Nothin's Cookin' This Christmas

     I'm too busy with stockings.  I have to do stockings or it's not Christmas.  This year there were so many things to go into the stockings that auxiliary stockings had to be purchased.  Soap, hand lotion, small toys, candy, crackers, chocolate coins, flavored chocolate apples, scented tags for car mirrors, emery boards, oddly shaped pens, a rolling pin, 6 shot glasses, spices, flavored salts, ouzo flavored candies, pez dispensers in the shapes of characters from the Lord of the Rings, miniature spice boxes for travelers in middle-America, note pads shaped like cup-cakes, post-it notes with colorful designs; all have been sorted out to the appropriate recipient. Six stockings for my six closest relatives.
     Why? The one empty stocking is mine.  And that is why I do stockings, religiously at Christmas.  It is in the futile hope that my mother will fill mine, as she did a half-century ago.  I actually do not remember what was in them, except tangerines. Yet, they remain my secret of the season.  Jamming into a small space the excitement, the surprise, the love she showed by creating them.  Somehow my frantic collecting and sorting of items doesn't quite match up to what I felt as a babe.
     So I wonder, should I continue this post-nightmare-Scrooge-like dispensing of trifles in hosiery?  If it is for myself that I do it, is it really loving or generous?  Once upon a time, my mother went on strike and didn't cook a turkey for Christmas.  I can remember the absence of wafting turkey grease as if it were yesterday.  Perhaps one year I will give up my stocking compulsion and gauge the reaction of the non-recipients.  Or maybe I won't.

Alice Richardson, Redux

     Oh the sociology of the kitchen!  Writing about popularity of The Joy of Cooking, Ann Mendelson observes "The Depression did not initiate the departure of the hired cook from American households...but it speeded up the process for middle class families." Both The Joy of Cooking and Just A Minute can be read as persuasive essays aimed at convincing middle class women that cooking was neither an impossible nor a menial task.
    The two cookbooks converged in 1961, when Alice was asked to edit the latest edition of what was by then the work of both Irma S. Rombauer and her daughter Marion Rombauer Becker.  According to Mendelson, Alice was remembered by the Rombauer-Beckers as "Having had several martinis before lunch and gone to sleep afterward," and they didn't find her of much help. As my copy of Joy is a later edition, there is no clue there.
     I do know that I was taken with her apartment in New York. In the narrow entrance hallway, she'd had someone paint a trompe d'oeil scene.  She was an editor at Look Magazine and wrote a book about hair and make-up which ought to be useful for anyone making movies about Manhattan in the 1960s. She placed my sister and I in a feature about permanents for children in Look that also involved Liza Minelli. On the tip of Long Island, near Montauk, she and her husband built a beach colony of modern design and furnishings, and there they retired.
     One more thing about the biscuits: Alice and my grandmother favored using a mix of bacon grease and butter instead o Crisco!
   
   

The Subject Was Biscuits

     What began as reflections on my mother's cooking has turned to ferreting out the identity of cook book author, copywriter, editor and family friend, Alice Wilson Richardson.  The subject was biscuits.  In my experience, the taste for biscuits at every meal runs deepest in the South.  My Texas-born-South-Carolina -bred grandmother's approval of Alice's friend chicken and Alice's tendency to include biscuits in her menus hinted at shared roots.
     Internet sleuthing turned up the next clue, in a New York Times obituary. It was a connection I'd never made. Turns out that Harriet Sappington, a movie actress and one of my grandmother's dearest New York pals, was Alice Wilson Richardson's sister.  Factoids like that are key to successful Ancestry.com research, and sure enough, I found Alice and her family. She was born in Florida and grew up in Baltimore!  (To put the icing on the cake in a surreal fashion, her baby book, with locks of hair and baby pictures intact,  turned up for sale on Alibris. )
     This explains her comment "The more proficient you become, the more you will be able to measure to taste in the Southern Mammy tradition." My grandmother was so reliant on "The Help" that she could barely boil water.  Alice, moving to a northern city,  pioneered working women's cooking as entertainment.
     I'm still puzzled about the biscuits.  She doesn't offer a recipe for them. "Make biscuits from prepared mix, following instructions of box." Biscuit recipes are simple, consisting of flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, shortening and milk or water.  So why a mix?   Necessity! Turns out, according to The Williamsburg Cookbook, from that venerable Virginia city, that homemade biscuit mixes were born before boxed biscuit mix. Mrs. Booth's Biscuit Mix produces 4 1/2 cups of mix, which you keep in the refrigerator. To make 6 biscuits, you measure out a cup of the mix and add enough milk or water to moisten. (Mrs. Booth's mix uses 3 cups self rising flour: 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder: 1 Tablespoon sugar: 1 cup shortening combined with pastry blender.)
     The biscuit mysteries solved, I'll next turn to Alice's most famous undertaking, and how she brought me my 15 minutes of fame at an early age.

The Real Woman of Mad Men Cook Fried Chicken

     Mad Men transmits a dreary view of the working women of Madison Avenue and the wives at home in the suburbs.  In the forty years my father spent in the world of  New York print, he met some very accomplished women.  Alice Wilson Richardson was one of these.  Writer, copywriter and editor, her flair was visible in her home and her cooking as well.

     Here is her recipe for Oven Friend Chicken, from The Just A Minute Cookbook:


3 or 4 lb. Chichen
1 lemon
flour with salt and pepper
2 eggs
bread crumbs
paprika
1/4 lb. butter

Have butcher cut chicken into pieces.  Remove pin feathers with tweezers, and squeeze the juice from one lemon over chicken, letting it stand for 10 minutes or mor.  Then dry with paper towels. Shake pieces in flour bag. (Leave 2 cupfuls of flour in the heavy paper bag it comes in, season with salt, pepper and paprika and shake chicken in it before frying.) Dip each piece in beaten egg, then in bread crumbs, and sprinkle with paprika.  Melt butter in flat baking pan and add chicken. Be sure pan is large enough so that chicken pieces do not touch. Cook in medium oven (375 degrees F.) for 30 minutes. If it is not brown enough by then, turn oven up full for 5 minutes.

     This is so not the low calorie recipe I learned from Oprah's chef Rosie!  It is very rich, and especially delicious cold, at a picnic. 

     Which got me to reading and thinking about what has changed in the kitchen in the last 50 or 60 years a and what has not.  Farewell butchers, farewell pin-feathers.  Richardson's words on entertaining in the 1950's diagram the transition from formal dining room to a entertaining n a room which combines previous generations' parlors, drawing rooms and music rooms.  To accomplish this Richardson proposes you cook in a chafing dish, or in your fireplace. Instead of waiting on your guests, "Your guests can work and like it, too."

    Richardson reserves canned and frozen vegetables for the most extreme, "the very last minute."

     Biscuits appear on many of her menus.  At first I was puzzled that she didn't provide a recipe, but rather included Biscuit Mix in her list of supplies to be kept handy.   The solution to the "Why biscuits? Why biscuit mix?" mystery took some sleuthing.

 
 

What Mama Was Cooking

     Everyone is ethnic, right?  Everyone, except Native Americans, is an immigrant.
     Which is why in fourth grade my children were asked to bring to class a food that their grandparents had brought from “the old country.”  The “old country” of their grandparents was the United States.  With one exception, their ancestors have been from America since the 17th Century.  One set of great-great-grandparents immigrated from Ireland to New Orleans in the 1850s. So I opted for soda bread and lamb stew, just about the first time I’d ever made either of them.
     So what did my own mother cook? More important to me, ex-anthropologist that I am, is why she cooked what she cooked: Bolognese sauce for spaghetti and lasagna; welsh rarebit, creamed chipped beef and creamed, sliced, hard-boiled eggs on toast.  She grew and served her own vegetables, and made sweet zucchini pickles.  Her mother,  born in Kansas City, but from a long line of New England farmers and sheep herders, gardened and put up jams and jellies, but all the meals I remember from that grand-mother's house were made by a Maryland-born Black cook.
     So where did these dishes come from?  Were they the product of the modernization of the family; no servants;  a working woman feeding her family quickly and economically? The creamed-on-toast dishes pleased childish palates. Maybe expediency was the mother of tradition. Maybe the home gardening and canning were products of the Depression and New England tightness.
     But the Bolognese?  Some gene occurs in me that craves that tomato sauce as though there were a phantom Italian on the family tree.  Was the secret of her Bolognese the long cooking time? Once in the course of its long simmering, I sampled it so many times the pot was almost empty at the end of the day.  Now when I make it, I make too much and freeze it the extra. As would she if I hadn't eaten it all. I don’t re-use my plastic containers, as she did, because after a while, her cooking tasted of all the other things she’d cooked and frozen.
     The basis for all the other creamed dishes should be roux: flour cooked in butter as a thickener, milk and cream added, and then the grated cheese, potted beef or hard-boiled eggs. I should have cooked one of these dishes for my children’s fourth grade class. Childhood is my “old country.”

     Then again, my mother was a literate cook, which is to say a collector of cookbooks.  Among those she collected was The Just A Minute Cookbook by Alice Wilson Richardson.  Alice Richardson was a pre World War II friend of my father, his brother and my grandmother. Alice was a “full-fledged career girl” who worked in copy-writing, editing and television. Just a Minute included the recipes for rarebit and creamed chipped beef.  Her rarebit involves melting a pound of grated cheddar in a can of cream of tomato soup, lots of Worcestershire sauce, and stirring in an egg. The chipped beef uses a can of chipped beef “frizzled” in butter and the addition of a can of cream of mushroom soup.
  Alice Wilson Richardson was far from mid-century Sandra Lee. In those days, Hudson River shad was readily available, as witnessed by her menu for shad-roe and bacon.   Alice’s recipe for fried chicken was good enough to be mentioned in my grandmother’s diary.  My Texas born, South Carolina bred grandmother knew her fried chicken.  More on that in the next installment!

Glutenfrei

Salon 1968, Belvedere, CA

The challenge: gluten free morsels, savory and sweet for a very intellectual, very aesthetic tea party.

The solution: french cookies, like madeleines, financiers and chocolate almond torte are already almond or hazelnut meal based. Just substitute rice/garbanzo flour for wheat flour, et voila.

Pizza crust is a little trickier, and without xanthan gum added to the gluten-free flour, there is nothing for the yeast to stretch. It's crunchy, but...

Detailles upon request from that rosy-cheeked, chef's whites bedecked wild woman of the kitchen, Mamalulu!

Albany, Oh Albany!

     Thanks to my friends Laurie and Mike, I've never eaten badly in Albany.  If we go in one direction we come to a restaurant called Creo'.  Like my all time favorite restaurant in Worcester, MA, now long gone, it's in a shopping center.  Above, their avocado tart with grilled lobster tail and asparagus.  Something else I miss out west: having to choose between Atlantic Salmon and Irish Salmon. Washed down with a blood orange margarita, I still had to wonder if was back in California.

     If we go in the other direction I eat the Albany Country Club Chopped Salad, whose secret is the way the bits are tossed with Russian Dressing.  To me it is a regional specialty, because this is the region where I was introduced to it!  And in case you were worried about my exercise regime,  know that I followed on foot as Mike and Laurie played nine holes of golf!

More Haute Dishes

Couldn't resist taking my cousin and her mid-western bred husband to Haute Dish; they don't get into at night.  I need not have worried that husband would be offended by HD's tongue-in-cheek renditions of middle-coast classics.  After his Duck in A Can, he was in love.
My love affair of the moment is with lamb and HD's Lamb x Five satisfied my Bah Bah jones.
Did I forget to mention that the evening before I drank something called a Minnesota Mule from a copper mug?

Ah yes, local organic vodka with a twist of ginger.
There was bio-tech scientist sitting next to me who said I was passionate about food.
Minneapolis = the next Northern California....

Read more about Haute Dish and the MN food scene here.

Minneapolis and Me

     You are surrounded by farms and forests. Morell mushrooms grow wild. Freshwater fish leap in the lakes.  Minneapolis is food crazy, and has a sense of humor.  Proof: a restaurant named Hell's Kitchen. Maybe it is called that because it is on the basement level. Maybe because they like to hot up the sweet potato fries.  It is the place nearest to my hotel that serves a Walleye BLT. If you don't know what walleye is, you never spent a summer in Wisconsin or MInnesota, as I did.  This is more than a fish sandwich.  I won't get it back in Fogville, because we have no nearby fresh water fisheries.  I'm told that the best place to get a Walleye sandwich is any dive bar; Hell's Kitchen was just fine, thank you very much.

     When your name is Lucey, a hamburger named the Jucy Lucy is must-try-it-at-least-once.  Again, everyone has a favorite place for it:  The 5 8 Club, Blue Door Pub, and the original, Matt's.  Matt's is just above dive bar, more like neighborhood tavern. Truly it is the grill that makes this burger. The bun is squeezy soft and after you wait a few minutes to let the very hot cheese inside the Jucy Lucy cool, the bun absorbs the ooze.  The burger has that veteran grill crunch on the outside.  I'm proud of my namesake.

     What should we call the casseroles and covered dishes of memory?  Church Supper Food? It's back.  Consider Tater Tot Haute Dish, from the restaurant of that name.  Best braised short ribs ever, side-by-side with real potato croquettes and topped with a few fresh green beans and morell mushrooms.  If I have to explain that haute dish is a play on the way Minnesotans pronounce hot,  you've stopped listening to Prairie Home Companion.  The ability to laugh at your self, Minnesota's gift to the world!