Cassandra Peterson on Releasing Her New Cookbook and Writing Recipes as Elvira

Cassandra Peterson has been a Halloween icon for decades. As the beloved horror host and Goth queen Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, she’s introduced us to some of our favorite cult horror movies, starred in movies of her own, and proven that a great look and witty banter never go out of style. 

Now, Peterson’s taking Elvira somewhere she’s never been before: The kitchen. The product of decades of entertaining as a home cook, Elvira’s Cookbook From Hell is Peterson’s take on a complete Goth entertainment guide, from crafty tablescapes to easy appetizers, right up to a full-blown wedding cake that looks like every horror fan’s dream. 

Just in time for Halloween, Paste sat down with Peterson to discuss her longtime cookbook dreams, her writing process, and what Snoop Dogg had to do with getting this book right. 

Paste Magazine: You mentioned in the acknowledgments at the back of the book that this was kind of a longtime dream for you. How far back does the idea of an Elvira cookbook go?

Cassandra Peterson: Believe it or not, almost to the ’80s. I keep crediting Martha Stewart, but she came out around ’83 with Martha Stewart’s Entertaining, and I love that damn book. I really took it to heart. I started having dinner parties where I was planning everything out. I think I cooked everything in that cookbook, and I’d make the table arrangements, I’d do flowers, I’d do everything. And at some point, somebody mentioned to me, “You’re like the Martha Stewart of the Macabre.” And that kind of stuck with me. I thought, hey, maybe there’s something there. And I decided then I would love to kind of follow in her footsteps, only with the Goth crowd. And so it was a dream of mine to kind of put together an entertaining guide for Goths. 

I took it out to try to get a publishing deal. And nobody was really down with that [at the time]. They didn’t think that there was really an audience for it. And looking back, they may have been right at that time. I think the whole Goth world, the whole Halloween world has grown and grown and grown over the years. People have gotten more into the Goth lifestyle in the last 30 years. It’s like if you build it, they will come. It’s like Field of Dreams, mine is Field of Screams. 

So it took me 30 years to finally get the crowd that is interested in this book, and I’m really thrilled to say it’s selling hotcakes right now.

Paste: So it’s been a long-time passion project, but how did the actual writing process for the book start once you got the greenlight?

Peterson: Honestly, for the last 30 years, I’ve been collecting recipes that I’ve found in books and in magazines. One little recipe guide was put out for the press for Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, and it had mostly joke recipes, like the recipe I make in the movie, Adraka Kozerole. You didn’t really eat these recipes. They were jokes. But I kept all these together in one little folder thinking, “Someday I’m going to be able to use these.” And they’re here now! 

 I’ve taken these recipes from [lots of] places, but of course, we put our own spin on it. We changed them up, we made them look different, made them taste different. So they were the inspiration for a lot of the recipes in this book. 

Paste: What was the recipe development process like, once you knew the approach you wanted to take?

Peterson: Well, first of all, putting a cookbook together is a project, I want to tell you. It is really hard. I almost look back and say, “Oh my gosh, this was harder than doing my autobiography.” I’m not kidding. At least with my autobiography, it was just me. I have to just sit my butt down and work on the computer. 

With this, I had to have a big team of people, people doing the recipes, people doing the props for the cookbook, the photography, the taste testing, and helping write the recipes out. I mean, I did not write the actual recipes out, measurements, and all of that. I wrote every single intro, every single intro to each chapter, every single intro to each recipe.

And that was pretty daunting too, not having ever written a cookbook and trying to make it sound like Elvira, but it was a big group effort. And I had a wonderful team of people who really got it. So I was involved in doing every single recipe. I did eat every single recipe. We had many recipes that ended up on the cooking room floor that just didn’t really work. So we went through so many different recipes and different ideas to finally get the final ones.

Paste: You mentioned your memoir, which got a very warm reception when it was published. What impact did the response have on you as a writer?

Peterson: Well, it certainly gave me confidence that it became a New York Times bestseller. I never dreamed in my wildest imagination that that would happen. I was just trying to write from my own self, my own experiences, and use my own voice. I wanted it to sound like me.

I am a huge autobiography reader. It is my favorite genre of book. And I can tell in two minutes of reading a book if that is the person writing it or if it’s a ghostwriter. The books that are written by ghostwriters, unfortunately, just really do not appeal to me. They ring hollow. I love to hear books, autobiographies that are in that person’s voice, [those] speak to me so much more, even if the writing is not great. They’re just so much more personal, and you really feel like you get to know the person. So I really, really wanted to be that. I didn’t set out to be Emily Brontë or anything. I set out to sound like me, get my voice out there, and tell my story.

Paste: For the cookbook, you have to go back to Elvira’s voice, which you’ve been writing in for a long time, obviously. How did it feel to slip into her voice for a cookbook? Did it come naturally?

Peterson: Well, something really funny happened. We wrote everything, all the intros to the recipes, which is quite a lot of writing when you add it all up, let me tell you. And we got done with it, the book was about to go to press, and I read it through one night. I go, “I want to make sure everything sounds good.” I read it through, and I went, “This is lacking Elvira’s voice. It is sounding like it could be Dracula. It’s sounding like it could be any spooky character. I am not getting Elvira.” And I had recently gotten Snoop Dogg’s cookbook, which is so crazy, but it was this huge bestseller, and I went out and got it. And I noticed that in the book, the great thing about that book was it sounded exactly like him talking. So again, just like with my autobiography, that was Cassandra Peterson talking.

This needed to be more Elvira’s voice. It needed to sound more like Elvira. And I literally went through from the top of the book to the end, and they were panicking. They had a few days for it to be done. And I said, “No, no. I have got to write the whole thing again.” And I rewrote it again, just, oh my God, it was a marathon. I went to my little cabin that I have and I locked myself in there. And I wrote from morning till night and got that thing done and made it sound like it was Elvira talking. I had just somehow missed that. I don’t know how I could have done it. It was crazy. But I think I finally did capture her voice, and it really, really improved the book.

Paste: Because Elvira is a Halloween icon, and this book is going to be tied to the Halloween season, I’m betting you’re going to get some fans who don’t really know how to cook who pick up this book. What’s your message to new cooks who are trying to find something to make in this book?

Peterson: Well, I made this book with those people in mind. I wanted this book to have recipes that anybody can cook. Literally, if you can boil out water, you can make the Bedeviled Spider Eggs. A lot of these recipes are more crafty than cooking. It’s the look that’s important. They all taste good, but the look was very important. I wanted that vibe. 

There are recipes in there for people who have almost never cooked before, like the Bedeviled Spider Eggs, on up to very, very difficult things for bakers. And I’m not a baker, I gotta admit right here. But the wedding cake, that Til Death Do We Party Wedding Cake, it’s complicated. It’s delicious, oh my God, but you really have to know what you’re doing. So I wanted to run the gamut and have a recipe in there for everybody. So yeah, I’d say even people who just want to have fun and, you know, want to have a funky kind of Goth-looking vibe for dinner are going to be happy with this book.

Elvira’s Cookbook From Hell is now available wherever books are sold. 

Matthew Jackson is a pop culture writer and nerd-for-hire who’s been writing about entertainment for more than a decade. His writing about movies, TV, comics, and more regularly appears at SYFY WIRE, Looper, Mental Floss, Decider, BookPage, and other outlets. He lives in Austin, Texas, and when he’s not writing he’s usually counting the days until Christmas.

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