‘Dead Celebrity’ chef and author Frank DeCaro says his series’s latest incarnation is about spreading the love for deceased entertainers through their favorite foods — with a holiday twist.  

The Protagonist does not shy away from dark and morbid content, which is why my ears perked when I heard about comedic entertainer Frank DeCaro’s Dead Celebrity Cookbook series.

DeCaro emphasizes, however, the series is more about promoting great performers than capitalizing on their deaths, a shock-value title or even the very recipes themselves.

DeCaro said he’s regularly frustrated at the younger generation’s lack of awareness about some of entertainment’s greatest deceased stars. He sees his project as a “spoonful of sugar” in making sure certain important names are remembered well after their time.

“I wanted to be able to pass along some pop culture history and so that was part of it,” he said, of the series’s origin. “You need to know who these people are — if Lady Gaga can know who Liberace is, so can you.”

“If a show meant a lot to me, I’d slip in a recipe,” he explained. “Even if it only had one deceased star.”

I asked DeCaro if including a recently deceased performer ever struck him as taboo or if his books garnered any negative reactions for their grimness.

“Once they go, I want to get them in the book,” he added, emphasizing it’s never “too soon,” especially since his series is all about paying tribute. The reactions from readers have been overwhelmingly positive as well. “Joey Arias was so happy I included Klaus Nomi,” he said. “Everyone in the book is someone I admire.”

Following the success of the original Dead Celebrity Cookbook, DeCaro is releasing The Dead Celebrity Cookbook Presents Christmas in Tinseltown: Celebrity Recipes from Six Feet Under the Mistletoe just in time for the holidays.

The holiday edition will feature recipes from stars who have passed, like Dick Clark, Robert Mitchum and several recipes from Miracle on 34th Street actors. DeCaro said the film was a jackpot in terms of celebrity recipes.

As evidence this book is largely about paying homage to entertainment greats and little else, DeCaro concedes some of the recipes are actually downright disastrous. A few of the recipes’ names are even a giveaway to this end, such as Lucille Ball’s “Chinese-y thing.” (Just because you’re a great entertainer, doesn’t mean you’re a great cook or culinary innovator.)

“The recipe I always make fun of is Isabel Sanford’s Boston Chicken,” said DeCaro. The recipe’s sauce calls for Russian dressing, onion soup mix, pineapple and apricot jam.

“We call it Chicken a la Barf,” said DeCaro. He assured me it didn’t change his love for Isabel Sanford.

If anything, hopefully DeCaro’s book can humanize these stars a bit for readers too.

“There’s a recipe in the new book that’s just downright creepy,” added DeCaro, describing something like jelly consomme flakes in avocado. He made a retching noise over the phone as he described the recipe, and I was right there with him.

“But I love me some Bea Arthur,” he continued. “Even if you don’t try that recipe, you certainly need to watch the bootleg Star Wars holiday special.”

Of course the series also has its major culinary successes. One consistent favorite is Katharine Hepburn’s brownies from the original book.

“You don’t really want to eat Elvis’s peanut-butter-bacon-whatever,” DeCaro pointed out, “but people always say ‘make those [brownies] again.’”

Check out Frank DeCaro’s books for yourself: www.deadcelebritycookbook.com

And that someone as visibly, pronouncedly Jewish should forever share her moment with Hepburn, celluloid’ s ultimate WASP exemplar, makes that announcement even more of a milestone. So who should know better to chronicle Streisand in Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand than author William J. Mann, who has previously penned the insightful biography Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn?

While the title cribs from Streisand’s signature, first line in Funny Girl, the movie that nabbed her her first Oscar, Mann never gets to that point. Instead, he focuses on a smaller window of her life, from 1960 to 1964, as the ambitious performer first made it out of the Brooklyn house dominated by her tough mother, Diana Kind, and began her launch into the stratosphere. He homes in on the gray areas usually bypassed in James Lipton’s useless Inside the Actor’s Studio filmographies. And so Gorgeous becomes a simultaneous dissection of a woman, a star, a talent and an industry all at once.

Meticulously researched and told with a cunning sense of acuity, Gorgeous provides enough personal details to whet the appetite without veering into overly salacious territory. Mann recounts Streisand’s family background – the father she lost before her second birthday, her mother’s remarriage and the rancorous relationship between the two women. He provides new accounts of her early sexual fumblings and the start of her relationship with first husband Elliott Gould, his subsequent drug use and her eventual straying. And if he gives short shrift to her early recording successes and Emmy and Grammy wins, his detailed account of ascent to Broadway stardom in I Can Get It For You Wholesale and then attachment to the Fanny Brice story in Girl remain a testament to a day when stardom still required both pluck and talent.

Most important of all, however, was how Streisand wore her ethnicity on her sleeve. Her refusal to alter her nose or name and her penchant for over-enunciating were both a shtick and a calling card. Mann dwells on how she forced people to look at her as is, which was a gamble, equal parts brave and stupid. While other Jewish actresses had become familiar to audiences (including Judy Holliday), most were relegated to character actress status. Streisand would blast past all of them. Through a series of interviews with such subjects as Kaye Ballard and Lainie Kazan, Mann carves a very human portrait.  He details the nerves and insecurities that came her way as a performer, even as the encomiums did as well. He acknowledges that she was never known to say “thank you,” but also highlights the rare instances when she did.

Gorgeous was not authorized by its subject, but nor was Mann’s access to information blocked in any way. It differs from other treatises on the woman who would sing “I’m the Greatest Star” in that instead of charting the course of her life and career – divorce, diva reputation, refusal to perform live – it focuses on the mechanics of the roller coaster that would lead to all the ups and downs. And this tome, at more than 500 pages, is quite the well-oiled machine. It’s a must for those who know nothing about La Streisand as well as for those who think they already know it all.

For more information about Hello, Gorgeous, go to williamjmann.com.