Mrs. Ian Erskine's Deviled Eggs

This is not your standard Deviled Egg. The recipe comes from The Royal Blue and Gold Cookbook produced as a fundraiser by the Marchioness of Cambridge in 1974. The cookbook is long out of print. This is another glorious library book sale find.

Before World War II, Dorothy Hastings Cambridge had an idea of making a cook book using recipes from dinner parties she and George had given for their friends and guests. The Marchioness had interesting friends like Clark Gable and Joan Crawford. Dorothy was supported in this effort by Queen Mary, who donated many recipes. The book did not get published until 1974. Proceeds were donated to the Royal British Legion Women's Section. 

This recipe is verbatim. I will provide one or two of the Marchioness's creative recipes also in another section. Enough typing for this morning.

Devilled Eggs

Ingredients to serve 4

1 tablespoon Butter or Margarine

1 ounce Butter (editor's note - you may use Margarine here as well)

4 Eggs

2 tablespoons Milk 

Salt

Cayenne Pepper

1 and 1/2 teaspoons prepared Mustard

1 tablespoon Chutney

2 tablespoons Capers

2 Eggs

Preparation

Melt the butter or margarine in a frying pan and fry the eggs carefully until the whites are set, but not hard. Meanwhile, melt the 1 ounce butter in a saucepan. Add the milk, the salt, and the cayenne and bring to a boil. Add the mustard, chutney, and the two eggs, well beaten. Stir the mixture over a low fire, until the sauce is like thick cream, never allowing it to come to a boil. Add the chopped capers and pour the sauce over the fried eggs. The dish may be warmed slightly under the grill or in a very hot oven for a few minutes, as it must be served very hot.

Don Marquis' Baked Beans Nirvana

Don Marquis' Very Special Baked Bean Recipe

From "The Almost Perfect State"
By Don Marquis
Doubleday, Page & Company
1927

If you WILL eat beans, here is the way to prepare them.

First, you must have an earthenware Bean Pot, about six hands high, and of a dark bay colour. It is better if this Bean Pot is inherited from a favourite grandmother, with a porous texture (the pot, not the grandmother) that has absorbed and retained the sentimental traditions of at least three generations. But if you own no such heirloom (more precious than the rubies of an imperial crown!) a new one can be made to do.

Procure your white navy beans, and pick them over on a Friday night, not hastily or cursorily, but with love and care, one bean at a time, for this is both an art and a science on which you have embarked--it is more; it is almost a religious rite. Cast from you all split beans, all rusty or spotted beans, all too-wrinkly beans; save only such superior beans, smooth, hard, and shining, as a twelve-months' old child would love to poke up his nose.

Put these aristocrats to soak in water that has three or four tablespoonfuls of baking soda in it. Don't ask me why the soda. I am not arguing with you. I am telling you.

Some people say that after these beans have soaked all night they are ready to bake. These people lie. They are not ready to bake. They are merely ready to boil.

Boil them from ten o'clock Saturday morning until noon, in a pot with a piece of salt pork in it. And time your boiling so that on the stroke of twelve there is very little of the liquid remaining. For they must not go into the Sacred Earthenware Bean Pot, the Ancestral Amphora, too soupy or sloppy.

Put into the bottom of the Bean Pot a layer of Beans four fingers deep. Poke deeply into this one bay leaf. Put on top of this a layer consisting of pieces of just the right kinds of salt pork. On top of the layer of pork, dribble a thin layer of thick New Orleans molasses.

Put in another layer of beans. Into this second layer poke four or five slender curling strips of pungent shredded onion. Put a dab of mustard on the onion. Then a sparse layer of pork. Then another dribbled layer of molasses.

Pause and put your Ego in harmony with the Cosmic All.

Build up these successive layers of beans, pork, and molasses, alternating the subtle bay leaf with the poetic onion, until the pot is filled within two inches of the top. From time to time, a conservative sprinkle of black pepper, as you work from the bottom upward. From time to time hum a verse of "Old Hundred." Don't put in any salt; the pork salts all.

Let the top layers of pork and molasses be a bit thicker than any of the others.

Bake, slowly, in a moderate oven, from noon until six o'clock in the evening. Some say it must be a brick oven. Nonsense! Your Bean Pot itself is your bricky heat-retaining medium.

Eat from six in the evening until midnight--and without fear of indigestion. The thorough cooking has taken all that sort of thing away.

Each separate bean of all these beans retains its form--almost. Almost. Not quite. Each bean is ready to melt tenderly into amalgamation with his neighbor bean. At the touch of the serving spoon the touched beans lose their individual identity, yield up their pride, merge gently into a kind of Bean Nirvana.

Some eat them with vinegar. Very good. Others with tomato catsup. I eat them with a squeeze of lemon juice. Ambrosia!

Best Party Meatballs

No matter how elegant a buffet I turn out, these delicious bites are always the first to be consumed. Mildred Albert did everything well. And her recipe for Sweet and Sour Meatballs is an example of her culinary and social talents.

MILDRED ELIZABETH LEVINE ALBERT

1905 – 1991

BibliographyDiscuss

by Sara Alpern

“M.A.” and “The Mighty Atom,” as Mildred Albert was called, charmed the fashion world as an international fashion consultant, lecturer, columnist, and radio and television personality.

Sweet and Sour Meatballs

Makes 75 to 85 Meatballs

1 clove Garlic, minced

2 pounds ground Beef
2 Eggs
3 tablespoons Chili Sauce
2 tablespoons dried Parsley flakes
1/2 teaspoon Salt
1/2 teaspoon Pepper, divided
1 quart (32 ounces) cocktail Vegetable Juice (V8)
1 box (1 pound) light Brown Sugar
1 cup white Vinegar
3 cloves Garlic, halved
30 prunes, pitted

Mash minced Garlic with ground Beef, Eggs, Chili Sauce, Parsley flakes, Salt and 1/4 teaspoon Pepper. Shape the mixture into 75 to 85 meatballs.

Combine Vegetable Juice, Brown Sugar, Vinegar, split Garlic cloves, and remaining Pepper. Bring the sauce mixture to a boil.

Drop Meatballs into the Juice mixture. Reduce heat to low. Cook at a low simmer for 40 minutes. Add prunes to the sauce and cook 30 minutes more. 

Drain off most, but not all, of the sauce before putting meatballs and prunes into a chafing dish. Serve hot with toothpicks.

Note: 
Make these a day ahead, refrigerate and skim fat from surface before serving. I find if I use a very lean grind of meat, there is hardly any fat.  I also add 1/4 cup of very fine dry bread crumbs to this mixture. It makes a difference if you use fresh parsley. However, both are optional and to your taste. You can increase the recipe to 115 to 125 meatballs by adding 1 more pound of ground Beef to make a total of 3 pounds. But be sure to leave the sauce ingredients as they are. Do not increase the liquid. Use exactly one quart. 

365 Days a Year - Course Dinner in 15 Minutes by Mabel Claire

I sing the praises again of my library book sale. I found a copy of Mabel Claire's The Busy Woman's Cookbook - Course Dinners in 15 Minutes published in 1925. Consider that all the machines and products that are sold today as labor and time saving did not exist in the 20s and 30s. This book can still be found at $20.00. I spent $0.50.

Vintage cookbooks are an educational peek at American culture of the period. I give you one of Ms. Claire's "15 minute course dinners" verbatim. This menu is delicious and quick. Just what a busy person needs when they have to cook dinner 365 days a year.

MENU - Serves 2

Ham and Eggs
Tomatoes, Peppers and Onions
Bread and Butter
Baked Bananas with Cream
Coffee

SHOPPING LIST

Slice of Ham
Four Eggs
Two Tomatoes
Three Green Peppers
Half Pint Cream
Four Small Bananas
Loaf Bread
1/4 Pound Butter

HAVE READY

3 Frying Pans
Fork
Tablespoon
Knife
Sugar
Butter
Cinnamon
Salt

Light the gas oven. Light two gas burners. On one put frying pan with a tablespoon of butter. On the second burner heat the frying pan for the ham.

When the butter in the frying pan is hot, peel and slice into it the onions, next the peppers cut small with seeds removed, last the tomatoes, cut in dice. When these are not, cover closely and cook over moderate flame until wanted.

When the frying pan is hot for the ham, brown the slice on both sides. Cook 8 minutes. Dish on to a platter and put into the oven.

Break four eggs into the pan the ham has cooked in and cook until done to taste, about 5 minutes.

Heat the third frying pan and melt in  it a tablespoon of butter. Peel and halve lengthwise the four bananas. Saute on both sides. Sprinkle over these a large tablespoon of sugar and a dusting of cinnamon and let this melt into them. Cooking time about 3 minutes. Remove the bananas to the oven to keep hot until wanted for dessert.

Turn off the oven. Prepare the coffee. Set the table, five minutes. Ms. Claire points out that doubling this recipe for a larger family does  not increase the cooking time.

Lady Bird Johnson and Burning Love

One way to love a Texas garden is to burn it. Encourages the growth of wild AbutiIon. I learned that from the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center.

The Wild Flower Center at Texas State University seems a fitting memorial to a First Lady who was a committed environmentalist. I found my way to the Wildflower Center because I was doing some research at the National Archives. 

This is a photograph of the Texas Indian Mallow or Abutilon fruticosum

Lady Bird Johnson left us her recipe for Texas Style Chili. Now that is some burning love because her recipe was “almost as popular as the government pamphlet on the care and feeding of children.” I love the National Archives. Send them some burning love.

Portagee Joe's Cafe Shrimp Bisque

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This recipe comes from Eggs I Have Known by Corinne Griffith. It was Miss Griffith's Coconut Bars that so delighted Clark Gable. I write about those elsewhere. Of course, this cookbook is out of print.

I have not yet made this bisque. I am going down to the Italian Market to get the shrimp today. I expect this dish to be delicious. I give it to you verbatim. Old cookbooks are low on directions. And I do not think this movie star actually ever cooked anything. We shall see. Nip and tuck.

Portagee Joe's Cafe was one of the small cafes which could be found along Fisherman's Wharf in 1950's Monterey California.

Portagee Joe's Shrimp Bisque

1 tablespoon Celery (chopped fine)
3 tablespoons Butter
2 cups Milk
1 cup cooked Shrimp (mashed fine)
1 wineglass Sherry
1 tablespoon Onion (chopped fine)
3 tablespoons Flour
3 cups Cream
1/4 teaspoon Salt
Paprika

Cook Celery and Onion in Butter over a slow fire for 5 minutes. Place in a double boiler and cook over hot water. Add flour. Add Milk, 2 cups Cream and put remaining 1 cup of Cream aside. Cook mixture until thickened. Add Shrimp, Salt and one drop of Tabasco Sauce (approximately) and reheat. Now whip remaining cup of Cream, add Sherry to Cream and Paprika. Remove soup from stove. Add whipped Cream and stir. Serves Six.