Famed interior designer Suzanne Frankfurt sought out Warhol after she came across one of his pieces at Serendipity café in the late 1950s. They became fast friends and eventually decided to create a book together. The result was Wild Raspberries, a parody of the mass-produced books on French cuisine popular in the 1950s. The title is a nod to Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film Wild Strawberries.[1]

Created in 1959, the “cookbook” is comprised of illustrations accompanied by whimsical recipes such as “Omelet Greta Garbo,” Greengages a la Warhol,” and “Baked Hawaii.” The book was created with the help of many: Warhol drew, Frankfurt created the recipes, Warhol’s mother copied the verses, and the resulting books were “colored” by four schoolboys hired by Warhol and Frankfurt. (The coloring process reportedly was slow; only thirty-four of the approximately 100 books published had all their pages colored.) These contributions epitomize the “assembly line” method that so fascinated Warhol.

In her essay “Social Satire in the Guise of a Cookbook,” Susan Rossi-Wilcox describes the origins of the book:[2]

As [Frankfurt] recalled, “Andy and I would look at the recipes and not be able to figure them out…. We decided there should be a cookbook for people like us.” They concocted the project during his first dinner at the Frankfurts’ home. She assembled the text, which was copied by his mother Julia Warhola. Given the absurdity of the recipes’ instructions, the manuscript’s uneven letters, confused capitals, and misspellings exaggerate the overall effect.

As Frankfurt recollected in an interview in the 1990s, “we did the book, Andy with his Dr. Martin’s dyes and Mrs. Warhol [Andy’s mother], her calligraphy. She was gifted and untutored, and we left all the spelling mistakes. I wrote the recipes.”[3]

At the time of its publication, Warhol and Frankfurt gifted the books to friends as well as consigned a few copies to Doubleday Publishing and other entities. They also tried (unsuccessfully) to sell the book through Bloomingdales.[4]

The book was the subject of an exhibit – aptly titled “Wild Raspberries” – at the Bodley Gallery from December 1-24, 1959

[1] William Norwich, “Warhol Cookbook Co-Author Tells All,” The New York Observer, December 1, 1997, https://observer.com/1997/12/warhol-cookbook-coauthor-tells-all/.

[2] Susan M. Rossi-Wilcox, "Social Satire in the Guise of a Cookbook: Warhol’s Wild Raspberries," in Reading Andy Warhol (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2013), 158.

[3] William Norwich, “Warhol Cookbook Co-Author Tells All,” The New York Observer, December 1, 1997, https://observer.com/1997/12/warhol-cookbook-coauthor-tells-all/.

[4] Lucy Mulroney, Andy Warhol: Publisher (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018), 13.