water, and in four minutes take them out and remove the skins. Return
them to the boiling water, add a cup of milk, pepper and salt, and
simmer until quite tender but not soft.
“Behold, the earth hath roots;
The bounteous housewife Nature, on each bush
Lays her full mess before you.”--_Timon of Athens._
It has been made plain, I trust, that it is not necessary to rely
solely on the damp-sodden vegetables of the pre-historic cuisine. It
is just as easy to cook them nicely as otherwise, and a deal more
satisfactory. The bounteous housewife Nature overwhelms us with her
treasures of root and sap, and it seems almost an outrage to neglect
the opportunities so lavishly offered to us.
I have just described a score or so of the plainer methods of cooking
vegetables, simply as an indication of their possibilities, but the
enterprising Chafer will find as he progresses in the art (and Chafing
grows upon one like any other hobby) that there are dozens of others
which lend themselves readily to his, or her, deft manipulation.
The grandfather of Charles Darwin was a poet of parts, and in his
“Phytologica” he says:
“Oft in each month, poetic Tighe! be thine
To dish green broccoli with savoury chine;
Oft down thy tuneful throat be thine to cram
The snow-white cauliflower with fowl and ham!”
This is wise advice, because the green broccoli is far better than the
white.
There are many American vegetables which may be cooked without a twang.
They are all in tins or bottles, bearing plain directions. Among
others I can speak from personal experience of Sugar Corn, Green Corn,
Oyster Corn, Boston Beans, Lima Beans, and Succotash. This last is a
meal in itself, and of most excellent flavour and convenience. Green
corn, too, reminds those who know the South African mealie in all its
toothsomeness, of many a hearty supper of Kaffir mealies roasted in
the embers of a camp fire, or even in that most primitive of ovens, an
ant-heap, which, believe it or not as you will, turns out better cooked
meats than some of your very patent, very modern, very “gadgetty”
kitchen ranges, although not better, I ween, than my chaste Chaffinda.
From vegetables to salads is but one step. I do not see any valid
reason for apologising for the inclusion of salads in a Chafing-Dish
book. They are not cooked in a Chafing Dish, it is true, but it is part
of my religion that no meal is complete without a salad, green for
choice, but anyhow a salad. I do not insist on salad for breakfast,
although on a blazing hot July day, after a swim or a tramp, or both, I
can imagine worse things than an omelette, some kidneys and bacon, and
a slice of real ham, and a green salad to top up with. But no dinner
is really a dinner without a salad, and by that I do not mean three
scraggy lettuce leaves, soused in vinegar, which as _Salade de saison_
is the usual accompaniment to that disastrous hen, _Poulet au cresson_,
which is a centipede as to legs and has no breast or liver wing.
As this screed is, after all, a plain record of personal likes and
dislikes, I see no reason for concealing the fact that I have no use
whatever, no manner of use in the wide wide world, for mayonnaise with
salad. The Americans swear by it; I swear at it. My salad mixture,
which goes with everything--absolutely everything--is simplicity
itself. _Eccolo!_
Salad Mixture.
Into a large bowl put half a teaspoon of salt, same of Paprika, a dash
of black pepper, freshly ground by a hand-mill, and a teaspoon of made
English mustard. Mix them up well. Now add very gradually the very
best quality of olive oil, almost drop by drop, to the quantity of
three tablespoons, mixing all the time until the ingredients assume the
consistency of cream; now thin this with one tablespoon of good wine
vinegar, and amalgamate thoroughly. That is all I use.
Now and again, by way of extra titillation of the jaded palate, you
may add half a tablespoon of Tarragon vinegar, herbs to taste, Spring
onions, chives, French mustard, olives (French only), hard-boiled eggs,
dandelion leaves, nasturtium leaves, and celery salt.
But there are half a dozen rules which I would seriously enjoin the
salad mixer to bear in mind.
Only use a wooden spoon and fork for mixing.
Never cut a lettuce; always break it with the fingers.
Dry the lettuce thoroughly in a serviette or in a salad-basket before
breaking.
Make the salad ten minutes before eating it. Neither more nor less.
Do not bother about garnishing the top of a salad; see the ingredients
are well mixed. The decoration will look after itself and be much more
artistic if left natural than if fussed into geometrical designs.
Make your mixture proportionate to your salad. This is a matter of
intuition and experience combined. The test of right mixing is that no
fluid should remain at the bottom of the bowl when finally mixed.
The “fatiguing” or turning over and over, that is, the actual mixing
of the salad, should be very thoroughly done for just as long as is
bearable to the verge of impatience. Rub a crust of bread with garlic
or onion, put it in the bottom of the bowl and take it out just before
serving. This is a _chapon_.
The true salad artist will never add any second dose of any ingredient
during the process of mixing the sauce. I was once present at a salad
duel between an eminent Belgian violoncellist and a British banker. The
former was an artist, the latter a well-meaning amateur. They used the
same cruet-stand, and during the mixing process the banker politely
pushed the oil and vinegar across to the Belgian, who bowed and said:
“Thanks. I never add!” The banker appreciated the rebuke and retired
from the contest. Both salads were excellent.
The old salad-proverb about the oil-spendthrift, the vinegar-miser,
and all the rest of it, is too old to quote, but it expresses a truism
aptly enough. Three to one is, according to my view, a fair proportion
of oil to vinegar, but this, as indeed most things in this so-called
twentieth century of ours, is only a matter of individual taste, and I
have no desire to suggest that my opinion should be given the force of
law. I have known a salad enthusiast who coated each leaf of lettuce
with oil on a camel’s-hair brush, but this I think is an exaggeration
of artistry. On the other hand, the wild stirring of dollops of the
four condiments in the salad spoon, which is then emptied vaguely into
the salad, is childish and inefficient. The Italians have a proverb
that runs:
“_L’insalata non è buon’ ne bella
Ove non è la pimpinella._”
The pimpernel is our burnet.
It is quite unnecessary to give full recipes for all the following
salads. I have already indicated the mixture, and the choice of
ingredients need only be hinted at.
Lettuce should be young, fresh, and crisp. There are many varieties,
the most delicate of which perhaps is the Romaine.
Endive is good when quite young. It should be very light in colour. Do
not mix it with lettuce. A few dandelion leaves are quite permissible.
Chicory makes an excellent salad, and radishes mix well with it.
Celery and Parmesan cheese go well together. The celery must be cut
into half-inch pieces.
Cauliflower, cooked and cold, mixed with celery, or a very few slices
of cold cooked carrot, is cool and pleasant.
Tomatoes and lettuce go well together, and onions are a good addition.
Potato salad requires firm round little potatoes cooked, cold, and cut
into slices. The best kind is known as Hamburg Potatoes, and they may
be had at the German Delikatessen shops. Avoid anchovies and olives
with potato salad, but encourage chives and a sprinkling of cheese.
Celeriac.
This is a variety of celery, sometimes known as Dutch celery, a tuber
which has a quite peculiar and characteristic flavour. It needs no
addition whatever, and is an excellent accompaniment to all meats. Cut
it in slices, after boiling it for twelve minutes, and mix carefully
with plenty of liquid.
Mashed Potato Salad.
Beat up ordinary mashed potatoes with a little lukewarm weak stock or
warm water instead of milk, and no butter. Then dress them with a
little chopped chive, oil and vinegar, pepper and salt. This can be
endlessly varied with chopped hard-boiled eggs, beetroot, cucumbers,
anchovies, &c. This salad comes from that most excellent compendium of
quaint conceits, “More Potpourri from a Surrey Garden,” by Mrs. C. W.
Earle.
Old-fashioned salads, according to a seventeenth-century cook-book,
were more diversified than ours. Among the ingredients of “Grand
Sallets of divers compounds” were broom buds, pickled mushrooms,
pickled oysters, blew figs, Virginia potato, caperons, crucifix pease,
sage, mint, balm, burnet, violet leaves, red coleworts, raisins of the
sun, charvel and ellicksander buds. Some of these we know under other
names, but “blew figs” and “ellicksander buds” are untraceable. The
list has a Rabelaisian smack, and gives one some idea of the crude
admixture of flavourings which was acceptable to our forebears.
In a very charming old book, “Travels in England in 1702,” by C. P.
Moritz, a Prussian clergyman, the following passage seems quotable:
“An English dinner generally consists of a piece of half-boiled, or
half-roasted, meat; and a few cabbage leaves boiled in plain water; on
which they pour a sauce made of flour and butter. This, I assure you,
is the usual method of dressing vegetables in England. The slices of
bread and butter which they give you with your tea are as thin as poppy
leaves. But there is another kind of bread and butter usually eaten
with tea, which is toasted by the fire, and is incomparably good. You
take one slice after the other, and hold it to the fire on a fork till
the butter is melted, so that it penetrates a number of slices at once;
this is called toast.”
Another part of the same book describes the kitchen in a country inn,
and gives a picture which seems to describe some old Dutch interior. “I
now, for the first time, found myself in one of these kitchens which
I had so often read of in Fielding’s fine novels; and which certainly
give one, on the whole, a very accurate idea of English manners. The
chimney, in this kitchen, where they were roasting and boiling, seemed
to be taken off from the rest of the room, and enclosed by a wooden
partition, the rest of the apartment was made use of as a sitting and
eating room. All round on the sides were shelves with pewter dishes
and plates, and the ceiling was well stored with provisions of various
kinds, such as sugar-loaves, black puddings, hams, sausages, flitches
of bacon, &c.”
A modern Dr. Syntax in search of the picturesque would vainly nowadays
look for anything approaching this homely simplicity in any English
hostelry. The modern tendency seems all directed towards spurious
finery, meretricious decoration, and uncomfortable New Art. The old
inns are neglected, and the new hotels merely vulgarly gorgeous. The
food is ambitious and basely imitative of bad French models. The
advent of the ubiquitous motor car on old country roads, away from
the railways, may in time improve matters, and revive, to a certain
extent, the extinct glories of the old coaching inns; but as yet there
is little, if any, improvement to be marked. In the meanwhile, I would
suggest that every travelling motor car be provided with a Chafing
Dish, and thus mitigate or improve the dull pretentious meals which the
country hotel proprietor thinks proper to provide. The Chafing Dish
and the motor car seem made for one another. Will somebody try the
combination?
There are just a few more salads which I should like to recommend,
premising, however, that they are not altogether orthodox. By this I
mean that they are not wholly composed of greenstuffs, but require the
addition of extraneous appetisers.
Walnuts and Green Peas.
Boil and blanch a dozen walnuts; break them in halves, mix them with
a pint of green peas, cooked and cold, and toss them about in a small
quantity of dressing.
Sprouts and Chestnuts.
Boil and skin a dozen chestnuts. Break them up and mix with a pint of
cold cooked Brussels sprouts. Toss them in a small amount of mixture.
Jardinière.
Almost any cold cooked vegetables. For choice, use equal portions of
sliced potatoes, green peas, carrots, beans, celery, tomatoes, and
onions. Add plenty of dressing.
Cucumbers and Anchovies.
Wash, scrape and dry the anchovies. Chop them up. Have the cucumber
thinly sliced and thoroughly drained; plenty of salt, and little
mixture. Sprinkle the anchovies over the sliced cucumber.
Cauliflower and Bacon.
Dry the cauliflower and break up into small pieces, using all the
flower and very little stalk or green. Cut a couple of slices of bacon
into dice, sprinkle it about in the cauliflower, and use plenty of
dressing.
Bread Salad.
Cut three slices of stale bread (crumb only) into half-inch squares;
same amount of sliced cold cooked potatoes; three tomatoes in
quarters, one onion; toss all well together with a good deal of
dressing. This sounds very simple, but as Sam Weller’s pieman said,
“It’s the seasoning as does it.”
Lest I be thought quite unspeakably impossible in these last recipes,
let me assure the worthy sceptics that they are in no wise guess-work,
but one and all duly approved, and that I have merely taken the
trouble to collate them and set them down here. They are excellent and
original. I think that many folks will be grateful for them.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: CHAPTER · VII · EGGS · AND · SAVOURIES]
“The vulgar boil, the learned roast an egg.”
POPE.
In the name of the profit: Eggs! Although farming in England may spell
ruin, poultry almost always pays, and if intelligently and economically
managed, one rarely hears of the failure of a poultry-farm. We import
a vast number of millions of eggs annually (many of which come to a
deservedly unrighteous end in villainous omelettes), but it would be
easy, with capital, initiative, and incubators, to produce them one and
all in Great Britain and make the egg trade a national industry.
A couple of generations ago, when any one walked gingerly in the
street, he or she was said to be going at an “egg-trot,” because it
reminded one of a good housewife riding to market at a jog-trot pace
with eggs in her panniers. Let us therefore approach the subject of
eggs at an “egg-trot.”
A good egg is never bad. That is not such an inept truism as it looks.
A good egg is unspoilable, even by the worst cook. There are over
four hundred and fifty ways of cooking eggs, each of which has some
peculiar excellence denied to the others. You cannot even make an
omelette without breaking eggs, and most people find breakfast almost
impossible without the regulation hen-fruit. To teach one’s grandmother
how to suck eggs is a futile labour partaking of juvenile presumption,
but it is at least easier than persuading the average cook that the
fried egg of commerce is only one out of scores of simple breakfast
egg-dishes. “There is reason in roasting eggs.” Even the most trivial
culinary conjuring trick has some good motive for being performed in
one way rather than in another. When wood fires were usual it was more
common to roast eggs than to boil them, and great care was required to
prevent their being “ill-roasted, all on one side,” as Touchstone says
in the play. Which is an additional reason for keeping strictly to the
formula. Eggs are ticklish things to monkey with, and it is much easier
to break them than to make them.
Learned disquisitions have before now been written on “How to boil an
egg.” It is not in my province to touch on that subject. The votary of
the Chafing Dish may be presumed to have enough common sense to come in
out of the rain, and to be able to boil an egg. It is not much to ask.
Pope, by the way, thought it vulgar to boil an egg, but then we are all
vulgar nowadays--and glory in it. Neither do I propose to expatiate
upon egg-flip, egg-nog, and kindred “dulceties.” I will give a few
plain straightforward recipes for eggs in the Chafing Dish, and leave
egg-eccentricities to my betters. I have only to premise that there is
but one kind of egg. The Best. Real new-laid eggs are reliable friends.
All others are base impostors!
Poached Eggs.
The Chafing Dish should be more than half full of boiling water. Break
each egg separately into a saucer and slip it steadily and dexterously
into the Chafing Dish. Light the lamp, cover up the water and eggs, and
put the dish over the lower hot-water pan, which should have in it a
pint of hot water. Let it heat until the whites of the eggs are set;
then remove the eggs from the pan with the special flat implement _ad
hoc_. Put the eggs on rounds of toast. Sprinkle them with pepper, salt
and parsley, and put a tiny piece of butter on top of each egg.
Scrambled Eggs.
Beat up three eggs, whites and yolks, in a bowl, and add a pinch of
salt. Put a good tablespoon of butter in the Chafing Dish, over a pan
of hot water. When the butter sizzles, pour in the eggs, and stir with
a wooden spoon very briskly for a minute and a half to two minutes,
keeping the eggs from adhering to the sides and bottom of the Dish.
Have rounds of toast ready, and pour the eggs on to them. Dust them
with Paprika and parsley.
It is easy and pleasant to vary plain scrambled eggs with a dozen odds
and ends. Asparagus tips, for instance, bacon dice, tiny slicelets of
ham, green peas, thin rounds of Brunswick sausage, broad beans, chicken
livers, button mushrooms, tomatoes, or chopped nasturtium leaves.
All these should be added, cooked of course, towards the end of the
stirring operation, and just before serving. Many other ingredients
might be suggested, but the ingenious innovator will be able to think
these out for himself, and he can always christen his invention
scrambled eggs _à la quelque chose_ to please his own fancy and flatter
his friends.
Omelettes.
An omelette should not be too lightly undertaken. There are few things
more tricky, more unreliable, more human, in a sense, than an omelette.
You may make it a dozen times with perfect success. It will be light,
frothy, ethereal, almost gossamer-like in its impalpable fairyhood.
The thirteenth time you proceed on precisely the same lines, use the
same material, and in every way follow the same formula, and the result
is chaos. If there be a sex in cookery, omelettes must be essentially
feminine.
This is how to make an omelette. Beat three eggs lightly with two
tablespoons of milk, a little salt and pepper. Put one tablespoon of
butter in the Chafing Dish over the hot-water pan, and when sizzling
hot, pour in the eggs. You must hold the dish in the left hand, and
rapidly scrape away with a knife the cooked egg where it seems to
adhere, letting the liquid portion follow the knife. It should be
cooked in less than fifty seconds if the water beneath it is boiling.
Then gently, but firmly, slip the knife under the left-hand edge of the
omelette and fold it over rapidly and neatly to the side of the dish
opposite the handle. Have a very hot plate ready; reverse it on to the
dish, turn the latter over the former quickly, and the omelette will
(or should) rest on the plate.
Of course all this sounds very easy, but it needs knack and
practice--lots of both. When entirely successful, however, it is most
gratifying and self-flattering. You feel a real cook at last, and look
upon Ude, Carême, Francatelli, and the other great names of history as
brothers. All Chafers go through that pleasant period when all goes
right and nothing goes wrong. Sometimes it lasts quite a while; but at
last, sooner or later, there comes a moment when we know we feel that
we know how little we know. As at golf, when we never play so well as
during our first month, even so is it with Chaffinda.
The testing of eggs should not rightly be one of the Chafer’s duties.
He should be able to rely on his purveyor. The best eggs I ever had in
London were provided by an old landlady who told me that she got them
twice a week from the country. When I asked her what county they came
from, she said, “They come all the way from Clapham Junction, sir!”
Anyhow, they were remarkably good, and I have been served with less
reliable ones in country farmhouses. This was possibly for the same
reason that one can rarely get fish at the seaside until the London
train comes in.
Eggs en Cocotte.
You must provide some of those dear little fireproof china cups
especially made for the purpose. Butter these little cups. Put two
teaspoonsful of cream into each. Then break very carefully an egg into
each. Dust with pepper, salt, and parsley. Stand these cups in the
Chafing Dish with enough boiling water to come half-way up the cups.
Have the lower pan full of hot water underneath. Boil up gently till
the eggs are just set. Serve in the cups very hot, taking care in
hauling them out of the Chafing Dish as they are very easily dropped.
Lady Effingham’s Eggs.
Put two slices of Gruyère cheese (not very thin) in the Chafing Dish
with a tablespoon of butter. Break two eggs in a saucer and slide them
on to the cheese; sprinkle with salt and Paprika and let it simmer
(over the hot-water pan) till the eggs are set. Serve with fingers of
toast.
Newmarket Eggs.
Put a tablespoon of butter in the Chafing Dish. When it sizzles add an
onion cut into slices; let it get well browned. Then throw in three
fair-sized potatoes in slices. Pour over these the well-beaten yolks of
two eggs, adding salt and pepper. Heat up to boiling-point. Serve with
toast.
Kempton Eggs.
Cut into slices three hard-boiled eggs and one onion; put the latter
only in the Chafing Dish with a tablespoon of butter. Stir it, and
fry the onion to a light brown, then sprinkle in half a tablespoon of
flour, and add two tablespoons of milk, pepper and salt. Boil up and
then add the eggs; serve at once with grated Parmesan cheese.
Anchovy Eggs.
Place a tablespoon of butter in the Chafing Dish, add half a teaspoon
of dry mustard, two tablespoons of tomato sauce, one of Worcester
sauce, and one of mushroom ketchup. Let it simmer, and then drop in
four hard-boiled eggs cut into quarters, salted and peppered. Prepare
four rounds of toast, spread them with good anchovy paste, or, better
still, with Patum Peperium, and put the eggs on the toast, pouring over
them the mixture.
This a remarkably good dish after a dance in the country and a ten-mile
drive home. If the proper preparations are made, it can be turned
out in five minutes in the billiard-room, and it picks one up in a
thoroughly businesslike and efficient manner. Those cold winter drives
after a busy night’s dancing, especially if the supper was good and
frequent, demand a powerful restorative.
Now come we to the great question of Welsh Rabbit. I venture to doubt
whether Rarebit is defensible, and I have read shoals of arguments for
and against. Anyhow, my kind is a Rabbit, and it tastes as nice--or
nicer.
A small boy walking across a common with his mother espied a bunny.
“Look, mother, there goes a rabbit!” “Nonsense, my boy, it must have
been imagination.” “Mother, is imagination white behind?”
There is no imagination about a Welsh Rabbit. It is sternly real. But
not, I think, quite as indigestible as generally supposed, especially
if it be liberally dosed with Paprika, which I find to be marvellously
digestive. A well-made Rabbit should be suave in flavour, not harsh,
stringy, or pungent. There should be a silky sensation of sensuous
softness, and, above all things, it should not tickle the palate. I
fear that I am led to dogmatise on the rabbit, and to ferret out my own
didactic ideas on the subject, but if my rabbit be carefully concocted
and intelligently degustated, I am convinced that I shall be forgiven.
Welsh Rabbit.