Part 4

1 onion (diced) 1 cup of stock ½ cup of rice water 1 cup of potatoes, which have been previously boiled and diced 2 cups of lamb, cold roast preferred, and cut into the size of dominoes 2 tablespoons of Curry Powder (Cross and Blackwells, or other imported—_never domestic_) Zest of one lemon Salt to taste

Give me the above ingredients, and I will make you the meat dish which, above all others, is, to my way of thinking, the most savory and delicious. Eight years ago, when I was first playing “Omar, the Tentmaker,” I became acquainted with various members of the Persian Embassy, who were especially interested in the play because of its Persian locale, and it was while dining in the home of one of these gentlemen that I first became initiated to lamb curry—that is, lamb curry as it really should be cooked! Begging the recipe from my host, it has ever since been the favorite pièce-de-résistance in my home.

First of all you brown the onion in olive oil in a deep pan; then add the stock, rice-water, salt and curry powder; the latter having been mixed with a little of the rice-water to insure a smooth sauce. Simmer slowly till the oil and curry float in dark blobs, add the lamb, and continue simmering and stirring until just before serving, when the lemon juice should be dripped in.

Lamb curry should always be served with hot rice, taking on your fork equal portions of both, increasing the amount of rice in case you find the curry too hot. Never drink water with curry, as it intensifies the burning sensation. The amount of curry powder used in the above recipe can be increased or decreased according to the individual taste. Cold cooked shrimps, lobster, veal or chicken may be used in place of lamb; but never beef. Personally I find that lamb produces the finest curry dish.

XLIV

_Dr. Don Rafael H. Elizalde_

(Minister from Ecuador)

SANCOCHO

Four pounds of loin beef cut into two-inch squares.

Eight good-sized potatoes.

Five or six ears of green corn, broken in lengths of two inches.

Water sufficient to make the amount of soup required.

Boil until the beef is tender, with the potatoes, then add the corn and cook until done.

_Onions_—

Slice thin three large onions—boil for half an hour, drain and cool. Then pour olive oil over them.

_Banana Paste_—

One quart of milk in a double boiler; add two heaping tablespoonsful of banana flour mixed in a little milk to a smooth paste, and cook from half hour to an hour.

_How to Serve_—

Strain the soup through a colander and serve in a tureen, placing meat, potatoes, corn, onions and banana paste in separate, individual dishes from which each person may help themselves.

(In South America the yucca and plantains are used in this dish.)

YAPINGACHO

Make potato cakes by the ordinary recipe, but before shaping them place a piece of cream cheese the size of a walnut in the center of each; then fry brown in very little fat.

_Sauce_—

One quart of milk and one half pound of peanuts ground fine; boil until thick, seasoning with salt, paprika and butter.

Serve the potato cakes with fried eggs and pour the sauce over both.

XLV

_Bide Dudley_

TOMATO SOP

Slice firm, ripe tomatoes; roll in flour and fry in equal parts of lard and butter until brown on both sides. Remove several slices to a platter, stir those remaining with flour and small lumps of butter: then thicken with milk and season to taste.

Sop with bread or toast.

EDITOR’S NOTE:—This is good. But in the interest of the culinary art it should be stated that the flour, and not the milk, is the thickening agent.

Try it—you’ll thank the author of “tomato sop.”

XLVI

_William Hale Thompson_

(Mayor of Chicago)

ROAST BEEF

My favorite food is Roast Beef, rare, or a good American sirloin steak, which, I take it, are so simple to prepare that they need no recipe.

_Suggestions_:

1. Stand your roast on two or three thin slices of bacon—not too fat.

2. On the top of the roast lay three or four thin slices of lemon—particularly if you like the “outside cut.”

3. If your steak looks a bit fresh rub with lemon juice (both sides) and allow to stand several hours before broiling or frying. Don’t be frightened if it turns a bit black—be glad.

4. Pan may be rubbed with garlic.

5. Steaks should be _thick_, particularly if you broil.

XLVII

_Booth Tarkington_

CORN FLAKES

My favorite dish is corn flakes. They should be placed in a saucer or hollow dish, then lifted in both hands and rolled for a moment, then dropped back into the dish. After that an indefinite quantity of cream should be poured upon them. They should be eaten with a spoon. I don’t know how to prepare anything else for the table. I think the best Kennebunkport manner of steaming clams is as follows:

A bushel of clams 4 dozen lobsters 4 dozen ears of sweet corn 4 dozen sweet potatoes 4 dozen eggs

A cartload of seaweed, a bonfire burning for six hours on rocks, then swept away; the lobsters, clams, etc., placed in the seaweed, and the seaweed on the hot rocks and covered with BBB canvas. Allow to steam until screams of distress issue from the seaweed; then be careful what you eat!

XLVIII

_T. A. Dorgan_

CHILI CON CARNE

_Comes through with a natural_

What is my favorite filler for the feed bag? Well, I’ll be on the square with my answer.... It’s Chili con Carne.

I might have said Terrapin Maryland, or some other Ritzy dish, but thought I’d better come with a natural.

I’ll play Chili con Carne and tamales as they are served in California (where I was born) against any dish I’ve ever forked over.

_Recipe_

Cut, say, two pounds of good beef in small pieces the size of the first finger joint. Add some of the chopped fat, mix and salt.

Put two tablespoonsful of lard in a deep pot and heat. To this add a chopped onion. When the onion is about half cooked add the meat. Stir well until the meat has boiled down in its juice. When it starts to fry add about one and a half pints of hot water, three tablespoonsful of Gebhardt’s Eagle Chili Powder and a few buttons of chopped garlic. Simmer and stir well until the meat is tender.

XLIX

_William De Leftwich Dodge_

RAGOUT DE MOUTON

I think my favorite dish is “Ragout de Mouton,” or, I would say, the one I cook the best.

The way it’s done is this:

Cut up lamb in small pieces and fry it in a frying pan. Slice three or four carrots and onions and fry them with it. When these are nicely browned, put into a pot, cover with water, and let boil slowly for an hour. Then put in a few potatoes and turnips (cut up in small pieces), and boil until done. Season as you see fit.

L

_Montague Glass_

BOUILLEBAISSE

Bouillebaisse is my favorite dish. I make it according to the recipe of Valentine Blanc, our cook in Nice, where we lived some years ago. Valentine could neither read nor write, nor could a story tell, but her Bouillebaisse was ever so much better than that they make in Marseilles (and I venture to say in Thackeray’s old restaurant either).

Melt about a half pound of butter in a sauce pan. I’m aware that in Marseilles they use oil, but Valentine used butter. Don’t let the butter burn. Have ready two large chopped onions—i. e.—onions chopped fine, and two “dents” of garlic also chopped fine.

Cook these in the butter until tender and without burning. Have ready three perch and one haddock. That is to say: cut off the heads and tails. Some people use eels instead of haddock. I detest eels. Cut into a large saucepan the heads and tails of the fish with about a quart of water and let simmer until well cooked, say about half an hour. Strain out the heads and tails and give them to the cat.

Add the cooked onions and garlic,—butter and all—to the strained bouillion from the heads and tails and allow to simmer for half an hour more, after seasoning to taste with salt and white pepper. Add about a gill of dry white wine of any variety,—Chablis, Cotes du Rhone or what not,—the cheaper the wine the better. Now take two smallish lobsters, alive, and if you have the heart, cut them into segments and take off the claws and cut _them_ into segments. Cook the massacred lobster for about a quarter of an hour in the liquid or liquor or bouillon above described and add a saltspoonful of dried Spanish saffron, while the whole is cooking together. If you can get mussels, cook also with the entire mess, a dozen or so,—in their shells if the shells be well scrubbed in advance. Somewhere in this process add about a tablespoonful of chopped parsley. Last of all, add the fish cut into convenient slices rather small, and let cook until done, but not long enough so that the fish becomes disintegrated. Remember there ought to be no violent boiling.

Before serving strain off most of the liquor and serve it first as soup with a slice of toast in the bottom of the plate. If the toast has been fried in advance in good butter, so much the better, but this is not necessary. Then eat all the solid part except the shells and sop up all the remaining gravy with bread, using your fingers to do the job and not a fork. Don’t leave a bit of it.

There ought to be enough of this stew for four people, but I can usually manage the whole thing myself with only the slightest assistance from my wife. Wine ought to be drunk with the meal, a good Burgundy Beaune or Chambertin. Later one should eat an artichoke cold vinaigrette, then some fruit and cheese and two small cups of well made black coffee. After this it is necessary to smoke a Corona Corona not too mild, and drink a small glass of Cointreau Sec. The bread ought to be _Pain Riche_ in flutes. The fruit may be fresh apricots, a few green almonds and perhaps some green gages.

The coffee ought to be drunk and the cigar smoked in the garden which must be in the vicinity of Mount Boron on the Grande Corniche or it may be in the Parc Imperial. God ought to be thanked either during or after the meal, and when it becomes a little too cold in the garden a fire should be built in the small living room and one should read Somerville & Ross’ _Recollections of an Irish R. M._, or Neil Lyon’s _Simple Simon_, or Belloc’s _Path to Rome_, or Richard Ford’s _Gatherings from Spain_ until bedtime.

Repeat the whole process on the following Friday.

God! How hungry I am.

LI

_John Philip Sousa_

PELOTAS Á LA PORTUGUESE

“_This serves from six to eight people and is my favorite dish._”

One quart can of tomatoes. Put in kettle on top of stove, simmer or let boil slowly for one and a half hours. Add pepper, salt, two onions cut in fine slices, four allspice and four cloves. The cloves and allspice to be added after it starts to boil. After two and a half hours add:

Two pounds chopped beef; add one onion, chopped fine, two cups bread crumbs, a little parsley, salt and pepper. Make into meat balls about the size of a plum. Put into sauce and boil one and one-half hours slowly. This makes fully three hours’ slow boiling for the sauce.

SPAGHETTI

Use a package or a pound of spaghetti; not macaroni. Have a large pot of boiling water with about one tablespoonful of salt. Slide the spaghetti into the water. Do not break it. Boil exactly twenty minutes. Must be tender, not tough nor doughy.

To sauce, add three bay leaves one hour before taking off the stove.

Serve spaghetti on large platter, pouring tomato sauce over it. Serve pelotas on smaller platter, allowing a small quantity of sauce to remain on them.

Serve grated Parmesan cheese on side. Use a piece of cheese to grate, not bottled cheese.

LII

_Will Hays_

CHICKEN PILAU

_“Get a fat hen—the fatter the better.”_

Because this recipe comes from a Southern cook, there are no accurate measurements.

Sam would always recommend a “fat hen”—“the fatter the better,” and “’nough rice and plenty of pepper.”

This I know: The chicken is cut up and boiled in the water until tender. Should be cooked in a good sized flat bottom kettle. When the chicken is tender there should be enough of the stock to come up well around it, but not to cover it. Then put in with the chicken about a scant pint of well washed rice. This should be stirred ONCE, Sam says, and allowed to steam slowly an hour. Use plenty of pepper to season and salt to taste. Each grain of rice should be fat and juicy. Successfully made it is delicious.

EDITOR’S NOTE:—The Chicken Pilau recommended by Mr. Hays is delicious. A variation perhaps equally good, may be had by substituting broken spaghetti, or vermicelli for the rice.

LIII

_Frank Ward O’Malley_

RUM-TUM-TIDDY

“——_has the best Welsh rabbit backed off the stove._”

Take one country home in New Jersey. One dependable apple-jack bootlegger. One cook who threatens to leave unless she can begin her nightly visits to her daughter in the village as early as seven-thirty o’clock.

Take three or four acquaintances who drop in for apple-jack cocktails just as your cook is about to put the steak on to broil. Then have your guests linger near the cocktail shaker until you, your wife and especially your delayed cook are approaching hysteria.

“Why not stay,” you now announce to your guests in desperation, “and we’ll all make a rum-tum-tiddy?”

You now tell your grateful cook not to bother preparing a meal. You next take one flivver and hurriedly drive her to her daughter’s in the village. Then you buy in the village one and one-half pounds of American cheese, one can of Campbell’s Tomato Soup and a dozen bottles of beer—real beer, if you can get it, Volstead beer if you can’t.

_NOW_:—

Pry your guests away from the cocktail shaker and shoo them into the kitchen. Everybody from this on who is not occupied in mincing the green pepper in a chopping bowl is busy cutting the American cheese into cubes about an inch square. Everybody else beats two fresh eggs—whites and yolks together.

Drop a lump of butter into a saucepan to prevent “sticking.” Begin to melt the pound and one half of diced cheese in the saucepan, stirring the lumps to prevent burning. When the cheese is fairly well melted, pour into it the can of tomato soup and the two beaten eggs. Stir into the mixture about one-third of a bottle of beer. Pour in also the finely chopped green pepper and continue stirring until smooth.

Have hot dinner plates ready, each plate containing a large slice of hot, unbuttered toast. Place at least one bottle of beer—two if it’s real—beside each plate.

Holler “Ready, people!” and pour on each piece of toast enough of the contents of the saucepan to form a pinkish overflow of rum-tum-tiddy on the plate.

That’s all—except to shake ’em up a semi-final cocktail and then start right back to the village in the flivver for another pound and one half of cheese, another pepper and more beer to make another immediately when the first rum-tum-tiddy is gone. One calls for two, often three.

Serve preferably in the kitchen. Serve in any room far from the kitchen if you want leg work exercise. Eat until gorged.

LIV

_Charles Evans Hughes_

CORN BREAD

“_My favorite dish is corn bread and honey._”

And here is a recipe for corn bread:

2 cups of flour 3 cups of cornmeal 4 heaping teaspoonsful of baking powder 2 eggs well beaten 1 teaspoonful salt 1 tablespoonful sugar 1 pint of milk 2 tablespoonsful of melted butter

Mix the meal and flour, baking powder, salt and sugar. Beat the eggs until they are light, then add the eggs and milk to the meal. Beat to a light smooth consistency and add the melted butter. Bake in a shallow pan (greased) for about twenty-five minutes.

Eat while hot and use plenty of fresh butter and honey.

EDITOR’S NOTE:—There is a white meal and a yellow. Expert appraisers of corn bread have said that the white meal is preferable. Still the golden hue of a pan of hot corn bread is not to be passed up lightly.

LV

_Walter Prichard Eaton_

MINCE-PIE

“_Made any other way it’s not mince-pie._”

My favorite dish, and the best food in the world, is King Canute Pudding, but I shall not tell anybody how to make it, because that is a family secret. I am descended from Canute, and this was the pudding he ate and which made him feel so good that he went out and bade the tide to cease rising. The recipe is handed down in each generation of my tribe. It was my paternal grandmother who had it to pass on. She lived to be ninety-nine, thanks to her own wonderful cooking and a cantankerous disposition. Her mince-pie was a thing to write sonnets about. It was the second best food in the world. For ten years after I went to New York I lived on the memory of that pie and shuddered at the horrendous messes masquerading under the same name which were offered to me.

Then I moved back to New England and achieved a cook who, by the grace of God and the right bringing up could make a pie like it. For six years I knew happiness again. Then we lost Kate, the incomparable. My only hope was my wife and that was a feeble hope, indeed. She was born not in the pie belt, but in New York. She had never cooked. She was an Episcopalian. I approached the next Thanksgiving breakfast with gloomy forebodings.

But lo, a miracle. It was an orthodox mince-pie. It was Katie’s mince-pie. It was grandmother’s mince-pie—in short, it was mince-pie. Here is the way to make it. Made any other way it’s not mince-pie.

_The Filling_

Affix the grinder firmly to the edge of the table. What the palette is to the artist so is the grinder to the creator of mince meat. Then pass the following ingredients through the grinder, and from thence into a large kettle and let the latter and its glorious contents simmer on the stove for the best part of a morning, stirring them frequently so that no portion shall be neglected and fail to come into close union with the soothing heat that mellows all into one fragrant whole. Take from the stove and store in stone crocks or glass jars in the dark, and keep tightly covered. When about to fashion a pie take out as much of the meat as you desire, wet it with boiled cider and with fresh cider, too, if possible, so that it is not stiff, and bake between the crusts whose ingredients are given below. Eat hot with soft dairy cheese and coffee.

The meat should be thoroughly boiled the day before the mince meat is made, and the cider should be boiled down at home—not bought—until it is the consistency of molasses. Boil enough to last all winter and put in glass jars. Now, alas, that no liquors may be had, it is well to bottle fresh cider and put it away where it is cool, so that with luck it may still be fresh when in March you scrape the last jar for the last pie. Only use care when it is opened, or perchance it will be the ceiling rather than the pie which will be wet down.

5 cups cooked beef; after grinding 2½ cups suet 7½ cups apples 3 cups cider ½ cup vinegar 1 cup molasses 5 cups sugar ¾ pound citron 2½ pounds raisins 1½ pounds small raisins (not to be put through grinder) salt to taste juice and rind of 2 lemons juice and rind of 2 oranges 1 tablespoon mace and nutmeg (or 2 nutmegs grated) 2 tablespoons each of cinnamon, cloves and allspice 2 tablespoons lemon extract 1 teaspoon almond extract 3 cups liquor in which beef was cooked

If you have wine or brandy put in a cupful after taking from the fire.

_The Crust_

2 cups pastry flour sifted with teaspoon salt. ½ cup (generous) of lard mixed in with fingertips till the combination is fine and powdery.

Wet with cold water, mixing with knife, and cutting, till you can take the dough from the bowl without sticking to it. Divide in half, pat gently on floured marble slab, and roll out thin. Lift lower crust carefully, place in tin and trim off edges. Roll out from trimmings a strip half an inch wide and place on top of lower crust, around edge, first wetting edge slightly with cold water. Put in filling, place upper crust on top, first wetting edge of rim slightly with cold water, press together with tines of fork and trim off overhanging of upper crust. Prick a large T. M. on the top crust and bake in hot oven till brown.

(The T. M. stands for “’Tis Mince” to distinguish it from the pies labeled T. M. for “’Tain’t Mince.”)

LVI

_W. T. Benda_

POLISH SPECIALTIES

In following my Polish recipes you will find a practical use for the geometry of your school days. If you have forgotten the axioms of Euclid, take a correspondence course before attempting “Ushka.”

It is simple when you finally master it—and marvelously good. Don’t forget the line B D. Everything hinges on that.

BARSHCK WITH USHKA

_Barshck. (Or Polish Beet Soup)_

If you are brave, put three large beets, peeled and quartered into a glass jar and pour on them a quart of water, add a teaspoonful of salt and a slice of rye bread. Keep this in a warm place for about five days. There will form a sour red-wine-like juice with a whitish mold skin on the top. Don’t lose your courage, take this skin off and pour off the juice.

Then prepare a quart of beef, pork and vegetable stock and while it is hot add to it all your beet juice and a bottle of cream which you previously have beaten with a teaspoonful of flour. Heat and stir it all just to boiling point, but do not let it boil, and serve with or without “Ushka” which are fully described in the next paragraph.

_Ushka_

Barshck is really not complete without “Ushka,” and as they are a very simple dish to prepare you should never omit them.

To make “Ushka” prepare first a fine hash of half a pound of boiled pork and beef with one small onion, a tablespoonful of flour, salt and pepper.

[Illustration: Fig. 1]

Make white sauce of butter and flour and a little water, mix this with your hash, let it stew for a while, then add one raw egg and stir it madly.

Now mix a dough, using half a quart of flour, one egg, two tablespoonfuls of water, half a teaspoonful of salt, and butter of the size of a walnut. Knead this vigorously for half an hour, or until it is quite smooth.

[Illustration: Fig. 2]

[Illustration: Fig. 3]

[Illustration: One-third size of beets]