Thursday, June 26, 2008
Got gas? Have we got recipes!
Larry Bly
Larry Bly runs an ad agency and does freelance writing in the Roanoke area.
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Once in a while I give my poor palate a rest and write about a different food-related subject. Let me tell you about a recent find while shopping at an antiques store in Baltimore.
It's a cookbook, put out by the wacky gas industry as a giveaway back in the mid-1930s. When you bought a new, "modern" 1935 gas range, the your local dealer would hand you one of these books, "presented with the compliments of your Gas Company," as the frontispiece said.
Today, nobody gives you anything.
The book is called "Be an Artist at the Gas Range." Can you imagine using such prose as this to describe the mundane cooking that poor old ladies (not men) had to deal with back then: "...with the hope that it will help you in the performance of those loving duties in the home which are apt to become commonplace because they recur each day."
The author, called "The Mystery Chef," must have done all right at his craft. There's a photo of a gothic, musty house with 20-foot ceilings, captioned, "A corner of the drawing room in the Mystery Chef's New York home." I reckon that this chef didn't spend a lot of time in front of the range.
The book starts with the basics: "To bring to the boiling point," "To simmer," "To sear," "To baste," etc., for those without skills. Heck, if you don't know any of that, what are buying a stove for anyway? There are some long-forgotten (or never-learned) tips that still hold water, like how to make sweet cream sour if you don't have sour cream: to each cup of cream add 2 teaspoons of lemon juice or vinegar. Next time you're whipping up a homemade beef stroganoff or any other recipe requiring sour cream: try it, you'll be amazed.
Or how to remove yolk of egg from the white: "Use the egg shell and you will find the yolk can easily be taken out; it cannot be taken out as readily in any other way."
Speaking of eggs, it was a chef at the famous Clydes of Georgetown who taught me the craft of poaching eggs for Benedicts. The very same tip is included in this book: "Use a few drops of vinegar to the water ... and they will hold together and the white will not separate in the water." Works every time.
I do eggs Benedict every Christmas morning for a half dozen people and they're easy to handle and perfect every time. The folks at Clydes make plenty of perfect Benedicts (with runny yolks) every single day using this method.
The book is full of useful information, most of it relevant today, and it contains a ton of great recipes, if dated by the ingredients, such as suet, rusks, lard.
I picked up a tip on making a substitute for chili powder, should you run out. "If not available, use 2 teaspoons of Worcestershire sauce and a speck of cayenne pepper. I can't vouch for that one, but would the Mystery Chef leads us astray? Still, it doesn't sound right to me.
Under "Famous National Dishes," it's interesting to see what passed for "international" in 1935: Italian spaghetti and sauce, Indian curry, beef a la stroganoff, chili con carne, Swedish meat balls, mustacholi (Spanish dish containing round steak), and something called sauerbraten mit kartoffel klosse, which today is simply known as sauerbraten. Kartoffel klosse is potatoes, eggs, flour, bread crumbs and nutmeg, mushed into some sort of potato balls that have to be boiled. OK!
Several pages are given over to cooking "every vegetable that grows," in accordance with the Mystery Chef's own personal methodology.
It's fun to go back into the pages of old books and see the trends of the time. Under "Cakes," there's the traditional Sally Lunn, big at the time. There's mince meat pie ... jam tartlets ... sponge cakes ... homemade meringues.
Here's something you won't find in today's cookbooks: "How to put out a fat fire." You know, when a big old hunk of greasy fat catches fire. In case you ever need to know, don't use water because fat and water don't mix.
Throw salt on the fire.
Well, the book is a lot of fun. And if you're real good, I'll share a few recipes with you. Guaranteed to bring back memories of 1935!
BE AN ARTIST AT THE GAS RANGE
Copyright 1935
Longmans, Green & Co.
