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| My maternal grandparents on their 50th wedding anniversary |
COOKING
FROM A MALE PROSPECTIVE, Part 2
Today
I am continuing the post from last week from the cook book, THE
STAG COOK BOOK,
WRITTEN
FOR MEN BY MEN.
Last week I mentioned that my paternal grandfather was married when
this book was published. Not so with my maternal grandfather. The
year this book came out, he married the woman who became my
grandmother.
So,
here are a few more of the recipes that men of that time liked to
eat and in some instances make.
William
Allen White
(a renowned a renowned newspaper editor and author)
VEGETABLE
SALAD
My
idea of good food is a vegetable salad. Any kind of a vegetable salad
is good; some are better than others. Here is a recipe for a French
dressing on a lettuce salad which you should try on your meat
grinder, or your potato masher, or your rolling pin or whatever
kitchen utensil you can play.
Get
a crisps head of lettuce, discard the outer green leaves, using the
inner yellow and white. Wash it thoroughly, and after pulling it
apart dry each leaf with a tea towel. Put it in a big bowl—a big
mixing bowl, six inches deep anyway. Then set that to one side, and
get about as much onion as the end of your first finger would make,
if it was chopped off at the second joint. Mince that. Put it in the
bottom of a bowl. Take a large tablespoon; put in salt and paprika to
taste, and don't be afraid of making it salty, then add oil and
vinegar, about three or four to one, mixing them in the spoon until
it slops over into the onion, and then stir the salt and paprika and
oil and vinegar down into the bowl of minced onion, taking a salad
fork and jabbing it around in the mixture until the onion has been
fairly well crushed and the onion flavor permeates the mixed oil and
vinegar, and the salt and paprika have become for the moment a part
of the mass. Don't let it stand a second, but pour it quickly into
the bowl of dry lettuce, and then stir like the devil. Keep on
stirring; stir some more, and serve as quickly as possible.
Cheese
may be mashed into the onion before putting on the oil and vinegar
and paprika and salt. If one wants to add tomatoes, wait until the
last three jabs of the stirring fork into the lettuce, and then
quarter the tomatoes and turn them in just before you turn the
lettuce over the last two or three times. This is done so that the
watery juice of the tomatoes won't get smeared over the oil on the
lettuce leaves. If you stir the tomatoes in early, you get a runny,
watery, gooey mess. Cucumbers may be added, and they should be
stirred in rather earlier than the tomatoes in the business of mixing
the lettuce leaves and the dressing. Green peppers may be added if
they are cut into strings, but too much outside fixings spoils the
salad for me. The tomatoes are about as far as one can go wisely.
Dan
Beard
(American illustrator, author, youth leader, and social reformer who
founded the Sons of Daniel Boone in 1905, which Beard later
merged with the Boy Scouts of America)
A
BURGOO
Clean
and dress the meat of a soft-shelled turtle, a painted turtle, a
poker-dot turtle, or almost any other kind of turtle. Clean and dress
a rabbit, a ruffled grouse, moose meat, elk meat, deer meat, sheep
meat, in fact any sort of game. Cut your meat into pieces about the
size of inch cubes. Save the bones, especially the marrow bones, to
put in with the meat. Add some salt pork cut into cubes, if you have
it.
If
you have been thoughtful enough to supply your outfit with some
ill-smelling, but palatable dry vegetables, they will add flavor to
your burgoo, put all the material in a kettle, and fill the kettle
half full of water. If you have beans and potatoes do not put them in
with the meat because they will go to the bottom and scorch. While
the stuff you have already put in the kettle is boiling, or
simmering, peel your onions and quarter them, scrape your carrots and
slice them, peel your potatoes, cut them up into pieces—about inch
cubes. After your caldron has commenced to boil dump in the fresh
vegetables, they will cool off the water and kill the boil. Do not
let it come to a boil again, but put it over a slow fire and allow it
to simmer. There should always be enough water to cover the
vegetables. A can of tomatoes will add greatly to the flavor. Use no
sweet vegetables like beets or sweet potatoes. Put the salt and
pepper in just before you take it off the fire. When the burgoo is
done, strain it into tin cups. The liquid out of an olive bottle adds
greatly to the flavor if you pour it in while the stew is cooking. If
you have such luxuries in camp as olives and lemons, a slice of lemon
with an olive in each cup over which the liquid is poured makes a
dish too good for any old king that ever lived.
The
excellence of a burgoo depends upon two things, the materials you
have of which to make it and the care you take in cooking it. No two
burgoos are alike, and every one I ever tasted was mighty good.
Civilized material such as can be purchased at the butcher shop and
the vegetable store makes a good soup, but the "goo" isn't
there. Consequently you cannot call it a burgoo.
Dr.
Charles M. Sheldon
(American minister. His novel, In
His Steps,
introduced the principle of “What Would Jesus Do?”)
LIKES
BREAD AND MILK
A
recipe of my favorite dish is very simple—bread and milk with
American cheese broken into it. I eat this dish once a day every day
and find it wholesome and nourishing. It does not require any
skillful putting together, simply a good appetite and a taste for
that sort of provender. If there is an apple pie anywhere around to
top it off with, I do not despise that.
I
find as a rule that the simpler and more elementary the food, the
better so far as the body is concerned. And take it the year around a
bowl of milk with fresh bread and rich American cheese, finishing up
with "good apple pie like mother used to make," is all the
midday meal I need. I can work on that all the afternoon and feel
better than if I had had a seven course dinner.
I
hope you have enjoyed this glimpse into the past at what some of the
men in the early 20th
Century like to cook and eat.
Did
any of them sound like things your fathers, grandfathers, or
great-grandfathers liked to eat?
