A grand day out

To begin your day with your nice tax lady, who in twenty minutes calculates that you owe the feds $36, and that the state of Illinois, I repeat actually the state of Illinois, owes you $84, is to begin a grand day out.

(Her office is a sight. It never changes from one year to the next. Carpet unspeakable -- not necessarily dirty, just unspeakable -- then see the ancient, leather, tufted, nail-studded couch in the "marsala" shade so popular a few years ago, the same shade I daresay we all once called maroon, when the couch was made. [Maroon: from the Fr. marron, chestnut; It. marrone, the same.] Two ancient wood-veneer bureaus stand directly beside each other to your right, of what use God knows. The lady's own desk is purely office-functional, carrying a huge flatscreen computer on top. Her chair is office-functional too, some kind of black mesh or black cushion or something; there is a fancier tufted sort of red leather nail-studded armchair for the client to sit in across from her, while he peers over at the computer screen at an awkward angle. Another bureau or two, or a filing cabinet, sit cramped to one's left on the other side of the tiny room. After that the eye is drawn to a waste of decorations. We see unused photo holders, their empty twirly prongs sticking up out of odd corners next to monkey sock puppets, children's artworks and children's portraits, and piles of envelopes and papers, and the crooked matched framed photos of nice nature scenes, the beach, the woods, a meadow, slung about on the wood paneled walls. Of course we are seated in a sort of inner sanctum, beyond the foyer, beyond the secretary's desk, carpet still unspeakable, past the ancient confusing double doors that seem not to open either out or in without a struggle, and the half-dead trailing pothos yearning at basement-style glass block windows. There are no windows at all here, in the lady's office. A diploma or certificate hangs on the wall. And lost in the mess is a photo of Mother (I have no doubt), smiling out from more dark paneling on some Occasion. Little do any of us realize what will be the picture of us that gets immortalized into a frame with a faux misty cloud accompanying, and a poem about our worth printed in some meditative font. I don't sneer, I simply take note. Meanwhile my tax lady herself is sharp as a tack, a pretty forty-five perhaps, with a complexion just going velvety with a bit of middle age, and bright brown eyes and bright brown hair a little differently styled each year. She has lovely small differently pointed teeth, which show when she smiles -- "wow, they've sold your mortgage already haven't they." I know, I answer, I thought that wasn't done anymore? -- wasn't that the big problem, in 2008? She shrugs, her pink lipstick softly gleaming. She wears soft purple or mint-green blouses, and this time a parure of greenish-moonstone earrings and necklace. Her right hand works the number keyboard at lightning speed.)    

Thirty-six dollars, plus eighty. I could have hugged her.

That done, let's go buy a Monstera deliciosa, a plant wrongly once called, it seems, a "split-leaf" philodendron. I have wanted one for a while, but never more so than since seeing, for the first time on the big screen at a real theater, All About Eve. Margo Channing has a huge Monstera in her home. I bought a tiny $5 specimen a week ago, labelled hopefully monstera but with its leaves uncut. Then today I turned a corner in my neighborhood big-box home improvement store and spotted three of the real thing. I picked the biggest. I now think of it as "Bette Davis plant."

Gardening books won't tell you why it is called deliciosa, except that it bears a fruit which is poisonous when young but sweet when mature. That takes a year. Perhaps the people who compile the books don't actually grow plants. I think the real reason it is M. deliciosa is because the roots, actually the roots, are sweetly fragrant. Fragrant enough, on the first day at least, to perfume a room.

Next, we'll go to the local woods carrying a friend's borrowed binoculars. I now live five minutes away from scenes that were a great treat to visit in childhood. When you look through binoculars, the grasses and water seem like a painting up close. I saw an American coot -- a duck, not a person -- and I may even have spotted a green-headed teal, another duck. The great heron, who quit flying when I arrived in my obvious white parka, stood still among the grasses, just a slim wash of blue-gray and a watching black eye in low beige thickets.

To return home is to see snowdrops -- surely? -- for the first time in a garden. This is the garden I was telling you about last summer, the one tended for twenty years by one woman who didn't ask permission of the condo association or the village or anybody, but simply started planting and kept on. Last fall I added tulip bulbs, which are sprouting also. If all goes well they should turn out orange. But these are snowdrops.

Last project of all was to carry on making my retro '50s art corner in my living room. At Allposters.com I found the art of Donna Mibus, who I assumed on account of her output must be some legend whom I, in my ignorance, was only just discovering. Not exactly, although to have one's art for sale at Allposters, and art.com, and Etsy, and featured in the magazine Atomic Ranch, is something of a feat. She explains at Etsy that she is a grandmother and only began painting when she turned fifty. I -- and many other people -- love her "MCM" (mid-century modern, i.e., retro '50s, and isn't it great that in Roman numerals MCM means 1900?) love Donna Mibus' retro '50s art. It's all full of flat bright pastel colors, egg-chairs, and elongated cats and dogs gazing at elongated '50s-worthy visiting aliens. Pairing it with a garish Debra Paget movie poster for Princess of the Nile, and a pastel cocktail-shaker-with-martini print, seemed just right. I must tell her.

   

Very small matters, quickly

Very minor points, but they struck me:

• a woman judge shows up in the courtroom scenes of an old episode of Perry Mason, which I watched late one night for the fabulous '50s clothes and makeup; who knew that such a thing could occur prior to our own enlightened era? 
• consider new meaning in the phrase "to have a pair." Nowadays it refers to testicles and courage, and is only vulgar. In the Nero Wolfe mystery Too Many Clients, Rex Stout uses it in an entirely different context. Wolfe's factotum (I guess) Archie Goodwin says to a helpful acquaintance, " 'Come off it. You haven't even got a pair.' " Any young person reading this today would probably laugh happily at such a startling modernism, but also miss the point. In 1956 it was a poker reference, wasn't it? And it meant "you haven't even got [so lousy a hand as] a pair [of any two cards]." 
• and, Archie's meals so far sound delightful, as cooked by Wolfe's chef, Fritz. Wolfe also employs an orchid valet, but more on that at another time. Chapter 3 opens with this:

"There was a bowl of chestnut soup, a cucumber-and-shrimp sandwich on toast, a roast-beef sandwich on a hard roll, home-baked, a pile of watercress, an apple baked in white wine, and a glass of milk."

I take it Archie's glass of milk is going to be a running gag throughout Rex Stout's series.

Finally, your Shakespeare quote for the day. We'll pick at random as usual. Perhaps it will, coincidentally, have to do with mystery or crime? People say everything is in Shakespeare.

Oddly, it might --

King Pandion, he is dead
All thy friends are lapped in lead

-- but it's from The Passionate Pilgrim, grouped in "Poems of Doubtful Authenticity."

New views, new wines

First, an old view. It won't do to be very sentimental, but I finally had a lilac bush blooming in my long-time-rented backyard, the day I moved out. Very tiny, no  more than a foot high. Long may it prosper.

When the men sighed and gathered up their padded ropes and straps and were paid and left -- this will sound horrible until you read the innocent details --- then it was time to put dishes in cabinets and arrange furniture. I had no idea, when one moves, how much time one spends standing around thinking where this or that should go. You also spend a lot of time walking back and forth from room to room, because no place is familiar and every thing is out of place. And like Lucia moving into Mallards, you are quite sure which boxes contain books and which contain linens, except it turns out they don't, and they all have to be rummaged through again. When everyone decides it's time to stop and rest, we open a nice bottle of wine.

2012 Yalumba shiraz/viognier (red and white together!) blend, juicy and respectable for $9.99.

Time, then, to get accustomed to new views. Third floor. We are positively in the branches of a magnolia tree. Nicholas hasn't slimmed down yet.

The settling in, and deciding swiftly, thinking "I can always change it" but you likely won't, which cabinets are most convenient for plates and which for cups, makes me feel a bit as if I am on vacation -- with the result that I am not sure I want to go anywhere else this summer for a real vacation, and be required to settle in there too. Luckily I am still supplied with a bottle of Fenn Valley, Michigan's "Cabaret" rose for patio sipping. Hands down it is the best rose I have ever tasted. I say that even while forthrightly acknowledging my pro-Michigan bias, both for its little summertime lakes and its wines. You want aromas of strawberries and cherry blossom, you want refreshing dryness and a healthy puckery acidity to go with all the season's grilled meats and fruit salads? Here you are.

Retail, at the Fenn Valley tasting room, about $13.

Then we opened another bottle of wine, after we had moved some more things and felt it was time to rest again. A friend had given me a housewarming present for just this purpose. "When you're all settled in for the day and everyone wants to relax," he said. It's a 2011 Domaine Louis Michel & Fils, Chablis Premier Cru, Montmain. In other words, it is a French chardonnay, given little oak treatment or none, from the Chablis region -- of Burgundy, tres drole! -- and of the highest legal quality, Premier Cru ("first growth"). One can call it creamy or steely or try to think up new fruit metaphors, or one can say, as I do to customers about French wine in general, that it seems to have an interior core that you almost eat. Withal the prime image in my mind as I contemplate this wine is of a calm and regal Grace Kelly in a plain mint-green satin gown. I think she did a publicity photo like that once. Retail, about $40.
 

A few weeks after the move came that gorgeous early June full moon. My balcony faces east.

Half the reason for the move was that I wanted to be closer to work, a ten-minute commute being so much nicer than a forty-minute one. And here is some of what I have been learning at work lately.

2013 Muga Rioja blanco. If you should tire a bit of your summertime chardonnays, pinot grigios, and sauvignon blancs, venture forth please into the world of Spanish white wines. French, too, of course, or why not Italian, or those nice little Portuguese vinho verdes? but this one happens to be a white Rioja. The best of them tend to have a lovely floral aroma plus, often, some of a chardonnay's luxurious mouthfeel without necessarily its weight or its vanilla-like effects.

Meanwhile I continue to study the set of "Mary's apartment" from the Mary Tyler Moore show, to understand how I may make my completely pristine place, new carpet and fresh paint and all, resemble hers. It's not that I want the beige velour couches with the decorative flaps hanging off the bottom and brushing the brown shag carpet (remember those flaps? when you got new couches they stuck up for a few days until gravity pulled them correctly down), and certainly it's not that I want the brown shag carpet. What I want is the look of homeyness, the look of someone's personality absolutely impressed on her surroundings. Study the scenes of her apartment closely, and then perhaps those of Ted Baxter's and then Murray and Marie's, and you'll see there was genius going on, I'm convinced of it, among the set decorators of the show. For "Mary" they were thinking young, single, not much money, a lot of friends: therefore, a lot of hand-me-downs and flea market finds, no one table or curio-armoire to match any other, and there are too many of them -- she wants exactly what she wants, there -- but she seems to have easy seating for twenty and (probably) her grandmother's old bizarre little cabinet nailed to the wall, along with one hip '70s art print and her famous initial "M."

Images from Hooked on Houses blog

As for Ted, his place is exactly what it should be. Like him, it's sleek, silly, and grotesque. Combinations of big colored balls swirl descending from the ceiling on steel sticks, to masquerade as art; pictures of Ted's face, and a lot of matching chrome-edged surfaces, beam out from everywhere. If this reminds you of where you live, you have interior decor problems. And even Murray and Marie Slaughter's home is exactly right for them. One carefully chic oversized metal wall sculpture, and a lot of carefully crowded, soft brown sofas make a background of just some wealth, some warmth, and some slightly too careful, middle aged sophistication.

I have so far watched only five or six episodes, none earlier than the fifth season. YouTube must have already caught up with whoever pirate-uploaded any of the first four, and shut them down just as they did all the divine Joan Hickson Miss Marple programs. Anyway from what I can see, Mary Richards and her friends and co workers still, in the mid 1970s, don't drink much wine. Lou Grant keeps scotch in his desk drawer and Mary gets her boyfriend "a drink." At her parties -- and really, who everlastingly wants to socialize with her coworkers? -- she drinks a glass of orange juice which I am sure is meant to be a screwdriver. If I hear mention of a grape varietal or a region of Europe, I will let you know.

Bon Appetit's Alsatian style Chicken in beer and cream sauce, 1987

It's been ages, my fatheads, since we simply cooked something new. On a gray rainy morning in April we will venture back to Bon Appétit magazine's hardbound collection, French Country Favorites, published in 1987. We'll choose Chicken in Beer and Cream Sauce, "Alsatian style."

And we'll do it our way. The recipe tells us to braise the chicken pieces. I don't do that, since for me the result of braising is a fussy, rubbery, thick-skinned mess. I manfully admit my technique is lacking, tug my forelock at those who do it well, and, re: braising instructions: bake either a whole chicken or chicken pieces in the oven instead, collect its drippings in a clear Pyrex cup, and then siphon off the good juices from under their layer of fat with a bulb baster. That gives you the chicken-y base liquid you need to put together the sauce that braising would have created. Remember one of our favorites, Chicken with Olive Sauce, done just this way? I even took a picture of the cup.

And a picture of the beginnings of a sauce, any sauce, which will probably include onions.

For our Chicken in Beer and Cream, Alsatian style, do take care what kind of beer you use. Three cups is a lot. Dinner will have a whiff of beer bitterness anyway. "Avoid dark," the recipe warns, and maybe circa 1987 that simple warning would have sufficed, but nowadays you must take even greater care to avoid any American ultra-hoppy craft beers. You might try Wisconsin-based Pecatonica, whose Alphorn ale and (ultra prize-winning) Amber ale I was lucky enough to be able to try yesterday. Both superb.

Our retro 1987 Alsatian recipe also called for a thickening of both a roux (butter and flour melted together) and three egg yolks. So French! So rich. But I thought this seemed too rich, so I let the beer, cream, and chicken essence simply cook down to a nice consistency.

Off we go, then; and for an accompaniment, why not a lithe and delicate Alsatian riesling, or possibly more of the beer? 

Chicken in Beer and Cream Sauce, Alsatian style

1 4-pound chicken, cut into serving pieces
1 Tbsp butter
1 large onion, chopped
1 large garlic clove, minced
1 large bay leaf
2 whole cloves
3 cups beer
1 cup whipping cream
pinch nutmeg

Bake the chicken pieces in a shallow pan in a 325 F oven for 45 minutes to an hour -- all dark-meat thighs and drumsticks can bake longer, about an hour and a half, and will be all the more succulent.

Meanwhile, make the sauce. Melt 1 Tablespoon butter in a heavy skillet. Add and soften the diced onion and then the minced garlic, taking care only to warm the garlic and not burn it. Add the bay leaf and cloves. Pour in the beer -- if your chicken is done by this time you may use some of the beer to deglaze the roasting pan, and then pour in that -- reduce heat, and simmer and reduce the sauce slowly.  Add the juices, defatted a la the Pyrex cup and the bulb baster, from the chicken roasting pan.

Pour in the cream, add salt and pepper to taste, and continue slowly simmering and reducing the sauce until it is of a nice thickness. Drop in a small pinch of nutmeg.

New cocktail: MAILER-DAEMON failure notice: "Mailbox full"

Why on earth anybody responds to a famous author's writings is beyond me. I guess we all think we're going to give the great man pause in some superb way, or we're going to be discovered, too. All we get is a ding in our inboxes, encouraging us to subscribe to whatever online magazine the famous author writes for; or we get a MAILER DAEMON failure notice. This time it was "mailbox full," which I gather is unusual in these post-floppy-disk days. Oh well. Here's what I wrote him. His groupies, know him as VDH.  

Dear Mr. Victor Davis Hanson,

Every once in a while, I think your editors ask you to write something optimistic, and the "Still Dazzling" article seems to me to be the latest. Right on schedule too, around Christmastime. They always seem to follow a more heartfelt (and depressing) piece chronicling the disintegration of life in rural CA. Anyway thank you for the dose of good cheer.

You're right, it's all about ordinary people carrying on, the trouble is it's also the ordinary people who foot the bills, and I sometimes think authentic crisis will come when ordinary people figure out they have no voice left except tax revolt. Then we may see what the government is willing to do to get their hands on the money.

I also agree with something Dennis Prager said years ago, that liberalism is a religion. Using politics to fight it does not work. Eighteenth century political cycles, i.e. voting every two years, move too slowly to keep up with 21st century, left-wing compassion tyranny. Or royal edicts, for that matter. I sometimes think a true opposition leader, when he comes, will be a religious figure -- not even necessarily a pastor or Bible-thumper, but someone with some kind of inner core that will be impervious to the weapons of the entrenched media/academic elite. I look forward to the first president who does not have a White House press corps, and sends no representatives to "the Sunday morning shows." I think maybe he'll choose to live in Detroit, or Branson, or maybe even (if he has a lot of imagination) Mexico City. Why not? 

You said the ordinary American keeps on working, taking care of his family, ignoring pop culture, and doing what he excels at. Good for you, yes, I think you're right. Years ago when I still read the Chicago Tribune I read an article of yours in which you wrote that what distinguishes today's America from earlier, declining empires was the presence in our midst of an elite which loathed the country and fought hard for its worldwide contempt and collapse. Even the Romans, you said, did not have that. I've always thought that was the best thing you have ever written and the thing historians will remember you for. 

Thanks again for the dose of Christmas cheer. Looking forward to next year's version.

Best



Drown your frustrations with a little something from a very pre-floppy-disk era. We're going to resurrect and re-christen the Calvert Party Encyclopedia's [1961] "Princeton cocktail," a delight not only from 1961 but from the early 1900s. Paul Clarke at Serious Eats records that the Princeton was created by "New York barman George Kappeler, who mixed it [ca. 1900] along with other Ivy League-named drinks at the Holland House bar." It must be true, since our Encyclopedia lists the recipe for the Yale on the very next page. The Princeton is simpler. It requires two of our favorites, gin and port, plus orange bitters.

Specifically it requires Old Tom gin, a style sweeter than today's usual gins. Mr. Clarke says that if you can't find new makers of Old Tom, the flavor can be approximated with a mix of regular gin and a bit of simple syrup. I suggest regular gin and -- why not? -- a bit of apple cider, or possibly even apple cider liqueur. Let's try Journeyman Distillery O.C.G. (Old Country Goodness) apple cider.

Therefore, our new cocktail becomes --

The MAILER-DAEMON

1 jigger (1 and 1/2 ounces) gin
generous dash -- say, 1/4 teaspoon -- apple cider liqueur, such as Journeyman
1/2 ounce -- a little less than half a jigger -- port
2 dashes orange bitters

Stir all ingredients in a mixing glass with 4 ice cubes. Strain into a cocktail glass. The usual garnish is a twist of lemon peel, which seems to me a jarring note. Port and lemon? No. A little cube of apple with peel seems better. Mr. Clarke by the way says the gin and bitters only should be mixed together with ice; after they are strained into the cocktail glass, the port is poured carefully down the side of the glass, so that it  may settle prettily at the bottom. Kind of like voters.  

History in the basement/Borden's Peanut Clusters, 1941

October 9, 1941.

My mother was twelve and a half.  My father turned eighteen the week before. Very likely their parents and households, living in the Chatham/South Shore neighborhoods of Chicago, took in a copy of this paper: the Chicago Daily Tribune.

Someone in the house I live in, in what are now the far southeast suburbs, used a sheet of the newspaper that day -- I presume -- to line a drawer of a (really magnificent) sideboard. It's a great heavy piece of furniture, I don't know my woods but I think it is made of something better and redder than oak, of simple and very austerely (maybe even clumsily) curving thick side panels, two deep recesses, and a central tier of four plain drawers. The whole thing is about eight feet long, the top a foot and a half deep. One imagines Sunday breakfasts of eggs and sausages laid out in silver salvers here; but perhaps the great hulk merely displayed the family china. The handles on the drawers, simple metal loops clearly "all original" as antique guidebooks say, are falling to decay. When the house was the only farm around, this sideboard must have been among the family's prize possessions.

What it must weigh! Who decided it was too great and ugly for use, and put it into storage in the basement? When? When was the last time it was moved? For twenty-five years now, one of the recesses has held a large, stuffed glossy bag, which looks for all the world like something you would collect grass clippings in. Twenty-five years ago, my mother was sixty, my father just turned sixty-six. I moved in as a young newlywed looking forward to starting a family. I spotted the old crumpled newspaper in a half-open drawer even then.

Why on earth Vichy France decreed that one may only drink aperitifs and digestifs for four hours a day, and never on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, is beyond me. Note that wine and beer seem not to have been a problem. Perhaps the information was simply totally garbled in translation, or perhaps there have always been French killjoys, and collusion with the Germans brought them out.

Below, a finely sketched lady contemplates, or "is romantic." It's a refreshing look in advertising, isn't it? -- accustomed as we are to full-color photographs of endlessly smiling maniacs. The perfume is "Houbigant's Chantilly." The lady wears gloves and carries a fan, but has her hair tied up in a strangely juvenile ribbon. I had thought we were to understand that the ball is over, and she is preparing thoughtfully for bed, but why would a lady keep her gloves on that long? Possibly the hair ribbon was not juvenile at all, but was rather the latest in fashion. 

Below, one crumpled page, entire. Look carefully and you may also spot a tiny beer ad -- it's near the windmill -- and some good looking shoes.

On the other side of the sheet there is one big article about the war going badly for the Soviets against Nazi Germany. Elsewhere one finds little blurbs about Churchill refusing to call Iran anything other than Persia, and about George Burns and Gracie Allen opening a new radio show on WGN that night. Otherwise what we have here is the back end of the paper, mostly ads. Liquor for $4 or $5 a fifth, a man's "topcoat" for $19.

Now in the intervening twenty-five years while the sideboard sat, the children have grown up, mother is 85 and dad died nine years ago. I dig up the paper from that jammed drawer and photograph it and write about it, because after this long time renting from (now ex)-in-laws, my goal is to live somewhere else by next year. Time flies, apartment hunting solo will be a new experience, moving is hectic. So this is just a little project that I did always want to take care of.

And, yes, there's a recipe. Please try some really retro Peanut Clusters, from 1941. Just think, since printed material has a copyright life of 75 years, if I had waited only two more years I could have safely proffered this creation as if it were my own. As it is I am content to credit the Borden milk company, by way of the Chicago Daily Tribune of that day. I would, however, suggest substituting dark chocolate for the sweet chocolate called for. Look at the amount of sweetened condensed milk required, and you will understand why. 

Peanut Clusters

1/2 pound sweet chocolate
2/3 cup (one 7 and 1/2 ounce can) Borden's sweetened condensed milk
1 cup whole peanuts

Melt chocolate in a double boiler, then remove from heat and stir in condensed milk and peanuts. Drop from teaspoon onto a buttered baking dish or plate, and let cool and solidify for several hours.

There is this, too.

 

(Wine and) snickerdoodles, snow and watercolors, and ....

The gentleman friend was rather crabby. He was due to leave for the tropics the next day, a prospect which should have thrilled him. "Going home," "back to my people," he calls it. Maybe. Only it's not much of a thrill or a vacation when a man has to launch himself at the problems of recovering the estate, whilst convicted criminals have just used their right of appeal to, perhaps, finger a family friend in the outrage. Then he must fire bad lawyers and hire better ones, even as he bleeds money. Will it all prove so very worthwhile, just to get that hacienda away from winter weather?

Maybe. As I drove home though the snowy woods, admiring the views, I thought "I must learn to paint watercolors." Watercolors, so I have read and so I have been instructed in art appreciation classes, require much training and discipline on the part of the artist. ("And yet they're the first paints we give children," a professor long ago huffed.) One opens the little tray, picks up a brush, wets it, and then tries to layer on washes of color judiciously enough to let plenty of white paper show through any scene, thus giving the style "its characteristic sparkle." I saw lots of sparkling white as I drove, which made me think that, done up as a watercolor, this would be easy. I saw a wash of very pale, translucent blue sky layered over with delicate stipples of rich brown -- that's the snow-covered branches of bushes and trees -- going back forever to a wintry-white vanishing point. The long firm streaks of brownish-black crowding the foreground would be the trunks of trees half slathered in snow and shadow, marshalled against the declining late-afternoon sun. All the rest of the space would be judiciously exposed watercolor-white paper. At the bottom of the picture plane would lay shadows. They are a challenge. Are shadows on the snow blue, or blue-ish, or the most faint and palest of all purples? Or are they grey? Could we, the artist, take a bit of artistic license, and touch on a frail and lovely pink that wasn't really there, but that often seems to be there in a winter sunset or a winter cloud?

But we intend to bake snickerdoodles. We venture from friends to snow to watercolors to snickerdoodles because, -- well, the friend does art, too, and doesn't like snow and had never heard of, or tasted, a snickerdoodle until we at Pluot baked them for him. And these cookies have to do with wine, which closes the circle of our blog-interest nicely. Don't you think?

Snickerdoodles of course are those rich butter cookies whose variations always include a generous teaspoon of cinnamon. Of their strange name, the Betty Crocker Ultimate Cookie Book says only that it has "amused people for centuries.” According to the American Heritage Cookbook (1965), “New England cooks had a penchant for giving odd names to their dishes ... snickerdoodles come from a tradition of this sort that includes Graham Jakes, Jolly Boys, Brambles, Tangle Breeches, and Kinkawoodles.” Every cookery source on God's clean earth, in print or on line since 1965, quotes this asseveration, so it must be true. However, the recipe for Snickerdoodles which American Heritage then offers includes nuts, currants, and raisins. If you have ever eaten glorious, real, plain Snickerdoodles, I feel sure you will agree all that clutter is not necessary and is close to being an abomination

My version of snickerdoodles, from a junior high school home ec. class by way of the Betty Crocker cookbook I should think, calls for cream of tartar and baking soda as the leavening agents. This may be a hint as to the recipe’s age. Before the invention of baking powder, cooks would have used baking soda to raise this "small cake." But baking soda needs an acid to work with, to create the carbon dioxide bubbles that lift a batter.

Many acids will do the trick; which is why recipes calling for baking soda may also call for lemon or orange juice. But cream of tartar, another acid, serves even better, being flavorless and conveniently available as a dry powder. Mixing two parts cream of tartar to one part baking soda creates what old-fashioned cooks would have called a single-acting baking powder, that is, a leavening which works as soon as a batter is moistened. A baked good made this way must go in the oven as soon as possible, to capture the bubbling and rising that is already going on. Recipes calling for baking soda and a simple liquid acid like orange juice should warn you of this.

When in the early1800s some bright soul had the idea of adding corn starch to a single-acting baking powder, he found himself with a ready-made leavening which could act twice. The corn starch kept the other two powders dry enough to permit them to raise a batter when it was moistened, and again when it went into the hot oven. To this day our commercial baking powders, dependable and convenient, their soda and acid all in one, are still labeled -- mysteriously, for most of us -- “double acting.”

Cream of tartar itself is, or once was, a byproduct of wine making. Tartaric acid (ah-ha), naturally present in grapes, collects on the inside of old wine barrels. When scraped off and mixed with potassium hydroxide, it creates a usable salt, potassium bitartrate or cream of tartar. If you have ever seen strange, harmless crystals clinging to a cork, or floating in a wine bottle, you have seen a wine's tartrates precipitating out. They especially cling to a cork when a wine has been abruptly chilled. The nice people at Wikipedia tell us that these are also called "wine diamonds," a very pretty term. Almost as cute as snickerdoodles.

Now you may bake. And after that, paint. We'll see what stories he brings home from the tropics.

Snickerdoodles 

Have ready: ½ cup butter, softened; 3/4 cup sugar; 1 egg

Mix in a bowl: 1 and ½ cups flour, 1 teaspoon cream of tartar, ½ teaspoon baking soda, 1/8 teaspoon salt

Mix in a separate bowl: 4 Tablespoons sugar, 2 teaspoons cinnamon

Preheat the oven to 400. Cream together the butter and sugar until light, and then add the egg. Mix thoroughly, and add the dry flour mixture. Combine well, and shape the dough into balls. Roll them in the cinnamon sugar mixture, and bake on ungreased cookie sheets 8-10 minutes. Makes about 30-35 cookies.

 

Retro hot fudge water pudding

It's strange to see a revolution take place in Kiev, to see the central square of a city burn and to know that citizens have been killed by their government's snipers. Strange to see an arrested former prime minister released from prison, and to know a current dictator has tried to flee the capital but has apparently been stopped. We look at the photo of the priest standing amid the smoke with what looks like a knight's shield on his back. Below it we joke that he is a "level 4 cleric," or "came to preach Jesus and whip ass and he's all out of Jesus." Here are people, strangely, who have made and lived through something that the revolutionists in Paris did, two hundred years ago; something like what our own founding fathers did, too. See the photos of them massing tensely a few days ago, they all in their thrown-together clothes and hats and helmets looking like something out of a Bruegel painting. The survivors will talk about these days all their lives. In his book The Closing of the American Mind (1987) Allan Bloom once wrote that the three most transcendent moments in the human experience are the creative process, consummated love, and victory in a just war.

Below, obviously the plate is prettier than the piece of Retro Hot Fudge Water Pudding. I thought we might need something to snack on while we're reading about Kiev, and, well, I still had the picture.
 

We get this recipe from Gold Medal Jubilee Select Recipes 1880-1955, the same little pamphlet that gave us the Buttermilk Spice Cake of a few days ago. I've called it Hot Fudge Water Pudding to draw attention to the last ingredient required, which is one and three-quarters cups of hot water, poured right on the batter before it goes into the oven. It's the kind of recipe twist that just shrieks, "try me!"

The pamphlet groups this pudding into the chapter "Popular recipes of 1940-1950," and explains that, being a sort of chocolate upside-down cake, it may constitute the original upside down cake of any variety. "In the old days," the authors say, "women poured heavy molasses in the bottom of the pan" to make the cake. Pouring hot water over a brown sugar topping mimics molasses.

The cake is by no means gorgeous to look at, but it's fun to put together and not too sweet.

Hot fudge water pudding

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Set out a 9 x 9 x 2 baking pan. In a bowl, mix:

• 1 cup flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 2 Tablespoons cocoa

Stir in:

• 1/2 cup milk
• 2 Tablespoons butter, melted

Blend in 1 cup chopped nuts. Spread in the pan (the batter is thick). In another bowl, mix:

• 1 cup packed brown sugar
• 1/4 cup cocoa

Sprinkle this mixture over the batter in the pan. Then, pour over the batter 1 and 3/4 cups hot water. Bake 45 minutes. The cake mixture will rise to the top and the chocolate sauce will sink to the bottom. Serve warm, with or without whipped cream.

 

Retro buttermilk spice cake, 1955

A retro cake for retro people, and what could be nicer? Please enjoy also the lovely advertisements reproduced below, from about the same era. It seems there was once a company called Textron, which made fabric for parachutes and then for ladies' underthings. Could both have been silk? This lady looks as though, while rocking in her quaint little winter-birdhouse chair, she is contemplating getting up and having a piece of cake.

The recipe comes from the Gold Medal Flour Jubilee Select Recipes booklet, published in 1955. It's specifically from the chapter titled "Popular recipes of 1920-1930 brought up to date." If you don't happen to have buttermilk on hand, you'll start with a lemon or a bottle of vinegar: use 1 Tbsp. of either lemon juice or vinegar to sour 1 cup of whole milk. Let the milk sit out at room temperature while you prepare the cake.

Buttermilk spice cake

• 2 cups plus 2 Tbsp flour
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 3/4 tsp baking soda
• 3/4 tsp ground cloves
• 3/4 tsp ground cinnamon
• 3/4 cup packed brown sugar
• 1/2 cup "soft shortening (such as Spry, Swift'ning)" -- I used equal parts butter and vegetable shortening
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 3 eggs

Preheat the oven to 350 F, and butter and flour two 9-inch cake pans. Mix in a bowl the flour, sugar, salt, leavenings, and spices. Add the brown sugar and mix in well, breaking up any lumps. Mix in the shortening and then the buttermilk or soured milk, beating well with an electric beater. Add the eggs, beating well again. Pour into the prepared pans and bake for about 35 to 40 minutes. Cool the cakes on racks and then frost and fill as desired.

For the frosting, I used the recipe for Quick Cream Icing on the next page of the Gold Medal booklet. Blend 1 and 1/2 cups sifted powdered sugar, 1/2 tsp vanilla, and 2 Tbsp cream or milk to make a thin icing. Spread it between the layers. Then, make another batch of the icing to drizzle over the top of the cake, or perhaps just dust the top with sifted powdered sugar.

 

 Image source, Ad Library from eBay.

Sour coon pfeffer (racoon pickled in onions and sour wine)

I ask you.


(Photo from wikipedia.)

I have become passionately devoted, if I wasn't already, to library cast off book sales, and especially to rummaging about on shelves and in boxes thereat, hunting for old obscure cooking pamphlets. There's no end to the gems, from no end of sources -- very often from foodstuffs manufacturers or kitchen appliance manufacturers (whose recipes can be quite good), or from women's civic groups or church groups. A recent favorite is Right eating ... keeps you swinging' published by the Carnation canned milk company in 1964, and intended for an audience of older teens and young adults about ready to go out on their own for the first time. ("Why be healthy? Because it's so much more fun than being unhealthy." Very true.)

Now I happen to have been just thumbing through Favorite Recipes from New Glarus, Wisconsin, published by the New Glarus Tourism Association sometime before September 3, 1977, which is the date inscribed inside the cover by a previous owner of the pamphlet. It looks very clean and unused, by the way. Many of the recipes in this one are followed by an explanatory little sentence, as "a family favorite," "an Amish favorite," "we have prepared this for Christmas in our home for 55 years." I'm sure the ladies were all encouraged to tell a little something about their treasures, when they sent them in to be considered for inclusion in the pamphlet. And every single recipe is followed by the name and address of the proud donor. On every page the pale brown typescript opens up vistas of generations gone by, and of a thousand private lives on a thousand shady American streets. Is the Kundert family of New Glarus still making Zueri Bieter every Thanksgiving? And is Mrs. Purdue of Canyon Road East in Puyallup, Washington, still known -- or perhaps her daughter or granddaughter is -- for Apples Wilhelm Tell? (She very properly credits Marcel Forster of Marcel's Pastry Shop in Seattle with the apple concoction. "I have changed it somewhat.") I'm indebted to a Mrs. Snyder of Mullens, West Virginia, for a recipe for Mock Oysters which is, incredibly, nothing but elderberry blossoms fried in butter.

But nothing is more incredible than this, which I give in full, not forgetting the unorthodox spelling of raccoon. It's on page 33, and comes from the New Glarus fire department, which seems perfectly right. Only strong men could cope with it.

Sour Coon Pfeffer

8 to 9 racoons
salt and pepper
onions
pickling spices
sour wine

Clean all fat from racoons and cut up. Soak one day in strong salt water. Then drain and rinse. Place in stone crock, a layer of meat at a time, salt and pepper each layer and add a few slices of onion to each layer. Put pickling spices in tea balls or sack (1 pak to 4 racoons). Cover with sour wine; let stand 3 days in refrigerator. Using the wine it was soaked in, cook in a roaster at 350 F for 2 and 1/2 hours.

Serves 40.

I'll bet it does. And I'm puzzled by the idea of having access to a whole lot of sour wine. What kind of wine, originally? Did the firemen buy it up cheap and let it sit around for a year or two? But then, procuring enough of that ingredient would in a way seem to be the least of the cook's problems here.

Because, really. I ask you.



I think we had better stick with this.

Vintage liquor ad, 1964

I adore the ads that show liquor as having something to do with women. Earlier ads, from the 1950s, often seemed to show just the product, as if no one had any more imagination than that.



The gal in red is Julie London, whom most of us will probably remember as the head nurse at the hospital on the old TV show Emergency! What we might not have known is that Julie London was also a pretty big-name jazz and nightclub singer -- voted among Billboard's top female vocalists for several years in the mid 1950s, with no less than 32 studio albums to her credit -- as well as a movie and television actress. Venture over to the website that tells you all this, and you'll also find an introduction to the book The Cocktail: the Influence of Spirits on the American Psyche, by Joseph Lanza. I feel sure this book is going to be great fun, once I get my hands on it.

Image from AdClassix.com.

Persian apples

(What a stroke of luck. This happens to be my 200th post. Tanti saluti e grazie tanti to all, as Lucia would say.)



It seems to be the inclusion of dates, in old cookbooks sometimes called "Persian apples," that gives this otherwise traditional American apple crisp the more exotic sounding name. The recipe comes from an old cookbook called Fondue, Chafing Dish, and Casserole Cookery, written by Margaret Deeds Murphy and published in 1969. Although the peeling and chopping of dates and apples takes a bit of time, it can be sort of Zen-like work if you let it, and the dish is easy to put together. It is very sweet, so much so that you may want to cut the sugar a bit, as I did.

Persian apples

Have ready: 1 cup pitted dates, cut crosswise; 4 large tart apples, peeled, cored, and chopped (make sure they are tart!); 1/2 cup chopped pecans. Combine the dates, apples and pecans with 1/4 cup granulated sugar (the recipe here calls for 1/2 cup of sugar).

Put this mix into a buttered 1 and 1/2 quart casserole. Preheat the oven to 375 F. Then mix 3/4 cup flour, 1/2 tsp. salt, 1/2 cup brown sugar, and 1 tsp. cinnamon. Cut in 1/2 cup butter, with two knives or a pastry cutter, until the mix resembles coarse meal. Spoon this over the apples and dates in the casserole. Bake for 35 minutes, or until the apples are tender.

And pair it with a robust syrah or a dry light rose, to see which you like better. Honestly, we all don't match desserts with wine enough.

Retro hot dog and eggplant dinner, 1963

It's a dinner worthy of Mad Men, albeit so unattractive looking in its casserole dish that I feel deeply compelled not to offer a photograph of it, substituting instead an arty-looking snap of one-sixth of an eggplant against the background of a pretty (and yes, retro) plate.

Our source: the Good Housekeeping Cookbook of 1963. Our chapter: "The Story of Meats," its subchapter, Frankfurters, appearing to be from the pen of someone moonlighting for the Hot Dog Advisory Board. Or maybe, in a plot twist worthy of Mad Men, sleeping with someone on the Hot Dog Advisory Board. "Today's hot dog is one of America's finest meats," Mlle. Anonymous assures us. "It's a combination of tender, lean, juicy meats and aromatic spices ... as fine for children as for grown ups ... they supply the same high-quality protein and meat values as roasts, chops, and steaks and are a very thrifty buy."

So be it. Our recipe: the very first in the subchapter's collection. "Franks Italian." We'll need:

1 medium eggplant
1/3 cup flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/8 tsp pepper
1/3 cup salad oil (olive oil)
8 franks -- [do splurge, and use good kosher ones]
2 (8 oz.) cans tomato sauce [I used stewed tomatoes]
1 cup grated cheddar cheese [and I omitted this, since it seemed a gooey bit of overkill]

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Wash the eggplant and cut into 8 half-inch thick slices. Coat each slice with a mixture of flour, salt, and pepper. In hot oil, in skillet, saute eggplant until golden on both sides. (If you omit this step, and simply proceed with the recipe, your dinner will of course be gluten free.)

Place 4 of the eggplant slices side by side in a greased 13 x 9 x 2 pan. Place one frank, sliced in half lengthwise, atop each. Spread with one can tomato sauce, and sprinkle with half the cheese, if using. Repeat layers.

Bake 30 minutes, or until cheese [if using] is bubbly. Top with snipped parsley.

This is one of those meals that you look at aghast on the page, thinking how decidedly un-French it is. No cream, no herbs, no braising of this and simmering of that. No stock, no wine, no garlic or fresh little haricots verts. Rather, hot dogs, good Lord, and eggplant [and cheese] all jumbled up together until they bubble.

But then you make it, reasoning that this is after all Good Housekeeping, and the magazine has long been known for reliable recipes. It's certainly easy enough for a weeknight. And after you make it and set it on the table, you find that you and the family eat it and keep eating it, and before you know it, you are looking for a second helping because this actually tastes pretty good.

What wine do you pair with hot dogs and eggplant? No, seriously -- what do you pair with them?

The Plantation Cookbook's Chicken and Peaches, 1972

Can orange juice, peaches, brown sugar, vinegar, garlic, nutmeg, and basil produce something good, -- when combined with fried chicken?

In the hands of southern cooks, certainly. Having experimented with this Plantation Cookbook (1972) a few times, and salivating as I do over the mere Kindle-reading of Dishes and Beverages of the Old South (Martha McCulloch-Williams, 1913), I begin to suspect that American Southern cooking may rank perfectly comfortably with the world's more frequently acknowledged culinary treasures -- the French, the Italian, the Chinese. Perhaps the enthusiastic use of butter accounts for this excellence. We know the French saying "butter is the best cook." But it's the frank exaltation about food that seems to show a civilization's sophistication in the kitchen. Ninety-eight years ago Martha McColloch-Williams wrote, in her opening chapter "Grace before meat:"

Proper dinners mean so much -- good blood, good health, good judgment, good conduct. The fact makes tragic a truth too little regarded; namely, that while bad cooking can ruin the very best of raw foodstuffs, all the arts of all the cooks in the world can do no more than palliate things stale, flat, and unprofitable. To buy such things is waste, instead of economy. Food must satisfy the palate else it will never satisfy the stomach. An unsatisfied stomach, or one overworked by having to wrestle with food which has bulk out of all proportion to flavor, too often makes its vengeful protest in dyspepsia.

... I am leading up to the theory that it was through being the best-fed people in the world, we of the South Country were able to put up the best fight in history, and after the ravages and ruin of civil war, come again to our own. We might have been utterly crushed but for our proud and pampered stomachs, which in turn gave the bone, brain, and brawn for the conquests of peace.

Two generations later, the authors of The Plantation Cookbook -- no byline is given except to the Junior League of New Orleans -- do not wax quite so eloquent about the power of good food in history. They save their prose for the glories of Louisiana only, and for the thirty-odd fine New Orleans houses, bearing romance-novel names like Rosedown, Beauregard House, and Shadows-on-the-Teche, whose biographies form the first half of the book. The prose begins like this:

An eerie marsh, a land of green flocking sprinkled over still, dark water -- a dip of the wing and the jet-age traveler is introduced to Louisiana. It is a strange land, this lake-studded fringe of the state. It makes one think of the Greek Limbo, where lost souls wander mournfully through the gray mists ....

I am always impressed with what seem, now, unusual cultural assumptions made by authors and editors of yesteryear. Who writing a cookbook today, what cookbook-writing committee like a Junior League especially, would refer to "the Greek Limbo" amidst recipes for gazpacho and riz au épinards? What cookbook-writing committee would tell us with a straight face that "the names of heroic explorers like DeSoto, LaSalle, Iberville, Bienville are familiar to schoolchildren everywhere, and rightly so"? I was a schoolchild in 1972 and I remember nothing of Iberville. DeSoto and LaSalle, a little.

Or do we wax too curmudgeonly about the dumbing down of educational standards, impossible cultural expectations, cookbook style, and all? Should we return simply to the chicken and peaches?

Here they are. The ingredient list may seem outlandish, but compared to almost everything else in The Plantation Cookbook, it is outlandish mostly in omitting that cup of heavy cream and that stick of butter which every other offering seems to include. Ah yes. Surely Louisiana and its queen city are not French for nothing.

The Plantation Cookbook's (Junior League of New Orleans') Chicken and Peaches, 1972

• 1 and 1/2 cups orange juice
• 2 and 1/2 cups sliced fresh peaches
• 3 Tbsp. brown sugar
• 3 Tbsp. white vinegar
• 1 and 1/2 tsp. nutmeg or mace
• 1 and 1/2 tsp. basil
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 16 selected pieces frying chicken, lightly salted
• 3/4 cup flour mixed with 2 tsp salt and 1/3 tsp black pepper
• cooking oil
• garnish: crabapples or fresh mint

Prepare the sauce in a medium sized pan: combine the orange juice, peaches, sugar, vinegar, nutmeg, basil, and garlic. Simmer, tightly covered, for 10 minutes.

Then, dredge the chicken in the seasoned flour. Pour the cooking oil into a large heavy skillet to a depth of half an inch, heat, and brown the chicken well. Remove and set aside.

Discard the excess oil, but save the browned bits; add 1/3 cup of the simmering sauce to the skillet. Replace the chicken in the skillet and pour the rest of the sauce and the peaches over.

Simmer, covered, for 20 minutes or until the chicken is done. Serve on a hot platter, garnished with crabapples or fresh mint.

Let's make some cocktails

During a recent stay-at-home vacation, the kind where you take field trips to the local and beautiful autumn woods,

I ventured to the local liquor superstore to splurge on a bottle each of good gin, scotch, and vodka, so as to begin stocking my liquor cabinet with the basics needed for future treats. It is amazing how many basics there seem to be. Rum and brandy are next on my shopping list, but after that, if I want to be truly at the ready, it seems I must lay in tequila and all sorts of liqueurs and fruit brandies, plus the contents of a fruit stand, plus gallons of sugar and flavored syrups ("orgeat" is my favorite so far -- it sounds so medieval and probably is, being almond milk syrup), and assorted colas and un-colas. 

These lists and almost all my other knowledge of cocktails comes from one master, Charles Schumann and his American Bar. He is the nice gentleman, remember, with the very high standards. In American Bar he won't make a typical Long Island Iced Tea, for example, because he considers it disrespectful to the spirit(s) to mix gin and vodka just for a start. He also demands care and discipline with his garnishes, positively abhorring a stuffed olive in a martini ("what place does a stuffed olive have in a Martini?"), permitting only a green olive with pit. The fact that he proffers no explanation for this makes me trust him all the more, on everything. He must know, or he wouldn't be so confident, right?

To be sure there are other, earlier masters one may also consult on the art of cocktail mixing. After all, somebody must have taught Mr. Schumann. The cognoscenti begin, it seems, with Jerry Thomas, "the father of all bartenders," who published his How to Mix Drinks or A Bon Vivant's Companion in 1862. Not far behind him in authority is Harry Johnson, another nineteenth century bar owner who published a Bartender's Manual twenty years later. Today we may turn to the fine website Liquor.com and learn from contributor Jim Meehan, author of the newly published The P.D.T. Cocktail Book, what he has in his library. Mr. Meehan's five favorites are:

The Artistry of Mixing Drinks by Frank Meier (1936)

Barflies and Cocktails by Harry McElhone (1927)

Cocktails: How to Mix Them by Robert Vermeire (1922)

The Gentleman’s Companion by Charles H. Baker (1939)

The Savoy Cocktail Book by Harry Craddock (1930)

I look forward to unearthing and reading these as soon as I can, but for the moment I dip into a second, humbler source, a dog-eared old promotional booklet from the Calvert Distillers Company called The House of Calvert Party Encyclopedia (1960). It hails straight from the Mad Men era by way of a local library's cast-off book sale, and looks every inch (ounce?) of it.

The pamphlet has been useful in giving me cocktail recipes of almost Schumannesque simplicity, calling for two or three ingredients only, and therefore just right as teaching tools and easy on my modest inventory. Thus far the Calvert Party Encyclopedia has taught me to make -- and heavens, if I can do it, you can -- :

the Bee's Knees

1 tsp. honey
the juice of 1/4 lemon
1 and 1/2 ounces gin

Mix in a cocktail shaker and serve in a cocktail glass (no garnish is suggested -- would an apple slice be good, or would it be an abomination?).

the Gin Rickey

1 and 1/2 ounces gin
the juice of half a lime

Mix in a shaker and pour over ice into a highball glass, then fill the glass with club soda. The recommended garnish is a slice of lime, but I opted for two green grapes speared on a toothpick.

the Highland Fling

1 and 1/2 ounces scotch
1 tsp. sugar
3 ounces milk 

Shake all ingredients well with ice, pour into a highball glass and dust with nutmeg.

the classic dry Martini

1 part dry vermouth
4 parts gin

Stir with ice and pour into a martini glass, to be topped off only with a green olive with pit. It seems we stir the martini -- never mind what James Bond says -- to avoid "bruising" the gin. Even the kid nephew in Auntie Mame, able at the age of eleven to mix a "Lucullan little martini" for the scandalized Mr. Babcock, says so. There is a tradition of swirling the vermouth in the glass and then gracefully tossing it out, before proceeding with the martini really. I seem to recall reading that this tradition reflects vermouth's usefulness, in bygone days, simply in disguising the taste of poor gin. Vermouth qua vermouth wasn't particularly wanted.  

Talking of unwanted things, the one spirit missing from our copyright 1960 pamphlet is tequila. Perhaps it wasn't popular, or perhaps the Calvert company didn't sell one at the time. Whatever the reason, tequila's absence means that margaritas are missing, too. As is another classic cocktail, the pina colada. Where it belongs, in the section on rum drinks, we find instead near-forgotten joys like the Pirate's Prize (2 parts dark rum, 1 part sweet vermouth, 1 dash bitters) and the Parisian Blonde (1 part dark rum, 1 part curacao, 1 part cream).

 
Now in order to do up our cocktails right this weekend, we novices should acquaint ourselves with some mechanics. American Bar advises that we must never mix more than two cocktails at once in a shaker. We see how conducive this rule would be to quiet romantic evenings. But, if we must savor our treat alone, then five or six ice cubes per recipe are desirable (use only three or four for a doubled version). Put the liquor into the shaker last; any juices or sugar syrups go in first. Ten seconds of shaking is enough for cocktails that mix easily. Those including egg or heavy syrups will need twenty seconds. It is the drinks that mix very easily, but are served very cold, or those that would turn murky with shaking, that are stirred with ice instead. Remember the Martini.

And as Mr. Schumann exhorts in red type and ALL CAPS: "A Good Cocktail Doesn't Mean a Big One." If you grew up watching the adults mix their Four O'Clock Drinks of about half an inch of Canadian Club in an ice-filled highball glass, with three inches of ginger ale then poured on, you will be startled at the diminutive size of what American Bar allows you to have. The Calvert Party Encyclopedia agrees at least that you must measure your liquor. "It will go further." The measurement repeated over and over again, in both books, is 1 and 1/2 ounces. This is 3 Tablespoons, a jigger, a gill, or 4.2 cl (centiliters). How small is a jigger? Quite small. The penny in the picture above, propped against the family heirloom pewter jigger, should help to show scale.

So a recipe for a classic martini,which consists only of a jigger of gin and a half teaspoon dry vermouth, will put a little over three full tablespoons of vital liquids into your glass, plus another half ounce of water (about a tablespoon) which the stirring with ice adds. Nothing like your parents' generously sized CC & ginger ale, and nothing like the huge glass canisters, full nearly to the brim, gripped by the earnestly debating men in the Calvert photo of 1960. And anyway why doesn't the girl get a drink, too?

I suggest that when she's done listening to the talk, she go out to the kitchen and mix herself a Gunga Din. It's my new favorite.

To five ice cubes placed in a cocktail shaker, add

half a jigger of dry vermouth
a jigger and a half of gin
"the juice of a quarter of an orange" (a little less than a jigger)

Shake for ten seconds. Serve in a cocktail glass garnished with a slice of fresh pineapple.  

And wear all the jewels you've got.

The Plantation Cookbook's pecan pie, 1972

The simple splendor of it really needs no comment -- except that we have used the Junior League of New Orleans' The Plantation Cookbook before, and will remember that most things in it are loaded with retro Southern voluptuousness. They seem to have excised any recipe that did not begin with "1 stick butter ...." 

Pecan pie

Preheat the oven to 375 F. In a bowl, beat:

2 eggs
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup dark Karo syrup
2 Tbsp. soft butter
1 cup chopped pecans
1 tsp. vanilla

Mix well. Pour the mixture into an unbaked 8 inch pie crust. Decorate with whole pecans. Bake for 30 to 35 minutes.

"Can be baked day before. Serve hot or cold with whipped cream or brush on thin layer of (1 ounce)  melted semi-sweet chocolate."

Or why not both?

Antoinette Pope's "Southern hash with rice," 1948 -- and a cocktail

There are times when a dinner which looks like glorified glop is in fact very delicious -- and it's the mid-twentieth century, family-style retro stuff that often fits this bill. Here is Southern hash with rice, from Antoinette and Francois Pope's Pope School Cookbook. What makes it Southern? My guess is the rice and the abundance of butter. Southerners seem not to have the slightest qualms about rich food.

And never you mind the picture.

To begin, you will brown 1 pound ground beef in a heavy skillet, using no other fat. This is my own little technique, and I can't think why cookbook writers do not more often suggest it. The Popes' written recipe tells us to sauté onions and green peppers in butter, and then add and brown the beef, and carry on with the recipe. Most ground beef recipes advise the same thing -- sometimes the vegetables are to be softened in olive oil -- but the meat gives off so much fat anyway that, unless you spoon it off at some point, you will end up with puddles of grease floating atop your finished casserole. If you do spoon it off after cooking vegetables and meat together, you will lose a lot of the nice butter or olive oil mixed in too. With my method, ground beef cooked alone can be freed from its grease and then you can add it to the aromatics that you will have already simmered and bathed (see immediately below) in their flavorful butter or oil.

To continue. Having browned the beef à la my way, you will cook "until tender and light golden in color" 1 cup sliced onions and 3/4 cup diced green peppers in 1/4 cup butter.

Now add the cooked beef.

Then add:

2 cups canned tomatoes
1 and 1/2 cups cooked rice
1 teaspoon chili powder
1 and 1/2 teaspoons salt
dash black pepper

Blend well. Pour into a buttered 10 x 6 x 2 inch baking dish. Sprinkle with 1 and 1/2 cups pulled bread crumbs, and drizzle with 2 Tablespoons melted butter.

Bake in a preheated 350 F oven for 25 to 30 minutes.

Retro, gloppy looking even if de-fatted, and delicious. While it is baking, why not relax and enjoy a cocktail? My latest treat has been the Daiquiri "natural," the authentic version as first created in 1898. Charles Schumann in American Bar says so. We know how strict he is: no stuffed olives in a martini, and here, no strawberries in your daiquiri.

Daiquiri "natural"

Shake well with ice in a cocktail shaker:

2 ounces (a little more than a jigger) white rum
3/4 ounce (about half a jigger) fresh lime juice
1/4 to 1/2 ounce (up to 1 Tablespoon) sugar syrup

Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Careful. It's potent.