Poetical Food.

I do not attempt to hide my love of words, and I admit to thoroughly enjoying yesterday’s fun with pome-granades. I continue with word fun today – in the form of  a ‘poem’. I put this in inverted commas, as I am not sure that my example fits with the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of a poem, which is:

“a piece of writing or an oral composition, often characterized by a metrical structure, in which the expression of feelings, ideas, etc., is typically given intensity or flavour by distinctive diction, rhythm, imagery, etc.”

The ‘poem’ of the day comes from a cookery book, of course. It is My pet recipes tried and true, contributed by the ladies and friends of St. Andrew's Church, Quebec, and published in about 1900. It is a useful aide-memoir for the new housewife (at least I think that is the justification) as to what goes with what, with a sprinking of useful hints and a stern warning to poor cooks.

It is at least in rhyme, which may or may not be an admirable quality in a poem. I leave it to you to judge if it is poetry, if it is good advice, and whether you think that modern cookbooks could be improved with the addition of more poetry.

Rhymes to Remember.

“Always have lobster sauce with salmon,

And put mint sauce your roasted lamb on.

In dressing salad mind this law

With two hard yolks use one raw.

Roast pork, sans apple sauce, past doubt,

Is Hamlet with the Prince left out.

Broil lightly your beefsteak – to fry it

Argues contempt of christian diet.

It gives true epicures the vapors,

To see boiled mutton minus capers.

Boiled turkey, gourmands know of course

Is exquisite with celery sauce.

Roasted in paste, a haunch of mutton

Might make ascetics play the glutton.

To roast spring chickens is to spoil them,

Just split them down the back and broil them.

Shad, stuffed and baked is most delicious,

T’would have electrified Apicius.

Roast veal with rich stock gravy serve,

And pickled mushrooms too, observe.

The cook deserves a hearty cuffing,

Who serves roast fowl with tasteless stuffing.

But one might rhyme for weeks this way,

And still have lots of thing to say:

And so I’ll close, for reader mine,

This is about the hour to dine.

Naturally I have to include a recipe for the book, and as it is turkey season, I give you this version of celery sauce, contributed by Mrs. Theophilus Oliver.

Celery Sauce.

Fifteen ripe tomatoes two peppers, five large onions, seven and a half tablespoons of white sugar, two and one half tablespoons salt, three cups of vinegar, two heads of celery, chop celery and onions, and peppers, and boil all together an hour and a half.

Quotation for the Day …

He’d noticed that sex bore some resemblance to cookery. It fascinated people. They sometimes bought books full of complicated recipes and interesting pictures. And sometime, when they were really hungry they created vast banquets in their imagination. But at the end of the day they’d settle quite happily for egg and chips, if it was well done, and maybe had a slice of tomato.

Terry Pratchett.

Matrimonial Cake.

July 18 …

Just a simple little cake recipe for you today my friends, for no other reason that it adds to the collection of recipes on a similar theme. We had Matrimony Sauce and Matrimony Pudding in a story over two years ago, today I give you Matrimonial Cake, and ask for you to help find the earliest recipe, just for fun, because it is disputed. We will allow ‘Matrimony’ as being an equivalent name, OK?

First, here is the recipe, as it appeared in an Ohio newspaper in 1933.

Matrimonial Cake.
2 cups rolled oats
2 cups pastry flour
2 cups brown sugar
1 tsp soda
1 cup butter or oil.
Filling:-
1 lb. stoned dates
¼ cup brown sugar
juice of 1-2 lemons
1 ½ cups boiling water.
Cook slowly over a low fire until soft. Cool Mix often to prevent burning.
Mix all dry ingredients with butter. Grease shallow cake pan. Cover with ½ of ingredients and then cover with date filling and with balance of dry ingredients.
Bake in oven at 325 degrees F. for about 45 minutes or until golden brown. When cold serve with whipped cream. Serves about 15.

The common theme to these recipes for sauce, pudding, and cake, is a mixture of two different items – existing, we hope, in delicious harmony rather than remaining rigidly aloof.

The OED gives other examples of ‘matrimony’ or ‘matrimonial’ as they apply to food. It may refer to ‘that injudicious mixing of wines, which is called matrimony’, or ‘a name given jocularly to raisins and almonds mixed’, or ‘oranges and star apples [peeled and sliced] mixed’, and even ‘a slice of cake between two pieces of bread and butter’ eaten together like a sandwich.

As for matrimony (or matrimonial) cake, the ownership is in dispute. Canada claims it in the above form of an oaty slice with a datey filling, although Ohio was clearly given permission to publish the recipe early in its life. There seem to be recipes appearing for it in the 1930’s, although I am not sure we should allow ‘date squares’, even if dates, in the normal order of things, precede the marital state.

There are ancestors of course – a Jewish cookbook of 1871 has a Matrimony Cake, although I do not know its composition. An oldish Northern England recipe has a one too, which is ‘a large round cake … having a layer of currants between two layers of pastry, covered with sugar … and cut into as many pieces as there are persons at the feast.’

Can anyone add any more anecdotes or recipes to this search for the perfect marriage of cake ingredients?

Quotation for the Day …

I refuse to believe that trading recipes is silly. Tunafish casserole is at least as real as corporate stock. Barbara Grizzuti Harrison.

Dominion Day, 1933.

July 1 ...

Today is Canada Day - or for old Colonials it is Dominion Day, or I guess it could have been called Federation Day. Whatever it represents nationally, today does a reasonable stand-in for Canada’s birthday - the day I salute my Canadian readers and hope every last one of you has a fine, maple-syrup drenched time.

What might a vaguely mysterious arisocratic Frenchman living in England in the 1930’s suggest as an appropriate menu for this day? The Vicomte de Mauduit – the “wandering nobleman” as he liked to call himself – wrote several books on food. In his book The Vicomte in the Kitchen (1933) he made menu suggestions for several important occasions such as “After Eighteen Holes of Golf”, and “When your Husband brings home an Influential Business Friend” and “Before the Races”.

For ‘Dominion Day’ in Canada he suggested:

Canadian Corn Soup.
Canadian Salmon, Sauce Vert.
Poulet Sauté Marengo.
Sweet Corn – Peas Sautés.
Canadian Apple Pie, Maple Cream Sauce.

To assist you on the day, here are his versions of the sauces.

Sauce Vert.
Take some finely chopped tarragon, chervil, parsley, and a little shallot, also chopped. Blanch and pound in a mortar with a little butter, and pass through a hair sieve into some Sauce Hollandaise. Add salt, pepper and cayenne, and stir well.

Canadian Maple Cream Sauce.
Whip one cup of cream stiff. Fold in half a cup of shaved maple sugar. Sprinkle with cinnamon and grated maple sugar on top, and serve at once.

Tomorrow’s Story …

Black Pudding?

Quotation for the Day …

The (apple) pie should be eaten “while it is yet florescent, white or creamy yellow, with the merest drip of candied juice along the edges, (as if the flavor were so good to itself that its own lips watered!) of a mild and modest warmth, the sugar suggesting jelly, yet not jellied, the morsels of apple neither dissolved nor yet in original substance, but hanging as it were in a trance between the spirit and the flesh of applehood...then, O blessed man, favored by all the divinities! eat, give thanks, and go forth, 'in apple-pie order!” Henry Ward Beecher.

A tale of tails.

June 2 ...

On this day in 1795, the Northwest Territory judge, George Turner wrote to George Washington. His letter was to accompany a gift of a buffalo robe and some beaver tails.

I don’t know if beavers’ tails figure very commonly on the dining table (or round the campfire) in the great Northwest any more, but they certainly feature regularly in tales of the old frontier. Once upon a time they figured in European tales too. In medieval times beavers’ tails were a very welcome food during the ‘fast’ (i.e non-meat) days of the Christian calendar, such as Lent – at least amongst the wealthy. How could this be? The beaver had fur, like a land mammal, but spent most of its time in the water. The debate went on for a long time, but eventually a greedily sensible compromise was reached and it was decreed that the tail would be allowed.

It goes without saying that beaver fur was desirable until recent politically correct times, so allowing the tail flesh to be eaten was very pragmatic. There were other ancient justifications for catching beavers too. They were a source of castoreum – ‘a reddish-brown unctuous substance, having a strong smell and nauseous bitter taste, obtained from two sacs in the inguinal region of the beaver … ’(OED). In other words a pheromone or ‘essential oil’ produced by the male beaver and used to mark out his territory and make the female swoon with lust. The oil was used in medicine. It was a powerful remedy, according to Pliny:

‘when applied to the head, it is productive of narcotic effects - a result which is equally produced by taking it in water ; for which reason it is employed in the treatment of phrenitis. Used as a fumigation, it acts as an excitant upon patients suffering from lethargy: and similarly employed, or used in the form of a suppository, it dispels hysterical suffocations. It acts also as an emmenagogue and as an expellent of the afterbirth …’

Quite useful, really. In view of its effect on the female of the species, and the fact that it was an expensive exotic ingredient, it also had a reputation as an aphrodisiac. Until recently (and perhaps still?) it was used as homeopathic remedy for headaches. Before you scoff, or are repelled by such ideas, think on this: you may be shocked – deeply shocked – to learn that you may have ingested it in chewing gum. Ask your supplier.

If you are gustatorily repelled or ethically outraged at the thought of eating furry aquatic animals with paddle-shaped tails, you can be reassured that you can have beaver-like alternatives. The Canadians make a beaver-tail-shaped doughnut called, not surprisingly, beavers’ tails, for the same reasons that there are cakey versions of bears’ paws and moose lips. I am not certain what those reasons are, apart from fun, which is a good enough reason. An earlier frontier version was simply bread, and the method was described thus in 1896:

‘If the traveler has no frying pan the bread is baked in a beaver tail. Such a loaf is long and narrow and is exposed to the fire upon a stick, the lower end being set in the ground, two or three cross sticks, the size of an ordinary skewer, are required to prevent the loaf from breaking and falling as it breaks.’

Finally, if it is not stretching linguistic coincidence too much, we can all enjoy our ‘beaver’ (more properly spelled ‘bever’) as an old English version of either a drink or a mid-afternoon snack.

And, I almost forgot, in his letter to George, George included a recipe for the tails.

Canadian Recipe for Dressing Beaver’s Tails.
First boil the Tail till it becomes soft & then broil it upon a gridiron until the fat or oil of it exudes in every direction. After this spread over the whole a coat composed of fine crumbs of bread & parsley, chopped very fine. Again lay it upon the gridiron till it becomes brown and crisp. In this state serve it up with vinegar salt and pepper.

Tomorrow’s Story …

Common food.

Quotation for the Day ..

You don't get ulcers from what you eat. You get them from what's eating you. Vicki Baum.

On keeping husbands at home.

Today, December 26th …

In 1899, when war with the Boers was inevitable, Winifred Heberden stayed on in Kimberley with her surgeon husband. She kept a diary during the four month siege, and on Boxing Day wrote:

The men stood to arms both yesterday and to-day at 3 a.m., expecting 'Christmas Boxes' from the Boers, but everything was quiet at our end of Kimberley … Eggs are now 6/6 a dozen, and so scarce that their price is sure to rise rapidly. Potatoes have vanished, and we have dried beans or crushed mealies with our meat …

She saw more of her husband by staying along for the military ride than most nineteenth century wives, if a little book from Canada is any guide. According to its male author, husbands on their way home from the corporate battlefield were easily waylaid by the gentleman’s club, for “the majority of men (when the pleasures of the table alone are considered) prefer to dine at their club or restaurant rather than at home.”

The title said it all: ‘The little helpmate, or, How to keep husbands at home: a dictionary of useful information not generally known; what dishes are good as well as cheap; the cost, and how it is done by professional cooks; together with several valuable household recipes, including the wonderful carpet shampoo which is alone worth many times the price.’

Luckily Winifred did not need the advice, because a generous supply of eggs was necessary.

Bearnaise Sauce.
“… as it is a favorite of club-men, I think their wives ought to know how to make it. Do not be discouraged if you don't succeed the first or second time, but try again. Put four tablespoonsfuls of chopped shallots into a small saucepan and let them stew for fifteen minutes. Then add two teaspoonsfuls of beef extract and six egg yolks, one a time, stirring all the while over a slow fire until it begins to thicken. Remove the saucepan to still cooler part of the range, and add, a little at a time, half a pound of butter, with occasional drops of water. When all the butter is stirred in , strain through a wire strainer, and add a little cayenne pepper, salt, and finely chopped green parsley.

Presumably nice clean carpet also helped keep the husband at home. If you want the wonderful carpet shampoo recipe, you only have to ask.

Tomorrow: A young woman in possession of a good recipe.