He’s got a recipe for every chick flick, slasher film and taste

In 2017, Pittsburgh native actor and filmmaker Richard S. Sargent began hosting triple-feature horror movie watch parties in his South Lake Tahoe, Calif., home. He would prepare a creative dish or drink that matched the theme of each film, but he never intended for his creations to make it out of the living room.

Then his friends began to tell him: “We’re having fun, but other people are going to want to do this, too.”

“I thought, ‘Really?’ I thought I was just a weirdo, but OK, fine. Maybe I will cater events. Maybe I’ll do movie nights out in the public,” recalled Sargent, now of Palm Springs, Calif. “But then I thought that wasn’t going to get to enough people. So I thought, ‘Well, maybe I’ll try turning it into a book.’ And it just fell right into place.”

In July 2023, Sargent published “The Horror Movie Cookbook,” (Ulysses Press, $18) which features 60 recipes connected to classic slasher or horror films.

It was so well received that friends and readers requested another cookbook based on another beloved movie genre: chick flicks.

“Maybe this will be a challenge for me as an artist,” Sargent remembered thinking. “To go back and learn how to appreciate these films that other people are clearly appreciating.”

“The Ultimate Chick Flick Cookbook” (self-published, $25) came out in April, offering two recipes for each of the 30 movies it features.

Finding yourself in movies

Sargent was involved in the theater and film industries long before he began compiling recipes for his cookbooks. So this second career as a cookbook author was “definitely not what I expected,” said his husband and bandmate in The Green Winter, Josh Moskoviz.

“His intention is he wants to give the readers the biggest, best experience ever,” Moskoviz said.

The chick flick cookbook took two years to write, an improvement over the five years the horror cookbook took. The movies run the gamut from “Funny Girl” (1968) to “Barbie” (2023).

It all starts with Sargent watching the movies for important food elements. “And if there is, then I try to recreate it,” a process that requires a lot of trial and error in the kitchen.

Once the recipe is perfected, he moves on to drinks, “and the same rules apply,” he said.

The recipes are aptly named, too. His newest cookbook begins with an appetizer of potato leek soup inspired by “Bridget Jones’s Diary” called Blue String Soup, bringing to mind a cooking mishap the character has in the film. And the difficulty level?

“Even Bridget could make it,” he writes in the headnotes.

Sargent said as a queer kid, he didn’t connect with the genre growing up. Classic rom-coms dating back decades didn’t typically have much LGBTQ+ representation, and when they did, many moviegoers missed the underlying themes “because they don’t relate to that aspect of the film,” he said. “They see what’s on the surface level.

“We try to dig in deeper to find any sort of representation in films. That’s my film background and my queerness coming into that.”

Even some newer shows and movies that portray LGBTQ+ people and couples don’t tackle the issues that queer people face, Sargent said.

“They show us like we’re just any other couple, but we’re not. We went through a lot to even get where we are,” he said.

“I think that’s one of the things about chick flicks is that they don’t really show any sort of struggle. So that’s why I never felt like when I was a kid that I connected with them very much.”

That’s not the case when he watches them today.

“Now, when you go into it, if you look past what’s on the surface, you might be able to find yourself in every one of these movies.”

Reconnecting with cooking

Though the cookbooks aren’t like any of Sargent’s other projects, cooking isn’t new to him. As a teenager in Lawrenceville, the North Catholic High School grad worked in kitchens, including the Blarney Stone in Etna, which closed in 2004.

After graduating Gannon University with a degree in theater and communication arts in 2005, Sargent moved to New York. He worked with chefs and eventually took some cooking classes, thinking a culinary career could be in his future.

But after a while, Sargent didn’t love it anymore; it felt like a lot of work, and it didn’t compare to the intensity of his feelings for working on a play or film.

So he put his culinary know-how on the back burner until he missed it.

“I was like, ‘Wait, I know how to do all this stuff. Let’s use it,’ ” Sargent said. “That’s when I started to have these movie-night parties.”

His training especially comes in handy when he can’t find a food in a movie that he wants to incorporate into his cookbook. In those instances, Sargent creates a recipe based on a character or where the film takes place.

Some of his recipes are adapted from cooking with family in Pittsburgh, he said. For instance, the pepperoni bread from “Miss Congeniality” is adapted from the broccoli cheese bread he used to make with his grandmother.

His mother, North Hills resident Karen Sargent, said the movie-inspired cookbooks were not a complete surprise.

“There’s a variety of everything with Richie. He never surprises you,” she said. “You just know he’s going to be doing something.”

On Saturdays when Sargent was young, they used to watch “Chiller Theatre” together. And when he would come home during breaks from college, they’d have a movie marathon day filled with scary movies — a genre she only watches when her son is around.

“I can tell you from a mother, he’s a great kid,” she said. “When he sets his mind to doing something, he does it, and he makes sure it’s right. He doesn’t do anything half. It has to be done just right, perfect.”

She recalled a time Sargent held a book-signing event for his horror cookbook in the North Hills. He made several of the dishes for readers to snack on at the event.

“When he stops enjoying it, then that’s when he’ll stop doing it,” his mother said. “But he doesn’t want it to become work because he enjoys it so much.”

‘That little home feeling’

One of Sargent’s longtime friends and mentors, Rodney Rhoda Taylor, was part of the group that came to his house to watch horror movies. The pair met about 15 years ago when Sargent auditioned for a show at Taylor’s LGBTQ+ Left Coast Theatre Co. in San Francisco.

Taylor said for artists like Sargent — who became artistic director at Left Coast Theatre Co. — the ideas and vision come naturally from within. The cookbooks were a way to combine his passions for movies and cooking.

“He gets an idea, he sees it, and he’ll just move forward and make it a reality,” Taylor said.

Even though they haven’t lived in the same city in a decade, the friendship between Taylor, Sargent and Moskoviz has remained the same.

“They offer that little home feeling that I’ve never had,” said Taylor, who now lives in New Orleans. “So that’s something I do definitely cherish.”

Sargent is already at work on a third cookbook that follows the same format as the first two. It will also feature “sweet treats and savory bites” rather than full-course meals and include movie trivia to make it more interactive. And he’s planning a second volume of the horror movie cookbook too.

“For the queer one, I tried to do as much representation as possible,” Sargent said. “These are a lot of films that I grew up sneaking VHSes from the video store and hiding them under my pillow at night.”

Allie Miller (allie.l.mill@gmail.com) is a freelance journalist living in New Stanton.