I am still torn on the matter of bird-shooting. I dread the day when conscience shall triumph over palate. There is no more delicious food than quail or dove, the one meat white, the other dark. I dress them whole, and they must be picked, never skinned. I stuff them with buttered crumbs and pecans, dip them in flour and brown them in butter. I place them then in a casserole, pour over them the browned butter to which a little hot water has been added, add an eighth of a cup of sherry for every bird, cover and bake slowly until meltingly tender. I prefer as accompaniments a Chablis or even a Sauterne for quail, and Burgundy for doves. I like to serve with them soft-cooked grits, small crisp biscuits, wild grape or wild plum jelly, whole baby beets warmed in orange juice and butter with grated orange peel, carrot souffle, a tomato aspic salad, and tangerine sherbet for a dessert. I make the tangerine sherbet by any good orange sherbet recipe, substituting tangerine juice for orange juice, and using more lemon juice and less sugar syrup. I cannot recommend the dessert, delicate as it is, unless one has one’s own tangerine trees. It takes two large water buckets of tangerines to make sherbet for eight.
In the matter of cooking ducks, I am in violent opposition to the pretendedly Epicurean school of raw bloody duck whisked through a duck press. The advice to “run your duck through a very hot oven” leaves me shuddering. I prefer my thoroughly done, moist, crumbling duck to any dripping, rubbery slices, fit only for the jaws of a dinosaur. When my flock of Mallards has an unusually successful season, so that I am fairly over-run with ducks, and the feed-bill equals that of four mules, I am sometimes obliged to decimate their numbers. My friends hint the year around that I have too many ducks. When I give in to them and announce a duck dinner, I find myself unable to eat, and must have a poached egg on the side. But on these sad occasions, I am certain of the age of the ducks, and I roast the young ones quickly. When I am uncertain, as one must be, with wild killed ducks, I take no chances, and steam them until tender, then proceed with the roasting, basting often with butter if the wild ducks have little or no fat. The rest of the menu is: claret; fried finger-strips of grits; sweet potato orange baskets; small whole white onions, braised; hot sherried grapefruit; tiny hot cornmeal muffins; a tossed salad of endive dressed with finely chopped chives, marjoram, basil, thyme and French dressing made with tarragon vinegar; for dessert, grape-juice ice cream.
—from Cross Creek, 1942
RAWLINGS’S BLACKBIRD PIE
This dish is illegal, since the taking of red-winged blackbirds is forbidden by Federal law—which I discovered probably just in time to save myself a term in the penitentiary. But I made it often in lean days at the Creek, and since it is so delicious, and since any small birds may be substituted for the red-winged blackbirds, such as ricebirds (legal in season), quail, dove, or one-pound-size chickens, I list it.
Brown the whole dressed birds in one tablespoon butter to every bird. Cover with hot water. Add one bay leaf, one teaspoon salt and a dash of pepper. Simmer until tender, tightly covered. Add one carrot cut in strips and two small whole onions to every bird. Simmer fifteen minutes. Add one small raw potato, diced, to every bird. Simmer fifteen minutes more. More hot water may be needed, as gravy should cover mixture. Thicken gravy with one tablespoon flour dissolved in two tablespoons cold water to every cup of gravy. Place mixture in casserole, add two tablespoons chopped parsley, one-quarter cup sherry to every bird, and cover with biscuit crust as for steak and kidney pie. Bake in hot oven twenty minutes or until well browned. Four birds per person are right, so that for six people, one has truly “four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.”
—from Cross Creek Cookery, 1942
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Meat of the Matter
PLUTARCH ON EATING MEAT
Can you really ask what reason Pythagoras had for abstaining from flesh? For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of soul or mind the first man who did so, touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth tables of dead, stale bodies and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived. How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench?…
But you who live now, what madness, what frenzy drives you to the pollution of shedding blood, you who have such a superfluity of necessities? Why slander the earth by implying that she cannot support you? Why impiously offend law-giving Demeter and bring shame upon Dionysus, lord of the cultivated vine, the gracious one, as if you did not receive enough from their hands? Are you not ashamed to mingle domestic crops with blood and gore? You call serpents and panthers and lions savage, but you yourselves, by your own foul slaughters, leave them no room to outdo you in cruelty; for their slaughter is their living, yours is a mere appetizer.
It is certainly not lions and wolves that we eat out of self-defence; on the contrary, we ignore these and slaughter harmless, tame creatures without stings or teeth to harm us, creatures that, I swear, Nature appears to have produced for the sake of their beauty and grace.…
What a terrible thing it is to look on when the tables of the rich are spread, men who employ cooks and spicers to groom the dead! And it is even more terrible to look on when they are taken away, for more is left than has been eaten. So the beasts died for nothing! There are others who refuse when the dishes are already set before them and will not have them cut into or sliced. Though they bid spare the dead, they did not spare the living.
We declare, then, that it is absurd for them to say that the practice of flesh-eating is based on Nature. For that man is not naturally carnivorous is, in the first place, obvious from the structure of his body. A man’s frame is in no way similar to those creatures who were made for flesh-eating: he has no hooked beak or sharp nails or jagged teeth, no strong stomach or warmth of vital fluids able to digest and assimilate a heavy diet of flesh. It is from this very fact, the evenness of our teeth, the smallness of our mouths, the softness of our tongues, our possession of vital fluids too inert to digest meat that Nature disavows our eating of flesh. If you declare that you are naturally designed for such a diet, then first kill for yourself what you want to eat. Do it, however, only through your own resources …
For what sort of dinner is not costly for which a living creature loses its life? Do we hold a life cheap? I do not yet go so far as to say that it may well be the life of your mother or father or some friend or child, as Empedocles declared. Yet it does, at least, possess some perception, hearing, seeing, imagination, intelligence, which last every creature receives from Nature to enable it to acquire what is proper for it and to evade what is not. Do but consider which are the philosophers who serve the better to humanize us: those who bid us eat our children and friends and fathers and wives after their death, or Pythagoras and Empedocles who try to accustom us to act justly toward other creatures also? You ridicule a man who abstains from eating mutton. But are we, they will say, to refrain from laughter when we see you slicing off portions from a dead father or mother and sending them to absent friends and inviting those who are at hand, heaping their plates with flesh.
—from Moralia, first century A.D.,
translated from the Greek by Harold Chermiss and William Helmbold
CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS ON BOILED VS. ROASTED
Boiled food is life, roast food death. Folklore the world over offers countless examples of the cauldron of immortality; but there is no indication anywhere of a spit of immortality. A rite performed by the Cree Indians of Canada conveys very clearly the cosmic totality attributed to boiled food. The Cree believed that the Creator told humans that the first berries to be picked had to be boiled. Then the bowl had to be held first towards the sun, who was asked to ripen the berries, then towards the thunder who was asked for rain, and finally towards the earth, who was asked to bring forth her fruits. For the Ojibwa too, boiled meat had a relationship to the order of the uni
verse; although they usually cooked squirrels by spitting the carcases and roasting them in the flames, they purposely boiled them when rain was needed. In this case, the roast and the boiled are given differential functions and their combination constitutes a culinary universe, which is a miniature reflection of the cosmos. Perhaps a similar interpretation would be appropriate for the unusual Welsh recipe which involved stuffing roast goose with boiled ox-tongue and then encasing it in a layer of forcemeat, inside a pastry crust; the dish was supposed to last all through Christmas week.
—from The Origin of Table Manners, 1968,
translated from the French by John and Doreen Weightman
ALEXANDRE DUMAS PÈRE ON BEEFSTEAK
I remember seeing the birth of beefsteak in France, after the 1815 campaign, when the English stayed in Paris for two or three years. Until then our cuisine and theirs had been just as separate as our points of view. It was therefore not without a certain trepidation that one saw beefsteak trying to introduce itself slyly into our kitchens. Yet, we are an eclectic people and without prejudice. So, as soon as we had realized that, in spite of ‘coming from the Greeks, it was not poisoned,’ before we held out our plates, and gave beefsteak its citizenship papers.
And yet, there is still something which separates English from French beefsteak. We prepare our beefsteak with a piece of fillet from the sirloin (aloyau), whereas our neighbours take something which we call sous-noix of beef, that is to say rumpsteak, for theirs. This cut of beef is always more tender there than it would be here, because the English feed their cattle better than we do, and slaughter their cattle younger than we do in France. They therefore take this cut of beef, and slice it in thick pieces of about half an inch, flatten these a little, and cook them on a cast-iron plate made expressly for the purpose, using ordinary coal instead of charcoal. Real beef fillet should be put on a thoroughly heated grill, with live coals, and should be turned only once in order to conserve its juices, which then marry up with the maître d’hôtel sauce. This part of English beef (and, to verify this, every time I go to England I eat it with renewed pleasure) is infinitely more flavourful than the part from which we take our steaks. One must eat it in an English tavern, sautéed with Madeira wine, or with anchovy butter, or on a bed of cress, well sprinkled with vinegar. I would recommend that it should be eaten with gherkins, if there were even one nation in the world which knew how to make gherkins.
As for French beefsteak, the best sauce to accompany it is maître d’hôtel, because one can sense the predominance of the flavour of the herbs and the lemon. But there is one observation which I will permit myself to make. I see our cooks flattening their steaks on the kitchen table with the flat side of the meat chopper; I think that they are committing a grave sin, and that they are causing certain nutritional elements to spurt out of the meat, elements which would play their role well in the process of mastication.
In general, ruminant animals are better in England than in France because, while living, they are treated with quite particular care. Nothing equals those quarters of beef, cooked whole, which are rolled along on little carts like railway wagons between the habitués of English taverns. Those pieces of beef, fat interlarded with lean, which one cuts for oneself as one wishes, from a portion of an animal weighing one hundred pounds! There is nothing to compare with them for exciting the appetite.
—from Le Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine, 1873,
translated from the French by Alan and Jane Davidson
ANTHIMUS ON EATING RAW MEAT
Perhaps there will be asked the question of how it is that other peoples eat raw and bloody meat and yet are healthy. The answer is that these peoples may not really be healthy, because they make themselves remedies; for when they feel ill, they burn themselves on the stomach and the belly and in other places, in the same way that untamed horses are burned. My explanation for all this is as follows: these people just like wolves eat one sort of food rather than a variety of foods, since they possess nothing but meat and milk, and whatever they have they eat, and they appear to be healthy because of the restricted nature of their diet. Sometimes they have something to drink, and sometimes they do not, and this lack of abundance seems to be responsible for their their state of health.
—from On the Observance of Foods, sixth century A.D.,
translated from the Latin by Mark Grant
NELSON ALGREN ON NEBRASKA BUFFALO BARBECUE
A half century and more after the last straggling remnants of free-ranging buffalo herds were slaughtered in western Nebraska, buffalo meat is reappearing in Nebraska on festival days.
A traveler will seldom find it on a restaurant bill-of-fare, but he may read an invitation in the newspaper to a free helping of barbecued buffalo at some community celebration. Once it was merely a matter of “catching your buffalo,” now it is necessary to wait until a government herd needs thinning and a few animals are being sold.
The barbecue pit is dug the previous day and a fire started in the late evening. By midnight the bottom of the pit contains a deep bed the pit contains a deep bed of glowing coals free from smoke. The meat is placed on the spit, and the spit must be turned at exactly the right moment to force the juices back into the roasting meat rather than letting them trickle off into the fire. The sauce, a tangy mixture of salt, pepper, vinegar, and oil, is swabbed on at intervals.
By midmorning the meat is ready to serve. A table made of boards placed across trestles is set up near the pit. Great baskets of buns, dishes of homemade pickles, and dozens of tin cups appear. The men of the village have managed the pit, but the women are taking over now. A fire is built between two flat stones, a shining new wash boiler produced, and coffee-making is under way.
Half a dozen of the village women are ranged behind the table, which boasts neither a tablecloth nor cutlery. The men have brought great platters of sliced buffalo meat, dark and a trifle stringy on the inside, crisp and dark brown around the outer edges. The hungry crowd, though giving the impression of a stampede in the beginning, has now formed an orderly line and files past the table where each is given a paper plate containing buns and several large slices of meat and has a chance to grab a pickle or two in passing. As each person secures his share of the lunch, he marches on to the steaming coffee boiler where a couple of women are ladling the hot strong brew into tin cups. There are sugar and cream for those who must have them, but the style of the day is to drink it black.
Plates and cups once filled, it is merely a matter of finding a spot of ground free of sandburs and sitting down. There is much talk and laughter, punctuated by squeals or yelps as hot coffee splashes over or concealed sandburs are discovered. The meat is nearly always tough and, despite the greatest care, has a flavor of smoke, but the sharp yet mellow sauce, combined with open-air appetites, makes second and even third helpings inevitable.
Sometimes a program is arranged for the afternoon. A bronco is ridden by some local champ, foot races are run, an impromptu ball game staged, or a budding orator may attempt to corral an audience. Usually, however, country women take advantage of the day in town to shop and visit with seldom-seen friends, while the menfolk congregate in groups and talk crops, herds, and politics.
But whatever else is or isn’t done, the festivities end in a dance, without which no sandhill celebration is complete. Weather permitting, it is held on a platform built for that purpose near the bandstand. If the evening has turned cold, and sandhill evenings often do, a hall is usually available.
—from America Eats, c. 1940
SAMUEL CHAMBERLAIN ON THE SUNDAY EVENING BARBECUE
Breakfast and dinner held their surprises, but Clémentine did not become genuinely goggle-eyed until supper-time, when our host invited her to join in that noted American institution, the Sunday evening barbecue. With something approaching stupefaction she watched him wheel out a portable grill, complete with a glittering array of accessories, and then start a charcoal fire. The whole picture may have become slightly blurre
d after that. There were cocktails, which Clémentine refused with a frightened smile. Then a platter of steaks and double-thick lamb chops appeared, bordered with bacon and ready to be grilled. A triumphant shout from both Diane and Phinney announced the one gastronomic treat they had been yearning for—hot dogs! A tray of cold cans appeared, and Diane took delight in informing the bewildered Clémentine that they contained beer. And finally, great ears of yellow corn were bared (the kind that never grows in France), and were prepared for the grill. It was too much to expect any newly arrived Burgundian to take in her stride. Clémentine blushed and retired into a confused silence. But a moment later little Phinney was tugging at her elbow. “Venez, Clémentine! Vous allez voir! Les chiens chauds!” He tugged more, until she came close to the grill, where a fine specimen of the great American hot dog awaited each of them, “with both,” as they say in the trade. Then the two retired to a little table and began their feast. Phinney’s eyes shone with delight as he clutched his roll in one hand and his soft drink in the other. Clémentine’s reserve suddenly melted. She poured her beer out of the can into a paper cup and began to consume her “chien chaud avec moutarde et peekaleelee.” A broad smile crossed her face. The Americanization of Clémentine had begun.
—from Clémentine in the Kitchen, 1943
M.F.K. FISHER ON TRIPE
The main trouble with tripe is that in my present dwelling place, a small town in Northern California, I could count on one hand the people who would eat it with me. What is more, its careful slow preparation is not something I feel like doing for a meal by myself at this stage of the game, or even several stages. It is one of the things that call for a big pot and plenty of hungry people.
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