Roald Dahl wrote the teleplay for “Lamb to the Slaughter” (1958), arguably the most famous of the 359 programmes Alfred Hitchcock's television company made for CBS and NBC between 1955 and 1965. In it, a housewife who is five months pregnant, played by Barbara Bel Geddes, murders her police inspector husband using a frozen leg of lamb. The victim's colleagues search the house but can find no evidence of the blunt instrument with which the murder has been committed. Meanwhile, the murderer is cooking it in the oven prior to serving it to the detectives who will then eat it.

A tale of murder, revolving around food, served with a sauce of mordant comedy is now seen as the perfect recipe for a story known generically as “Hitchcockian.” Food is a recurring motif in many of Hitchcock's fifty-three feature films. In Rope (1948), the two murderers strangle their friend and place his corpse in a chest which they then cover with a tablecloth, where it forms the centrepiece of a dinner party whose guests are the friends and family of the victim. In Rear Window (1954), Grace Kelly, whose luminous beauty is caressed by the camera with all the love the director can summon through his art, arranges for the temporarily immobilized James Stewart to be served the finest food prepared by Jack and Charlie's 21 Club, one of Hitchcock's own favourite restaurants. The food appears to be as seductive as the actress. “You want a leg or a breast?” she asks Cary Grant archly at the picnic in To Catch A Thief (1955). The words are Kelly's but the innuendo was planted by her director.

Hitchcock invariably encouraged this identification with food. On first arriving in New York in 1937, he courted journalists by inviting them to lunch in a number of different restaurants. Later, he invited them to dinner at the house he and his petite wife, Alma Reville, owned in Bel Air. He knew perfectly well that they would write about his gargantuan appetite but he also knew that the Hitchcock legend was fostered by it. They weren't being invited to eat with him so much as to watch him eat – infamously so as he devoured ice cream, followed by a steak which was then followed by ice cream and topped off with another steak. In a town in which thin, physically perfect people were ten a penny, Alfred Hitchcock, whose weight would balloon to between 250 pounds and over three hundred pounds, stood out both literally and metaphorically.

Although Hitchcock's obsession with food has been noted and commented upon in previous scholarly works, none has focussed on it exclusively as Professor Jan Olsson has done in Hitchcock à la Carte. What makes his book a significant addition to the research into the less populated areas of the Hitchcock oeuvre is that he spends considerable time on many of the individual episodes of his two long-running television series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–62) and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962–65). Hitchcock personally directed only eighteen of the television episodes, compared with the forty-nine by Robert Stevens and the twenty-seven by Paul Henreid (better known as Victor Laszlo in Casablanca (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1942)). Nevertheless, it is Hitchcock's influence that is paramount (appropriately) throughout, particularly since he introduced and usually closed each episode personally. Those Hitchcockian pieces to camera, which seemed to audiences to capture the essence of the Alfred Hitchcock personality they felt they knew “intimately,” were in fact written by Jimmie Allardice, who received more public recognition for his work on Hogan's Heroes (1965–71) and The Munsters (1964–66).

Food was an essential ingredient in the stories and Hitchcock revelled in their association with death. Olsson is convincing when he extends the analysis of food as mordant comedy and reads it as something rather more disturbing. He extracts from the fifty hours of taped conversation that François Truffaut recorded, which formed the basis of the French director's homage to his English master, Hitchcock's speculation on making a film about the role of food in the daily life of a city. It was to be

Beyond the jokey Hitchcock dictum that actors were to be treated like cattle lay another, darker, Hitchcock, a somewhat sadistic puppeteer, as actresses like Madeleine Carroll and Tippi Hedren found to their detriment. Behind the chuckling fat man, ostensibly happy to display for public consumption his morbidly obese body and his seemingly insatiable appetite, perhaps lurked a Hitchcock full of anger and self-loathing. Jan Olsson has written a book that helps us to understand both Hitchcocks a little more.