The Hemingway Cookbook

by Craig Boreth

  Upon settling in Key West, Ernest immediately took full advantage of Cuba’s proximity, fishing in the Gulf Stream and taking writing retreats to the Ambos Mundos Hotel in Havana. In April 1939, when his marriage to Pauline was all but over and his marriage to journalist Martha Gell-horn only awaited the divorce papers, he moved to Cuba to live with Martha. His fame and need for privacy had outgrown his hotel room, and Martha soon rented an old estate called the Finca Vigia in the hills of San Francisco de Paula outside Havana, for $100 a month. For Christmas 1940, Hemingway purchased the estate, whose name means “Lookout Farm,” an appropriate title given the clear view of San Francisco de Paula and Havana it commands from its hillside perch.

  It was there that the celebrity and legend of Ernest Hemingway grew to its full stature. He wrote little fiction in the first years in Cuba, spending his time on correspondence and fishing. He had purchased the Pilar, a 38-foot Playmate cabin cruiser, in 1934 while living in Key West. The Pilar had the range to take him on 100-mile cruises to fish for giant marlin in the warm Cuban waters. Now that he lived in Cuba, with the Pilar moored in Cojimar or Havana Harbor, the lure of the big fish was as strong as that of the bullfights or the wild game. It became one of his greatest passions, and his happy years fishing the Gulf Stream aboard the Pilar and its rented predecessor, the Anita out of Key West, inspired such works as To Have and Have Not, Islands in the Stream, and The Old Man and the Sea.

  Hemingway brought to both Key West and Cuba his appetites for food and drink. Aboard the Pilar he was treated to native dishes by his mate and cook, Gregorio Fuentes, whom Hemingway would pit against the chef of the Ritz in Paris in their own culinary mano a manos.

  Closer to home, the Finca Vigía’s kitchen was eventually ruled by Mary, another journalist who Ernest met while in Europe during World War II. In 1946 Mary became Hemingway’s fourth wife. She was the only one of his wives to take a genuine interest in cooking, and she enjoyed the experimentation and challenge of overseeing the meals prepared for her husband and the endless stream of visitors to the resort that their home had become. The diversity of notables who visited was only surpassed by the variety of cuisine. Mary recalled one dish and one visitor in particular: “I baked a wahoo roast, basting it in Brut champagne, lime juice and chicken broth, for Jean-Paul Sartre when he was here, and he liked it.”3

  Our culinary tour of Key West and Cuba begins with the first of Ernest’s novels to feature a Cuban setting: To Have and Have Not. Throughout our tropical sojourn, we will experience the splendor of Cuban cuisine, the dangerous watering holes of Prohibitionera Key West, and the characters and anecdotes that surrounded a man whose appetite for food, drink, and life only seemed to grow (often despite doctor’s orders) as the years went by.

  TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT

  Considered by Socialists to be Hemingway’s “coming out” novel, To Have and Have Not is more likely a product of his gut reaction to the social and financial polarization of Depressionera Key West. It is a story of one man’s desperate struggle to simply survive, and no amount of political interpretation can mask the stark humanity of Harry Morgan’s failure to do so. The story opens violently in a café in Havana, La Perla de San Francisco, and in the aftermath the food mingles with the fear:

  I went in the Perla and sat down at a table. They had a new pane of glass in the window that had been shot up and the showcase was all fixed up. There were a lot of gallegos drinking at the bar, and some eating. One table was playing dominoes already. I had black bean soup and a beef stew with boiled potatoes for fifteen cents. A bottle of Hatuey beer brought it up to a quarter. When I spoke to the waiter about the shooting he wouldn’t say anything. They were all plenty scared.4

  THE MENU

  La Perla de San Francisco Café Menu

  Black Bean Soup

  Beef Stew with Boiled Potatoes

  Hatuey Beer

  Black Bean Soup

  I would like to thank Teresa Merenges-Berry for her assistance with this and several other traditional Cuban recipes in this chapter. She embodies the spirit and character of Cuba and its flavorful and spirited cuisine. Feel free to adjust all of the seasonings to taste. Teresa claims, happily and with a certain degree of pride, that her preparation of this dish has never tasted the same twice. This recipe will create a thick soup that is wonderful by itself or served over rice.

  6 SERVINGS

  1 pound dry black beans

  3 large green bell peppers

  1 bay leaf

  3 tablespoons olive oil

  1½ cups chopped onion

  3 cloves garlic, chopped

  1 tablespoon cumin

  1 tablespoon chopped fresh or ½ teaspoon crushed dried oregano

  4–5 small cilantro leaves

  Salt

  1 tablespoon vinegar

  Hot sauce

  Rinse the beans, removing any stones. Place the beans in a large bowl and cover with cold water to about 2 inches above the beans. Let soak overnight. Rinse the beans and place them in a large stockpot. Cover the beans once again with cold water to 2 inches above the top. Add one whole green pepper and the bay leaf to the pot. Bring the pot to a boil. Reduce heat, cover, and simmer for about 1 hour, or until the beans are tender. Discard the pepper and the bay leaf.

  Wash, seed, and cube the 2 remaining peppers. Heat the olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat. When the oil is hot, add the peppers and cook for 1 minute. Add the onion and cook for 1 minute. Add the garlic and cook for 1 minute more. Stir the vegetables into the beans. Add the cumin, oregano, cilantro, and salt to taste. Cook, uncovered, for about 30 minutes, or until thickened to taste. Add the vinegar and hot sauce and adjust seasonings to taste.

  Beef Stew with Boiled Potatoes

  This recipe for beef stew and potatoes is based on Gregorio Fuentes’s version. It is among the handful of treasured secrets that he shared with Mary Hemingway over the years of their acquaintance.5 As was characteristic of Fuentes’s cooking style, it is simply prepared, with just a touch of magic. Mary recalls that Gregorio usually served this dish with white rice. While he never seemed to measure the rice, water, or timing, it always seemed perfectly prepared. She fondly remembers lounging on the afterdeck aboard the Pilar, when suddenly Gregorio would leap down to the galley and remove the pot from the fire. His secret was the smell. When the rice began to “smell faintly, barely noticeably, of mothballs,” then it was cooked to perfection. I would suggest following the directions on the package, as not all of us are blessed with Gregorio’s gastronomic inspiration.

  Mealtime aboard the Pilar

  4 SERVINGS

  ¼ cup lard

  2 onions, chopped

  3 cloves garlic, minced

  1¼ cups tomato purée

  ¾ cup chopped tomatoes

  1 can, or 2 whole, pimientos, finely chopped

  1 cup sherry

  1 tablespoon crushed dried oregano

  1 bay leaf

  1 pound stew beef, cut into bite-size pieces

  3 medium potatoes, cut into small chunks

  First prepare the sauce, with plenty of garlic (feel free to add more if desired): heat the lard in a kettle over medium heat. When hot, add the onions and garlic and sauté until the onions are translucent. Add the tomato purée, chopped tomatoes, pimientos, sherry, oregano, and bay leaf. Simmer for 15 minutes, adjusting the seasoning to taste. Add the beef. Simmer the stew over low heat for 1 hour. Add the potatoes and continue cooking for an additional 20 minutes, or until potatoes are just tender. Serve over rice.

  HATUEY BEER

  Hemingway’s palate for wine and stronger drinks overshadowed his taste for beer. That is not to say he didn’t enjoy and write about beer frequently throughout his life. His favorite during the Cuban years was Hatuey, brewed in Cotorro, a town near his home in San Francisco de Paula, by the good people at the Bacardí Company. Aboard the Pilar there was always a generous supply of Hatuey (or another beer called Tropical) in the ice box that ran across th
e stern of the boat. Hemingway mentioned the brew in both To Have and Have Not and The Old Man and the Sea, when the owner of the Terraza sends along two returnable bottles of Hatuey along with the plates of food. The owners of Hatuey and Bacardí did not allow Hemingway’s endorsement to go unrecognized, although it’s likely he wished they had.

  On August 13,1956, the owners of the brewery organized a tribute to Hemingway, in honor of his presence in Cuba and his receiving the Nobel Prize in 1954. Hemingway was celebrated for his friendship with local fishermen, his larger-than-life character and talent, and, of course, his assistance in promoting the cosponsors, Hatuey and Bacardí, in his novels.

  Sloppy Joe’s: The Fiction and the Facts

  “It’s a strange place,” said Professor MacWalsey. “Fascinating, really. They call it the Gibraltar of America and it’s three hundred and seventy-five miles south of Cairo, Egypt. But this place is the only part of it I’ve had time to see yet. It’s a fine place though.”6

  It is not clear exactly when Ernest first entered the little, cavelike bar on Green Street, although we could safely assume it was very shortly after checking into the La Concha Hotel in early April 1928. One thing we do know is that in many ways he never left. The bar has changed names a few times, but its legacy of intrigue, utility, romance, superstition, and literature has remained. When Hemingway first ordered a Scotch at the Silver Slipper, he hitched his youthful legend to a bar that could hold its own as far as legends were concerned. When Joe Russell, who owned the bar in the 1930s, cashed a Scribner’s royalty check for Ernest, the legends of man and bar would hence-forth be immutably intertwined.

  In 1851, the Key West icehouse was built from disassembled pirate ships confiscated off South America. Shortly thereafter, well before its inventory would be used to chill whiskey, it was used to chill dead bodies. By the mid-1850s, the building was converted to the city morgue. Ten years later, a tremendous hurricane struck Key West, causing severe flooding and burying many of the morgue’s inhabitants under several feet of mud.

  Hemingway with friends and a bottle of Hatuey beer.

  There they remain to this day, under what is now the pool room. Not to worry, though—their spirits have been mollified. Several members of the large Bahamian population of Key West warded off any wayward spirits with bottles of holy water, the empty remains of which may still be found there today.

  This nondescript little building also served as the first telegraph station of Key West and was home to the city’s hanging tree, both of which prompted its inclusion in the National Historic Registry. In the late 1870s, it first became a bar, the Silver Slipper. And there Hemingway found it on a hot spring afternoon, having just arrived from Paris.

  After Joe Russell bought the bar in 1933, it became the successful young writer’s favorite watering hole, Sloppy Joe’s. There Hemingway found a setting for the barroom brawls of To Have and Have Not and met his eventual third wife, Martha Gellhorn, in December 1936.

  Ernest in the Pilar trailed by Mary in the Tin Kid, sailing past Morro Castle in 1947, Cuba.

  Sloppy Joe’s moved to Duvall Street in 1937, where it remains the epicenter in name, if not in place, of Hemingway’s presence in Key West. Where the original Sloppy Joe’s stood is now a bar called Capt. Tony’s Saloon, the oldest bar in Key West. In the 1960s Tennessee Williams lived upstairs, Truman Capote dropped by for a while, and Jimmy Buffett found a place to sing. To this day Hemingway’s legacy has been preserved at Capt. Tony’s. While Sloppy Joe’s may thrive on his name and face and the Papa Dobles they serve, Capt. Tony’s will always play host to Hemingway’s spirit in Key West.

  Captain Tony’s Saloon was the original Sloppy Joe’s from 1933 to 1937.

  Islands in the Stream

  As he had done in Key West with Sloppy Joe’s, Hemingway began to mingle his legend with local institutions in and around Havana as well. He would later claim that his attraction to bars and restaurants like El Floridita and La Terraza in Cojímar was not solely the food or drink. Even though he would often go through a dozen Daiquirís in one sitting, it was more the characters that inhabited these places that he truly enjoyed. Many of them appear in To Have and Have Not as well as in the posthumously published Islands in the Stream, which was originally part of his Sea trilogy. This story, begun in the early 1950s, is about Thomas Hudson, a good painter who will not get better. Hudson bears a striking resemblance to his creator, not solely for his hunting for German submarines, as Hemingway did aboard the Pilar. In addition they share the pleasure of La Terraza, a bar in Cojímar “built out on the rocks overlooking the harbor.”7 It was here that Hemingway may have founded his Royal Order of Shrimp Eaters and where he bestows upon Thomas Hudson the semifictional cat, Boise, with the presumptuous eating habits:

  The proprietor of the bar had asked him, “Do you want some shrimps?” and brought a big plate piled with fresh cooked prawns and put it on the bar while he sliced a yellow lime and spread the slices on a saucer. The prawns were huge and pink and their antennae hung down over the edge of the bar for more than a foot and he had picked one up and spread the long whiskers to their full width and remarked that they were longer than those of a Japanese admiral.

  Thomas Hudson broke the head off the Japanese admiral prawn and then split open the belly of the shell with his thumbs and shucked the prawn out and it was so fresh and silky feeling under his teeth, and had such a flavor, cooked in sea water with fresh lime juice and whole black peppercorns, that he thought he had never eaten a better one; not even in Málaga nor in Tarragona nor in Valencia. It was then that the kitten came over to him, scampering down the bar, to rub against his hand and beg a prawn.8

  Prawns in Sea Water

  4 SERVINGS

  8 cups sea water (fresh water with sea salt will suffice)

  4 tablespoons fresh lime juice

  6 whole black peppercorns

  2 pounds prawns (with the heads still attached) or jumbo shrimp

  2 limes, quartered

  Combine the water (and salt, if necessary), lime juice, and peppercorns in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Add the prawns or shrimp and boil for 5 minutes, or until the prawns turn bright pink. Drain the prawns and plunge immediately into a bowl of ice water. Drain again and serve, piled on a plate with lime quarters.

  ROYAL ORDER OF SHRIMP EATERS

  Hemingway had a penchant for turning the mundane into the regal and renowned (if not infamous). We encountered a fictional example of this with Colonel Cantwell’s El Ordine Militar, Nobile y Espirituoso de los Caballeros de Brusadelli (see page 30). In real life, Hemingway once formed a legal partnership with friend, biographer, and traveling companion, A. E. Hotchner, known as Hemhotch, Ltd. The partnership was originally formed as a racing syndicate to cover their bets on the steeplechase at Auteuil. Eventually, they had greeting cards made (as was the European custom at the time) announcing the partnership’s diversification beyond the races and into such endeavors as duck hunting, the bullfights and other masculine pursuits.9

  In Havana, Hemingway introduced Hotchner to yet another quasi-formal order he had founded. As the two sat before a heaping plate of un-peeled shrimp, Hemingway informed Hotchner that should he wish to join The Royal Order of Shrimp Eaters, there is but one membership requirement: that he eat the shrimp complete with the heads and tails. Hemingway happily crunched one of the large shrimp. Hotchner followed, with markedly less enthusiasm.10

  If you so choose, you may take this opportunity to induct yourself into this prestigious order. I won’t recommend repeating the initiation often enough for it to grow on you, though. That’s for inductees to decide on their own.

  In the novel, the proprietor of La Terraza gives Thomas Hudson the prawn-begging Angora Tiger cat as a Christmas gift. It was Gregorio Fuentes who gave Hemingway the real-life cat, named Boise, who maintained the same high gastronomic standards as her owners. Mary Hemingway thought Boise “one of the world’s most sophisticated cats in his food preferences,”11 who, eve
n after eating melons and sauerkraut and chili and pie, “still jumps like a feather in the breeze.”12 Soon after Thomas Hudson takes Boise home from La Terraza, he learns of the cat’s rather precocious eating habits:

  Then when the alligator pear trees, the big, dark green aguacates with their fruit only a little darker and shinier than the foliage, had come into bearing this time when he had been ashore in September for overhaul, preparing to go down to Haiti, he had offered Boise a spoonful out of the shell, the hollow where the seed had been, filled with oil and vinegar dressing, and the cat had eaten it and then afterwards at each meal, he had eaten half an aguacate.13

  Boise’s Avocado

  Note: A ripe avocado should be firm but forgiving. Be careful to buy neither too hard nor too soft a fruit. To seed the avocado, cut along the fruit laterally, down to the round central pit, then twist the two halves apart. To remove the pit, strike the pit with a large, sharp knife, firmly enough that the blade will stick. Twist the knife and remove the pit.

  3 HUMANS AND 1 CAT

  2 avocados

  Lime juice

  6 tablespoons olive oil

  2 tablespoons white vinegar (or a combination of white and wine vinegars)

  Pinch of salt

  Cut the avocados in half, remove the pits and sprinkle with lime juice to prevent browning. Whisk together the olive oil, vinegar, and salt. Fill the hollow of each half with dressing.

  Islands in the Stream is a mosaic of Hemingway’s reminiscences, including his memories of his three sons, his third wife, his early days in Michigan, his life in Paris, and his later adventures in the 1930s and 1940s. Sitting on his hillside Cuban perch, Ernest had endless opportunities to remember—looking back through time and across the ocean—to his former lives. From Paris to Marseilles to Hong Kong, these memories are invariably infused with the tastes and smells of the foods therein. Hemingway would not begin to write his full memoirs of Paris until 1957, when he began A Moveable Feast. In Islands in the Stream, we get a taste of things to come: