The first thing is to figure out what sort of party you like, and what sort of party you like to give. After years of contemplation (and the arrival of a baby who is now a child), I realize that I do not like parties at night: I am too tired. I do not want to feed and bathe a child and then feed sixteen adults, or spend what might be perfectly useful time asleep cleaning up. After nine o'clock 1 begin to wilt, and I notice that others do, too. My favorite party is a tea party. These days I like one that begins at three and ends around five thirty.
A tea party is suitable for people of all ages. It comes at a time of day when people often have time on their hands or are feeling inclined toward a little something to eat and drink and someone to talk to. A tea party accommodates your grown-up friends with and without children, and it accommodates the children, too. As all parents know, at four o'clock, children must be fed something.
At four in the afternoon, everyone feels a little peckish but only the British have institutionalized this feeling. Every year one English magazine or another carries an article about the decline of the tearoom, but teatime still exists and many tea shops serve it. It is a perfect child meal since children and their caregivers tend to droop around four o'clock and need to be revived.
There are two kinds of tea: high and low. In this country high tea is mistakenly construed to mean an elaborate tea with lots of cakes and cookies. The fact is that high tea is merely a dinner tea, that is, tea served at six o'clock with a light evening meal, for instance, poached eggs on toast, or, as I was once served in a hotel in Brecon, Wales, a bowl of something called Windsor (or brown) soup, and a mutton chop with bristles on it, and a big cup of tea.
Low tea, taken at four, may be as humble as bread and butter and a pot of tea with a plate of biscuits, or it may be as elaborate as a large iced cake, a plate of strawberries and a
heap of tea sandwiches. For inspiration, it is useful to read Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers or the early novels of Iris Murdoch, in which tea menus are elaborately described.
The great advantage of a tea party is that everything can be done in advance and the hostess gets to put her feet up and sit around for a little while before the thundering herds appear. Furthermore, the menu should resemble a crazy quilt or set of unmatched china. The chocolate cake sits next to the cheese buns, and the cucumber and anchovy sandwiches commingle with the shortbread. In short, you can serve four or five (or two or three) of your favorite things and a pot of tea (with coffee or wine for those who do not drink tea).
There are times when the tea party will not do: Christmas Eve and the Fourth of July. Christmas Eve requires a sit-down dinner with a big bird or large fish. Our Christmas Eve menu is not fixed. One year we had goose, a magnificent-looking creature sitting majestically on a huge platter. When this enormous bird was carved, each person received a wisp of meat, since that is about all you get from a goose, and my husband had an allergic reaction to it and had to be put to bed with two Benadryl tablets. We have had capon, ducks, turkey and last year we had salmon which was enjoyed by all except for one of the guests who confessed at the table to being highly allergic to fish.
A festival meal requires one big item, some elegant side dishes and a wonderful dessert. Then everyone leaves the table and sits in the living room drinking decaffeinated espresso, eating pistachio nuts, oranges and chocolates, leaving your floor littered with pistachio shells and little shreds of the colored paper from the chocolates.
The Fourth of July was always taken seriously in my family when I was a child, and I have maintained this tradition. Each year the menu is always the same: fried chicken, potato salad and cole slaw, with something down home for dessert: peaches and ice cream or gingerbread.
But when birthdays come around, I always revert to the tea party. This began with a tea party to celebrate my husband's
birthday. It was neither high nor low, but a combination. Twenty-five people consumed a large platter of ham sandwiches, another of cucumber sandwiches, a tower of brownies, a ginger cake, an enormous Latvian birthday cake (a coffee cake made of saffron-flavored yeast dough spiked with yellow raisins and formed in the shape of a figure eight), a basket of cheese straws, two pots of baked beans, a basin of strawberries and a samovar of tea.
ELZA JURJEVICS' LATVIAN BIRTHDAY CAKE
/ stick butter
VU cup milk
1 tablespoon saffron
3 tablespoons water 4 cups flour V2 cup sugar
1 tablespoon yeast
1 medium potato, boiled
1 cup raisins
4 ounces sour cream 1 egg beaten with a little water
sugar
This is a saffron-flavored coffee cake that can also be made into wreaths or buns. The traditional shape for a birthday cake is a figure eight.
/. Butter a baking sheet and set aside. Preheat oven to 350°. Melt butter in milk and set aside. 2. Boil saffron in water and set aside.
3. Sift flour, sugar and yeast. Sieve in potato, while hot, and mix it into the flour with your fingers. Add raisins.
4. Add butter and milk to the flour Add the saffron. Beat in sour cream and then beat until glossy. You do not knead this dough. Let the dough rise until doubled in bulk.
5. Beat it down and, adding a little flour to make the dough less sticky, beat it again. Then form the dough into a long roll by rolling and stretching gently. Place on the buttered baking sheet in the shape of a figure eight—you are aiming for something that looks like a big pretzel.
6. Butter two custard cups and place them in the open parts of the pretzel to keep them open during baking. Brush the top with an egg wash, scatter with sugar and bake at 350° for forty-five minutes.
This cake is served with the candles, in little candle holders, in the openings.
This is really a coffee cake with saffron dough. The dough can be formed into delicious little buns instead of a figure eight. My mother-in-law makes hers the size of coat buttons, and in my house dozens of them vanish in an instant. They are known as yellow bread, and I have noticed that our cat is crazy about them too.
The dough is a beautiful, rich yellow. The saffron gives it a subtle, exotic and quite indescribable taste. This is not meant to be a very sweet cake. It is eaten plain or with butter and jam, and it keeps well if you are lucky enough to have any left.
Each year our daughter's guest list gets a little longer but the party stays the same: tea sandwiches, a small Latvian birthday cake (since she is half-Latvian) and her two personal choices, a carrot cake made from a recipe in Jewish Cooking and made-leines, half in the traditional shape and half in the shape of a scallop shell. To use up the egg whites, a plate of chocolate meringues. Tea and coffee for the grown-ups, juice and milk for the children. This party begins at three and ends at five, before
there is time to get overtired, cranky or upset. Birthday parties are often more of a strain on young children than many adults realize, and it seems a good idea to keep them fairly simple. The rule is that if the adults are having a nice, relaxed time, the children v^ill, too, and many small children v^ill stand by the table amusing themselves nicely by picking all the cucumbers off the cucumber sandwiches. Because a tea party does not rely merely on cake and ice cream, children do not fill up on sugar and if the party ends at five, you have an hour to unwind before dinner.
My birthday is a sort of makeshift affair. My favorite cake is gingerbread with chocolate icing, and I make the cake the night before. Sometimes I make two layers, and sometimes I split one. When the cake is cool, I spread the middle with a very, very thick layer of raspberry jam and stick the layers together. The top is spread with a thin layer of jam and the cake is left to stand, uniced, overnight. The next morning I make a plain butter, sugar and chocolate icing—any standard cookbook will give a recipe with proportions, or see page 172—on which, at my daughter's insistence, sprinkles of various kinds—chocolate and multicolored—are festooned.
This year to go with the cake I made a plate of cheese buns— white
bread dough rolled thin, stuffed with Gruyere, chopped scallions, black pepper and a little olive oil, scattered with chopped rosemary and baked in the oven.
The guests included two girls, seven and eight, a nine-year-old boy, two three-year-old girls (one mine, one my oldest friend's) and two baby boys, aged seven months and ten months, plus various parents.
"Don't give the baby any birthday cake," said the mother of the ten-month-old baby. "It's too spicy. It will make him cry."
"It's my birthday," I said. "Can't he have a taste?"
"Just icing," said his mother.
The icing was a huge success.
"Oh, give him a little cake," said his father.
"No!" said his mother. "It will make him scream."
HOME COOKING
I gave the baby a little piece of icing with cake attached. He began to laugh and pound his fist, which means "More!"
The babies all ate ginger cake. The three-year-olds ate cake and then attempted to pick off all the icing. The older children ate cake and cheese buns and then everyone helped clean up. By the time the last dish had been put in the dishwasher, the three-year-olds had been fed their suppers and given their baths. One was asleep in her bed and the other was in a taxi on her way to her bed. Every crumb had been eaten, the table had been wiped. The toys had been put away and there was a relative degree of order in the house. It was seven thirty, with plenty of time to finish the paper, read a book and send out for Chinese food.
Now, that's what I call a good party.
I
HOW TO MAKE GINGERBREAD
Gingerbread, that most evocative of nursery treats, has gone out of fashion and even the revival in American cooking has failed to bring it back. You never see it on
menus or in bakeries, except in the form of gingerbread cookie men at Christmastime.
I love gingerbread in its true cake form—moist, spongy and spicy. It is strictly home food, but no one makes it anymore. Those who crave it get their fix from mixes, and if you give them the real thing, they appear confused. Why doesn't their gingerbread taste that good? There is nothing to be said about mixes: they are uniformly disgusting. Besides, gingerbread made from scratch takes very little time and gives back tenfold what you put into it. Baking gingerbread perfumes a house as nothing else. It is good eaten warm or cool, iced or plain. It improves with age, should you be lucky or restrained enough to keep any around.
Gingerbread exists in some form or other all throughout northern Europe. Florence White's classic Good Things in England, for example, has twelve recipes. Mrs. Mary Randolph's The Virginia Housewife, published in 1824, has three. It is definitely
food for a cold climate. Its spicy, embracing taste is the perfect thing for a winter afternoon. Ginger warms up your stomach (and is believed by many to purify the blood). When you serve it, once they have stopped giving you a funny look, people often say: "Gingerbread! I haven't had that since 1 was a child."
If you are feeding sophisticates, you can either take them back to childhood and serve it plain with a little whipped cream, or fancy it up by adding creme fraiche and a poached Seckel pear (page 161).
I have tried any number of recipes and have finally found the one I like best. Its basic proportions come from a recipe for Tropical Gingerbread in a spiral-bound book entitled The Charleston Receipts. This gem, which has been published since 1950 by the Junior League of Charleston (and is still available for ten dollars by writing to The Charleston Receipts, Box 177, Charleston, South Carolina 29402), contains wonderful recipes for everything from Brunswick stew to scones to shorten' bread and spoonbread. Tropical Gingerbread, however, calls for coconut which I feel has no place in gingerbread at all, so I have felt free to make a few changes and additions to an otherwise excellent recipe.
Instead of the white sugar called for, I use either light or dark brown. Light brown makes a slightly spongier cake, and dark brown creates a more sugary crust. I also add two teaspoons of lemon brandy, a heavenly elixir easily homemade by taking the peel from two lemons, cutting very close to get mostly zest, beating up the peels to release the oils and steeping them in four ounces of decent brandy. I have had my bottle for thirteen years and have replenished the brandy many times.
Besides the ginger, the heart of gingerbread is molasses. Now, there is molasses and molasses and there is the King of Molasses, which is available in the South but virtually unknown in the North. It comes in a bright yellow can and can be ordered by mail. In black letters is the following message:
STEEN'S
PURE RIBBON CANE SYRUP
(A delicious table syrup—soppin' good)
i
"Non sulphur or lime"
Rich in available iron
Made and put up by
THE C.S. STEEN SYRUP MILL, INC.
ABBEVILLE, LOUISIANA 70510
Nothing added—Nothing Extracted—Open Kettle
I was once given a tin by a Cajun friend, and when I ran out, I called the Steen Company and asked how to get more. A case of four twenty-five-ounce tins now costs $15.49 with shipping. On the back of the tin is their recipe for gingerbread which is very delicious but extremely sticky and you must therefore eat it with a fork. I like mine much less sticlty so you can eat it with your hands. You do not need Steen's to make gingerbread, but I see it as one of life's greatest delights: a cheap luxury.
The following recipe makes one nine-inch cake:
GINGERBREAD CAKE
/ stick sweet butter
V2 cup light or dark brown sugar
V2 cup molasses
2 eggs
Vh cups flour
V2 teaspoon baking soda
1 generous tablespoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon cinnamon
V4 teaspoon ground cloves
V4 teaspoon ground allspice
2 teaspoons lemon brandy, or plain vanilla extract
V2 cup buttermilk (or milk with a little yogurt beaten into it)
1. Butter a 9-inch cake tin and set aside. Preheat oven to 350°.
2. Cream butter with brown sugar. Beat until fluffy and add molasses.
3. Beat in eggs.
4. Add flour, baking soda and ground ginger (this can be adjusted to taste, but I like it very gingery). Add cinnamon, cloves and allspice.
5. Add lemon brandy or plain vanilla extract. Lemon extract will not do. Then add buttermilk (or milk-yogurt mixture) and turn batter into the buttered tin.
6. Bake at 350° for between twenty and thirty minutes (check after twenty minutes have passed). Test with a broom straw, and cool on a rack.
Recently my daughter came into a set of child-sized baking things—a roaster big enough for a pear, a tiny double boiler, a finger-sized eggbeater plus two little muffin tins and three saucer-sized cake pans. One afternoon, I decided to bake the gingerbread in these pans.
The muffins came out the size of coat buttons and the cakes were six inches in diameter. As I looked at those little cakes, I realized I had stumbled into something Big.
I fed the muffins to my daughter and her friends as I hatched my plans for the cakes. I would make a three-layer ginger cake, each layer spread with seedless raspberry jam and covered with chocolate icing. I got out my dime store cake-decorating kit and then made the icing. I intended to decorate this cake with swags and garlands but I struck too fast. The cake had not quite cooled and my swirls slid down the sides and melted. The result was not a thing of beauty but it didn't last very long, either.
CHOCOLATE ICING
V2 stick sweet butter
4 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa
1 teaspoon vanilla brandy, or vanilla extract or plain brandy
1 cup powdered sugar
/. Cream butter When fluffy add unsweetened cocoa. 2. If you fiave some, add vanilla brandy (easily made by steeping a couple of cut-up vanilla beans in brandy — another excellent thing to have around), or plain vanilla extract or plain brandy. Then add powdered sugar, a little at a time until you get the consi
stency you want.
This cake is also delicious with lemon icing. Substitute for the cocoa the zest of one big lemon, one teaspoon of lemon brandy (or extract) and one tablespoon of lemon juice, and proceed as in chocolate icing.
Lemon icing, I have discovered, must stand around for a v^hile in order to bloom. At first taste, it is impossibly sweet but after an hour or so it mellows into something suave and buttery.
Of course, you need not ice gingerbread at all. You can bake it in an adult-sized pan and shake powdered sugar on top or serve it with ice cream or leave it alone. Cut into wedges, it goes a long way, unlike the three-decker child cake.
This little three-layer cake will feed six delicate, well-mannered people with small appetites who are on diets and have just had a large meal, or four fairly well-mannered people who are not terribly hungry. Two absolute pigs can devour it in one sitting— half for you and half for me—^with a glass of milk and a cup of coffee and leave not a crumb for anyone else.
STUFFED BREAST OF VEAL: A BAD IDEA
There comes a time in every cook's life when he or she feels he or she ought to make a stuffed breast of veal. I know this impulse well, for I have fallen prey
to it.
Like many others, 1 too went to the butcher in advance. I asked him to bone the breast of veal and save the bones for me. I went home and consulted a number of cookbooks until I found what I felt would be a magnificent stuffing—rice, spinach, parsley, garlic, ham, grated cheese and pine nuts, or something like that. I got my meat from the butcher and made veal stock from the bones. 1 stuffed that critter, stitched it up and basted it with butter and stock. I watched it tenderly.
When it was cooked, I sliced it and fed it to friends. It looked very impressive on its platter and after all that work it tasted all right but nothing at all to rave about. The next day I ran the leftovers through a meat grinder and made some nice enough croquettes.
I once gave in to the impulse to bone a chicken and stuff it with pate. This was in my younger days when that sort of thing
Home cooking Page 14