Elizabeth Taylor was extraordinary on screen, and according to Neil Zevnick, her personal chef for nearly a decade in the '90s, she also threw incredible parties at home.
“We always set a huge single table,” Zevnik tells TODAY.com of her Thanksgiving dinners with more than 40 guests at her ranch-style home in Bel Air, California. A former actor, he worked as Taylor's chef from 1991 to 1999.
Yawn says that while he usually only cooked for her, the holidays were a special occasion. While he prepared the feast, movers removed all of her furniture from the living room and trophy room to make room for a square of banquet tables, which he said he also decorated.
“I literally had to take my shoes off and I had to stand on the table,” he says. “I would make these very elaborate centerpieces out of fabrics, flower vases, trinkets and candles.”
Taylor loved to sit at the same table, he says, adding that children, adults, celebrities and non-celebrities sat together, “because then who could sit with her?”
For Turkey Day, Zevnik prepared traditional dishes: turkey, mashed potatoes, classic bread stuffing, cornbread sausage stuffing, sweet potato casserole, green beans, creamed pearl onions, fresh cranberry-peach dressing and mince pie.
“You know, she liked cranberry jelly sliced out of a jar,” he says.
“Her two favorite Thanksgiving foods were turkey wings and gravy, and the turkey wings had to be cooked crisp And crisp And salty, and she wanted several of them,” Zevnik recalls. “Lots of gravy.”
Scroll down to see it Crispy Turkey Wings Recipe.
Taylor requested that her chef prepare extra portions of these two dishes so that she would have plenty of food on her plate, as well as leftovers.
On days when she wasn't entertaining, Taylor's dinners were ordinary, but never boring.
“As a rule, we don’t make a lot of plans in advance,” Zevnik says. He would come over to cook throughout the day and offer her options that were “cooked to a certain point” as well as her favorite dishes that he could easily whip up.
“At some point she said, ‘OK, what do we have today?’” he says. He would ask her what she was in the mood for: salty, crunchy, creamy, healthy, etc. “Then we’ll go from there.”
Yawn says that every afternoon Taylor forced him to cook for everyone working in the house. “The whole staff would get together and sit together in the kitchen.”
Taylor was very open to trying new foods, but having grown up in the UK, she particularly enjoyed British dishes such as roast beef with Yorkshire pudding and Marmite.
She was also a lover of sweets—in fact, she loved Zevnik's “toffees” so much that she had a refrigerator stocked with them in her bedroom.
Zevnik has worked with a long list of celebrities since then—Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Garner, Pierce Brosanan and Charlize Theron, to name a few—but his years with Taylor still inspire him.
“She was one of the most dedicated and generous people I have ever known,” he says. She began her AIDS advocacy in the 80s when most celebrities refused to helpand eventually installed Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation. “She didn't care what people thought. She did what she thought was right.”
He recalls that when she didn't like the stew he made, she “ate some of it and that was it.”
“She very kindly said, 'I don't think we'll do this anymore.'
Crispy turkey wings
Ingredients
- 6 turkey wings
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- 3 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
- 1/2 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
- Frank's hot sauce splash
Preparation
- Preheat oven to 425 F. Line a baking sheet with heavy-duty aluminum foil. Lightly spray with olive oil cooking spray.
- Whisk together olive oil, butter, Worcestershire and hot sauce. Place the wings on a baking sheet and brush both sides with the butter mixture.
- Bake in the oven for 18–20 minutes, turning once. Turn the oven to 475 F and cook for another 3 minutes until nice and crisp.
- Sprinkle with salt and serve.
