Feast Your Eyes

Few of my vintage cookery books have photographs.  Those that do usually make gravy look like an oil spill and vegetables look like the surface of an inhospitable planet.  Food styling was either non-existent or demented.

The photos in A Treasury of Great Recipes, though, are like everything else in the book: luxurious. It is hard for me to imagine all the technical challenges of trying to capture entire restaurants, or the Prices at home, with the cameras, film and printing processes of 1965 but the photographers represented in this book certainly seem to have done a fantastic job. Better than my scans can represent. 

In the above photo by William Claxton, we see the authors, in casual dress, in their own kitchen. There is a lot going on here, but let me just point out one detail: The monogrammed panels on either side of Mr. Price.

There is also a lot going on in the below photograph, not all of which I'm sure I understand, but you don't grow up in the home town of Knox Gelatin and not know an aspic when you see it. Or maybe that's just me.

Photo by Eliot Elisofon at La Pyramide restaurant.

A Treasury of Great Recipes

Okay, I know what you’re thinking: “What makes this cookbook so great?”  Er, actually you’re probably thinking; “Wait, Vincent Price?  Really?”

Like most people of a certain age, my most vivid memory of Vincent Price is from Michael Jackson’s Thriller, but what made him so perfect for Thriller was that he was already established in my mind and in everyone else’s as Creepy.  Über –creepy.  What performances gave me this impression,  I’m not sure.  I’d probably seen him in House of Wax, and in various roles here and there.  More recently I came across him in an old time radio episode where he played a guy who liked to wall people up in his pipe organ. (Suspense: June 1^st, 1944 Fugue in C Minor)  Very creepy.

What I didn’t know is that Vincent Price and his wife, Mary, a costume designer, were noted gourmands and art lovers. Check it out on Wikipedia.

When this book came across my desk at work, though, it wasn’t the name Vincent Price that made me fall in love with it.  Sure it adds a fillip of interest, and the photos of Vincent Price are quite something, but really all the photos are Quite Something.

I think of my favorite cookbooks as narrative cookbooks:  they tell a story with their recipes.  They offer the romance of fine cooking, the history of a great restaurant, or a slice of a certain lifestyle.  This book does all of those.  Divided into geographic areas the recipes are grouped not by meal or ingredient, but by restaurant.  Major restaurants are introduced with an essay, two photographs, and a reproduction of their menu. Each recipe is introduced with a paragraph on its virtues. One can imagine oneself the jet-setter of 1965 visiting all these restaurants or the housewife trying to re-create some of their glamour for her dinner party (à la Betty Draper).

The book itself is sumptuous.  Lots of color photographs on coated paper interspersed with the uncoated pages of text printed in two colors decorated with charming illustrations.  There are two ribbon bookmarks.  In the back:  pages for you to record not only your own recipes but notes on your favorite wines and your favorite guests. That last makes me wish the previous owner of this book had filled in a few pages.

And of course, it offers a generous helping of delicious absurdity.  The very first recipe is Truite Farcie Fernand Point (Stuffed Trout Fernand Point) from M. Point’s restaurant, Pyramide, in France.  The recipe is in three parts: Stuffing (four steps), Fish (five steps) and Garniture (seven steps). Per the introduction:   

At the Pyramide, the fabulous trout they serve are caught in a nearby brook and kept alive in an outdoor aquarium near the kitchen until the chef is just ready to cook them. Moral: Only the freshest fishes are truly delicious.

The garniture is mostly what you see on top of the fish: the shrimp topped with a mushroom, topped with a shaving of truffle.  Because the dead eyes of the fish weren’t disturbing enough, we thought we’d add some eyes made of mushrooms. As the caption notes: “Beautiful to look at, beautiful to eat”

A Brown Paper Package

It's here ! It's here!

I know this means I've crossed some sort of Rubicon, but for the first time rather than just browsing the used book stores or library book sales and buying things that turn up, I actually hunted down a book online and ordered it from a dealer. And I admit I paid more than $12.95, my previous high.

But look at it!

Besides the fact that it's really tough to get an image of a cover with that much faux-gold leafing, do you notice anything? Like the author?

Yes, that Vincent Price.  And there are pictures.  We will definitely be dipping into them in coming posts. Definitely.

An Authority

I came across a book at the library today: American Regional Cookery by Sheila Hibbing (1947 Little Brown & Co.). Around sixty years ago, some library worker cut of the inside flap from the dust jacket and pasted it inside the book. The flap copies stated:

The author of this cook book is an Authority.

Ahem. Well. There is no arguing with that capitalization. In her introduction to this second edition, Hibbing noted that while in the thirties she had to use all her arts of persuasion to get cooks to give up their secrets, now it was almost impossible to get them to shut up. What was worse, they were doing things like topping apple pie with marshmallows and adding raisins to puddings that should have no raisins. Modern Jiffy-mixes and ready-made products and their advertisements were making a wasteland of of our dinner tables.

Will a four-color layout for a pumpkin pie bring solace and contentment to a generation that has forgotten the trick of making a flaky crust?

Chez nous, we try to have a side of contentment at every meal, but solace is more of Sunday supper thing.

Rarebit and Ibsen

One of the key parts of an après theater cooking performance is the theater.  Really it doesn’t have to be theater.  It could be the symphony or the opera (but not The Hold Steady, or Avatar).   Something refined to begin with, so the refinement continues into the rarebit portion of the evening.  The ‘theat-ah’ just seems quintessential.  I had checked the various theater schedules for the spring and settled on Ibsen’s A Doll House performed by students at the University.

I do not have a great knowledge of Ibsen, but certainly enjoyed what I had seen.  I had a vague affinity for Ibsen because one always hears Chekhov compared to him.  I admit I like getting to know an acclaimed ‘Classic’ if for no other reason than to use it as Vega around which to build a lyre.

I dutifully checked out a copy of A Doll’s House from the library and read it the other night.  I found the transformation of Nora from a woman who hides macaroons from her husband to a woman willing to leave her home with nothing but a carpet bag in the middle of the night with no prospects to be unbelievable.  But then, I had been reading rather quickly and it can be hard to judge a play by reading it.

Alas, even in performance the abrupt change was a bit hard to accept.  Some of the few early  lines in that showed Nora’s  strength were cut, making her resolve in the final act even less creditable.   The actress did a fine job: she lost some but not all of her girlishness, et cetera.   It just didn’t work for me. 

The whole production seemed a bit heavy handed in holding Torvald up for scorn.  The actor who played him used to be my barista, and I always liked him.  His performance had some wonderful moments.  He played drunk rather well.  But there were a couple of times  when he would hold on to a word just a little too long, gesture a bit too dismissively for me not to think even he held Torvald in contempt.  I suspect the director encouraged him in this.

However it was good fodder for discussion, which is just what I wanted.  I had invited a couple that Matt and I have had over to the house quite a few times.  It turns out the lady of this couple was unable to make it, so the gentleman brought another young woman.  They both enjoyed the play.  He thought the writing was superb, the acting enjoyably bad.   She delighted in the humor while taking exception to the casting. We all agreed that the man who stumbled in late and fell asleep two rows in front of us had uncanny timing:  his snores rang out just as Nora was pleading with her Torvald in the last act.

Neither of our guests had had Welsh rarebit before, nor knew what it was. As I stirred the cheese into the ale, I explained about it being a classic chafing dish specialty.  The cheese melted with a quickness.  I always thought of chafing dish heat as gentle.  Gentle perhaps, but prodigious.  We all had to laugh when our gentleman guest admitted that he’d always thought a chafing dish was a bowl of water you dipped your hands in, getting them wet and then drying them in the wind leading to chafed hands.

This time we used Bass Ale instead of porter and the result was a less overpowering rarebit, but still rich and tangy.  I had been nervous having a new guest over and forgot to put out the sliced apples.  They would have been a nice counterpoint.

Matthew did not dislike it but he steadfastly refused to eat it poured over toast.  Rather he swirled hunks of bread through the rarebit in the chafing dish.  He later regretted not getting out some of the left over ham we have in the refrigerator, which I admit would have been a nice addition.

The best part was that the next morning I was able to clean the chafing dish and have it put away before noon.  No soaking, no scraping, no scrubbing.   Could the chafing dish become my new fondue pot?

My Time to Shine

Matt’s plan for dinner didn’t work out.  He asked if I could figure out something to make.  Could I? Most assuredly.    I love cooking with specialty ingredients, but I also love the challenge of whipping something up with whatever is in the cupboard.  Cooking with canned goods and non-perishable staples seems is very much in the ethos of many of my favorite cookbooks.  Plus, dinner gains a seasoning from frugal virtue.

Spying a can of corn back behind the boxes of spaghetti (why do we have three half finished boxes of spaghetti/) I immediately thought:  Corn Fritters! 

I really dislike canned corn except when it’s folded into light, airy batter and deep fried.  Then canned corn is perfect, giving a little pop of sweet savory goodness in the pillowy fritter.   I don’t think I’ve ever had corn fritters for breakfast, but because we always ate them with pancake syrup, they always had the camping-in-the-living-room-fun-time aura of Breakfast for Dinner.  We had them regularly when I was a kid.

Korn Fritters with Honey Butter are a staple of the Anchorage street fair and sporting event culinary scene. No Aces game is complete without a third period order of Korn Fritters, but they are not quite the same as my at-home rendition.  Furthermore Fritz, the chef of Nero Wolfe (the fictional detective and gourmand extraordinaire) was known to make corn fritters, although his were usually drizzled with wild thyme honey from Greece.

But of course, the corn fritters I make from the recipe copied from my mother’s Betty Crocker have a flavor all their own. It's made up of the salty richness of deep fried batter, the of the velvety finish of that wooden table with its varnish worn off, my brothers' jokes and sweet sticky pancake syrup. Which is appropriate given how sappy I'm feeling about corn fritters. Maybe tomorrow should be salad night? 

Easter Bonus

Some advice from 250 Ways to Prepare Meat, a 1950 cookbook from the Culinary Arts Institute:

Something Old, Something New

In a step back from my “Mid Century Modern” cookbooks, this weekend I’m exploring a modern/ancient foodway. Modern because it’s a recipe that I got from The Internet and because it’s quite fashionable right now. But ancient because it’s bread. Simple bread. The kind a peasant might throw together and still have time to harvest the grapes or turnips or what have you. I’m talking about Jim Lahey’s No-Knead Bread. It’s got 4 ingredients: flour water salt and yeast, and requires about 15 minutes of work. Hours of rising and baking time, but seriously no kneading.

I first tried this a few weeks ago working directly from the recipe that was in the New York Times a few years back. I learned a few things along the way. Well, no. I learned One Thing. Active Yeast ≠ Instant Yeast. Okay, okay rookie mistake. But when you go to the store and the only kind of yeast you see is Active, you figure that must be what the recipe called for. There was no mention of it being hard to find and I’m in a Safeway store, not exactly a tiny, limited options kind of place.
But when my bread seemed to be taking twice as long to do what the recipe said it was I looked into it further and discovered that there is a difference. Apparently yeast comes indifferent levels of liveliness and instant is the liveliest.

So yesterday while Matt and I were out and about scouting locations for Flat Stanley photo shoots, we were in midtown and I remembered that Jenny had mentioned the Natural Pantry probably has Instant Yeast. So in we went. The Natural Pantry is an alternative grocery store. It moved into one of the spaces left empty after the grocery wars of a few years ago. The first thing I noticed on entering was the smell of incense.
We moved quickly through the store, looking for baking supplies. I stifled my urge to stop and look at all the weird and wonderful products on the shelves (Dr. Oetker’s Trio Treat anyone?) We found a baking aisle but there was no yeast there. Alternative flours and sugars of various refinements, but no yeast. We scanned the aisles again. No yeast of any kind. I lost Matt somewhere along the way. I finally found a young woman restocking the organic lip balms and she brought me to a refrigerated case where I found a one pound brick of Instant Yeast. Refrigerated! Of course!

Okay, so I’ve got my instant yeast. But rather than make the same recipe again, my impatience gets the better of me and I go for the newer, quicker recipe. Only four hours of rising! Since I get started at about 5 pm, this means fresh bread at around ten pm. Matt asks if I need any help, but it’s really just a matter of stirring the ingredients together and letting them rise.

The recipe states ‘warm room temperature, about 70 degrees’. None of our rooms is regularly kept at 70 degrees. Unless the fireplace is going, we’re in more of a 60-65 range. I want to stick as close as possible to the recipe, so I turn up the thermostat in the reading room to 70 and use that as my proofing box.
About five hours and two steps later, I have my rustic loaf of bread. It has thick, crisp crust. I would describe it as heavier than chewy. The loaf I made a few weeks ago with the longer rise time and wrong kind of yeast was chewier and tastier. Maybe I should have baked this loaf a little longer? Matt was not terribly impressed, but he was really in the mood for chicken wings anyway.

I am next on the list for Jim Lahey’s book at the library, so I’ll see what kind of improvements I might make next time. Who knows, maybe I'll be able to whip up a loaf that would work for the Welsh Rarebit.