Re: The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book by Alice B. Toklas
Posted: Wed Mar 22, 2023 8:17 am
8. Food in the United States in 1934 and 1935
WHEN during the summer of 1934 Gertrude Stein could not decide whether she did or did not want to go to the United States, one of the things that troubled her was the question of the food she would be eating there. Would it be to her taste? A young man from the Bugey had lately returned from a brief visit to the United States and had reported that the food was more foreign to him than the people, their homes or the way they lived in them. He said the food was good but very strange indeed -- tinned vegetable cocktails and tinned fruit salads, for example. Surely, said I, you weren't required to eat them. You could have substituted other dishes. Not, said he, when you were a guest.
At this time there was staying with us at Bilignin an American friend who said he would send us a menu from the restaurant of the hotel we would be staying at when Gertrude Stein lectured in his home town, which he did promptly on his return there. The variety of dishes was a pleasant surprise even if the tinned vegetable cocktails and fruit salads occupied a preponderant position. Consolingly, there were honey-dew melons, soft-shell crabs and prime roasts of beef. We would undertake the great adventure.
Crossing on the Champlain we had the best French food. It made me think of a college song popular in my youth, Home Will Never Be Like This. If the food that awaited us at the Algonquin Hotel did not resemble the food on the French Line it was very good in its way, unrivalled T-steaks and soft-shell crabs and ineffable ice creams.
Mr. Alfred Harcourt, Gertrude Stein's editor, had asked us to spend Thanksgiving weekend with Mrs. Harcourt and himself in their Connecticut home, and there we ate for the first time, with suppressed excitement and curiosity, wild rice. It has never become a commonplace to me. Carl Van Vechten sends it to me. To the delight of my French friends I serve
WILD RICE SALAD
Steam 1/2 lb. wild rice.
1/2 lb. coarsely chopped mushrooms cooked for 10 minutes in 3 tablespoons oil and 2 tablespoons lemon juice, 2 hard-boiled eggs coarsely chopped, 1 green pepper finely chopped, 1-1/2 cups shelled shrimps, all lightly mixed and served with
AIOLI OR AILLOLI SAUCE
Press into a mortar 4 cloves of garlic, add a pinch of salt, of white pepper and the yolk of an egg. With the pestle reduce these ingredients to an emulsion. Add the yolk of an egg. You may continue to make the sauce with the pestle or discard it for a wooden fork or a wooden spoon or a wire whisk. Real Provencal Aioli makers use the pestle to the end. With whatever instrument you will have chosen you will commence to incorporate drop by drop an excellent olive oil. When the egg has absorbed about 3 tablespoons of the oil, add 1/2 tablespoon lemon juice. Continuing to stir, now add oil more briskly. When it soon becomes firm again add 1 dessertspoon tepid water (I repeat, tepid water). Continue to add oil, lemon juice and tepid water. The yolk of 1 egg will absorb 1 cup and 2 tablespoons oil, 1-1/2 tablespoons lemon juice and 2 dessertspoons tepid water.
Aioli is, of course, nothing more than a garlic mayonnaise, a creamy mayonnaise. Mayonnaise with tepid water is creamier than without it. Mayonnaise should have more salt and pepper added to the yolk of egg than Aioli as well as powdered mustard and paprika.
Gertrude Stein said she was not going to lunch or dine with anyone before lecturing, we would eat simply and alone. Before her first lecture she ordered for dinner oysters and honey-dew melon. She said it would suit her. In travelling to a dozen states she deviated as little as possible from that first menu. Occasionally the oysters had to be replaced by fish or chicken. From the beginning the ubiquitous honey-dew melon bored me. Melons to me are a hot-weather refreshment. Rooms heated to 70° and over do not replace the sun. In any case, I prefer the flavour of Spanish melons to honey-dew and Persian melons. So the most fantastic dishes were experimented with, anything except what sounded like drug-store specialities.
Gertrude Stein continued with her satisfactory regime on the days of lectures. On the other days we fared more lavishly with friends in their homes and at restaurants, at first in New York, and then an excellent dinner at the inn at Princeton, at the Signet Club at Harvard with half a dozen of its members and no one else at Gertrude Stein's request, and very well at Smith College. Then we stayed with delightful people in an old historic house amidst rare and beautiful furniture and objects and dined and lunched with exquisite eighteenth-century porcelain, crystal and silver on a precious lace tablecloth, and left, quite starved, to find late in the afternoon fifty miles away an unpretentious but carefully cooked meal in a small town -- oysters, roast turkey and its accompaniments and an unusually good rice pudding were not beyond our capacity. We asked to see the cook to thank her, and she gave me the recipe for
RICE PUDDING
Thoroughly wash 1/4 lb. rice, cook in double boiler in I quart milk with a pinch of salt. Stir the yolks of 8 eggs with a wooden spoon gradually adding 1 cup sugar and 5 tablespoons flour. Stir for 10 minutes and slowly add 2 cups scalded milk. Place over very low flame, stirring continuously until the mixture coats the spoon. Remove from heat and strain through a sieve, adding 1 teaspoon vanilla extract. When rice is quite tender, add slowly to egg-sugar-milk mixture. Then gently incorporate the beaten whites of 3 eggs. Pour into buttered mould and cook in 350 ͦ oven for 20 minutes. Do not remove from mould until tepid. Serve with
VANILLA CREAM SAUCE
Stir the yolks of 6 eggs thoroughly with 1 cup sugar. Add 2-1/4 cups scalded milk. Stir over very low flame with wooden spoon until the mixture coats the spoon. Remove from flame and add 1 tablespoon best kirsch. Strain through hair sieve. Stir occasionally until cold enough to put into the refrigerator. Before serving gently add 1 cup whipped cream.
Gertrude Stein's and Virgil Thomson's opera was to be given in Chicago. She had never heard it, so when Bobsie Goodspeed telephoned that we ought to fly out there to hear it- -- here would not be time between lectures to go there by train -- Gertrude Stein said she would but only under the protection of Carl Van Vechten. After a perfect performance of Four Saints in Three Acts; Bobsie gave a supper party. She was known to have a perfect cuisine. Of the many courses I only remember the first and the last, a clear turtle soup and a fantastic piece montee of nougat and roses, cream and small coloured candles. The dessert reminded me of a postcard Virgil Thomson once sent us from the Cote d' Azur, Delightfully situated within sight of the sea, pine woods, nightingales, all cooked in butter. This is the recipe for
CLEAR TURTLE SOUP
Soak 1/2 lb. sun-dried turtle meat in cold water for four days changing the water each day. On the fourth day prepare 1 stalk celery, 1 leek, 1 carrot, 2 onions and 1 turnip. Put 12 peppercorns, 3 cloves, 8 coriander seeds, a sprig of basil, of rosemary, of marjoram and of thyme in a muslin bag. Put the vegetables, the bag of spices and condiments and the turtle meat in a large stewpan. Cover with 4 quarts stock and bring to the boil uncovered, skim thoroughly, cover and simmer gently for 8 hours at least. It may be necessary to add more stock, in which case add very little at a time and be certain that it is boiling. When the turtle meat is quite tender, remove from pan and put aside. Strain the soup through muslin. When the fat rises to the surface, carefully remove all of it. To clarify the soup add the whites of 3 eggs and the juice of 1/2 lemon. Put over moderate heat and bring to the boil whisking continuously. When it boils, reduce heat, cover. In 10 minutes, strain through muslin. It will have come beautifully limpid. Cut the turtle meat into 1-inch slices, put into strained soup, add salt and a good pinch of cayenne, 1/2 cup best dry sherry per quart of soup. Serve hot. A tasty, nourishing but light soup.
We were driven through a winter landscape to a women's college where Gertrude Stein had accepted an invitation to dine with some members of the faculty. The dining-room was really a huge mess hall with acoustics that made a pandemonium of the thousands or was it only hundreds of voices. It was the beautiful young women students who were making this demoniacal noise. No wonder we had always thought of the graduates of the college as sirens, tragic and possibly damned. A restricted dinner was served in a manner appropriate to the surroundings. Gertrude Stein asked if she might have a soft-boiled egg and an orange.
After Gertrude Stein had lectured in New England, we went to Wisconsin, Ohio, Illinois and St. Louis, where the cooking was uniformly good with the exception of a superlative lunch given by a friend of Carl Van Vechten at her vast estate near Minneapolis. The drawing-rooms and dining-room were filled with flowers, largely orchids, the first Tiepolo blue ones we had ever seen. The dining-room table had a bowl of several varieties of hot-house grapes with thin tendrils and tender leaves -- and the snow steadily falling outside. Our hostess was in the tradition of a Dumas fils heroine, though she was, I believe, the original of Carl Van Vechten's Tattooed Countess. It is unnecessary to say that the menu was entirely a French one, and therefore a recipe of one of its courses has no place here.
The temptation however is too great. This is the way to prepare
LOBSTER ARCHIDUC
Thoroughly wash a live lobster weighing not less than 3 lbs. Plunge into boiling water, allow to cool in liquid. Cut it down the middle and then across, take off the two claws, put aside the coral or eggs. In a deep pan melt over hot flame 4 tablespoons butter and 4 tablespoons oil. When it bubbles, put the six pieces of lobster, in their shell, into the pan. Heat thoroughly, turn with a wooden spoon until each piece is coated with the butter and oil. Then cover the pan and reduce the heat. Cook gently for 1/2 hour. Drain the lobster. Remove all meat from the shell and replace in the pan with the sauce. Replace over heat. Reheat slowly over low flame. Add the coral or eggs, 1/4 cup brandy, 1/2 cup best port wine and 2. tablespoons whisky. Season with salt and cayenne pepper. Cover and allow to boil for 5 minutes. Add 2. cups heavy cream. All to boil. Add the yolks of 2 eggs, heat thoroughly but do not allow to boil. Add the juice of 1/4 lemon and 5 tablespoons butter in very small pieces, turn gently until melted. Serve. This dish has an illusive flavour.
When we were at St. Paul to our surprise and delight there was a telephone message from Sherwood Anderson. He had heard we were in the neighbourhood. He proposed calling for us and driving us down to meet his wife -- they were staying with her sister and their brother-in-law -- which he did, through miles of ice and snow-drifts, to sweet people and a festival dinner. It was the happiest of meetings. Of all the delicacies served, it is strange to remark that it was the first time we tasted mint jelly.
In Columbus, Ohio, there was a small restaurant that served meals that would have been my pride if they had come to our table from our kitchen. The cooks were women and the owner was a woman and it was managed by women. The cooking was beyond compare, neither fluffy nor emasculated, as women's cooking can be, but succulent and savoury. Later, at Fort Worth, there was a similar restaurant to which Miss Ela Hockaday introduced us. We were to fly out to California and the restaurant packed us a box of food that was the best picnic lunch ever was. It would be a pleasure to be able to order something approaching it when taking a plane today. Has food on the American planes -- not the transatlantic flights but on interior routes -- improved? It has not in Europe, it is incredibly bad, even worse than on trains. Do they cook these meals in the locomotive and in the fuselage?
At Detroit there was a strange incident at the hotel which seemed sinister to us. The hardened European visitors became frightened. Gertrude Stein had the habit of an hour's walk after the evening meal, improperly spoken of as dinner. To calm her mind, she went off for a walk, but in a short time she returned quite agitated. Not far from the hotel, from the loudspeaker on a tower with a revolving searchlight, a warning was being repeated that no one was to move until a gunman was caught. A murder had just been committed. Suddenly Joseph Brewer's name flashed into my head. Had we not said we would stay with him if we were in his neighbourhood? He was the president of Olivet College. So we telephoned him and said we would like to be rescued. He said he would come to collect us and our bags, which he did the next morning with a large part of his faculty in several cars. It was an invigorating drive through snow and bitter cold sunshine to Lansing, where we had a carefully prepared lunch. For dessert we had an old-fashioned
BIRD'S-NEST PUDDING
Butter a porcelain pudding dish, slice 8 apples into it, sprinkle with sugar. Pour over them a batter made of 1 cup sour cream, 1 cup flour. Mix well, add the yolks of 3 eggs and 1 cup milk in which has been mixed 1 scant teaspoon baking soda. Beat the whites of 3 eggs, fold into mixture. Bake for 1/2 hour in medium oven. Brush the top with melted butter and sprinkle with sugar. Brown for 10 minutes. Serve with sweetened heavy cream. This is a pudding we should not neglect.
With a couple of days' rest with Joseph Brewer and the students at Olivet we forgot the horrors of Detroit and started off again. With Gertrude Stein's cousins in their home near Baltimore we enjoyed our first southern hospitality. We went to see Scott Fitzgerald in Baltimore who, with tea, offered us an endless variety of canapes, to remind us, he said, of Paris. In Washington southern hospitality continued. There was no disparity between the inspired negress cook and the enormous kitchen over which she presided. The hospitality was so continuous that there was never time to ask her for a recipe from her vast repertoire. She made the cakes, ices, punches and sandwiches for the parties, and the elaborate lunches and dinners that succeeded each other. No trouble at all, she said, when one has all the best material one needs. A dish, my father once said, can only have the flavour of what has gone into the making of it.
In New York we picked up Carl Van Vechten who was going to Richmond with us to introduce us to some of his friends there. On the way we stopped at Charlottesville where Gertrude Stein was to lecture at the University of Virginia, and where we lunched extremely well with some of the faculty, who pleased us with their divided allegiance to Edgar Allen Poe and Julien Green. At an epicurean dinner at Miss Ellen Glasgow's I was paralysed to find myself placed next to Mr. James Branch Cabell, but his cheery, Tell me, Miss Stein's writing is a joke, isn't it, put me completely at my ease so that we got on very well after that.
At William and Mary we lunched in state with the president at the Governor's house. On the road to Charleston we lunched at an old Planter's Hotel copiously and succulently, for which the French have the nice word plantureux. We were asked to lunch at Strawberry. Was the exquisite food more seductive than the incredible water gardens, was the preparation of the menus at the Villa Margharita more exciting than the avenues of camellias? I have never been able to decide. Now they are all one. Changing planes at Atlanta, Gertrude Stein was delighted to see on a huge sign near the airport, Buy Your Meat and Wheat in Georgia.
In New Orleans we found Sherwood Anderson again and he took us to lunch at Antoine's and at a smaller restaurant which we preferred where we ate for the first time
OYSTERS ROCKEFELLER
Place oysters on the half shell in preheated deep dishes filled with sand (silver sand glistens prettily). Cover the oysters thickly with 1/4 chopped parsley, 1/4 finely chopped raw spinach, 1/8 finely chopped tarragon, 1/8 finely chopped chervil, 1/8 finely chopped basil and 1/8 finely chopped chives. Salt and pepper some fresh breadcrumbs, cover the herbs completely, dot with melted butter and put for 4 or 5 minutes in a preheated 450 ͦ oven. Serve piping hot.
This dish is an enormous success with French gourmets. It makes more friends for the United States than anything I know.
In New Orleans I walked down to the market every morning realising that I would have to live in the dream of it for the rest of my life. How with such perfection, variety and abundance of material could one not be inspired to creative cooking? We certainly do overdo not only the use of the word but the belief in its widespread existence. Can one be inspired by rows of prepared canned meals? Never. One must get nearer to creation to be able to create, even in the kitchen.
Before leaving Miss Henderson gave us two bottles of orange wine, wine that was still being made in her home. It wasn't until some-weeks later that we opened one of the bottles in Chicago and found the wine to be pure ambrosia.
In Chicago we stayed in Thornton Wilder's flat. He had said it would be convenient for Gertrude Stein as it was close to the university where she was to lecture. There was an extensive view from the little flat. It was very exciting, compact and comprehensive. The kitchen, though no larger than a dining-room table, permitted one, with its modem conveniences and marketing by telephone, to cook with the minimum of time and effort quite good meals. Those days are still my ideal of happy housekeeping. Once again we had lovely food with Bobsie Goodspeed, and at old-fashioned restaurants with friends and a delicious dinner with Thornton Wilder at a lakeside restaurant. We even had guests for meals at the flat. The meat or fowl delivered in waxed paper was deposited from the outside hall into the refrigerator, as were also the vegetables, cream, milk, butter and eggs.
On to Dallas where we went to stay with Miss Ela Hockaday at her Junior College. It was a fresh new world. Gertrude Stein became attached to the young students, to Miss Hockaday and the life in Miss Hockaday's home and on the campus. Miss Hockaday explained that all good Texas food was Virginian. Miss Hockaday's kitchen was the most beautiful one I have ever seen, all old coppers on the stove and on the walls, with a huge copper hood over the stove. Everything else was modem white enamel. The only recipe I carried away with me was for cornsticks, not knowing in my ignorance that a special iron was required in which to bake them. But when we sailed to go back to France in my stateroom one was waiting for me, a proof of Miss Hockaday's continuing attentiveness. It was my pride and delight in Paris where it was certainly unique. What did the Germans, when they took it in 1944, expect to do with it? And what are they doing with it now?
At the university at Austen the faculty asked some of the students to meet Gertrude Stein after the lecture. A very stiff punch was served, but when I was about to light a cigarette I was asked not to do so. Only men smoked.
Then we were off to God's own country. It was even more so than I remembered it. If there were more people and more houses, there were compensatingly more fields, more orchards, more vegetables and more gardens. A great part of the United States that we had seen had been new to me, it was a revelation of the beauty of our country, but California was unequalled. Sun and a fertile soil breed generosity and gentleness, amiability and appreciation. It was abundantly satisfying. In Pasadena amongst olive and orange groves we saw our first avocado trees and their fruit offered for sale stacked in great pyramids, almost as common as tomatoes would be later in the season. Driving north we heard that the desert wild flowers were in bloom so we took a day off to see them and the date palms. Through acres of orchards and artichokes, we made our way north to Monterey where happy days of my youth had been spent in an adobe house where my friend Senora B. had been born. The story was that General Sherman had courted her in the garden of her home, and before leaving Monterey had planted a rose tree later to be known as the Sherman rose. By the time I stayed with her she was an exquisite wee old lady with flashing black eyes. She would throw one of her shawls over my shoulders and say with a devilish glint, Go out and stand under the rose tree and let the tourists from Del Monte take your photograph. They will try to give you four bits but you may continue to turn your back on them. Senora B. made a simple Spanish sweet of which Panoche is the coarse Mexican version. She made it like this and unpretentiously called it
DULCE (1)
In a huge copper pan put quantities of granulated sugar, moisten with cream, turn constantly with a copper spoon until it is done. Then pour into glasses.
Senora B. said the longer it cooked the better the flavour would be. Senora B. would start it early in the morning and would entrust it to me when she went to mass. It was a compliment I could have dispensed with. As she was so little she stood on a footstool before her charcoal fire. In her simple but voluminous dark cashmere clothes she looked like a Zurbaran angel.
Here is my version of the
DULCE (2)
Put 2 cups sugar and 1 cup thin cream in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Then at once lower the heat and cook very slowly, stirring continuously for about an hour. It will become heavy and stiff and will have the colour of its flavour. There are people who like it a lot.
We had stopped at Monterey so that Gertrude Stein could see the house of Senora B. but it was no longer where it had been. A traffic policeman came up to us and asked us roughly what we were trying to do. To find Senora Bo's home, I said. It used to be here. That's right, he said, but years ago one of those rich easterners came out and bought it and carted it away into the hills. Carted an adobe house away, I muttered. But he wafted us on.
At Del Monte cooking was still of passionate interest to the management of the hotel. The same careful attention was given to the kitchen as to the vegetable and flower gardens. Grilled chicken and turkey broilers, spring lamb, cooked on a spit and basted by brushing it with a bunch of fresh mint, served with gooseberry jelly and an iced souffle, were still unrivalled experiences.
This is the way to make
GOOSEBERRY JELLY
Take the tips and stalks off 6 lbs. gooseberries, put in a pan over a low flame with 4 pints water. Simmer until the berries are tender. Turn into a jelly bag and let the juice run through. Weigh the juice. Place over high flame and boil briskly for 15 minutes. Add equal weight of sugar. Mix thoroughly and bring to the boil. Boil for 15 minutes or until it jellies.
Here is the recipe for the ineffable
ICED SOUFFLE
Put 2 cups sugar in heavy enamelled saucepan with 8 yolks of eggs and 1 whole egg over lowest flame. Beat with a rotary beater until it is quite thick. This will take some time. When it makes pointed peaks when the egg beater is removed, take from the stove and flavour with 1 tablespoon kirsch or anisette. Place on ice to cool. Pour into a souffle dish and sprinkle on top 3 macaroons dried in the oven, rolled and strained. Put in the refrigerator for 3 hours. This is a particular favourite with men.
At Del Monte Lodge we ate for the first time abalone, and thought it a delicious food. It was served in a cream sauce in its shell, lightly browned with breadcrumbs without cheese, we gratefully noticed. Abalone has a delicate flavour of its own and requires no barbecue or barbarous adjuncts.
In San Francisco we indulged in gastronomic orgies -- sand dabs meuniere, rainbow trout in aspic, grilled soft-shell crabs, paupiettes of roast fillets of pork, eggs Rossini and tarte Chambord. The tarte Chambord had been a speciality of one of the three great French bakers before the San Francisco fire. To my surprise in Paris no one had ever heard of it.
At Fisherman's Wharf we waited for two enormous crabs to be cooked in a cauldron on the side-walk, and they were still quite warm when we ate them at lunch in Napa County. Gertrude Atherton took us to lunch at a restaurant where the menu consisted entirely of the most perfectly cooked shell-fish, to her club where the cooking was incredibly good, and to dinner at a club of writers where conversation excelled.
And then the dearest friend sent us a basket of fruit and flowers, fit subject for an Italian painter of the Renaissance, and we tasted for the first time passion fruit. We had known passion-fruit syrup in Paris and thought its flavour exquisite (it made a wonderful ice cream). And now we were told that passion fruit was the fruit of the passion-flower vine. Surely not from the passion-flower vine that has climbed a wall in every garden I ever had.
Then the time had come when we would have to leave California, to leave the United States, to go back to France and cultivate our garden in the Ain. Above everything else I enjoyed working in that garden, but leaving the United States was distressful.
It was not until we were on the Champlain again that I realised that the seven months we had spent in the United States had been an experience and adventure which nothing that might follow would ever equal.
WHEN during the summer of 1934 Gertrude Stein could not decide whether she did or did not want to go to the United States, one of the things that troubled her was the question of the food she would be eating there. Would it be to her taste? A young man from the Bugey had lately returned from a brief visit to the United States and had reported that the food was more foreign to him than the people, their homes or the way they lived in them. He said the food was good but very strange indeed -- tinned vegetable cocktails and tinned fruit salads, for example. Surely, said I, you weren't required to eat them. You could have substituted other dishes. Not, said he, when you were a guest.
At this time there was staying with us at Bilignin an American friend who said he would send us a menu from the restaurant of the hotel we would be staying at when Gertrude Stein lectured in his home town, which he did promptly on his return there. The variety of dishes was a pleasant surprise even if the tinned vegetable cocktails and fruit salads occupied a preponderant position. Consolingly, there were honey-dew melons, soft-shell crabs and prime roasts of beef. We would undertake the great adventure.
Crossing on the Champlain we had the best French food. It made me think of a college song popular in my youth, Home Will Never Be Like This. If the food that awaited us at the Algonquin Hotel did not resemble the food on the French Line it was very good in its way, unrivalled T-steaks and soft-shell crabs and ineffable ice creams.
Mr. Alfred Harcourt, Gertrude Stein's editor, had asked us to spend Thanksgiving weekend with Mrs. Harcourt and himself in their Connecticut home, and there we ate for the first time, with suppressed excitement and curiosity, wild rice. It has never become a commonplace to me. Carl Van Vechten sends it to me. To the delight of my French friends I serve
WILD RICE SALAD
Steam 1/2 lb. wild rice.
1/2 lb. coarsely chopped mushrooms cooked for 10 minutes in 3 tablespoons oil and 2 tablespoons lemon juice, 2 hard-boiled eggs coarsely chopped, 1 green pepper finely chopped, 1-1/2 cups shelled shrimps, all lightly mixed and served with
AIOLI OR AILLOLI SAUCE
Press into a mortar 4 cloves of garlic, add a pinch of salt, of white pepper and the yolk of an egg. With the pestle reduce these ingredients to an emulsion. Add the yolk of an egg. You may continue to make the sauce with the pestle or discard it for a wooden fork or a wooden spoon or a wire whisk. Real Provencal Aioli makers use the pestle to the end. With whatever instrument you will have chosen you will commence to incorporate drop by drop an excellent olive oil. When the egg has absorbed about 3 tablespoons of the oil, add 1/2 tablespoon lemon juice. Continuing to stir, now add oil more briskly. When it soon becomes firm again add 1 dessertspoon tepid water (I repeat, tepid water). Continue to add oil, lemon juice and tepid water. The yolk of 1 egg will absorb 1 cup and 2 tablespoons oil, 1-1/2 tablespoons lemon juice and 2 dessertspoons tepid water.
Aioli is, of course, nothing more than a garlic mayonnaise, a creamy mayonnaise. Mayonnaise with tepid water is creamier than without it. Mayonnaise should have more salt and pepper added to the yolk of egg than Aioli as well as powdered mustard and paprika.
Gertrude Stein said she was not going to lunch or dine with anyone before lecturing, we would eat simply and alone. Before her first lecture she ordered for dinner oysters and honey-dew melon. She said it would suit her. In travelling to a dozen states she deviated as little as possible from that first menu. Occasionally the oysters had to be replaced by fish or chicken. From the beginning the ubiquitous honey-dew melon bored me. Melons to me are a hot-weather refreshment. Rooms heated to 70° and over do not replace the sun. In any case, I prefer the flavour of Spanish melons to honey-dew and Persian melons. So the most fantastic dishes were experimented with, anything except what sounded like drug-store specialities.
Gertrude Stein continued with her satisfactory regime on the days of lectures. On the other days we fared more lavishly with friends in their homes and at restaurants, at first in New York, and then an excellent dinner at the inn at Princeton, at the Signet Club at Harvard with half a dozen of its members and no one else at Gertrude Stein's request, and very well at Smith College. Then we stayed with delightful people in an old historic house amidst rare and beautiful furniture and objects and dined and lunched with exquisite eighteenth-century porcelain, crystal and silver on a precious lace tablecloth, and left, quite starved, to find late in the afternoon fifty miles away an unpretentious but carefully cooked meal in a small town -- oysters, roast turkey and its accompaniments and an unusually good rice pudding were not beyond our capacity. We asked to see the cook to thank her, and she gave me the recipe for
RICE PUDDING
Thoroughly wash 1/4 lb. rice, cook in double boiler in I quart milk with a pinch of salt. Stir the yolks of 8 eggs with a wooden spoon gradually adding 1 cup sugar and 5 tablespoons flour. Stir for 10 minutes and slowly add 2 cups scalded milk. Place over very low flame, stirring continuously until the mixture coats the spoon. Remove from heat and strain through a sieve, adding 1 teaspoon vanilla extract. When rice is quite tender, add slowly to egg-sugar-milk mixture. Then gently incorporate the beaten whites of 3 eggs. Pour into buttered mould and cook in 350 ͦ oven for 20 minutes. Do not remove from mould until tepid. Serve with
VANILLA CREAM SAUCE
Stir the yolks of 6 eggs thoroughly with 1 cup sugar. Add 2-1/4 cups scalded milk. Stir over very low flame with wooden spoon until the mixture coats the spoon. Remove from flame and add 1 tablespoon best kirsch. Strain through hair sieve. Stir occasionally until cold enough to put into the refrigerator. Before serving gently add 1 cup whipped cream.
Gertrude Stein's and Virgil Thomson's opera was to be given in Chicago. She had never heard it, so when Bobsie Goodspeed telephoned that we ought to fly out there to hear it- -- here would not be time between lectures to go there by train -- Gertrude Stein said she would but only under the protection of Carl Van Vechten. After a perfect performance of Four Saints in Three Acts; Bobsie gave a supper party. She was known to have a perfect cuisine. Of the many courses I only remember the first and the last, a clear turtle soup and a fantastic piece montee of nougat and roses, cream and small coloured candles. The dessert reminded me of a postcard Virgil Thomson once sent us from the Cote d' Azur, Delightfully situated within sight of the sea, pine woods, nightingales, all cooked in butter. This is the recipe for
CLEAR TURTLE SOUP
Soak 1/2 lb. sun-dried turtle meat in cold water for four days changing the water each day. On the fourth day prepare 1 stalk celery, 1 leek, 1 carrot, 2 onions and 1 turnip. Put 12 peppercorns, 3 cloves, 8 coriander seeds, a sprig of basil, of rosemary, of marjoram and of thyme in a muslin bag. Put the vegetables, the bag of spices and condiments and the turtle meat in a large stewpan. Cover with 4 quarts stock and bring to the boil uncovered, skim thoroughly, cover and simmer gently for 8 hours at least. It may be necessary to add more stock, in which case add very little at a time and be certain that it is boiling. When the turtle meat is quite tender, remove from pan and put aside. Strain the soup through muslin. When the fat rises to the surface, carefully remove all of it. To clarify the soup add the whites of 3 eggs and the juice of 1/2 lemon. Put over moderate heat and bring to the boil whisking continuously. When it boils, reduce heat, cover. In 10 minutes, strain through muslin. It will have come beautifully limpid. Cut the turtle meat into 1-inch slices, put into strained soup, add salt and a good pinch of cayenne, 1/2 cup best dry sherry per quart of soup. Serve hot. A tasty, nourishing but light soup.
We were driven through a winter landscape to a women's college where Gertrude Stein had accepted an invitation to dine with some members of the faculty. The dining-room was really a huge mess hall with acoustics that made a pandemonium of the thousands or was it only hundreds of voices. It was the beautiful young women students who were making this demoniacal noise. No wonder we had always thought of the graduates of the college as sirens, tragic and possibly damned. A restricted dinner was served in a manner appropriate to the surroundings. Gertrude Stein asked if she might have a soft-boiled egg and an orange.
After Gertrude Stein had lectured in New England, we went to Wisconsin, Ohio, Illinois and St. Louis, where the cooking was uniformly good with the exception of a superlative lunch given by a friend of Carl Van Vechten at her vast estate near Minneapolis. The drawing-rooms and dining-room were filled with flowers, largely orchids, the first Tiepolo blue ones we had ever seen. The dining-room table had a bowl of several varieties of hot-house grapes with thin tendrils and tender leaves -- and the snow steadily falling outside. Our hostess was in the tradition of a Dumas fils heroine, though she was, I believe, the original of Carl Van Vechten's Tattooed Countess. It is unnecessary to say that the menu was entirely a French one, and therefore a recipe of one of its courses has no place here.
The temptation however is too great. This is the way to prepare
LOBSTER ARCHIDUC
Thoroughly wash a live lobster weighing not less than 3 lbs. Plunge into boiling water, allow to cool in liquid. Cut it down the middle and then across, take off the two claws, put aside the coral or eggs. In a deep pan melt over hot flame 4 tablespoons butter and 4 tablespoons oil. When it bubbles, put the six pieces of lobster, in their shell, into the pan. Heat thoroughly, turn with a wooden spoon until each piece is coated with the butter and oil. Then cover the pan and reduce the heat. Cook gently for 1/2 hour. Drain the lobster. Remove all meat from the shell and replace in the pan with the sauce. Replace over heat. Reheat slowly over low flame. Add the coral or eggs, 1/4 cup brandy, 1/2 cup best port wine and 2. tablespoons whisky. Season with salt and cayenne pepper. Cover and allow to boil for 5 minutes. Add 2. cups heavy cream. All to boil. Add the yolks of 2 eggs, heat thoroughly but do not allow to boil. Add the juice of 1/4 lemon and 5 tablespoons butter in very small pieces, turn gently until melted. Serve. This dish has an illusive flavour.
When we were at St. Paul to our surprise and delight there was a telephone message from Sherwood Anderson. He had heard we were in the neighbourhood. He proposed calling for us and driving us down to meet his wife -- they were staying with her sister and their brother-in-law -- which he did, through miles of ice and snow-drifts, to sweet people and a festival dinner. It was the happiest of meetings. Of all the delicacies served, it is strange to remark that it was the first time we tasted mint jelly.
In Columbus, Ohio, there was a small restaurant that served meals that would have been my pride if they had come to our table from our kitchen. The cooks were women and the owner was a woman and it was managed by women. The cooking was beyond compare, neither fluffy nor emasculated, as women's cooking can be, but succulent and savoury. Later, at Fort Worth, there was a similar restaurant to which Miss Ela Hockaday introduced us. We were to fly out to California and the restaurant packed us a box of food that was the best picnic lunch ever was. It would be a pleasure to be able to order something approaching it when taking a plane today. Has food on the American planes -- not the transatlantic flights but on interior routes -- improved? It has not in Europe, it is incredibly bad, even worse than on trains. Do they cook these meals in the locomotive and in the fuselage?
At Detroit there was a strange incident at the hotel which seemed sinister to us. The hardened European visitors became frightened. Gertrude Stein had the habit of an hour's walk after the evening meal, improperly spoken of as dinner. To calm her mind, she went off for a walk, but in a short time she returned quite agitated. Not far from the hotel, from the loudspeaker on a tower with a revolving searchlight, a warning was being repeated that no one was to move until a gunman was caught. A murder had just been committed. Suddenly Joseph Brewer's name flashed into my head. Had we not said we would stay with him if we were in his neighbourhood? He was the president of Olivet College. So we telephoned him and said we would like to be rescued. He said he would come to collect us and our bags, which he did the next morning with a large part of his faculty in several cars. It was an invigorating drive through snow and bitter cold sunshine to Lansing, where we had a carefully prepared lunch. For dessert we had an old-fashioned
BIRD'S-NEST PUDDING
Butter a porcelain pudding dish, slice 8 apples into it, sprinkle with sugar. Pour over them a batter made of 1 cup sour cream, 1 cup flour. Mix well, add the yolks of 3 eggs and 1 cup milk in which has been mixed 1 scant teaspoon baking soda. Beat the whites of 3 eggs, fold into mixture. Bake for 1/2 hour in medium oven. Brush the top with melted butter and sprinkle with sugar. Brown for 10 minutes. Serve with sweetened heavy cream. This is a pudding we should not neglect.
With a couple of days' rest with Joseph Brewer and the students at Olivet we forgot the horrors of Detroit and started off again. With Gertrude Stein's cousins in their home near Baltimore we enjoyed our first southern hospitality. We went to see Scott Fitzgerald in Baltimore who, with tea, offered us an endless variety of canapes, to remind us, he said, of Paris. In Washington southern hospitality continued. There was no disparity between the inspired negress cook and the enormous kitchen over which she presided. The hospitality was so continuous that there was never time to ask her for a recipe from her vast repertoire. She made the cakes, ices, punches and sandwiches for the parties, and the elaborate lunches and dinners that succeeded each other. No trouble at all, she said, when one has all the best material one needs. A dish, my father once said, can only have the flavour of what has gone into the making of it.
In New York we picked up Carl Van Vechten who was going to Richmond with us to introduce us to some of his friends there. On the way we stopped at Charlottesville where Gertrude Stein was to lecture at the University of Virginia, and where we lunched extremely well with some of the faculty, who pleased us with their divided allegiance to Edgar Allen Poe and Julien Green. At an epicurean dinner at Miss Ellen Glasgow's I was paralysed to find myself placed next to Mr. James Branch Cabell, but his cheery, Tell me, Miss Stein's writing is a joke, isn't it, put me completely at my ease so that we got on very well after that.
At William and Mary we lunched in state with the president at the Governor's house. On the road to Charleston we lunched at an old Planter's Hotel copiously and succulently, for which the French have the nice word plantureux. We were asked to lunch at Strawberry. Was the exquisite food more seductive than the incredible water gardens, was the preparation of the menus at the Villa Margharita more exciting than the avenues of camellias? I have never been able to decide. Now they are all one. Changing planes at Atlanta, Gertrude Stein was delighted to see on a huge sign near the airport, Buy Your Meat and Wheat in Georgia.
In New Orleans we found Sherwood Anderson again and he took us to lunch at Antoine's and at a smaller restaurant which we preferred where we ate for the first time
OYSTERS ROCKEFELLER
Place oysters on the half shell in preheated deep dishes filled with sand (silver sand glistens prettily). Cover the oysters thickly with 1/4 chopped parsley, 1/4 finely chopped raw spinach, 1/8 finely chopped tarragon, 1/8 finely chopped chervil, 1/8 finely chopped basil and 1/8 finely chopped chives. Salt and pepper some fresh breadcrumbs, cover the herbs completely, dot with melted butter and put for 4 or 5 minutes in a preheated 450 ͦ oven. Serve piping hot.
This dish is an enormous success with French gourmets. It makes more friends for the United States than anything I know.
In New Orleans I walked down to the market every morning realising that I would have to live in the dream of it for the rest of my life. How with such perfection, variety and abundance of material could one not be inspired to creative cooking? We certainly do overdo not only the use of the word but the belief in its widespread existence. Can one be inspired by rows of prepared canned meals? Never. One must get nearer to creation to be able to create, even in the kitchen.
Before leaving Miss Henderson gave us two bottles of orange wine, wine that was still being made in her home. It wasn't until some-weeks later that we opened one of the bottles in Chicago and found the wine to be pure ambrosia.
In Chicago we stayed in Thornton Wilder's flat. He had said it would be convenient for Gertrude Stein as it was close to the university where she was to lecture. There was an extensive view from the little flat. It was very exciting, compact and comprehensive. The kitchen, though no larger than a dining-room table, permitted one, with its modem conveniences and marketing by telephone, to cook with the minimum of time and effort quite good meals. Those days are still my ideal of happy housekeeping. Once again we had lovely food with Bobsie Goodspeed, and at old-fashioned restaurants with friends and a delicious dinner with Thornton Wilder at a lakeside restaurant. We even had guests for meals at the flat. The meat or fowl delivered in waxed paper was deposited from the outside hall into the refrigerator, as were also the vegetables, cream, milk, butter and eggs.
On to Dallas where we went to stay with Miss Ela Hockaday at her Junior College. It was a fresh new world. Gertrude Stein became attached to the young students, to Miss Hockaday and the life in Miss Hockaday's home and on the campus. Miss Hockaday explained that all good Texas food was Virginian. Miss Hockaday's kitchen was the most beautiful one I have ever seen, all old coppers on the stove and on the walls, with a huge copper hood over the stove. Everything else was modem white enamel. The only recipe I carried away with me was for cornsticks, not knowing in my ignorance that a special iron was required in which to bake them. But when we sailed to go back to France in my stateroom one was waiting for me, a proof of Miss Hockaday's continuing attentiveness. It was my pride and delight in Paris where it was certainly unique. What did the Germans, when they took it in 1944, expect to do with it? And what are they doing with it now?
At the university at Austen the faculty asked some of the students to meet Gertrude Stein after the lecture. A very stiff punch was served, but when I was about to light a cigarette I was asked not to do so. Only men smoked.
Then we were off to God's own country. It was even more so than I remembered it. If there were more people and more houses, there were compensatingly more fields, more orchards, more vegetables and more gardens. A great part of the United States that we had seen had been new to me, it was a revelation of the beauty of our country, but California was unequalled. Sun and a fertile soil breed generosity and gentleness, amiability and appreciation. It was abundantly satisfying. In Pasadena amongst olive and orange groves we saw our first avocado trees and their fruit offered for sale stacked in great pyramids, almost as common as tomatoes would be later in the season. Driving north we heard that the desert wild flowers were in bloom so we took a day off to see them and the date palms. Through acres of orchards and artichokes, we made our way north to Monterey where happy days of my youth had been spent in an adobe house where my friend Senora B. had been born. The story was that General Sherman had courted her in the garden of her home, and before leaving Monterey had planted a rose tree later to be known as the Sherman rose. By the time I stayed with her she was an exquisite wee old lady with flashing black eyes. She would throw one of her shawls over my shoulders and say with a devilish glint, Go out and stand under the rose tree and let the tourists from Del Monte take your photograph. They will try to give you four bits but you may continue to turn your back on them. Senora B. made a simple Spanish sweet of which Panoche is the coarse Mexican version. She made it like this and unpretentiously called it
DULCE (1)
In a huge copper pan put quantities of granulated sugar, moisten with cream, turn constantly with a copper spoon until it is done. Then pour into glasses.
Senora B. said the longer it cooked the better the flavour would be. Senora B. would start it early in the morning and would entrust it to me when she went to mass. It was a compliment I could have dispensed with. As she was so little she stood on a footstool before her charcoal fire. In her simple but voluminous dark cashmere clothes she looked like a Zurbaran angel.
Here is my version of the
DULCE (2)
Put 2 cups sugar and 1 cup thin cream in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Then at once lower the heat and cook very slowly, stirring continuously for about an hour. It will become heavy and stiff and will have the colour of its flavour. There are people who like it a lot.
We had stopped at Monterey so that Gertrude Stein could see the house of Senora B. but it was no longer where it had been. A traffic policeman came up to us and asked us roughly what we were trying to do. To find Senora Bo's home, I said. It used to be here. That's right, he said, but years ago one of those rich easterners came out and bought it and carted it away into the hills. Carted an adobe house away, I muttered. But he wafted us on.
At Del Monte cooking was still of passionate interest to the management of the hotel. The same careful attention was given to the kitchen as to the vegetable and flower gardens. Grilled chicken and turkey broilers, spring lamb, cooked on a spit and basted by brushing it with a bunch of fresh mint, served with gooseberry jelly and an iced souffle, were still unrivalled experiences.
This is the way to make
GOOSEBERRY JELLY
Take the tips and stalks off 6 lbs. gooseberries, put in a pan over a low flame with 4 pints water. Simmer until the berries are tender. Turn into a jelly bag and let the juice run through. Weigh the juice. Place over high flame and boil briskly for 15 minutes. Add equal weight of sugar. Mix thoroughly and bring to the boil. Boil for 15 minutes or until it jellies.
Here is the recipe for the ineffable
ICED SOUFFLE
Put 2 cups sugar in heavy enamelled saucepan with 8 yolks of eggs and 1 whole egg over lowest flame. Beat with a rotary beater until it is quite thick. This will take some time. When it makes pointed peaks when the egg beater is removed, take from the stove and flavour with 1 tablespoon kirsch or anisette. Place on ice to cool. Pour into a souffle dish and sprinkle on top 3 macaroons dried in the oven, rolled and strained. Put in the refrigerator for 3 hours. This is a particular favourite with men.
At Del Monte Lodge we ate for the first time abalone, and thought it a delicious food. It was served in a cream sauce in its shell, lightly browned with breadcrumbs without cheese, we gratefully noticed. Abalone has a delicate flavour of its own and requires no barbecue or barbarous adjuncts.
In San Francisco we indulged in gastronomic orgies -- sand dabs meuniere, rainbow trout in aspic, grilled soft-shell crabs, paupiettes of roast fillets of pork, eggs Rossini and tarte Chambord. The tarte Chambord had been a speciality of one of the three great French bakers before the San Francisco fire. To my surprise in Paris no one had ever heard of it.
At Fisherman's Wharf we waited for two enormous crabs to be cooked in a cauldron on the side-walk, and they were still quite warm when we ate them at lunch in Napa County. Gertrude Atherton took us to lunch at a restaurant where the menu consisted entirely of the most perfectly cooked shell-fish, to her club where the cooking was incredibly good, and to dinner at a club of writers where conversation excelled.
And then the dearest friend sent us a basket of fruit and flowers, fit subject for an Italian painter of the Renaissance, and we tasted for the first time passion fruit. We had known passion-fruit syrup in Paris and thought its flavour exquisite (it made a wonderful ice cream). And now we were told that passion fruit was the fruit of the passion-flower vine. Surely not from the passion-flower vine that has climbed a wall in every garden I ever had.
Then the time had come when we would have to leave California, to leave the United States, to go back to France and cultivate our garden in the Ain. Above everything else I enjoyed working in that garden, but leaving the United States was distressful.
It was not until we were on the Champlain again that I realised that the seven months we had spent in the United States had been an experience and adventure which nothing that might follow would ever equal.