—it tends to cost between $60 and $100, depending on the seller and the quality—you might change your mind about combining these events. Margolis and Alani, writing with the bold sex-positivity of the 70s, never question whether you would want to host a sex party. Instead, they argue that sex and food are a combination as natural as lungs and oxygen: “Because of the tremendous influence our sensory powers have on our sexual and amatory desires, there is no question that a well-prepared meal of subtly seasoned foods will greatly add to a heightening of those desires.”
So how did an Iraqi Jewish serial entrepreneur known for his absurd theme restaurants and a Polish-American counterculture writer responsible for The Poetry of Richard Milhous Nixon and a truly bizarre B movie called Linda Lovelace for President, among other things, end up publishing something so surprisingly substantive?
It began with some of the best parties in all of hippie-era Los Angeles: lavish, extravagant parties thrown on a surprisingly tight budget.
Every bite sent “chills of pleasure up and down my spine.”
The year was 1963 the first time Alani invited Margolis, at the time a young television writer working on his first pilot, to one of these groovy shindigs. It was a defining moment for him. As Margolis pushed the door open, he “was almost blinded by a sight created by a Fellini gone mad.” There was a belly dancer and a six-piece Middle Eastern band. Cars were parked by valets. The men wore tuxedos, the women long gowns and tiaras. Margolis felt out of place in his comparatively shabby corduroy jacket, and to make matters worse, “Daud was dancing with a woman so beautiful she made me wish I had some Top Secret government documents she wanted.” But he relaxed as he wandered around the kaleidoscope of a party, mingling and having a good time.
And then he found the food. The elaborate spread looked like it had been staged for a photo-shoot, and each of the twelve dishes held a different unexpected treasure. As Margolis “furtively sampled each of the dishes,” every bite sent “chills of pleasure up and down my spine.” After he ate, he got back to mingling. But when he returned to the dining room, “Lo! There were twelve more large serving dishes, each filled with something totally new.”
Eventually, he wandered into the kitchen, where Alani was taking some food out of the oven. Standing there, Margolis suddenly realized that Daud had single-handedly prepared all 24 courses with his only assistance coming from one woman who bussed and washed dishes. He resolved to become better friends with the man as soon as possible.
From Cooking for Orgies and Other Large Parties
From the sound of it, that was a great decision. If you had Daud Alani on your side, your life was instantly more fun. While researching this piece, I spoke to two sources who asked to remain anonymous to protect their family’s privacy, and both of them described him as a remarkably optimistic, giving, creative person.
In the early 1940s, an 18-year-old Alani came to the United States to study writing, narrowly escaping The Farhud, Iraq’s answer to the Holocaust. He planned on going to college in California, but shortly after arriving in the US he was drafted into WWII. By the time he got back, he was as American as he was Iraqi. Not to mention ambitious.
Land in Southern California was cheap in the mid-20th century, so if it involved real estate, Alani tried it. He ran a gay-friendly hotel in Hollywood. He had a dinner theater and motel called Razzmatazz. He even co-owned a chain of King Henry VIII-themed restaurants with former washing machine mogul John Bloom. At its height, the campy business, which the LA Times once described as being “PG-rated although the performers like to pretend it’s an R,” boasted ten locations across England and California and was even featured in Time Magazine.
Alani was a charismatic, savvy businessman. But despite his magnetic personality and imaginative ideas, he was too generous and free-spirited to ever save money. Margolis claimed in the book that Daud “made a million dollars three times and lost it twice.” He was broke as often as he was rolling in it. He never really planned things.
Cooking for Orgies, on the other hand, is extremely organized.
I had to test it out, so a while back, I had friends over for an admittedly less sexual party than the book intends and made the Seventh Dinner.
Alani’s Integrated Recipe System uncomplicates the process of making many recipes simultaneously, demystifying large-format cooking. The menus are set by design so you can make each dish simultaneously, using downtime in the first to get started on the second. He even includes several recipes in each menu that use elements from previous dishes. In the First Dinner Menu, for example, Dish B (Baked Potatoes with Elixir of Crab) cannot be finished without liquid from Dish D (Crab Ecstasy).
The system is brilliant and economical, even if you’re not especially jazzed about adding a whole cup of ketchup to your lamb and eggplant stew. I had to test it out, so a while back, I had friends over for an admittedly less sexual party than the book intends and made the Seventh Dinner (Coffeed Zucchini, Lovely Chicken Legs, Overstuffed Mushrooms, Incredible Veal, Strange Bananas, and Snowflake Salad) for 14 people.
From Cooking for Orgies and Other Large Parties
Was it dated? Yes: Breading and frying bananas, saucing them, and then letting them get soggy in a chafing dish is not something I would recommend. Was some of it confusing? Yes: A modern recipe writer would never direct you to “scramble three eggs in a mixing bowl” and the inclusion of instant coffee in Coffeed Zucchini (an incredibly delicious tomatoey rice pilaf with ground beef and caramelized zucchini) threw off every one of my guests. Was some of it unappetizing? Yes: The Lovely Chicken Legs turned out less than lovely. And it definitely did not take just an hour to make all that food.
But none of that mattered, because Cooking for Orgies itself had engendered such a remarkable atmosphere. Was some of the food weird? Yes, absolutely. That being said, I’ve already made Coffeed Zucchini again, and everyone loved the Overstuffed Mushrooms and Snowflake Salad (a brilliantly simple chilled cauliflower dish that I’ll be making again). Was serving six whole courses way more labor-intensive than anything I would normally make for a crowd? 100 percent. But overall, the book’s advice for large-format cooking is smart, economical, encouraging, and fun.
From Cooking for Orgies and Other Large Parties
Cooking for Orgies and Other Large Parties is such a strange, hilarious, and useful relic that just about everyone was excited to check it out, reading sex-positive excerpts aloud, analyzing the alternative recipe structure, and photographing the casually explicit illustrations of naked folks passed out under tables.
We’ve come a long way since the 1970s where both food and sex are concerned. But both are sensory celebrations, and a great meal or great sex always makes any good night better. According to the book’s offbeat authors, “Warmth is an abstract quality which relies not on one specific thing,” but by feeding people, regardless of whether you have “low-level lighting and a fireplace” you can always create an upbeat, inviting atmosphere. So have some friends over soon and make them something delicious, regardless of what it is. Polyamory is optional, but if the mood strikes you, I think Daud and Jack would approve.
