The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book by Alice B. Toklas

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8. Food in the United States in 1934 and 1935



WHEN during the summer of 1934 Gertrude Stein could not decide whether she did or did not want to go to the United States, one of the things that troubled her was the question of the food she would be eating there. Would it be to her taste? A young man from the Bugey had lately returned from a brief visit to the United States and had reported that the food was more foreign to him than the people, their homes or the way they lived in them. He said the food was good but very strange indeed -- tinned vegetable cocktails and tinned fruit salads, for example. Surely, said I, you weren't required to eat them. You could have substituted other dishes. Not, said he, when you were a guest.

At this time there was staying with us at Bilignin an American friend who said he would send us a menu from the restaurant of the hotel we would be staying at when Gertrude Stein lectured in his home town, which he did promptly on his return there. The variety of dishes was a pleasant surprise even if the tinned vegetable cocktails and fruit salads occupied a preponderant position. Consolingly, there were honey-dew melons, soft-shell crabs and prime roasts of beef. We would undertake the great adventure.

Crossing on the Champlain we had the best French food. It made me think of a college song popular in my youth, Home Will Never Be Like This. If the food that awaited us at the Algonquin Hotel did not resemble the food on the French Line it was very good in its way, unrivalled T-steaks and soft-shell crabs and ineffable ice creams.

Mr. Alfred Harcourt, Gertrude Stein's editor, had asked us to spend Thanksgiving weekend with Mrs. Harcourt and himself in their Connecticut home, and there we ate for the first time, with suppressed excitement and curiosity, wild rice. It has never become a commonplace to me. Carl Van Vechten sends it to me. To the delight of my French friends I serve

WILD RICE SALAD

Steam 1/2 lb. wild rice.
1/2 lb. coarsely chopped mushrooms cooked for 10 minutes in 3 tablespoons oil and 2 tablespoons lemon juice, 2 hard-boiled eggs coarsely chopped, 1 green pepper finely chopped, 1-1/2 cups shelled shrimps, all lightly mixed and served with

AIOLI OR AILLOLI SAUCE

Press into a mortar 4 cloves of garlic, add a pinch of salt, of white pepper and the yolk of an egg. With the pestle reduce these ingredients to an emulsion. Add the yolk of an egg. You may continue to make the sauce with the pestle or discard it for a wooden fork or a wooden spoon or a wire whisk. Real Provencal Aioli makers use the pestle to the end. With whatever instrument you will have chosen you will commence to incorporate drop by drop an excellent olive oil. When the egg has absorbed about 3 tablespoons of the oil, add 1/2 tablespoon lemon juice. Continuing to stir, now add oil more briskly. When it soon becomes firm again add 1 dessertspoon tepid water (I repeat, tepid water). Continue to add oil, lemon juice and tepid water. The yolk of 1 egg will absorb 1 cup and 2 tablespoons oil, 1-1/2 tablespoons lemon juice and 2 dessertspoons tepid water.

Aioli is, of course, nothing more than a garlic mayonnaise, a creamy mayonnaise. Mayonnaise with tepid water is creamier than without it. Mayonnaise should have more salt and pepper added to the yolk of egg than Aioli as well as powdered mustard and paprika.

Gertrude Stein said she was not going to lunch or dine with anyone before lecturing, we would eat simply and alone. Before her first lecture she ordered for dinner oysters and honey-dew melon. She said it would suit her. In travelling to a dozen states she deviated as little as possible from that first menu. Occasionally the oysters had to be replaced by fish or chicken. From the beginning the ubiquitous honey-dew melon bored me. Melons to me are a hot-weather refreshment. Rooms heated to 70° and over do not replace the sun. In any case, I prefer the flavour of Spanish melons to honey-dew and Persian melons. So the most fantastic dishes were experimented with, anything except what sounded like drug-store specialities.

Gertrude Stein continued with her satisfactory regime on the days of lectures. On the other days we fared more lavishly with friends in their homes and at restaurants, at first in New York, and then an excellent dinner at the inn at Princeton, at the Signet Club at Harvard with half a dozen of its members and no one else at Gertrude Stein's request, and very well at Smith College. Then we stayed with delightful people in an old historic house amidst rare and beautiful furniture and objects and dined and lunched with exquisite eighteenth-century porcelain, crystal and silver on a precious lace tablecloth, and left, quite starved, to find late in the afternoon fifty miles away an unpretentious but carefully cooked meal in a small town -- oysters, roast turkey and its accompaniments and an unusually good rice pudding were not beyond our capacity. We asked to see the cook to thank her, and she gave me the recipe for

RICE PUDDING

Thoroughly wash 1/4 lb. rice, cook in double boiler in I quart milk with a pinch of salt. Stir the yolks of 8 eggs with a wooden spoon gradually adding 1 cup sugar and 5 tablespoons flour. Stir for 10 minutes and slowly add 2 cups scalded milk. Place over very low flame, stirring continuously until the mixture coats the spoon. Remove from heat and strain through a sieve, adding 1 teaspoon vanilla extract. When rice is quite tender, add slowly to egg-sugar-milk mixture. Then gently incorporate the beaten whites of 3 eggs. Pour into buttered mould and cook in 350 ͦ oven for 20 minutes. Do not remove from mould until tepid. Serve with

VANILLA CREAM SAUCE

Stir the yolks of 6 eggs thoroughly with 1 cup sugar. Add 2-1/4 cups scalded milk. Stir over very low flame with wooden spoon until the mixture coats the spoon. Remove from flame and add 1 tablespoon best kirsch. Strain through hair sieve. Stir occasionally until cold enough to put into the refrigerator. Before serving gently add 1 cup whipped cream.

Gertrude Stein's and Virgil Thomson's opera was to be given in Chicago. She had never heard it, so when Bobsie Goodspeed telephoned that we ought to fly out there to hear it- -- here would not be time between lectures to go there by train -- Gertrude Stein said she would but only under the protection of Carl Van Vechten. After a perfect performance of Four Saints in Three Acts; Bobsie gave a supper party. She was known to have a perfect cuisine. Of the many courses I only remember the first and the last, a clear turtle soup and a fantastic piece montee of nougat and roses, cream and small coloured candles. The dessert reminded me of a postcard Virgil Thomson once sent us from the Cote d' Azur, Delightfully situated within sight of the sea, pine woods, nightingales, all cooked in butter. This is the recipe for

CLEAR TURTLE SOUP

Soak 1/2 lb. sun-dried turtle meat in cold water for four days changing the water each day. On the fourth day prepare 1 stalk celery, 1 leek, 1 carrot, 2 onions and 1 turnip. Put 12 peppercorns, 3 cloves, 8 coriander seeds, a sprig of basil, of rosemary, of marjoram and of thyme in a muslin bag. Put the vegetables, the bag of spices and condiments and the turtle meat in a large stewpan. Cover with 4 quarts stock and bring to the boil uncovered, skim thoroughly, cover and simmer gently for 8 hours at least. It may be necessary to add more stock, in which case add very little at a time and be certain that it is boiling. When the turtle meat is quite tender, remove from pan and put aside. Strain the soup through muslin. When the fat rises to the surface, carefully remove all of it. To clarify the soup add the whites of 3 eggs and the juice of 1/2 lemon. Put over moderate heat and bring to the boil whisking continuously. When it boils, reduce heat, cover. In 10 minutes, strain through muslin. It will have come beautifully limpid. Cut the turtle meat into 1-inch slices, put into strained soup, add salt and a good pinch of cayenne, 1/2 cup best dry sherry per quart of soup. Serve hot. A tasty, nourishing but light soup.

We were driven through a winter landscape to a women's college where Gertrude Stein had accepted an invitation to dine with some members of the faculty. The dining-room was really a huge mess hall with acoustics that made a pandemonium of the thousands or was it only hundreds of voices. It was the beautiful young women students who were making this demoniacal noise. No wonder we had always thought of the graduates of the college as sirens, tragic and possibly damned. A restricted dinner was served in a manner appropriate to the surroundings. Gertrude Stein asked if she might have a soft-boiled egg and an orange.



After Gertrude Stein had lectured in New England, we went to Wisconsin, Ohio, Illinois and St. Louis, where the cooking was uniformly good with the exception of a superlative lunch given by a friend of Carl Van Vechten at her vast estate near Minneapolis. The drawing-rooms and dining-room were filled with flowers, largely orchids, the first Tiepolo blue ones we had ever seen. The dining-room table had a bowl of several varieties of hot-house grapes with thin tendrils and tender leaves -- and the snow steadily falling outside. Our hostess was in the tradition of a Dumas fils heroine, though she was, I believe, the original of Carl Van Vechten's Tattooed Countess. It is unnecessary to say that the menu was entirely a French one, and therefore a recipe of one of its courses has no place here.

The temptation however is too great. This is the way to prepare

LOBSTER ARCHIDUC

Thoroughly wash a live lobster weighing not less than 3 lbs. Plunge into boiling water, allow to cool in liquid. Cut it down the middle and then across, take off the two claws, put aside the coral or eggs. In a deep pan melt over hot flame 4 tablespoons butter and 4 tablespoons oil. When it bubbles, put the six pieces of lobster, in their shell, into the pan. Heat thoroughly, turn with a wooden spoon until each piece is coated with the butter and oil. Then cover the pan and reduce the heat. Cook gently for 1/2 hour. Drain the lobster. Remove all meat from the shell and replace in the pan with the sauce. Replace over heat. Reheat slowly over low flame. Add the coral or eggs, 1/4 cup brandy, 1/2 cup best port wine and 2. tablespoons whisky. Season with salt and cayenne pepper. Cover and allow to boil for 5 minutes. Add 2. cups heavy cream. All to boil. Add the yolks of 2 eggs, heat thoroughly but do not allow to boil. Add the juice of 1/4 lemon and 5 tablespoons butter in very small pieces, turn gently until melted. Serve. This dish has an illusive flavour.

When we were at St. Paul to our surprise and delight there was a telephone message from Sherwood Anderson. He had heard we were in the neighbourhood. He proposed calling for us and driving us down to meet his wife -- they were staying with her sister and their brother-in-law -- which he did, through miles of ice and snow-drifts, to sweet people and a festival dinner. It was the happiest of meetings. Of all the delicacies served, it is strange to remark that it was the first time we tasted mint jelly.

In Columbus, Ohio, there was a small restaurant that served meals that would have been my pride if they had come to our table from our kitchen. The cooks were women and the owner was a woman and it was managed by women. The cooking was beyond compare, neither fluffy nor emasculated, as women's cooking can be, but succulent and savoury. Later, at Fort Worth, there was a similar restaurant to which Miss Ela Hockaday introduced us. We were to fly out to California and the restaurant packed us a box of food that was the best picnic lunch ever was. It would be a pleasure to be able to order something approaching it when taking a plane today. Has food on the American planes -- not the transatlantic flights but on interior routes -- improved? It has not in Europe, it is incredibly bad, even worse than on trains. Do they cook these meals in the locomotive and in the fuselage?

At Detroit there was a strange incident at the hotel which seemed sinister to us. The hardened European visitors became frightened. Gertrude Stein had the habit of an hour's walk after the evening meal, improperly spoken of as dinner. To calm her mind, she went off for a walk, but in a short time she returned quite agitated. Not far from the hotel, from the loudspeaker on a tower with a revolving searchlight, a warning was being repeated that no one was to move until a gunman was caught. A murder had just been committed. Suddenly Joseph Brewer's name flashed into my head. Had we not said we would stay with him if we were in his neighbourhood? He was the president of Olivet College. So we telephoned him and said we would like to be rescued. He said he would come to collect us and our bags, which he did the next morning with a large part of his faculty in several cars. It was an invigorating drive through snow and bitter cold sunshine to Lansing, where we had a carefully prepared lunch. For dessert we had an old-fashioned

BIRD'S-NEST PUDDING

Butter a porcelain pudding dish, slice 8 apples into it, sprinkle with sugar. Pour over them a batter made of 1 cup sour cream, 1 cup flour. Mix well, add the yolks of 3 eggs and 1 cup milk in which has been mixed 1 scant teaspoon baking soda. Beat the whites of 3 eggs, fold into mixture. Bake for 1/2 hour in medium oven. Brush the top with melted butter and sprinkle with sugar. Brown for 10 minutes. Serve with sweetened heavy cream. This is a pudding we should not neglect.

With a couple of days' rest with Joseph Brewer and the students at Olivet we forgot the horrors of Detroit and started off again. With Gertrude Stein's cousins in their home near Baltimore we enjoyed our first southern hospitality. We went to see Scott Fitzgerald in Baltimore who, with tea, offered us an endless variety of canapes, to remind us, he said, of Paris. In Washington southern hospitality continued. There was no disparity between the inspired negress cook and the enormous kitchen over which she presided. The hospitality was so continuous that there was never time to ask her for a recipe from her vast repertoire. She made the cakes, ices, punches and sandwiches for the parties, and the elaborate lunches and dinners that succeeded each other. No trouble at all, she said, when one has all the best material one needs. A dish, my father once said, can only have the flavour of what has gone into the making of it.

In New York we picked up Carl Van Vechten who was going to Richmond with us to introduce us to some of his friends there. On the way we stopped at Charlottesville where Gertrude Stein was to lecture at the University of Virginia, and where we lunched extremely well with some of the faculty, who pleased us with their divided allegiance to Edgar Allen Poe and Julien Green. At an epicurean dinner at Miss Ellen Glasgow's I was paralysed to find myself placed next to Mr. James Branch Cabell, but his cheery, Tell me, Miss Stein's writing is a joke, isn't it, put me completely at my ease so that we got on very well after that.

At William and Mary we lunched in state with the president at the Governor's house. On the road to Charleston we lunched at an old Planter's Hotel copiously and succulently, for which the French have the nice word plantureux. We were asked to lunch at Strawberry. Was the exquisite food more seductive than the incredible water gardens, was the preparation of the menus at the Villa Margharita more exciting than the avenues of camellias? I have never been able to decide. Now they are all one. Changing planes at Atlanta, Gertrude Stein was delighted to see on a huge sign near the airport, Buy Your Meat and Wheat in Georgia.

In New Orleans we found Sherwood Anderson again and he took us to lunch at Antoine's and at a smaller restaurant which we preferred where we ate for the first time

OYSTERS ROCKEFELLER

Place oysters on the half shell in preheated deep dishes filled with sand (silver sand glistens prettily). Cover the oysters thickly with 1/4 chopped parsley, 1/4 finely chopped raw spinach, 1/8 finely chopped tarragon, 1/8 finely chopped chervil, 1/8 finely chopped basil and 1/8 finely chopped chives. Salt and pepper some fresh breadcrumbs, cover the herbs completely, dot with melted butter and put for 4 or 5 minutes in a preheated 450 ͦ oven. Serve piping hot.

This dish is an enormous success with French gourmets. It makes more friends for the United States than anything I know.

In New Orleans I walked down to the market every morning realising that I would have to live in the dream of it for the rest of my life. How with such perfection, variety and abundance of material could one not be inspired to creative cooking? We certainly do overdo not only the use of the word but the belief in its widespread existence. Can one be inspired by rows of prepared canned meals? Never. One must get nearer to creation to be able to create, even in the kitchen.

Before leaving Miss Henderson gave us two bottles of orange wine, wine that was still being made in her home. It wasn't until some-weeks later that we opened one of the bottles in Chicago and found the wine to be pure ambrosia.

In Chicago we stayed in Thornton Wilder's flat. He had said it would be convenient for Gertrude Stein as it was close to the university where she was to lecture. There was an extensive view from the little flat. It was very exciting, compact and comprehensive. The kitchen, though no larger than a dining-room table, permitted one, with its modem conveniences and marketing by telephone, to cook with the minimum of time and effort quite good meals. Those days are still my ideal of happy housekeeping. Once again we had lovely food with Bobsie Goodspeed, and at old-fashioned restaurants with friends and a delicious dinner with Thornton Wilder at a lakeside restaurant. We even had guests for meals at the flat. The meat or fowl delivered in waxed paper was deposited from the outside hall into the refrigerator, as were also the vegetables, cream, milk, butter and eggs.

On to Dallas where we went to stay with Miss Ela Hockaday at her Junior College. It was a fresh new world. Gertrude Stein became attached to the young students, to Miss Hockaday and the life in Miss Hockaday's home and on the campus. Miss Hockaday explained that all good Texas food was Virginian. Miss Hockaday's kitchen was the most beautiful one I have ever seen, all old coppers on the stove and on the walls, with a huge copper hood over the stove. Everything else was modem white enamel. The only recipe I carried away with me was for cornsticks, not knowing in my ignorance that a special iron was required in which to bake them. But when we sailed to go back to France in my stateroom one was waiting for me, a proof of Miss Hockaday's continuing attentiveness. It was my pride and delight in Paris where it was certainly unique. What did the Germans, when they took it in 1944, expect to do with it? And what are they doing with it now?

At the university at Austen the faculty asked some of the students to meet Gertrude Stein after the lecture. A very stiff punch was served, but when I was about to light a cigarette I was asked not to do so. Only men smoked.

Then we were off to God's own country. It was even more so than I remembered it. If there were more people and more houses, there were compensatingly more fields, more orchards, more vegetables and more gardens. A great part of the United States that we had seen had been new to me, it was a revelation of the beauty of our country, but California was unequalled. Sun and a fertile soil breed generosity and gentleness, amiability and appreciation. It was abundantly satisfying. In Pasadena amongst olive and orange groves we saw our first avocado trees and their fruit offered for sale stacked in great pyramids, almost as common as tomatoes would be later in the season. Driving north we heard that the desert wild flowers were in bloom so we took a day off to see them and the date palms. Through acres of orchards and artichokes, we made our way north to Monterey where happy days of my youth had been spent in an adobe house where my friend Senora B. had been born. The story was that General Sherman had courted her in the garden of her home, and before leaving Monterey had planted a rose tree later to be known as the Sherman rose. By the time I stayed with her she was an exquisite wee old lady with flashing black eyes. She would throw one of her shawls over my shoulders and say with a devilish glint, Go out and stand under the rose tree and let the tourists from Del Monte take your photograph. They will try to give you four bits but you may continue to turn your back on them. Senora B. made a simple Spanish sweet of which Panoche is the coarse Mexican version. She made it like this and unpretentiously called it

DULCE (1)

In a huge copper pan put quantities of granulated sugar, moisten with cream, turn constantly with a copper spoon until it is done. Then pour into glasses.

Senora B. said the longer it cooked the better the flavour would be. Senora B. would start it early in the morning and would entrust it to me when she went to mass. It was a compliment I could have dispensed with. As she was so little she stood on a footstool before her charcoal fire. In her simple but voluminous dark cashmere clothes she looked like a Zurbaran angel.

Here is my version of the

DULCE (2)

Put 2 cups sugar and 1 cup thin cream in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Then at once lower the heat and cook very slowly, stirring continuously for about an hour. It will become heavy and stiff and will have the colour of its flavour. There are people who like it a lot.

We had stopped at Monterey so that Gertrude Stein could see the house of Senora B. but it was no longer where it had been. A traffic policeman came up to us and asked us roughly what we were trying to do. To find Senora Bo's home, I said. It used to be here. That's right, he said, but years ago one of those rich easterners came out and bought it and carted it away into the hills. Carted an adobe house away, I muttered. But he wafted us on.

At Del Monte cooking was still of passionate interest to the management of the hotel. The same careful attention was given to the kitchen as to the vegetable and flower gardens. Grilled chicken and turkey broilers, spring lamb, cooked on a spit and basted by brushing it with a bunch of fresh mint, served with gooseberry jelly and an iced souffle, were still unrivalled experiences.

This is the way to make

GOOSEBERRY JELLY

Take the tips and stalks off 6 lbs. gooseberries, put in a pan over a low flame with 4 pints water. Simmer until the berries are tender. Turn into a jelly bag and let the juice run through. Weigh the juice. Place over high flame and boil briskly for 15 minutes. Add equal weight of sugar. Mix thoroughly and bring to the boil. Boil for 15 minutes or until it jellies.

Here is the recipe for the ineffable

ICED SOUFFLE

Put 2 cups sugar in heavy enamelled saucepan with 8 yolks of eggs and 1 whole egg over lowest flame. Beat with a rotary beater until it is quite thick. This will take some time. When it makes pointed peaks when the egg beater is removed, take from the stove and flavour with 1 tablespoon kirsch or anisette. Place on ice to cool. Pour into a souffle dish and sprinkle on top 3 macaroons dried in the oven, rolled and strained. Put in the refrigerator for 3 hours. This is a particular favourite with men.

At Del Monte Lodge we ate for the first time abalone, and thought it a delicious food. It was served in a cream sauce in its shell, lightly browned with breadcrumbs without cheese, we gratefully noticed. Abalone has a delicate flavour of its own and requires no barbecue or barbarous adjuncts.

In San Francisco we indulged in gastronomic orgies -- sand dabs meuniere, rainbow trout in aspic, grilled soft-shell crabs, paupiettes of roast fillets of pork, eggs Rossini and tarte Chambord. The tarte Chambord had been a speciality of one of the three great French bakers before the San Francisco fire. To my surprise in Paris no one had ever heard of it.

At Fisherman's Wharf we waited for two enormous crabs to be cooked in a cauldron on the side-walk, and they were still quite warm when we ate them at lunch in Napa County. Gertrude Atherton took us to lunch at a restaurant where the menu consisted entirely of the most perfectly cooked shell-fish, to her club where the cooking was incredibly good, and to dinner at a club of writers where conversation excelled.

And then the dearest friend sent us a basket of fruit and flowers, fit subject for an Italian painter of the Renaissance, and we tasted for the first time passion fruit. We had known passion-fruit syrup in Paris and thought its flavour exquisite (it made a wonderful ice cream). And now we were told that passion fruit was the fruit of the passion-flower vine. Surely not from the passion-flower vine that has climbed a wall in every garden I ever had.

Then the time had come when we would have to leave California, to leave the United States, to go back to France and cultivate our garden in the Ain. Above everything else I enjoyed working in that garden, but leaving the United States was distressful.

It was not until we were on the Champlain again that I realised that the seven months we had spent in the United States had been an experience and adventure which nothing that might follow would ever equal.

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9. Little-known French Dishes suitable for American and British Kitchens



THESE dishes should add variety to American and British menus. In France they are no longer novelties nor creations, nor have they the distinction of being distinctive, which, as defined by a cousin of Gertrude Stein, is something that is done six weeks before all the world is doing it. On the contrary, they are most of them a slow evolution in a new direction, which is the way great art is created -- that is, everything about is ready for it, and one person having the vision does it, discarding what he finds unnecessary in the past. Even a way of cooking an egg can be arrived at in this way. Then that way becomes a classical way. It is a pleasure for us, perhaps for the egg.

It is, of course, understood that there are always those who rush in and irreverently add a dash or a pinch from a bottle, a tin or a package and feel that some needed flavour has been found. This, a matter too literally of taste, is not arguable. It is a pleasure to retire before such a fact.

For the preparation of these dishes, certain standard sauces and what the French call composed butters are necessary. Those used in these recipes follow these standards and conventions. To commence then at the beginning:

I.

COLD HORS D'OEUVRE

MUSSELS

After thoroughly scrubbing and rinsing, put 2 quarts mussels in a saucepan over highest heat with 3/4cup dry white wine, 1 tablespoon crushed shallot, 2 stalks of parsley, 1 twig of thyme, 1/4 laurel leaf, salt and pepper. Cover. About 2 minutes after it has come to a boil again look to see if the shells have opened. As soon as they have remove from flame, drain thoroughly, remove from shell, cool, chill. Just before serving mix with 3/4 cup Tartar sauce. Serve very cold. [1]

EGG PLANT A LA PROVENCALE

Wipe but do not peel 6 aubergines or egg plants, cut in slices of 1-1/2 inches, salt and pepper; put them in saucepan over medium heat in which 6 tablespoons olive oil are bubbling. Brown lightly on all sides, remove from flame, drain the aubergines. In the oil in which they have been cooked; put 3 blanched and skinned tomatoes that have been coarsely chopped. Add salt and pepper, 1 clove of crushed garlic and 2 diced anchovies. Cook over low heat until tomatoes are cooked. Remove from flame and add 1 tablespoon chopped basil. Place 1 teaspoon of this sauce on each slice of egg plant. On the sauce place a thin slice of lemon, on the lemon place a rolled anchovy, and in the anchovy stand 1 black olive upright.

SMALL FISH IN THE ORIENTAL MANNER

For 4 fish -- any small fish but preferably red mullets weighing 1/2 lb. each -- clean, dry and remove scales if necessary. Place in hot olive oil in a frying pan over great heat. Fry on both sides for 3 minutes. Remove from heat. Put in well-oiled fireproof dish and cover with 8 tablespoons puree of tomato that has been previously cooked for 10 minutes over low heat with 1/3 cup white wine, 1/4 teaspoon powdered saffron, 1/4 teaspoon powdered thyme, 1/4 teaspoon powdered laurel and 1/8 teaspoon powdered or ground coriander seed, 1 clove of crushed garlic, 1 teaspoon chopped parsley and salt and pepper. At the last moment add 4 tablespoons olive oil but without allowing it to boil. Cover and cook in preheated 400° oven for 8 minutes. Serve chilled.

STUFFED CUCUMBERS

Cut unpeeled cucumbers in half lengthwise. Boil for 2 minutes. Remove from heat. Put under cold-water tap, drain and dry thoroughly. When cold, with a sharp knife hollow out within 1/4 inch of the skin and fill with previously cooked, chilled and diced string beans and green peas. Chill thoroughly and cover with a green mayonnaise. Sprinkle with minutely cut chives.

GREEN MAYONNAISE

Put the yolk of 1 egg in a bowl with1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon pepper. Stir well. Add drop by drop 2 tablespoons olive oil, constantly stirring. When it commences to stiffen add a few drops lemon juice and pour the oil in more quickly. It will require i cup of oil and the juice of 1/2 lemon. This mayonnaise must be particularly firm. Then gradually add the following puree:

Take equal parts of leaves of cress, spinach, chervil and tarragon, boil them in unsalted water for 2 minutes, drain and put under coldwater tap and press out the water. Pound in a mortar until they are reduced to a pulp that can be strained through a fine muslin. They should make 1/4 cup. Add to the mayonnaise, to which the greens will give not only a colour but a flavour.

FROGS' LEGS A LA PARISIENNE

In a saucepan over medium heat place the frogs' legs covered with dry white wine, salt and pepper, the juice of 1 lemon (for 50 frogs' legs). Poach for 10 minutes. Remove from heat and drain. In a bowl or dish place an equal volume of diced potatoes salted and peppered. Mix with mayonnaise (1/4 cup mayonnaise for 2 cups potatoes). Place the frogs' legs on the potato salad. Cover with mayonnaise.

CAULIFLOWER WITH MUSTARD CREAM SAUCE

Boil the flowerets of cauliflower in salted water for 10 minutes. Drain, cool and chill. Before serving, pour over them this sauce.

In a saucepan melt 1 tablespoon butter. Add 1 tablespoon flour and 1 tablespoon mustard. Mix thoroughly, add 2/3 cup boiling water. Mix with a whisk. Add 2 yolks of eggs mixed with 1 tablespoon whipped cream. Beat before pouring over flowerets and serve at once.

II

HOT HORS D'OEUVRE

POACHED EGGS BABOUCHE

For four, cut 2 large tomatoes in half, remove seeds and juice and grill. Place 1 tablespoon boiled rice in each half tomato, on which place a poached egg. Cover with 2 cups cream sauce, in which 1 teaspoon curry has been mixed and the sauce brought to a boil.

FRIED CREAM WITH CHEESE

Stir 2 whole eggs and 3 yolks, add gradually 1 cup and 2 tablespoons flour, stir carefully. The mixture should be perfectly smooth. Add 1/4 teaspoon salt, a pinch of pepper and nutmeg. Add 1 quart hot milk. Place over low heat and stir until the mixture is very thick, but do not allow to boil. Remove from heat and add 1 cup grated Swiss or Parmesan cheese. Spread on buttered marble, or on a large dish. The mixture should be about 1 inch thick. See that the edges are even. When cold, cut into squares. Dip into beaten egg, then into dried fine breadcrumbs. At the last moment, before serving, fry in deep oil.

OYSTERS SAUCE MORNAY

Poach oysters to heat, drain thoroughly and replace in shells. Sauce Mornay is a cream sauce with cheese in this proportion: If the oysters are large, 5 dozen will require 2 cups thick cream sauce to which has been added while still over low flame 2 tablespoons grated Swiss cheese and 2 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese. Add in small pieces 4 tablespoons butter. Do not allow to boil. Remove from heat, completely cover the oysters. Sprinkle with a little grated cheese and place in 450 ͦ oven for 4 or 5 minutes. Serve at once.

OMELETTE PALERMITAINE

Mix 8 whole eggs with 4 tablespoons diced truffles, 3 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese and 2 tablespoons lightly browned butter. With a fork stir until the yolks and whites are thoroughly mixed. In a very hot frying pan melt 3 tablespoons butter, allowing it to become very slightly browned. Pour the eggs into the frying pan. In l/2 minute bring the edges to the centre with a fork so that the eggs that are liquid may be cooked. If necessary tip the frying pan. In 2 minutes more the omelette will be done. Place 3 tablespoons of hot puree of tomatoes, to which has been added 2 tablespoons butter, on one side of the omelette. Fold the other side of the omelette over across the centre, and place on a hot serving plate. Surround with a thick tomato sauce.

FRIED OYSTERS

Poach the oysters for 1 minute in their own water. Remove from heat, drain and dry thoroughly. Sprinkle generously with olive oil, salt and pepper. Marinate for 1 hour. Cover each oyster with salted frying batter. Fry in deep fat, remove as soon as brown. Place on hot serving dish in a mound, and surround with very thin slices of lemon. In the centre of the mound place a quantity of slightly fried parsley.

SOUP

MIMOSA SOUP

Boil in salted water 1 cup string beans. When tender, depending upon size and freshness, remove from heat, drain and cut into cubes. Mash through a very coarse sieve the yolks of 4 hard-boiled eggs. Just before serving, bring to a boil 1 quart bouillon. Add diced string beans and the yolks of eggs. Bring to a boil again, remove at once and serve.

CREAM OF GREEN-PEA SOUP

Put % cups green peas in 6 cups boiling water in a saucepan over medium heat. Add 1 medium-sized onion, salt, pepper and 1 stalk of parsley. Boil uncovered until peas are tender -- about 25 minutes, depending on age and freshness. Prepare small croutons. Chop fine 1 tablespoon chervil. Mix 3 yolks of eggs with 6 tablespoons cream, add chervil. Before serving, remove onion and parsley from water in which peas have boiled. Add, at once, 1/2 cup butter cut in small pieces, do not stir but tip the saucepan in all directions. Pour over cream and eggs. Add croutons and serve.

CONSOMME WITH PARMESAN CHEESE CROUTONS

Mix 4 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese with 1 tablespoon flour. Separate the yolks from the whites of 2 eggs. Beat the whites of the eggs, fold in the yolks, the grated cheese and flour, and salt and pepper. Spread this mixture on slightly buttered bread to a thickness of 1/3 inch and cook in medium oven for 20 minutes. While still hot cut into squares, rounds or ovals, and serve at the same time as 6 cups hot bouillon.

ONION SOUP

Brown 4 thinly sliced onions in 1 tablespoons butter in a saucepan over low heat stirring with a wooden spoon. In 20 minutes, sprinkle 1 teaspoon sugar over the onions. Add 6 cups boiling water, salt and pepper. Boil, covered, for 10 minutes. In a fireproof dish or casserole place 1/2 lb. bread cut in slices of 1/3-inch thickness. Cover each piece of bread with very thin slices of Swiss cheese. It will take a little more than 1/4 lb. cheese. Place them in the soup dish and pour over them the contents of the saucepan. The slices of bread will rise to the surface. Sprinkle on the top 4 tablespoons melted butter. Put the casserole in 375ͦ preheated oven for 10 minutes. Serve very hot.

FISH

MEURETTE

This is to Burgundy what the Bouillabaisse is to Marseilles. The fish are mixed river fish and should be small -- trout, perch, eel, pike and carp are most suitable. Use all five of them if possible. Clean and remove scales and fins, and wash 3 lbs. fish. If any of them are too large for one serving, cut in slices. Place in a saucepan over low heat 1 bottle red wine most nearly resembling Burgundy wine, with 1 large onion, 3 medium-sized carrots, the white ends of 2 leeks, 3 cloves of garlic, salt and pepper, a very small piece of nutmeg or a pinch of powdered nutmeg, a twig of thyme, a laurel leaf and 1 clove. Simmer for 1/4 hour. Strain this over the fish that have been placed in fireproof casserole. Add 1/4 cup brandy, cover and cook for 1/2 hour. Add 5 tablespoons butter cut in small pieces. Do not stir but tip casserole in all directions. Do not allow to boil. At the bottom of the serving dish place 8 pieces of bread toasted, and rubbed with garlic. Cover with the fish and pour the bouillon over it.

BAKED SHAD

Remove scales and fins of a 3 lb. shad. Wash thoroughly but do not allow to remain in water. Drain and dry. Cut in slices. In a generously buttered fireproof dish, place a thin sprinkling of 4 finely chopped shallots, 1/4 lb. finely chopped mushrooms and 1 tablespoon finely chopped parsley. Place the sliced fish on this, reconstructing the fish, head at one end, tail at the other. Add 1 cup dry white wine. Sprinkle 2 tablespoons melted butter on the fish. Cook in preheated 370° oven, baste frequently. After 20 minutes add 1/2 cup cream and cook for 10 minutes longer, having increased heat to 425°.

FILLETS OF SOLE PERINETTE

Salt and pepper 4 large fillets of sole. Prepare 2 cups mashed potatoes thoroughly mixed with 2 tablespoons cream, 1 egg, salt and pepper. Mash through fine sieve 2 yolks hard-boiled eggs. Chop very fin 1/4 cup truffles, mix yolks of eggs and truffles with potatoes. Spread this mixture on two of the fillets, cover each with another fillet, press them together. Cover them with a beaten egg mixed with 1 tablespoon olive oil and I tablespoon water. Cover with grated breadcrumbs. Melt in frying pan over medium heat 1/2 cup butter. Brown the fillets on both sides in this, reducing the heat so that the fillets will be cooked through. In a preheated serving dish spread 2 cups mashed potatoes, to which has been added 4 tablespoons browned butter. Place the fillets on the potatoes, and on the fillets place thin slices of truffles alternating with thin slices of lemon.

FRESH COD MONT-BRY

Have 3 lbs. fresh cod cut in thin slices. Heat 3/4 cup olive oil in frying pan over medium heat. Place the slices of fish which have been rubbed with salt and curry powder in the hot oil. Reduce heat and brown fish on both sides. Place them on serving dish on which has been spread a tomato and egg plant puree which has been prepared by cooking in a covered saucepan 6 peeled and chopped tomatoes and 4 peeled and chopped egg plants in 3 tablespoons olive oil with 4 cups dry white wine for 20 minutes. Salt and pepper, and strain. On each slice of fish place a thin slice of lemon and on the lemon place a tablespoon of diced pimiento heated in olive oil. Serve with

CURRY SAUCE

Chop 1 large onion and cook it in covered saucepan over low heat in 3 tablespoons olive oil for 20 minutes. Add 1 cup Bechamel sauce. Strain and replace over low heat. Add a pinch of saffron and 2 tablespoons curry powder, salt and pepper. Bring to a boil and serve in sauce boat at the same time as the fish. [2]

DEVILLED SMELTS

Clean, remove fins, wash and dry 6 smelts. In a bowl mix 1-1/2 tablespoons powdered mustard, 1-1/2 tablespoons French mustard, 3 tablespoons olive oil, 3 yolks of eggs, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1 tablespoon anchovy paste and 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper. Mix thoroughly and spread on both sides of each fish. Pour melted butter over the fish and cover them with fine cracker crumbs. Grill over low heat. Serve with

DEVIL SAUCE

Put 1/4 cup dry white wine, 1 tablespoon vinegar, 1 tablespoon chopped shallots and 1/4 teaspoon pepper in a small saucepan over low flame. Simmer, stirring constantly with wooden spoon until reduced to half its volume. Add 1 cup tomato juice and 1 cup white wine. Bring to a boil, simmer and add 1-1/4 tablespoons flour thoroughly mixed with 1-1/4 tablespoons butter. Stir and watch carefully. The sauce should be perfectly smooth. Mix 1 tablespoon dry mustard, 1 tablespoon French mustard and 1/2 tablespoon anchovy paste, 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper, 1/4 teaspoon powdered saffron. Stir carefully, and simmer for 10 minutes. Remove from flame, strain into sauce boat and serve at the same time as the fish.

STEWED MACKEREL WITH PAPRIKA

If the mackerel are small take 4; if large, 4 slices. Clean, remove fins, wash and dry. In a stew pan melt 6 tablespoons butter over low heat, add 4 medium-sized onions cut in fine slices. Cover and simmer, shaking the pan from time to time, for about 20 minutes or until the onions are transparent. Then add I teaspoon paprika, salt and pepper. Place the fish on the onions with salt and pepper. Add 1 cup hot water. Cover and slightly increase heat. Cook for 20 minutes. Add I cup thinly sliced mushrooms. Cover and continue to cook for 8 minutes more. With a perforated spoon remove fish to hot serving dish. Add to saucepan a sauce prepared in advance of 2. tablespoons butter mixed with 1-1/2 tablespoons flour. Place over low heat, gradually add very hot water, stir and cook for 5 minutes. Add salt, pepper and 1/2 teaspoon paprika. Cook for 5 minutes more. Then add 3/4 cup heavy cream. Add to contents of stew pan. Heat thoroughly but do not boil. Pour over fish and serve.

SALT CODFISH A LA MONEGASQUE

Soak overnight 6 fillets salt codfish. In the morning put under cold-water tap. Drain, place in a bowl, cover with milk and soak for 2 hours. Then poach in water until tender. Drain, dry thoroughly, and cook over low flame in 1/2 cup olive oil in covered frying pan for 20 minutes. Shake the pan frequently and turn the fillets once. Place them on heated serving dish surrounded by small pieces of bread 1-inch thick lightly browned in oil. Serve with 1-1/2 cups thick tomato sauce in which 1/2 cup capers have been cooked.

RAY WITH BLACK BUTTER

The thorn-back ray is the best variety. Nothing is removed from the large ones, as they are sold ready to cook. The small ones require to be scraped, the gall, head and tail removed carefully, the fish cleaned and washed. Put 3 lbs. ray in a saucepan with cold water to cover, with 1 tablespoon salt and 2 tablespoons vinegar. Bring to a boil over medium heat. When the water boils, reduce to the least possible heat and allow 1/2 hour for a large piece of ray and 20 minutes for small ones. Remove from water, drain thoroughly. Place wrapped in a cloth in tepid oven with door closed while the black butter is being prepared.

Place 1 cup butter in frying pan over medium heat with 1 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon pepper and 1 cup unchopped parsley. Add juice of I lemon. Pour butter and parsley at once over fish, which has been placed on serving dish, and serve.

POULTRY

CHICKEN IN HALF MOURNING

Cook 4 truffles, in Madeira to cover, over lowest flame in covered saucepan for 20 minutes. Remove from flame and allow to cool in wine. Place a fine chicken in a cocotte with a tight-fitting cover. Pour over it to half its height hot veal bouillon with 1 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon pepper, a bouquet of parsley and thyme and 1/2 laurel leaf. Bring to a boil over medium heat, then gradually reduce to lowest flame. One hour will cook the chicken. For the sauce, heat in saucepan over medium heat 1/2 cup butter, add 3 tablespoons flour, gradually add 3 cups veal bouillon and 1/4 cup chopped mushrooms, stirring with a wooden spoon. As soon as it comes to a boil reduce heat and simmer uncovered for 1/2 hour. Stir to prevent scorching or burning. Remove from heat, strain, skim, add 1/2 cup heavy cream and 1-1/2 finely chopped truffles. Cut chicken in serving pieces, and place on heated serving dish. Heat the sauce but do not allow to boil. Pour over chicken, and on each piece place a slice of truffle and serve.

BRAISED CHICKEN STUFFED WITH NOODLES

Poach for 6 minutes in boiling salted water 1-1/2 cups noodles cut in narrow strips. Remove from flame, drain, place under cold-water tap and drain again. Place in a bowl, and, mixing lightly with a fork, add to them 1/2 cup grated Parmesan, 1/2 cup grated Swiss cheese and 3/4 cup heavy cream. Add 3/4 cup small mushroom caps, salt and pepper. Mix well. Stuff the chicken with this dressing. Skewer or sew the opening together. Skewer legs and wings to keep in place during cooking. Put 4 tablespoons butter in enamel-lined pot over medium flame. Brown the chicken lightly in the butter. Add 1 cup hot chicken bouillon. Cover the pot and lower the flame. Simmer for 1 hour, basting, from time to time. Prepare a Sauce Mornay, which is a Bechamel to which grated cheese has been added. For this chicken the proportions are 2-1/2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 2 cups milk, 1/4 teaspoon salt. Simmer for 1/2 hour. Stir with a wooden spoon frequently to prevent burning. Remove from heat, add 1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese. Place the chicken in a fireproof serving dish. Cover with the Sauce Mornay and place for 10 minutes in 450 ͦ preheated oven to glaze.

COCK IN WINE

Cut a young cock or a young chicken in serving pieces. In an enamellined pot melt 3 tablespoons butter, add 3/4 cup diced side fat of pork, 6 small onions, 4 shallots and 1 medium-sized carrot cut in thin slices. Brown these in butter. Remove and place pieces of chicken in pot and brown over high heat. Add salt, pepper and 2 cloves of crushed garlic. Remove the browned pork fat, onions, shallots and carrot. Heat 3 tablespoons brandy, light and pour into pot. Sprinkle 3/4 tablespoon flour into the pot. Stir with a wooden spoon for 2 or 3 minutes, then add 1 cup fresh mushrooms and 1 cup hot good dry white wine. Increase heat, add pork fat and vegetables. Cook uncovered for 1/4 hour. Serve very hot.

A FINE FAT PULLET

A fine fat pullet is cleaned, the breast bone is removed with a small sharp knife and the bird is well skewered. Place 3/4 cup lard, 3/4 cup butter and 4 tablespoons olive oil in a casserole. Place the chicken in the casserole over medium heat. When the fats commence to boil reduce heat -- the chicken should not brown. Add 2 tablespoons finely chopped shallots, 6 tablespoons finely chopped mushrooms, 2 tablespoons finely chopped parsley, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon pepper. Cook for 10 minutes. Remove chicken and cover with contents of casserole. As the chicken cools, again cover with the fats and chopped vegetables. It may be necessary to do this several times. When the chicken is cold, wrap it in a thin slice of fat back of pork. Take six sheets of white paper large enough to cover the chicken completely and oil each sheet generously. Place the chicken on the first sheet and bring the end of the sheet to the middle of the breast of chicken. Continue with the other sheets. Tie the sheets so that the chicken is hermetically closed. Return chicken to casserole and cook for 1 hour in preheated 350 ͦ oven. To serve, cut the string of the sheets. If the two outside sheets are too dark from the oven heat, remove them but do not disturb the others. Send to the table wrapped in the remaining sheets.

GODMOTHER'S CHICKEN

In the cavity of a fine chicken put 1 cup chicken bouillon, 1/2 cup butter and a large bunch of tarragon which have been well mixed together, sew up the cavity and skewer the legs and wings. Place in a pot over medium heat, with 2 cups chicken bouillon, salt and pepper. When it comes to a boil, cover hermetically, reduce to lowest flame and simmer for 3/4 hour. Remove the chicken broth and the juice from the cavity of the chicken into the pot. Put the chicken aside and reduce the contents of the pot by half. Remove from flame and add 1/2 cup soft butter. Stir until melted, add salt, pepper, a pinch of powdered nutmeg and a pinch of cayenne pepper. Return to low heat. When very hot remove from heat and add the juice of 1/2 lemon and 2 tablespoons Madeira. Cover the chicken with the sauce.

CHICKEN MONTSOURIS

Cut a chicken down the back and flatten it with a mallet. Put it in a casserole with pepper, salt and 1/4 lb. butter over high flame. As soon as the butter bubbles put in preheated 400 ͦ oven. Baste frequently. After 35 minutes remove from oven. Put chicken on serving dish. Put the casserole over medium flame and add 2 finely chopped shallots. Heat 1/3 cup brandy, light it and pour into casserole. Add 2 tablespoons heavy cream, 1 teaspoon finely chopped tarragon. Stir with wooden spoon. Before it boils, add 5 tablespoons butter cut in small pieces. Tip casserole in all directions until butter is melted. Pour over chicken and serve.

MINUTE SQUABS (OR YOUNG PIGEONS)

Cut the squabs in half. Flatten them gently with a mallet. Paint with melted butter. In a frying pan over hot flame put for 2 squabs 1/2 cup butter. Keep turning the pieces so that they do not burn. They will be cooked in 12 minutes. When they are half cooked add 1 tablespoon onion juice. Place the squabs on preheated serving dish. Add to contents of pan 1 tablespoon cognac. Scrape pan to detach glaze. Stir in 1/2 cup hot bouillon. Add 1 teaspoon chopped parsley and pour over squabs.



ROAST SQUAB ON CANAPES

Place in the cavity salt and pepper. Cover squabs with thin slices of back fat of pork and tie securely. Put them in preheated 400° oven. Roast for 20 minutes. Baste twice. Cut the string and remove pork fat and place on canapes. The canapes are slices of bread dipped in melted butter and heated in a frying pan. They should not brown. Spread on them a puree of mushrooms and truffles. For 4 canapes, chop 1/2 cup mushrooms, pound them with a potato masher through a sieve. Put them in a saucepan with 2 tablespoons butter and over medium heat cook uncovered until all the moisture has evaporated. Add salt and pepper, 1/4 cup Bechamel sauce and 1 tablespoon heavy cream. Simmer for 10 minutes or until quite thick. Put aside. Wrap to cover completely 4 truffles in fat back of pork. Tie each truffle securely. Place in casserole with 2 tablespoons Madeira. Cook covered over low flame for 20 minutes. Remove pork fat. Pound truffles through a sieve and add to mushroom puree. Add the juice in which the truffles have cooked to the pan in which the pigeons have roasted. Over medium flame add 2 tablespoons Madeira and 1/2 cup bouillon. Bring to a boil and pour over pigeons.

DUCK WITH BORDELAISE SAUCE

A 3 lb. duck will take about an hour in a preheated 400° oven. Put salt and pepper in the cavity. Paint the bird with 4 tablespoons butter and place in oven. Commence to baste after 1/4 hour. As the legs of a duck are proportionately heavier than those of a chicken, turn the duck on each of its sides for 10 minutes after it has been in the oven 1/2 hour.

BORDELAISE SAUCE

Press the liver of the duck and an extra one through a sieve and put aside. Put 2 finely chopped shallots with 2 tablespoons butter in saucepan over low heat. When all the moisture has evaporated, let them cook a few minutes longer to form a glaze. Add 1/2 cup bouillon in which 1 tablespoon tomato puree has been dissolved and to which 1 tablespoon flour and 1 tablespoon butter has been added. Add 4 tablespoons lighted brandy. Bring to a slow boil, add salt, pepper and a pinch of cayenne. Simmer for 10 minutes. Add 1/2 cup bouillon. Bring to a boil. Slowly pour half the contents of the saucepan over the two strained livers. Pour into the saucepan and replace over low heat, stirring constantly, but do not allow to boil. Add 4 tablespoons butter. Tip saucepan in all directions, do not stir. When butter is melted, pour into preheated sauce boat and serve at the same time as the duck.

YOUNG TURKEY WITH TRUFFLES

For a turkey weighing 6 to 7 lbs. you will require 3 lbs. of the fat that surrounds pork kidneys. Melt it and strain. Pour 4 cups of whole truffles into a quarter of the melted pork fat. The truffles should be cut in half or in quarters, according to size. Poach for 1/4 hour, mix with the rest of the fat and cool. When cool, fill the cavity of the turkey into which salt, pepper and a little nutmeg have been rubbed with the cold fat and truffles. Sew the cavity together, skewer wings and legs. Put aside in a cool spot -- but not in the refrigerator -- for two days in winter and one day in summer. When ready to roast, wrap the turkey in buttered paper. Roast in 400° preheated oven, allowing 10 minutes to the pound. Half an hour before it is ready to be taken from the oven, remove paper. Baste three times before removing from the oven. Place on serving dish. Skim the fat from the juice, add 3 cups of the bouillon of the giblets, neck and first joints of wings (that have been poached for 2 hours in water to cover, and then strained together with 1 bay leaf, a sprig of thyme, parsley and salt and pepper). Mix well to detach the glaze from the pan. Serve in sauce boat.

MEATS

SPRING NAVARIN

Ask the butcher to cut in square pieces -- two to a serving -- 2 lbs. shoulder of mutton. In an iron or enamelled pot melt 2 tablespoons butter over high flame. When the butter is very hot, place the pieces of meat in it. Stir with a wooden spoon until all sides are lightly browned. Add salt, pepper and 2 tablespoons flour after the fat has been skimmed off. Stir for 10 minutes. Cover with hot water stirring constantly. The sauce should be perfectly smooth. Add a bouquet of thyme, parsley and a laurel leaf, a pinch of powdered nutmeg, a large onion with 1 clove stuck in it and a clove of crushed garlic. Add 1 lb. tomatoes, blanched, peeled, seeds removed and cut in small pieces. Bring to a boil, cover pot, and reduce heat. Wash 1dozen new potatoes, dry and rub off the skins, scrape 1 dozen young carrots, wash and dry them and remove outer skin of 1 dozen spring onions, peel 1 cup young turnips and cut in quarters. Heat 4 tablespoons butter in a saucepan over medium heat. When hot, put in the turnips and sprinkle over them 1 teaspoon sugar. Brown them on all sides, stirring constantly. Then strain and put aside. Shell 1 cup green peas. Snap off the ends of 1 cup of very young string beans. After 1 hour's cooking remove bouquet and onion from pot. If there is any fat on the sauce, skim. Bring to a good boil and add the potatoes, carrots, turnips and onions. Cover and reduce to medium heat. Boil for 10 minutes in salted water, in separate saucepan, the green peas and beans. After the first vegetables have cooked in the pot for! hour, add peas and beans. Cook for 1/2 hour longer, skim the sauce again, and serve very hot in preheated hollow dish.

BOEUF BOURGUIGNON (2)

Ask the butcher to cut 2 lbs. upper shoulder of beef in square pieces, two pieces for one serving. Marinate in 6 tablespoons brandy for 6 hours, turning the meat frequently. In an iron pot over high flame put 4 tablespoons butter. While it is very hot place the meat in it in a single layer -- no piece should cover another. Brown them on all sides, remove and put aside. Put into the pot 1 cup diced side fat of pork, brown and remove. Put into pot 12 small onions, brown and remove. From the pot remove about two-thirds of the fat. Put into the pot 1 tablespoon and 1 teaspoon flour. Stir with wooden spoon for 10 minutes and add the meat. Pour over it 3 cups hot red Burgundy wine or a wine that resembles it as nearly as possible and 1 cup hot water. Add a little salt, pepper, the diced pork fat, a bouquet of thyme, parsley and laurel leaf, a pinch of ground nutmeg and J crushed clove of garlic. Cover and when the contents of pot commence to boil reduce to medium heat. Cook for 2-1/2 to 3 hours. Add the onions and cook for 1/2hour longer. Remove bouquet, if necessary skim, place on hollow serving dish and sprinkle over the meat 1 tablespoon finely chopped parsley.

It very much adds to the flavour of the dish to add at the last moment 2 cups small fresh mushrooms that have been cooked in a saucepan over low flame in 4 tablespoons butter for 10 minutes.

VEAL MARENGO

Ask the butcher to cut in pieces suitable for serving 2 lbs. shoulder of veal and remove bones. Put in iron pot over high flame 1/2 cup olive oil. When it commences to smoke put in the pieces of meat side by side. Brown on all sides and remove. Dice 1 cup mushrooms, place in pot, brown and remove them. Put 12 small onions in the pot, brown them and remove. Remove two-thirds of the oil from the pot and put in pieces of meat. With a wooden spoon mix 1 tablespoon and 1 teaspoon flour with the fat in the pot, brown for 2 or 3 minutes. Add 1-1/2 cups hot dry white wine and 1-1/2 cups hot water. Add 2 medium-sized tomatoes skinned, seeds removed and cut in cubes of about 1 inch, a bouquet of thyme, parsley and 1 laurel leaf, 2 crushed shallots and 1 clove of garlic, salt and pepper. Add to the pot the onions and mushrooms. Reduce heat, cover the pot, cook for I hour. Skim the oil, remove the bouquet, cover pot and cook for 10 minutes longer. Pour into preheated dish and surround with triangular pieces of bread, about 1/2 inch thick, that have been very lightly fried in olive oil.

FILLET OF BEEF ADRIENNE

Prepare a marinade with I bottle dry white wine -- the better the wine the better the sauce -- 1/2 cup olive oil, a bouquet of thyme, parsley and 1 laurel leaf, 2 sliced medium-sized carrots, I sliced medium-sized onion, pepper and salt. In this, place a 3 lb. fillet of beef. Cover and put aside, but not in the refrigerator, for 48 hours. Turn the meat in the marinade twice a day. At the beginning of the third day remove meat from marinade and dry thoroughly. Wrap it in a thin slice of back fat of pork and tie this securely round the fillet. Place in a preheated oven 350°. Put the marinade, including the vegetables, in a saucepan over low flame. Turn the fillet after 1/4 hour. After 1/2 hour commence to baste the roast with 4 tablespoons of the hot marinade. Baste every 10 minutes with marinade. The roast will be cooked in an hour. Remove from oven, remove pork fat, and place on serving dish. When the juice in pan boils again, add I tablespoon flour and 1 tablespoon butter previously well mixed in bowl, hot water, and then 3 teaspoons currant jelly. Mix thoroughly, allow to boil. Add 2 tablespoons brandy. Strain sauce into sauce boat. Salt each slice of fillet as served.

DAUBE OF SLICED-BEEF NICOLETTE

A daube is an earthenware recipient high for its circumference. The meat that is cooked in such a recipient is always mentioned as being cooked in daube. Cut 3 lbs. fillet in thin slices, flatten with mallet. Cover each fillet with a thin slice of side fat of pork of the same size. Chop 3 large onions, 1/2 cup parsley, 2 cloves of garlic, 3 shallots, 1/2 cup chervil, and 4 truffles. Add 1/2 teaspoon powdered thyme, 1/2 teaspoon powdered laurel leaf, 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon pepper, 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon and 1/4 teaspoon cloves. Mix thoroughly. Spread some of this mixture on the pork fat, cover with another piece of pork fat. Recommence with the next slice of fillet-pork-fat mixture. Place these prepared slices one on top of the other and tie securely. In the daube or in a fireproof earthenware casserole with a cover that closes hermetically put 1/4 cup butter. Place over medium heat, add 1 cup chopped fat back of pork, chopped coarsely, the fillet, a calf's foot, a bouquet of parsley, chervil, laurel leaf, twig of thyme, 1/2 teaspoon curry powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon pepper and 4 tablespoons puree of tomatoes. Cover with 1 bottle Marsala and 2 cups hot water. Cover and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer for 4 hours. Then remove daube from heat. Remove meat from juice, place in bowl and remove strings when cool enough to do so. The slices should remain in place. Strain juice over slices of beef, which it should cover. Set aside in a cool place for 24 hours. Remove from bowl to serving dish.

ROSETTES OF BEEF

For six servings take 12 slices from the small end of a fillet of beef. Melt 1/2 cup butter in a fireproof earthenware casserole with a cover that closes hermetically or in an enamel-lined pot, over medium heat, and add the fillet. Heat 4 tablespoons brandy, light and pour over the fillet. Add 1 large onion, chopped fine. Cover with heavy cream and 1/2 cup strong beef bouillon, 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon pepper. Cover and place in preheated 350 ͦ oven for 1-1/2 hours. Place in serving dish with sauce poured over it.

VEGETABLES

ENDIVES

Wipe 12 endives, remove outer leaves, cut both ends. In a casserole with a cover that closes hermetically place 1/2 cup butter. Heat over low flame. Add the endives, sprinkle 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon sugar over them and the juice of 1 lemon. Cover with a well-buttered piece of waxed paper. Reduce heat to smallest flame, cover and cook for 5 minutes. Raise to high flame and cook for 20 minutes longer. Shake the casserole from time to time but do not uncover until ready to serve.

BROWNED SPINACH DAISY

Wash in five waters 4 lbs. spinach. Drain and press to remove most of the water. Put by handfuls in a saucepan over highest heat. Turn with a wooden spoon so that each new handful is at the bottom of the saucepan. When the spinach has been thoroughly heated cover saucepan. Gradually reduce heat to low flame. Boil for 5 minutes, drain, place under cold-water tap until spinach is tepid. Place in a saucepan over low heat and stir with a wooden spoon until all the water has evaporated. Prepare a puree of mushrooms by pounding through a strainer 1 lb. fresh mushrooms. Place in a saucepan over low heat. With a spoon stir until all water has evaporated. Place 1-1/2cups thick Bechamel sauce in saucepan over medium heat. Add 1 cup heavy cream. Stir until thick. Add salt, pepper, a pinch of nutmeg, the mushrooms and 4 tablespoons butter. Mix well and remove from heat. In a well-buttered fireproof casserole place a layer of one-third of the spinach, then one-third of the puree of mushrooms -- three layers of each. Cover with 1-1/2 cups Bechamel sauce in which 1/2 cup grated Swiss cheese has been mixed. Sprinkle over this 3 tablespoons melted butter. Stand in a recipient of hot water and put in preheated 300° oven. The water should not boil. Bake for 1 hour.

CREAMED CUCUMBERS

Peel 12 cucumbers. Dice them in 1-inch cubes. Put them in 4 cups boiling salted water over medium heat. Cover the saucepan and boil from 5 to 10 minutes, until they are no longer hard. They should not be overcooked. Remove from heat, place them under cold-water tap until they are tepid. Drain and wipe dry. In a saucepan over a low heat put 1-1/2 cups cream sauce. When hot add cucumber. Gently stir so that the sauce does not scorch. When the cucumbers and sauce come to a boil add 4 tablespoons butter cut in small pieces. Reduce heat to low flame and dip saucepan in all directions until butter is melted. Place in preheated serving dish and serve at once.

POTATOES SMOTHERED IN BUTTER

Peel 2. lbs. medium-sized potatoes, cut in eight pieces. In a saucepan over medium heat put 3/4 cup butter. When the butter has melted, put the potatoes into the saucepan and cover. Stir with a wooden spoon from time to time. Reduce heat after 1/4 hour. If the butter is too reduced add more. (This will depend on the kind of potatoes used.) Increase heat to medium, then to high. The potatoes should be browned and crisp on the outside and soft on the inside. Salt (no pepper) and serve very hot.

THE REAL RIGHT WAY FOR FRENCH FRIED POTATOES

Peel the potatoes, cut them all of the same size and length. Put them in moderately hot oil, lard or very white beef fat -- there should be enough so that the potatoes are not crowded. When the potatoes come to the surface, remove them from the fat at once. Let the fat reheat quickly, increase to highest flame. The potatoes should not be out of the fat more than 2 minutes. Plunge them into the fat for the second time and remove at once. Sprinkle with salt and serve at once.

SALADS

SALAD BAGRATION

Six hearts of artichokes, in 1/3-inch slices, shredded raw celery root (celeriac). Put aside. Bring I quart salted water to a rolling boil. Drop into it 1/4 lb. macaroni broken into 3-inch lengths. As soon as the water recommences to boil, lower heat and cook gently for 15 minutes. Cut off heat, but allow macaroni to stand covered for 5 minutes. Then drain thoroughly, cool. Mix the vegetables and macaroni, salt and pepper, and 1-1/2 cups mayonnaise to which 3 tablespoons puree of tomatoes have been added. Place in a mound on serving dish, surround with alternating borders of chopped yolks of 4 hard-boiled eggs, 8 slices chopped smoked beef tongue and chopped hard-boiled whites of eggs. Sprinkle over mound and border 2 tablespoons finely chopped parsley.

SALAD CANCALAISE

For each serving take 1 leaf of lettuce; on this place 3 tablespoons diced potato mixed with I teaspoon mayonnaise. On this place 3 poached oysters drained and placed on linen cloth to dry, then mixed with oil, lemon juice and pepper. On the oysters place a thin slice of truffle. Place the lettuce leaves and their garnishings on a round dish in a circle with one in the centre.

SALAD NICOISE

Take equal parts of diced potatoes and diced string beans. Boil separately- -- he potatoes in covered cold salted water brought to the boil, the string beans in boiling salted water. Do not overcook. When cooked remove from water and drain thoroughly. When cold mix the two vegetables, add two parts oil to one part lemon juice, salt and pepper. Place in a mound in salad dish and decorate with anchovies, stoned black olives and capers. Surround with quarters of peeled tomatoes. Sprinkle generously with chopped basil.

SALAD PORT ROYAL

Take equal parts of boiled sliced potatoes, shredded peeled apples and cubed boiled string beans. When the potatoes and string beans are cold, mix with apples, salt, pepper and mayonnaise. Place in salad bowl, cover with small quantity of mayonnaise, decorate with cubed string beans. Surround with quartered heads of lettuce and quartered hardboiled eggs.

SALAD RAPHAEL

Shred lettuce and mix with mayonnaise made with 1 teaspoon paprika, instead of black pepper. Surround alternately with sliced cucumber, peeled tomatoes, cut in eight parts, and hearts of lettuce. Place between each of these vegetables 4 small finely sliced unpeeled radishes. Pour over the border a vinaigrette of two parts oil, one part lemon juice, salt, pepper and chopped chervil.

POTATO SALAD

In a large bowl place 1 tablespoon French mustard, 1/4 teaspoon pepper, 1 tablespoon chopped chervil, 1 tablespoon finely cut chives, 1 tablespoon finely chopped tarragon and 1 tablespoon chopped parsley. Remove the skin, head, tail and bones of 1 salt herring. Pound the flesh and mash through fine strainer, add to the contents of the bowl. Shred I tart apple and put in bowl. With 2 tablespoons olive oil amalgamate thoroughly, then slowly stir into it 1/2 cup strong beef bouillon. It should be perfectly smooth. Slowly add 1 cup dry white wine. Into a saucepan of cold water over highest flame put 2 lbs. unpeeled potatoes. Cover, and when the water comes to a boil regulate heat. Do not overcook. Remove from water, drain, peel and thinly slice while hot. Put into bowl and mix with the sauce. Keep the saucepan covered and remove one potato at a time. Be careful in mixing not to bruise the potatoes. When thoroughly mixed, put aside for at least 3 hours before serving.

SALAD MELI-MELO

Mix 10 oysters poached for 1 minute, 10 mussels, 1/2 cup shrimps, the meat of 1 medium-sized lobster, 3/4 cup very young diced string beans, 5 sliced hearts of artichoke, 10 green tips of asparagus, 1/4 cup diced beetroot, 1/2 cup celery cut in thin rings, salt and pepper. Mix lightly and pour over the mixture 1 cup olive oil and 1-1/2 cups dry champagne.

WINTER SALAD

Large sweet Spanish onions cut in thin rings with this sauce: 2 tablespoons French mustard, 1 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon pepper, 1 tablespoon paprika, 1 cup heavy cream. Mix well and pour over onions at the last moment.

SALAD LIVONIERE

A mixture of vegetables of the season in equal quantities. For four cups, add 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon pepper, 1 teaspoon French mustard, 3 tablespoons brandy, 3 tablespoons Madeira, 2 tablespoons oil and 1 tablespoon vinegar.

DESSERTS

COLD DESSERTS

BAVARIAN CREAM PERFECT LOVE

Mix 2 cups sugar and 8 yolks of eggs until lemon-coloured. Slowly add 2 cups hot milk in which 6 cloves have been heated. Put in saucepan over lowest heat. With a wooden spoon stir continuously in the same direction until the spoon remains thickly covered. Do not allow to boil. Remove from heat and pour over 1/2 tablespoon powdered gelatine that has been soaked for 5 minutes in 1/4 cup cold water. Stir in the same direction until the gelatine is completely dissolved, then strain and stir from time to time in the same direction until cool. When cold, mix with 3 cups whipped cream to which the grated zest of 2 lemons have been added. Pour into lightly oiled mould and place in refrigerator for 4 hours. Remove from mould to serving dish. The cream may be flavoured with fruit puree. Two and a half cups puree and I tablespoon lemon juice are mixed with 1/2 cup icing sugar.

A chocolate cream is made by melting 3 ozs. chocolate in the milk; a coffee cream, by substituting 2. cups strong coffee for the 2 cups milk. For the rest, proceed as above.

CHARLOTTE CREAM

Prepare half the quantity of the above recipe. Cut sponge fingers to fit a lightly oiled mould; for the bottom, cut to fit; for the sides, cut one end straight across, and even the tops after the lined mould has been filled with the cream. Any flavour may be used. When it is ready to be served,. decorate through a forcing tube with whipped cream and surround by whipped cream. If a fruit puree is used, decorate on top with whipped cream and surround by whole fruits -- the same kinds as used for the flavouring -- cooked in a heavy syrup and well drained. Or instead of a puree of fruit, the recipe for Cream Perfect Love may be used, omitting the lemon and clove flavouring, and adding 1-1/2 cups fresh fruit or berries macerated for several hours in best kirsch or curacao and well drained. A cream made with a puree of fruit may have added to it another fruit diced and macerated, for example a strawberry or raspberry puree with cubed peaches or apricots -- or vice versa -- the combinations are endless. [3]

CREME RENVERSEE A LA CEVENOLE

(Chestnut Custard)

Stir 2 whole eggs and 4 yolks with I cup sugar until it is pale lemon-coloured. Slowly add 2 cups hot milk. Strain through a sieve. Stir from time to time until cold, then mix with a puree of chestnuts made by shelling 25 chestnuts and boiling them gently for 7 or 8 minutes. Remove from heat, drain and replace in covered saucepan. Take out a few at a time and remove skins (they peel more easily when warm). Put the peeled chestnuts in a pan over medium heat with 2 cups milk, 1 tablespoon butter, a stick of vanilla cut in half and a pinch of salt. When it commences to boil, place the covered saucepan in a 275 ͦ preheated oven. It will take about 3/4 hour. If necessary add hot milk. When quite tender, mash while very hot through fine strainer. Replace over low heat and add 1/2 cup sugar. When sugar is dissolved remove from heat. When cold, mix with egg-milk mixture. Pour into buttered mould and place in a recipient containing hot water to within 1 inch of the top of the mould. Place mould in preheated 275 ͦ oven for about 3/4 hour. It is very important that the water in which the mould is standing does not boil. If water evaporates, add boiling water. Do not remove the cream from the mould until cold.

This dessert can be poured into a ring mould, and at the last moment whipped cream lightly sweetened is placed in the centre. One tablespoon icing sugar added to 1 cup cream and flavoured with 1 tablespoon kirsch to the cup. This custard, in double the quantity before adding the chestnuts, can be prepared by adding any desired flavouring; for example, moulded coffee custard is made by replacing 1 cup milk with 1 cup strong coffee, or chocolate custard by adding 2 ozs. melted chocolate to milk.

CREME CAREME

This is a dessert created by Careme, the great early-nineteenth-century cook who wrote several of the most important French cook-books.

Mix 8 yolks of eggs with 3/4 cup sugar and 1 tablespoon rice flour (or a little less than 1 tablespoon cornflour) until the mixture is pale yellow. Add very slowly 3 cups hot milk. Put in a saucepan over very low heat, stirring with a wooden spoon until the spoon is thickly coated. Remove from heat, stirring occasionally until cold. Put in the refrigerator (Careme says on ice and surrounded by ice). Remove from refrigerator from time to time to stir. Just before serving add 1/3 cup best Maraschino and 1-1/2 cups whipped cream. You will then have (these are Careme's words) a light velvety mellow cream.

APPLE MOUSSE

Peel 8 apples, remove cores, cut in eighths and put in saucepan over medium heat with 1 cup sugar, 1 cup water and the zest of a lemon. Stir from time to time, gradually lower heat. Cook until it has become quite thick. Before removing from heat add 1/2 oz. gelatine that has been dissolved in 1/4 cup water. Mix thoroughly, add the juice of 1 lemon. Strain, and with an electric beater or egg beater whip the apple sauce until it is very frothy. Put in refrigerator. Before it becomes too stiff, in about 1/2 hour, add 1-1/2 cups unsweetened whipped cream flavoured with a liqueur, Grand Marnier if convenient. Three tablespoons will be sufficient. Any liqueur is suitable, but it is preferable to use one with a fruit base rather than a herb. Serve chilled in bowl.

FRUIT MOUSSE

One lb. mixed fruits of the season -- bananas and fresh pineapples are always acceptable additions. Peel the fruits and remove stones, cut bananas in half their length and half their width, pineapple in thin slices -- do not dice -- and leave large fruits whole. Arrange in deep serving dish and place in refrigerator several hours before serving. At the last moment mix 8 yolks of eggs with 3/4 cup best kirsch and 1 cup sugar. Beat with an electric beater or egg beater until thickened and frothy. Pour over fruits and serve.

APPLES WITH RASPBERRY SYRUP

Peel, core and cut in quarters 1-1/2 lbs. apples. Put in saucepan over high heat with 1 cup sugar, 1/2 cup water and the zest of a lemon. Stir to prevent scorching. Boil for 20 to 25 minutes. Remove from heat and strain into lightly buttered mould, the bottom of which should have a piece of white paper to fit. When cool place in a refrigerator for several hours. Unmould when ready to serve and turn on to serving dish. Pour over it 2 cups strawberry or raspberry puree. If these fruits are not in season, heat 1-1/2 glasses jelly with 2 tablespoons water. Heat only sufficiently to liquefy the jelly, which should be chilled before using.

PEACHES GLACEES

Put 6 fine peaches in hot water only long enough to peel. Prepare a syrup of 1 cup sugar and 3/4 cup water. Poach the peaches covered in the syrup over low flame for 4 minutes. Remove peaches and drain. When the syrup is quite thick, after about 3 minutes' further cooking pour over peaches. See that it adheres. When cold place peaches on serving dish in refrigerator for at least 2 hours. Prepare a puree of 1 lb. fresh strawberries, 1/4 cup icing sugar, add 2 tablespoons best brandy and I cup whipped cream. Put in refrigerator for at least 2 hours. Before serving pour puree over peaches.

HOT DESSERTS

APPLE FRITTERS

Remove core and peel 6 apples, cut in 1/3-inch slices. Put in bowl and macerate for 1/2 hour in juice of 1 lemon, 2 tablespoons sugar and 3 tablespoons brandy. Turn several times in order to moisten and sweeten all the slices. The batter is prepared by sifting 1 cup flour into a bowl and mixing gradually with 1 egg, 1 cup light beer, 3 tablespoons brandy and 3 tablespoons olive oil. Mix thoroughly, the batter should be perfectly smooth. It is best, if convenient, to prepare the batter the night before using. It must be made at least several hours before being used. The apples are dipped in batter and at once fried in deep fat. When browned, remove with perforated spoon, cover generously with sugar. While still hot, place in hot oven to glaze.

All fruits are prepared in this way for fritters.

OMELETTE A LA BOURBONNAISE

Prepare an omelette in the prescribed way with 6 eggs and 1 tablespoon sugar. Before folding, place on it I cup diced pineapple mixed with 1/4 cup strained apricot jam. Fold and sieve 1/4 cup sugar over the omelette. Pour 1 cup rum over it and light in the dining-room before serving.

This type of omelette can be filled with I cup strained jam and any liqueur suitable to the flavour of the jam; for example, strawberry with kirsch, or orange with curacao.

FRUIT SOUFFLE

Prepare a heavy syrup with 1 cup sugar and 1/4 cup water. Let it boil for 5 minutes. Mix with 1-1/2 cups puree of any fresh fruit. If it is not thick boil to reduce and then measure. This would be necessary with berries. Mix lightly but quickly with 6 whites of eggs that are beaten at the last moment -- do not let them stand. Turn into a buttered and sugared souffle dish and bake in preheated 375 ͦ oven for about 20 minutes. After 18 minutes sieve icing sugar over the top to glaze.

VIOLET SOUFFLE

Melt 2 tablespoons butter in a saucepan over medium heat, add 2 tablespoons flour stirring constantly. Add 1 cup hot milk and boil until thick. Remove from heat and cool to tepid. Add 2 tablespoons sugar and 1 tablespoon Kummel, and the yolks of 3 eggs, one at a time, mixing each one thoroughly before adding the next. Beat 4 whites of eggs and lightly and quickly add to mixture. Add 1/2 cup candied violets broken into three or four pieces each. Place a wreath of candied violets on the top of the souffle. Pour into a souffle dish and place in preheated 375 ͦ oven for 20 minutes.

CROUTE A LA BELLE AURORE

Cut stale cake in slices 1/3-inch thick. Sprinkle them generously with rum. Cover half of them with very thick apple sauce to which has been added 1 tablespoon heavy cream to each cup of apple sauce and 3 tablespoons tiny dried mixed glad fruits. Place the other slices of cake on the prepared ones, pressing so that they hold together. Dip in beaten egg, cover with rolled sifted cracker crumbs and fry in butter over medium heat. Serve with

HOT SABAYON SAUCE

For six servings, stir in saucepan over lowest heat as in bain-marie 3 yolks of eggs with 8 tablespoons sugar until thoroughly mixed. Add very slowly 2 cups Marsala, beat with a whisk until it thickens. Serve in preheated bowl or sauce boat.

_______________

Notes:

1. The bay laurel (Laurus Nobilis) is the one to use here and wherever else a laurel leaf is needed in my recipes.

2. Bechamel is a basic white sauce made with equal quantities of flour and butter, cooked in enough milk to make a creamy mixture.

3. Lady fingers are known as sponge fingers in English confectionery.

[admin]

Part 1 of 2

10. Servants In France



UNFORTUNATELY there have been too many of them in my service. Unfortunately there have been too many unsatisfactory ones, and too many of the satisfactory ones did not stay long. My housekeeping experiences in Paris date from 1908 and during forty-five years many servants come and go for many different reasons. The memory of some of them is vague, even of some of them who were satisfactory and stayed for quite a long time -- that is, comparatively a long time. But my memory is quite vivid of some who came and left within a day or two and that perhaps is natural.

The first servant I engaged left a pleasant memory. A friend and I took a flat, small, sunny and cheerful, in 1908. When the furniture was being moved into it the time had come to think of a servant who would take care of it. When I asked Gertrude Stein how you went about finding one in Paris and what questions you put to her in your interview with her, she answered that it was easiest and most reliable to find her through connections in the quarter, and the proper question to ask was, did she make a good omelette. The next day a nice young girl, a Swiss-Italian, presented herself. She was the niece of Gertrude Stein's concierge. She would therefore be honest and respectable, as one had reason in those days to suppose, and she said she made a good omelette. So she was engaged. Within a few days we moved and Celestine, sweet, smiling and timid, was there to greet us and to begin her work. When it was time for her to go marketing and she was given a list of what she was to buy, together with some money and an account book, she confessed that she had never marketed. She was more discouraged than I. We bought the provisions together. If she cooked well enough experience would do the rest. Lunch was inedible -- commencing with the omelette. She obviously had not the slightest instinct for cooking. I told Gertrude Stein why we could not keep her and together we told Gertrude Stein's concierge, who said that perhaps she should take a position as a lady's maid.

Then a friend recommended a middle-aged Basque cook who would like to cook and do the household work for two ladies. Maria Lasgourges was a treasure, an excellent cook, resourceful and experienced. All that winter we had guests, invited, unexpected and uninvited, who were served with Maria's unfailingly delicious food. She had an elaborate, formal, ceremonious manner towards the bohemian acquaintances we had met. She only made one blunder: we were having six guests for Christmas dinner and Maria was told to cook a dinner suitable to the occasion and the position of our guests. She was left as usual to select her menu without consultation, but was warned that she should buy anything that she needed to cook a good dinner. What was our surprise and mortification to find that the first dish was cold boiled crawfish in their shells -- exactly five for each person. What followed was chosen and cooked with her usual taste and competence. When I thanked Maria and complimented her after the guests left, the crawfish were not mentioned. They were spoken of the next morning as a surprise to us. She said she had expected they would be, that she had considered the expense but concluded that they were indispensable for a Christmas dinner.

When in spring we had planned our summer vacation we spoke to Maria and told her that we proposed paying her her wages during our absence. Perhaps she would go to stay with her people in the country. She thanked us and said she was getting too old to work and had planned to go to them permanently. It was a blow to us. She had been an expert cook and housekeeper, and a warm and kindly presence in the flat.

When we returned to Paris an acquaintance leaving Paris asked us if we didn't want her perfect servant for whom she was hunting a suitable situation. Maria Entz was Swiss, with all the Swiss virtues and limitations. She was clean, hard-working and honest, and her cooking was indifferent, either too heavy or too economical. We suffered from her incurable romanticism. She liked to cook dishes in which cheese or chocolate were the principal ingredients, and wrote to Switzerland to have them sent to her. She made honey cakes cut out to represent vegetables, fruits and flowers, men, women and children, birds and animals, garden implements and kitchen utensils. With these and her unvarying reliability we had to content ourselves and not too greatly regret the marvellous other Maria. Once more it was time to announce our plans and conditions. Maria Entz told us that in any case she was about to be married (blushes and giggles), having completed the purchase of her personal and household linen. We were surprised, as we had considered her a confirmed old maid. We told her that we hoped that she would be happy and that she was marrying a man who would be worthy of her. With more blushes and giggles she said he would prove so as he was young and she could form him -- at twenty-two that could easily be managed. For her wedding gift a veil with a wreath of roses was suitable.

After that vacation of 1910, I went to live with Gertrude Stein, whose admirable servant Helene had charge of her and her household. It was Helene who made all the practical decisions. A friend noticing this observed that it was to be hoped that her servant left a free choice of the Picassos to Gertrude Stein. No one could have accomplished so much with so little effort and in so little time as Helene did. She was that rare thing, an invariably perfect cook. She knew all the niceties of making menus. If you wished to honour a guest you offered him an omelette souffle with an elaborate sauce, if you were indifferent to this an omelette with mushrooms or fines heroes, but if you wished to be insulting you made fried eggs. With the meat course, a fillet of beef with Madeira sauce came first, then a leg or a saddle of mutton, and last a chicken. Elaborate desserts she said were not made by plain cooks, and to her any dessert more complicated than a souffle was that. When she saw the cake I ordered for tea from an amazing Viennese baker, she asked me to order a dessert from him for a dinner party. She was horrified but impressed when she paid for it, and as proud as if she had made it when it was served.

Helene was without humour and was always practical. When the Titanic sank, she said she thought the Anglo-Saxon gallantry of saving women and children first was unintelligent and unnatural. She believed families should be saved first, then single people. What, she asked, are widows to do without husbands to take care of them. She supposed that there would be no painters in the United States, since they all came to Paris to learn to paint. When I asked her what she thought Americans did do, her answer was that most of them must be dentists. From Helene I learned nothing about cooking. She would have thought such an idea was misplaced. A lady did not cook. In the spring of 1914, Helene's husband said she should no longer work for others, but stay at home and take care of him. It would be a sad parting for Gertrude Stein, who had had Helene's admirable care and consideration for nine years.

Eventually a good cook was found -- Gertrude Stein at once nicknamed her Muggie Moll -- a handsome woman with a cast in one eye which she cleverly used to her advantage. Her husband was a gendarme, which was a guarantee for her honesty and respectability. We left for a visit to England just before portentous Sarajevo occurred, and then were unable to return to France until after the Battle of the Marne. Muggie Moll, whose husband was away at the war, in spite of the difficulties, managed to find suitable food. Then she suddenly announced that for reasons over which she had no control she would have to leave.

A concierge in the quarter recommended a young woman whom she had known for several years. Jeanne was a suitable person for us, she had worked for six years in a family and had lately been dismissed, the reason for which would not be repeated. She advised us to take her. Jeanne was sent for and proved to be a treasure. She was a very good cook, kept the pavilion (our garden house) scrupulously clean and was attentive to our wants. Our guests those days were frequently unexpected. Jeanne was adequate in emergencies.

One day when she sighed, I asked if she was worried. She explained that, Belgium being occupied by the wicked Germans, we would have no endives that winter, since the best endives were imported from Belgium. When a Zeppelin raid had sounded, Jeanne, pointing to the sky, said that something soon would be pelting down on us. To be casual I said, perhaps not on us. But, Jeanne said, such heavy black clouds meant we were in for a rainstorm.

When we commenced to work for the French wounded, we left Paris to visit hospitals and Jeanne cleaned the pavilion from top to bottom. When we got home after one of the trips she told us she was to be married. The war had changed one's attitude to many things. Losing Jeanne was not the tragedy it might have been. But during many years I regretted her.

Then our history with femmes de menages commenced. It was a long and not always a happy one. Leonie, the first of them, came to us very soon after peace was signed. Too hardworking for her years, her boundless energy and reckless courage frightened me. With her long arms and frail body she would climb a step-ladder with the agility and the unnatural smile of a professional acrobat. In her brusque way she asked me one day if she might be allowed to make us some cakes. More curious than hopeful I agreed. She said they were named after the nuns who first made them long ago. The religious order to which the nuns belonged was that of the Visitation, and the cakes, like the nuns, were called

VISITANDINES

Put 1-1/4 cups butter in a saucepan and allow it to become golden brown. Put aside and cool. Add one by one to each other the unbeaten whites of 6 eggs, adding them very slowly and stirring with a wooden spoon. This should take 1/4 hour. Then add 2/3 cup sifted flour. Fold in until perfectly smooth. Add 1 teaspoon vanilla extract and the cooled melted butter. Fold in 2 beaten whites of eggs. Fill small buttered muffin pans and bake in preheated 400 ͦ oven until pale gold. When baked, transfer to grill and paint with reduced strained apricot jam. Cover with kirsch icing.

They were delicate and tasty and made evident Leonie's possibilities. If she could bake as well as the Visitandines proved she could, was she perhaps an equally good cook. As she was engaged to do the heavy work, it was not for me to ask her if she could cook until she suggested it, which she did. It did not take long to appreciate its quality. We had certainly luck in finding good cooks, though they had their weaknesses in other ways. Gertrude Stein liked to remind me that if they did not have such faults, they would not be working for us. The first dish Leonie prepared for us was

BAKED ZUCCHINI OR ITALIAN SQUASH

Wash and dry but do not peel the squash, preferably small and definitely firm. Cut them in half lengthwise. With a sharp knife, cut the flesh all around within 1/4 inch of the skin but not at the bottom. Cook in boiling water, salted, from 4 to 6 minutes according to their size. Drain well and wipe dry. In a frying pan melt 1/4 cup olive oil and cook in it 4 medium-sized onions, for 4 medium-sized squash. Remove the flesh from parboiled squash without piercing the bottom, chop fine. Add to onions with 1/2 cup fresh bread crumbs and 2 cloves of crushed garlic, salt and pepper. Mix well, remove from flame and add 2 tablespoons chopped basil and I tablespoon chopped parsley. In 10 minutes add 2 well-beaten eggs. Mix well and fill squash shells with mixture. Place in well oiled, fireproof dish. Cover the squash with a thick coating of dried breadcrumbs. Sprinkle generously with olive oil. Bake for 1/2 an hour in preheated 350 ͦ oven. Baste two or three times during baking.

After we enjoyed the squash Leonie gradually came to do the greater part of the cooking and I did more of the household work. Leonie was physically unable to work longer than she originally proposed, nor could we have afforded it. She continued to be a good reliable cook, and asked me to give her some recipes, which I did, but it was obvious that she did not measure or weigh the ingredients. She preferred to pray. To tease her I told her she did not always pray to the right saint.

After two years had passed, we felt that fortunately Leonie had become a permanency. But before the end of the third year she had gone, and it must be acknowledged that later we could not remember the reason why, though we were far from ungrateful to her for her faithful service.

Then a pearl graciously condescended to work for us. This second Jeanne was indeed without price. She was for days uncertain what she should be paid, and we were equally certain no amount would be too much. Jeanne was gentle and had the smile of a cocotte, wore a complicated headdress and was as naive and inexperienced as a baby. At the end of a week, we came to an arrangement for the wages she was to be paid. It was then that she said that she would, if it suited me, tell me each morning what the previous day's accounts had been. To "tell them" apparently meant to "give them." In a flash her hesitancy and some of her mystery were explained. She neither read nor wrote. After that she told me what she had spent the previous day by placing the money that remained on a table and asking me if she had done the account correctly. She was attaching. In her very lovely low voice she said little. She was strange, but agreeably so. Gertrude Stein was unable to interpret Jeanne's mystery.

We were becoming acquainted simultaneously with Jeanne and her cooking. La cuisine c'est la femme. Her sauces had unknown, delicate and still exotic flavours. A dish would have an unexpected squeeze of orange juice. She used rum in all her desserts. When she prepared chicken with fresh coconut, we had an answer to some of the strangeness. Pondicherry. And we were satisfied. And she pleased us more than ever, and well she might, when she made us such dishes as

CREAM TART

Stir the yolks of 3 eggs, 1/4 cup sugar and 1 tablespoon flour until they are pale yellow. Add slowly 1 cup hot milk. Put in saucepan over very low flame and stir constantly until thick. It must not boil. Strain through fine sieve. Line a 9-inch pie plate with puff paste. When the egg-sugar mixture is cold, pour it on the crust and cover with

COCO MARMALADE

Over low flame melt in a saucepan 2 cups sugar and 1 cup water. Stir until it commences to boil. When it begins to thicken, add 1-1/2 cups freshly grated coconut or moist grated coconut. Boil until transparent. Pour over cream in pie crust and bake in preheated 350 ͦ oven until cream is stiff and the top has browned.

It is still one of our favourite tarts. But was it one from Pondicherry? We were commencing to feel that that was not the answer to anything relating to Jeanne's strangeness. We didn't know until she had been with us for seven or eight months. Then one morning she did not come. A pneumatique explained her absence. She had been suddenly ill during the night, she had a high fever and as soon as the doctor had seen her there would be another bulletin. The following day there were two more which told nothing. We strolled down on the third afternoon to see her concierge who said briefly that Jeanne was seriously ill and would not be able to see us, but we would hear how her illness was progressing. More bulletins rained upon us. At the end of the week, the concierge, strangely embarrassed, said Jeanne's condition remained unchanged. Just as we were about to question the concierge further, in bounced Jeanne as gay as a lark, her arms filled with packages of all sizes and shapes and a bandbox balanced on one finger. Of the four of us the only one who had any presence of mind was the concierge. She wafted Jeanne out as she told her to go to her room and she would explain all. It was a bare and plausible story.

Twenty-odd years ago Jeanne had rented the room and kitchen she was still living in. She did not work then, she received letters from Martinique -- not Pondicherry -- for some years. Then they ceased. The people who came to see her were well behaved, there was neither noise nor disorder from Jeanne's room. Then she commenced to work. After several months' work she would stay in her room and not take on new work for a month or even longer. Always during this time, she would go out at night and alone.

We told the concierge that we liked Madame Jeanne, as we had been speaking of her, and would like her to return as soon as possible. The same evening there was word saying that Jeanne would return to us the following Monday morning. When she did, nothing was said on either side of her illness or the return from her shopping expedition. We could once more enjoy her lovely low voice, her gentle ways and her cocotte smile. She prepared her subtly flavoured food which was neither from Pondicherry nor Martinique, but her very own. And to please us and to vary the menu she cooked us

CHICKEN CROQUETTES AND EGGS

Put through the meat chopper enough chicken, skin removed, to make 4-1/2 cups. Season with salt and pepper, a pinch of cayenne, and 1 crushed clove of garlic, 1/4 teaspoon powdered mace, and 2 tablespoons cream cheese. Form into round flat croquettes with slightly floured hands. Fry in 4 tablespoons butter, brown on both sides, lower heat the last 5 minutes, and pour over the croquettes 6 well-beaten eggs. As much as possible, prevent the eggs from touching the pan. They should cover the croquettes and only cook enough not to run, for about 3 minutes. Turn the pan upside-down on a preheated dish. Serve hot with

SAUCE FOR CROQUETTES

Put 1-1/2 cups chicken stock in a saucepan over low flame with salt and pepper, 1/4 teaspoon mace, a pinch of cayenne pepper, add 2 tablespoons puree of tomatoes, mix well. Then add 3 tablespoons cream cheese, heat well but do not allow to boil. Strain and pour into sauce boat and serve with croquettes.

Jeanne one morning did not appear to make my coffee, but this time when she did not come to her work there were no bulletins concerning the state of her health. On the second afternoon we went to her concierge and told her to say to Jeanne that if she did not return the next morning she should not bother further about us. The following morning, when she had not appeared, I went sadly to find someone to succeed her. It was no longer so easy to find a satisfactory servant. It was not a surprise not to have been able to engage one, but it was a surprise to find Jeanne bringing my coffee the next morning. There was no reference on either side to her A.W.O.L. Jeanne had her lovely low voice, her cocotte smile and her gentle ways in spite of her shopping expedition having been curtailed.

Jeanne's cooking was always varied. She smilingly, not boastingly, said she supposed she could cook eggs and potatoes in a hundred different ways. Here is an example of what she did with eggs:

MIRRORED EGGS A LA BRAHAN

For 4 eggs, chop 1/4 lb. mushrooms, cook with 2 tablespoons butter, salt and a pinch of lemon juice in a covered saucepan over low flame for 8 minutes. Chop or put through meat grinder enough chicken to make 1-1/2 cups. To this when ground add half its weight of butter, about 5 tablespoons, and salt and paprika. Make miniature small round croquettes and fry lightly on both sides in 2 tablespoons butter. In well-buttered fireproof dish spread the mushrooms; place 4 eggs on the mushrooms and 1 teaspoon butter on the yolk of each egg. Place the dish in preheated 400° oven on asbestos mat for 5 minutes. The chicken croquettes must be ready and hot, as well as 1 cup cream sauce to which the yolk of 1 egg has been added but not allowed to boil. When the eggs are cooked, remove the dish from the oven, place the chicken croquettes against and around the eggs, and pour a narrow border of cream sauce around them.

This is another and equally original way Jeanne prepared eggs:

POACHED EGGS A LA SULTANE

Bake puff paste in fluted pare shells. When baked and still hot place in each one a poached egg. Cover with a sauce made in this way:

For 6 pate shells, melt 1-1/2 tablespoons butter in a saucepan over low heat. When butter is melted add 1-1/4 tablespoons flour. Turn with a wooden spoon until thoroughly amalgamated, then add slowly 3/4 cup strong hot chicken bouillon. Stir constantly over lowest heat for 5 minutes. Add 1/2 cup heavy cream. Do not allow to boil. Add 1/4 cup pistachio nuts that have had their skins removed by soaking for 3 minutes in hot water. Dry and rub in cloth -- the skins will loosen and finally remain in the cloth. Pound them in a mortar with a drop of water added from time to time to prevent the nuts from exuding oil. When they can be strained through a sieve, add 1/4 cup and 1 tablespoon soft butter to them and mix together. Add this mixture very slowly (called, naturally, pistachio butter) to the chicken bouillon cream sauce. Heat thoroughly but do not boil. Cover the eggs with this and serve at once. As good as it looks.

Here is one of the many ways Jeanne cooked potatoes:

POTATOES CRAINQUEBILLE

Chop 2 large onions. Melt 4 tablespoons butter in a saucepan over low flame and cook the chopped onions in it without letting them brown. Put them in a shallow fireproof earthenware dish. Cover them with large new potatoes. Pour J teaspoon melted butter on each potato. Cover the dish and cook on an asbestos mat over low flame for 1/4 hour. Then put in preheated 350 ͦ oven for about 1/2 hour depending upon the size of the potatoes. When they are tender enough to indent with a fork remove from oven. Turn the oven to 450 ͦ. Gently press on each potato to make a small hollow in the centre. In this, place 1 teaspoon of tomato puree to which a quarter of its volume in butter has been added. Cover the puree and potatoes with grated Parmesan cheese and return to the hot oven to brown. This too is a dish as good as it looks.

One more of Jeanne's recipes, for

POTATOES MOUSSELINES

Bake 2 lbs. potatoes in the oven. When cooked for about 3/4 hour in a hot oven, according to size, remove skins, mash through strainer, add 1 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon pepper, a pinch of nutmeg, 3/4 cup soft butter and 4 yolks of eggs. Mix thoroughly. Add 1/2 cup whipped cream. Cover with melted butter and put for 5 minutes in a 450 ͦ preheated oven.

Jeanne continued to be a delightful presence in the pavillon and a pearl of a cook. Then the inevitable occurred. One morning and for the third time she did not appear. When Gertrude Stein saw me bringing her her breakfast tray, she knew what had happened. We said in chorus, Never once without twice and thrice. We sent word to Jeanne's concierge that we were making other arrangements and did not expect Jeanne to return. For a long time afterwards I went out of my way to pass where she lived on the chance of seeing her, but never did. She was buried in one of the department stores making her purchases. I always hoped she had gone across town for something more satisfactory than window shopping.

After Jeanne we had no success in finding a suitable servant. The French law permits one to engage a servant and dismiss her the next day on the condition that she is paid a week's wages and living expenses, or she may be told that she will be dismissed in a week and her wages paid for the week. Experience taught me the arithmetic for these calculations, and it was at the pencil's tip. One of the servants who were coming and leaving continuously surprised us. On her arrival early in the morning she said that with my permission she would give a thorough cleaning to the kitchen before she undertook any other work, and would I please tell her where the stepladder was. Later in the morning when I saw how hard she was working, I suggested to Gertrude Stein that we go to a restaurant for lunch. We could safely leave her alone. She had been highly recommended by our butcher. She was given some money to market and for the household material she might need. She impressed us favourably. She opened the door for us and then I remembered to tell her she should not attempt to clean the studio, not to derange anything in it. We came home later than we had expected to. The door was opened by a person whose expression was severer and more resolute than I had remembered from the morning. Firmly but not aggressively she announced that she was leaving at once. She found the conditions regarding her work were different from what she had supposed they would be. We did not understand. A friend said the decision was come to after seeing the pictures in the studio. They had frightened her.

The reasons they did not wish to stay, given by some of those that followed, were strange. One young woman seemed to be both satisfactory and satisfied. She was a gourmet, which should include being a good cook. She was not, but enjoyed the cooking I did. This did not flatter me, it bored me. She asked me if she might eat her meals before she served us. It was agreed that she should do so. The first time we had guests was for Thanksgiving Day, a lunch for two out-of-town American boys and their father. The traditional menu was to be cooked. The turkey was an imposing bird. About three-quarters of an hour before lunch was to be served, when I was basting it, Louise came to the oven with a carving knife and fork. She said that a wing or a second joint would be sufficiently cooked for her to eat her portion at once. She had commenced her lunch and was now ready for turkey. It was necessary to make clear to her that the turkey would not be presented and carved at table with even a small amputation. She threw her knife and fork on the table and burst into tears, sobbing that it was a cruel thing to do to her. It was not a precedent but an exception that Louise failed to understand. So she departed.

When an Austrian agreed to come to us, recommended by Americans from Dayton, Ohio, for whom she had worked first in Paris and then in Dayton, I told her we liked American cooking but did not wish grilled steak and chops more than once a week each. She was a nice person and apparently pleased with her work and us. It had come to our being pleased when they were pleased with us. On the third morning she looked at me severely and said that we "lived French" and that that was not what she had been led to suspect and she was leaving, which she did.

Then three very nice Bretonnes, sisters, came in turn to be our servants. Their cheerful, happy point of view toward their work encouraged me to hope that we were returning to the quiet and contented household of other days. They all three were attractive, gay, intelligent and responsible. Jeanne, who was the first to come to us, was the prettiest, the eldest and the best cook. The three of them each had gone to a convent school, but Jeanne had received the best and longest education. She spoke an almost classical French, and she cooked the classical French kitchen, so we were not surprised when she prepared

BROWN BRAISED RIBS OF BEEF

Ask the butcher to remove the bones from 3 ribs of beef and chop each rib bone into two or three pieces. Place the meat in a Dutch oven and brown in 4 tablespoons butter on all sides. Remove the meat when well seared and brown the bones. Chop 1 hard-boiled egg, 1 cup raw mushrooms, 2 large stalks of celery and I stalk of parsley, and 3 tablespoons fresh pork fat. Place these in the Dutch oven with salt and pepper. Place the meat on aluminum foil. Press the mixed chopped ingredients on top of the meat. Wrap securely in the aluminum foil. In the Dutch oven place a 1/2-inch slice of back fat from which the skin has been removed. Put the wrapped meat and the bones on this, add 1 cup of hot bouillon and 1 cup hot dry red wine, 1 medium-sized onion, salt and pepper, a bouquet of parsley, thyme and laurel. Simmer covered over low heat. After 1-1/4 hours, turn the meat and simmer 1-1/4 hours further. It may be necessary to add a little more hot bouillon and wine, half and half. After 3 hours' cooking, remove from flame. Place meat on preheated earthenware dish. Strain the juice and skim thoroughly. Pour over the unwrapped meat. Press I cup fresh breadcrumbs, 3/4 cup grated Swiss and 1/3 cup grated Parmesan cheese and 4 tablespoons melted butter, well mixed together, on the top of the meat and put in the oven at 450 ͦ to brown.

This is a luscious and savoury dish, but be warned that it has nothing to do with roast beef.



With Jeanne in charge of the household, with our usual resilience we soon forgot the dark days we had suffered before she came, and with a baseless optimism accepted our present satisfaction as permanent -- until Jeanne told us that she was pregnant and would not be able to work more than a couple of months more. We were not disturbed by this. She had written to her sister of whom she had spoken to us, and to whom she had said that she should be prepared to come and replace her. Caroline had a heart of gold and was in every way superior to her, Jeanne. We would see. There was nothing to do but accept. In the evening Jeanne's husband would call for her. He made a feeble joke by saying that if he hadn't married Jeanne he would have married Caroline, and Jeanne added that among six unmarried sisters he had ample choice. Finally Caroline arrived, and Jeanne stayed in her little home to wait for her baby to come.

Caroline was not pretty, attractive and charming, but she certainly had a heart of gold. We always spoke of her to each other as Heart of Gold. She was perpetually sacrificing herself at the expense of her state of mind or her pocketbook. Their prettiest sister, it had been discovered, was living with a married man. The family was outraged. Such a thing had never happened amongst them before. Caroline persuaded one sister and brother after the other to forgive her. For a much younger sister, she had supplemented the wages of an inexperienced worker from those she herself received, and when the sister's wages were raised continued to give her the supplement. Such was Caroline who came to work for us.

She quickly learned our ways and even Jeanne's, and her own were intelligent and amusing. She told many stories of the life of the Breton village where she had been born and raised, of what could and did happen to the boys and girls and the married couples and the aged. She said the solutions of these stories was a question of souls or sous.

As they had been deprived of sugar during the war, she made us at once two sweets. This is a very simple liqueur to prepare.

NOYEAU

Mash with a heavy hammer the stones and kernels of 16 peaches. Put in a jar and cover with brandy. Allow it to infuse for 1 month. Filter through a fine linen cloth. Melt 1 lb. sugar over lowest heat with 1/3 cup water. Stir until it is about to boil, then tip the casserole in all directions. Allow to boil for 2 minutes. Remove from flame and skim. Add the filtered brandy, and bottle.

This is a delicious liqueur. To make an equally good curacao use the same recipe replacing the peach stones and kernels with dried mandarine orange or tangerine peels and allow to infuse for 2 months.

KALOUGA

Place 1 cup cream and 1 cup sugar in enamelled saucepan over low flame, stirring constantly until the mixture is the colour of coffee and cream. Then remove from flame, pour on oiled marble or enamelled sheet. Cut, before they cool, into squares or diamonds. This is a simplified and rich version of fudge, and proves the commonplace that there is nothing new under the sun.

And this was the best strawberry jam we ever had on our shelves or table and the simplest and quickest to make.

[admin]

Part 2 of 2

STRAWBERRY JAM (1)

Take equal weight of carefully chosen berries and sugar. Macerate for 12 hours. Then bring to a boil. Boil up three times and then quickly remove berries with flat perforated spoon. Replace syrup over medium heat, skim completely, boil until a spoon is lightly coated. Remove from flame and cool. Put berries in glasses and cover with warm syrup. Cover and store. The berries prepared in this way retain all their flavour.

Caroline could cook other dishes than sweet ones and did during a long hot summer that we devoted to getting the Legion d' Honneur for an American friend who highly deserved and ardently desired it. Her work for France had not been spectacular, it was known in fact to only a few friends. We needed someone with influence. We sometimes thought an American colonel could and would do it for us, sometimes a French judge, or a Hungarian man about town, or just anybody whom we had met even for the first time. We gave a lunch party for each one who looked likely. By July it was very hot. We kept the dining-room cool. It was blisteringly hot in August. The dining-room was cool, but the kitchen was insupportable. Caroline was stoic. We bought her a deckchair with cushions and installed it in a corner of the dining-room where she could rest when she was free.

To prove that she could prepare more than the simplest dishes of meat for these lunch parties, she cooked

A DUCKLING WITH PORT WINE

Put 24 fresh figs covered with the best port into a hermetically closed jar. Let macerate for 26 hours. Then put the duckling into a preheated 400° oven in a well-buttered fireproof earthenware dish. After 15 minutes put the strained figs around the duckling and commence to baste with the hot port wine in which the figs macerated. Baste every 15 minutes. If there is not enough port wine baste with veal bouillon or chicken bouillon. To roast the duckling, 3/4 hour is ample time if it is medium sized.

To be served with rice, potatoes and green peas.

She also made a very good and attractive vegetable dish.

PUREE OF CELERY ROOT WITH CREAM SAUCE

Very early celery root (celeriac), when it is still small and tender, is peeled, mashed, cut in thick slices and boiled in salted water for 15 or 20 minutes according to their size. Those Caroline used were so small she allowed 2 for each person. As soon as they are tender, remove from heat. Drain thoroughly and strain. Pound with potato masher through a sieve. Replace in casserole over low flame and add 1/2 cup heavy cream to 4 small celery roots. Cook, stirring constantly until reduced to consistency of a thick puree, for about 1/4 hour. Place, in the form of a dome, on a preheated serving dish, and cover with I cup heavy cream sauce for 4 celery roots. Sprinkle thickly on this skinned pistachio nuts lightly browned in the oven and then cut in fine slices. They are of course prepared in advance. It does take a long time, but they add a flavour and are very pretty.

Caroline continued faithfully to produce these lunches. In August, when Gertrude Stein and I were forced to acknowledge our efforts for our friend had failed, Caroline went to Brittany and we went to Normandy to cool off. Caroline rested, but not for long. The youngest sister, who received the supplementary wages, had come to Paris to work, and Caroline chaperoned her several evenings a week to public dances for Bretons where Margot danced tirelessly. This exhausted her considerably older sister. Caroline however remained our conscientious servant.

That winter, uneventful in the kitchen and household, Margot would call for her sister and they would go off to see the sights of Paris. Then Caroline heard from the sister who was the friend of the married man that perhaps as he was now a widower they might be marrying. Cecile came to Paris to see Caroline. What was expected of Caroline was evident. She would take care of the baby. So Margot, the third of the sisters we were to know, was sent for to work for us.

Margot was a great favourite with everyone who came to see us. She cooked well and quietly. It was she who could toss crepes high in the air and light a flaming dessert as she carried it from the kitchen to the dining-room. She would have arranged the flowers if she had been encouraged, and with taste, no doubt, for the dishes she served were effectively and appetisingly presented. She often made an

ALEXANDRA SALAD

Boil 1-1/2 lbs. potatoes in their skins until they are just tender -- do not overcook. Boil in salted water 1-1/2 lbs. carrots. Shred the white stalks of 1 head of celery. When the potatoes are tender, peel and cut in thin slices, and the carrots likewise. Put aside 1 potato and 1 carrot. Mix the three vegetables in a bowl. In a small bowl, mix 1-12 tablespoons vinegar, 4 tablespoons olive oil, 1 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon pepper, 1/2 teaspoon dry mustard. Pour this over the sliced vegetables and macerate for 1 hour. In another bowl place 1/2 cup diced lean ham, 1 cup mushrooms that have previously been boiled for 6 minutes in water to cover with 1/4 teaspoon salt, a squeeze of lemon and 2 grated apples. Mix the contents of the two bowls and 1 cup very stiff mayonnaise. Place in salad bowl in a mound. Sprinkle liberally with chopped parsley, tarragon and finely cut chives. Around the base decorate with alternate slices of the carrot and potato that were put aside.

Margot had not much actual experience of cooking and was pleased to learn. The three sisters all had an instinct for cooking. Margot in time would equal Jeanne. Margot went with a cousin to the Breton balls so successfully that finally, with the approval of Caroline who had come down to Paris expressly, she married a young man she had met there. For the three years the sisters had served us we were carefree and very content. Gertrude Stein used to say nothing seemed more unnatural to her than the way a servant, a complete stranger, entered your home one day and very soon after into your life and then left you and went out of your life. This was not literally true of the three sisters.

When it was evident that connections in the quarter were no longer able to find a servant for us, it was necessary to go to the employment office. That was indeed a humiliating experience, from which I withdrew not certain whether it was more so for me or for the applicants. It was then that we commenced our insecure, unstable, unreliable but thoroughly enjoyable experiences with the Indo-Chinese.

Trac came to us through an advertisement that I had in desperation put in a newspaper. It began captivatingly for those days: "Two American ladies wish --" There were many candidates. Trac was my immediate choice. He was a person with neat little movements and a frank smile. He spoke French with a vocabulary of a couple of dozen words. He would say, not a cherry, when he spoke of a strawberry. A lobster was a small crawfish, and a pineapple was a pear not a pear. The Chinese cooking was delicate, varied and nourishing. To see Trac, immaculate in white, slicing in lightning quick strokes vegetables and fruits was an appetiser. There was only one course in which he was weak. He made very few desserts and those were of the simplest. To his childish joy, I taught him several. But before this he .served one evening a very dubious elaborately frosted and decorated cake. There was something familiar about the cake. Did you make the cake, Trac, I asked him. As he answered that he had, I remembered that I had seen it for years, or one like it, in the window of a very second-rate confectioner's. Are you sure, I ruthlessly continued. Trac nodded his head and broke out into the gayest, most innocent and infectious laughter, At once the three of us were laughing together. Nothing more was said that evening, but the next morning I said quite seriously, You must never make that cake again, we didn't care for it. All Trac said, but with a wide smile, was, Me know, me know.

Of course there was no way of knowing how Trac prepared any of his delicious food. He was not secretive, but he was master in his kitchen. Much later, when he had left us and returned to us twice and then married, his wife told me the ingredients he used in some of the dishes he had cooked for us, but even she never knew the measurements. Trac said he didn't measure.

Trac left us for the first time because he was restless and wanted a change, He went off saying he would return to us and would bring us gifts. That year with Trac had spoiled us. I suggested that he find another Indo-Chinese for us. In his pretty childish way he said we wouldn't like any other Indo-Chinese, none of them were nice like he was.

And they weren't. We soon discovered that they had none of ht!i amiable weaknesses. We had a succession of them. Each one in turn was either a gambler, which made him morose when he lost (and he always lost, for he did not work when he won), or he drank, which was unthinkable in our little home, or he loved women and would become dishonest, or he was a drug addict and he would not be able to work. Of the many we tried before Trac reappeared, Nguyen was the most satisfactory and one of the three best cooks we were to have in our long and varied experience. He would drink gently and harmlessly, for he cooked marvellously. He had been a servant in the household of the French Governor-General of Indo-China, who brought him to France. He was not young when he came to us. We took him to Bilignin for the long summer vacation, where it was obvious that he could not cook as elaborately as he did and do anything else, so we agreed that he should send for a friend of his in Paris to do the household work. Gertrude Stein and I drove over one dark night to meet the friend at the station. The new boy was well mannered. The next morning Nguyen and he were arguing in the kitchen. Nguyen said his friend had a difficult character. He seemed to be unfamiliar with household work. They quarrelled. After three days Nguyen declared that he did not suit and that we -- Nguyen and I -- would have to send him back to Paris. So there was a conversation. The result was that Nguyen was again contented but overworked. The Widow Roux came every day thereafter instead of twice a week. She and Nguyen bore with each other as best they could. They were as unlike as our little Chihuahua and our big white poodle. There was no love lost between either of these couples.

Nguyen cooked Chinese dishes and French dishes, and to perfection, but objected to preparing a menu with both. It was his correct sense of balance that influenced him. Both our French and American friends disagreed with him, they considered a whole Chinese menu excessive. Finally he compromised. The first course -- soup, fish or shellfish with noodles or rice -- would be Chinese. What followed would be French. It was suspiciously a plot to enhance the quality of Chinese cooking. In the course of time Nguyen confessed that by its delicacy and unblended flavour Chinese cooking could be remembered, and French cooking following it could not. Gertrude Stein and I thought Nguyen delightfully Chinese.

The hamlet of Bilignin was intrigued with an Asiatic in its midst and the farmers were too welcoming. They gave their guest too much wine and he got tipsy. It had become a problem in which way one should approach the subject with Nguyen. The difficulty could not be mentioned. One day to help me he said it -- his health -- should not be a worry to me, it was steadily improving, very soon he would be well again. And with that we dropped the question. He produced his marvellous cooking all through the summer. As with all Chinese cooks, his movements were more rapid than the eye could follow. In the afternoon when he saw the cars of unexpected friends drive into the court he would have within an hour and a half trays of the most elaborate little and big cakes and iced drinks of all kinds, as well as a sorbet. It was not from Nguyen that I learned, but this must have been the way he made

FRUIT SORBET

One quart puree of fruit, 1 cup icing sugar, put in tray of refrigerator to freeze. When it commences to harden mix thoroughly with a fork. It is unnecessary to beat it. Twenty minutes later, mix again with a fork. In 1-1/4 hours it will be stiff enough to put with a large spoon in a chilled crystal bowl and decorate with 1 pint whipped cream pressed through a pastry tube.

Nguyen was forethoughtful. He would put in the refrigerator every day a quart or more of puree or juice of some fruit that I had gathered in the garden and brought to him each morning. And he would see that there was a provision of whipped cream. During the freezing he would prepare his own mixture of almond paste, eggs, syrups and puff paste that he kept in reserve, and bake his little cakes. He was inventive, deft, a wizard.

This is what he would do in haste, but when he had time he made some extremely tasty combinations. For example,

COUPE GRIMALDI

Fresh pineapple cut in inch squares is macerated in kirsch for 1 hour, drained, placed in a glass and covered with mandarin orange or tangerine sorbet, decorated with sweetened but unflavoured whipped cream and crystallised violets.

Or a

COUPE AMBASSADRICE

Fill 3/4 of the glass with raspberry ice cream, on which place half a peach which has been previously poached in a thick syrup (1 cup sugar to 1 cup water), cooled and put in the refrigerator. Fill each half peach with 1 tablespoon puree of strawberry flavoured with kirsch. Surround the peach with a border of sweetened unflavoured whipped cream, sprinkle chopped skinned pistachio nuts on the cream.

Those were the names he gave these desserts, but are they or were they his inventions.

In autumn when we were preparing to close the house Nguyen went to all gatherings of the grapes for the vintage. He merited any distraction the countryside offered. It was however a pleasure for which we all paid. He came back every evening a little merrier. It was not a surprise but very disturbing. Gertrude Stein and I and the dogs had come down in the car, Nguyen by train. We had promised him that we would take him back in the car. But could we? Luckily he was soon able to tell me his health was again improving and he would be able to support the voyage. Would we. We took a chance and Nguyen was not only a perfect cook but a kind and attentive valet. Spending the night at Macon, he had a long conversation there with the chef.

Paris was however too tempting and Nguyen was no longer a possible servant for us. We parted on excellent terms, and Gertrude Stein and I remembered that Trac had warned us against his compatriots. We wondered what had become of Trac, and engaged a young Polish-American woman. She was a contrast in too many respects to Nguyen, whose cooking we would always regret. Agnel's cooking of American dishes was poor and careless; she took great pains in cooking French dishes very badly, but her Polish cooking was first rate. It was however too heavy and too rich for a daily diet. She made a Polish, not a Russian, Borshch, Polish and not Russian Piroshke. But what we liked most was

FRIED AND ROASTED BREADED CHICKEN

The chickens weigh more than 1-1/2 lbs. They are cut in four pieces -- down the back and breast and across. For 2 chickens, put 1/2 lb. butter in a frying pan, flour each piece thoroughly. Beat 2 eggs in a hollow dish, coat floured chicken thoroughly with eggs, and then cover thickly with dried breadcrumbs. It is important that the chicken is thoroughly covered with flour, then with egg, then with breadcrumbs. Place in melted butter in frying pan over medium heat and brown lightly on both sides. Place in fireproof earthenware dish, wings on one side and legs on the other, backs in the centre. Put in preheated 300 ͦ oven and roast for 2 hours, basting frequently with 1 cup sour cream.

People say that they are the best Southern fried chicken they ever ate. Agnel could give the Polish names for the Polish dishes she cooked but could not write them. She was illiterate in both languages. Her mother taught her to make

VEAL AND PORK MEAT LOAF

Grind twice through the meat chopper 3/4 lb. veal and 3/4 lb. lean pork. In a bowl thoroughly mix the two meats with 1 cup chopped mushrooms, 1/4 cup fresh breadcrumbs soaked in white wine and pressed dry, 1 egg, 1 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon pepper, 1 crushed clove of garlic, a good pinch of nutmeg and 4 tablespoons sour cream. When they are well mixed form into oblong loaf, moulded around 2 hardboiled eggs placed tip to tip. Put 4 tablespoons sour cream in a fireproof earthenware dish and place the meat loaf with enough space on all sides to be able to baste. Pour 2 tablespoons sour cream over the meat loaf so that top and sides are well covered. With the tines of a fork dipped into sour cream, press lightly on the top of the meat loaf to make a design. Bake in a preheated 400° oven for 3/4 hour basting frequently. If necessary add a little more sour cream. When done add 1-1/2 cups boiling bouillon to the bottom of the dish and scrape whatever may be adhering to the bottom and the sides.

At the time Agnel was working for us there were in the markets in Paris the largest frozen crawfish I ever saw. When Agnel learned that they came from Poland, we were frequently served them in a Bechamel sauce made with sour cream, to which a pinch of nutmeg and a very small pinch of marjoram had been added. She also prepared them by browning them lightly in lard, and pouring melted sour cream with dried brown breadcrumbs over them. Another way she cooked them was in one cup of bouillon of veal and 3 tablespoons puree of tomato.

Then unexpectedly Trac dropped in upon us and said he was ready to come back to work for us, and he would commence the following morning. We explained the delicate situation he was putting us in. He left, saying he would commence to work the following morning. Agnel was overjoyed. She would take a month's vacation on the Cote d'Azur and would find a situation there. We paid her vacation and wages and were able to introduce Trac to her the following morning. They thanked each other. It was ludicrous.

Trac had been to Indo-China as a cook on a boat from Marseilles, and he had seen his family. When he became restless there, he came back on a boat again. The parrots and a monkey he had brought back with him, and the bolts of silk he had bought in Hanoi, had been sold in Marseilles at a large profit. He would work for us for a while and then he would open a restaurant. It wasn't a secure future for any of us if Trac had these dreams, but it was extremely comfortable for as long as it lasted. Then he told us about Lucienne, his Bretonne, and their plans. He had returned to Paris to work for us and to see Lucienne. So Trac had more than one dream. He had also brought back with him Chinese dried mushrooms, peppers and powders of a kind not purchasable in Paris, so the food had new and more subtle flavours than before. One day Nguyen came to see us or him -- we never could decide which. It was most unfortunate. He said he had come to tell us how healthy he now was, he had entirely recovered from the illness he had had when he was in Bilignin and he would like to work for us again. Whereupon Trac burst into an avalanche of Chinese and Nguyen left.

Trac had in some inexplicable way learned to make desserts and to bake cakes during his absence, perhaps on the boat. It was an accomplishment of which he was very proud. He said it would be useful when he opened his restaurant.

Trac had never cooked Sunday dinner for us, he left his work after lunch and returned to it on Monday morning. One day he asked me if I would teach him how to prepare Lobster Newburg. Why did he want to know how to cook that dish, I asked. He explained that since his return he had been cooking dinner on Sundays at the home of a rich bachelor who frequently gave dinner parties and whose cook did not work on Sunday evenings. Was she too perhaps cooking for someone else Sunday evenings, and so on ad infinitum until eventually Trac would come back to cook for us on Sunday evenings. Telling Trac how to cook something would be futile, so I told him we would cook it some day together. No, he said, it must be today, Saturday, because the gentleman said he was to cook it for Sunday evening. It seemed to me a useless effort if Trac was going to cook it with unmeasured and unwritten ingredients. But the gentleman and his guests were so pleased with the way it had succeeded that he had been sent for and had been given a glass of champagne and told that he was a great cook. Then Trac bought a chef's white starched cap.

This may have helped him to decide to marry Lucienne at once and open a restaurant. He said to do all this he would have to leave us soon. He brought Lucienne to see us -- she was a very good-looking, educated, middle-class Bretonne. She was in love with Trac and called him her little Jean -- she was making a Frenchman of him. He was happy and flattered. And in a month they had married, found a suitably small restaurant to rent in the quarter, redecorated and refurnished it attractively, and were installed and waiting for customers. We were naturally among their first. As they were expecting us, Trac made a special effort. The menu consisted of many dishes, proper to Chinese cooking. Lucienne and Trac were very happy to be restaurant keepers, but we were sadly embarrassed to find that our table was the only one occupied. Lucienne as cashier sat in the French manner high at her desk near the door. We persuaded her to eat lunch with us at our table where Trac joined us when he could spare a moment from the kitchen. He was wearing his chef's tall cap. When we were leaving, they said we would bring them good luck. We could highly recommend the little restaurant to our friends, and they were indeed pleased with the food, but alas reported that there were few if any customers.

When once more it became necessary to find a servant, it was more difficult than ever. But one morning, in one of the American newspapers, in Paris, there was an advertisement of what must have been the servant we were hunting. When she came to see me, she would unquestionably not find the situation with us the one she was hunting. She was a pale but vigorous, cultivated, smartly dressed Finn. She had all the qualifications to please us, and to my astonishment was ready to work for us. After telling her the disadvantages and inconveniences she would encounter, she still was ready. To be sure her wages were very high, more than double the usual wages. It was all arranged that she should come when Gertrude Stein came into the studio and was told what had been decided. Do you know if she can make desserts, she said to me. To which the Finn answered, Any dessert, Miss Stein, you may wish, from a simple Brown Betty to a souffle en surprise.

So Margit was for several years the joy of our household, though not a radiant presence. She had a northern melancholy, and was called Mademoiselle Hamlet by a French friend. Her constant depression was not contagious -- it became a game to combat it. There were several privileges she had with us; she had realised these before she agreed to come. As soon as she had seen Gertrude Stein she had recognised her. Margit was an omnivorous reader -- there would be a library in which she would find what she longed for. She saw Gertrude Stein's easy democratic approachableness -- there would be conversations with her. She would be with us and our friends in a sympathetic atmosphere. We got on excellent terms with each other. She said to us one day that she supposed there was no objection to her borrowing autographed volumes if they were not taken to the kitchen.

As a cook she was neither melancholy nor intellectual, but perfect. Margit could cook anything you asked, but she would not (indeed she refused) draw up the menus, for some unexplained undiscoverable reason. It was the only thing she expected of me. It was little enough to do in return for the excellence of the way she prepared them. For example, she frequently made for ourselves and our guests a

COVERED COCK WITH CUMIN

This is a classic of the French kitchen. It is not however a cock but a fine large chicken that is required. Boil I teaspoon powdered cumin in 1 cup olive oil for 1/4 hour and then put aside. Prepare the dough to cover the chicken by mixing 2 cups creamed butter, an egg slightly beaten, 1/2 cup cold water, 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon pepper. When this is well mixed work into it with a blender 4 cups flour. Place on a lightly floured board and knead with the palm of the hand into a large sheet. Gather together and repeat this operation. Roll into a ball, wrap in waxed paper and put aside in a cool place for 3 or more hours.

For the dressing, chop the liver of the chicken, 1/4 lb. calf's liver, a calf's brain previously soaked in water for 1 hour and then boiled for 10 minutes, 1 truffle, 3 shallots and 1 handful of parsley. Put this into frying pan over medium heat with half the cumin-flavoured oil and a brandy-glass of good brandy, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon pepper. Take from fire and add 1 egg. Mix well and put into the cavity of the bird, sew or skewer carefully. Completely cover the chicken with large thin slices of pork back fat. Roll out the crust into two large rounds which will cover the chicken. Place the chicken on one, the other on top, thoroughly pinch the two together all around. In the centre of the top crust carefully cut a round opening of about I inch diameter to permit the steam to escape. Wrap the chicken and its covering in waxed paper as hermetically closed as possible. In a fireproof earthenware dish pour the rest of the cumin-flavoured oil. Place the chicken in the dish and roast in preheated 375 ͦ oven. Roast for 1 hour more or less, according to the size of the chicken, allowing 1/4 hour more than usual because of the crust. Baste frequently. Twenty minutes before it is done, remove waxed paper to brown the crust. This is a delicious variant of the usual roast chicken.

Margit was not inventive. She was forethoughtful, rose to emergencies and met all unexpected situations with calm. Her one ambition was to get to America, and the only obstacle was the quota, for applications had already been filed for the next seven years. Margit would frequently say that Gertrude Stein should use her influence to see that she did not have to wait so long. She did not understand that such influence as Gertrude Stein had was not in official quarters.

While we were flourishing so happily under Margit's efforts Lucienne and Trac had not been so fortunate. Their restaurant in spite of its attractiveness and Trac's good cooking had not succeeded as Trac had counted on. It was not a quarter where appreciation of Chinese cooking would be found. Lucienne said the only customers who came for meals were Trac's Chinese friends and they did not pay. They were forced to sell the furniture and the good will of the restaurant to pay their debts. They had lost all their savings. There was no pleasure in having prophesied that this would happen. Lucienne bravely decided that they would go to work together as servants. She had not been in service before, but for several reasons felt this the safest course. They would use our enthusiastic recommendation. In a few days Trac came to say that our friend Madame de C.T. was then ready to engage them. He was very excited, nothing could have been more fortunate. They would learn everything about being servants from a person accustomed to fashionable society as Madame de C.T. was. She would tell them what she expected them to do and be exacting in the way they did it. Trac was not pleased when he was told that she would expect them to know such ways and would not expect or undertake to tell them what or how to do anything. He glossed over this and said she would appreciate his cooking. She had asked him if he was able to cook a number of dishes. As he had not understood he had replied yes to all the questions.

There was a telephone call from his future mistress, and the reference given was as warm as it could possibly be. They were dismissed as inadequate after two weeks, but with Trac's good luck they found some wealthy internationals with whom they stayed for many years. Frequent absences of their master and mistress made it possible for Trac and Lucienne to satisfy their wandering habits.

Margit continued to cook excellently a variety of food. She prepared home-made

CANNELONI

Mix thoroughly 5 eggs with 3-1/4 cups flour, a pinch of salt. When this is quite smooth add 2 tablespoons tepid water. Place on floured board and knead with the palm of the hand into a long strip, roll into a ball. Repeat this operation. Cover with waxed paper and put aside for 1 hour.

The filling is made by chopping 2 cups white meat of chicken, 2 cups chicken livers, 1/2 cup ham, 1 cup mushrooms. Mix this well, add 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon pepper and 2 eggs. Mix thoroughly.

The sauce is made with 4 tablespoons butter melted in saucepan over low heat. Add 3 tablespoons flour, stir with wooden spoon, and when it commences to bubble add very slowly, stirring constantly, 2 cups hot chicken or veal bouillon. Slowly bring to a boil. Add 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon pepper. Simmer for 1hour, stirring so that no lumps will form. Add 2 cups cream. Just before pouring over canneloni, mix in 2 yolks of eggs, heat but do not boil.

Roll out the dough to 1/10 inch thickness, cut into squares of about 7 inches. Put them gently into 3 quarts violently boiling salted water. Be careful they do not sink to the bottom of the saucepan. With a fork, prevent this and their sticking together. As soon as the water comes to a boil again, reduce heat and boil gently for exactly 7 minutes. Take from heat, drain and pour cold water over them -- to put them under a tap with a spray is the quickest and best method. Drain, place on clean dishcloth and wipe dry, but really completely dry. Spread out the canneloni on a board, fill with filling at one end, roll up and pinch ends. Place on serving dish that has been liberally buttered. Do not place one on top of another. Pour the sauce over them, sprinkle 1 cup dried breadcrumbs over canneloni, also 1 cup grated Parmesan cheese, and 1/4 cup melted butter. Brown in 400° oven for 1 hour.

This is of course not an Italian way of making canneloni. Is it a Finnish way, most likely. Margit made them with lobsters and hard-boiled eggs, for which she used half sherry and half chicken bouillon for the sauce. With asparagus tips, green peas and string beans, she used a tomato sauce.

Margit went with us to Bilignin where to our surprise she took a lively interest in the families of the farmers far and near. She would make decorated cakes of all kinds for the various holidays they celebrated, and she for them was an affable and distinguished foreigner. She was pleased and flattered when one of the young farmers wanted to marry her.

Books were sent to Gertrude Stein by some of the young writers which shocked Margit; she hoped that these were not the books young American girls were reading. In preparation for the fulfilment of her hope of getting to the United States, she occasionally cooked American dishes for us, with her usual success. Our friends in the Bugey were intrigued and amused by our succession of good cooks. Margit enjoyed their critical appreciation. She made for them a

TRICOLOURED OMELETTE

Make a puree of spinach by placing 1 lb. of well-washed spinach in a saucepan without water over medium heat. Turn constantly from the bottom so that it does not scorch, until it boils. Then turn flame to lower heat and cover. Cook for 10 minutes. Remove from flame, drain off water, place under running cold water until cold. Drain and press out as much water as possible. Return to saucepan over very low flame and dry out completely. Then press through fine sieve with potato masher. Mix this with 4 eggs and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Make an omelette cooked only enough to fold. Put aside and keep hot. Make another omelette of 3 yolks of eggs and 4 whole eggs, 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon powdered saffron. Place the spinach omelette on this and fold the saffron omelette over it. Place on the serving dish with a tomato sauce made by heating 4 tablespoons puree of tomatoes with 2 cups dry white wine. When hot pour slowly into 4 tablespoons melted butter that has been mixed over medium heat with I tablespoon flour. Stir until smooth and about to boil. Then add l/2 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon pepper, a pinch of cayenne, of cloves and of nutmeg, and 1 tablespoon onion juice. Allow to simmer for 1/4 hour and add 4 tablespoons butter. Do not allow to boil. Pour around the 2 omelettes and serve. This is an effective and tasty entree.

Margit prepared for our guests complicated, delicious and frozen desserts, but the favourite was

FARINA PUDDING

Put in a saucepan 1 quart milk, 4 tablespoons sugar and a pinch of salt. When it boils sprinkle into it 3 tablespoons farina ( a granulated cereal). Cook for 20 minutes. Remove from flame and add 1 tablespoon orange-flower water and 2 beaten eggs. Stir from time to time.

Put 1 lb. dates and mash through a sieve with a potato masher. Mix with I cup unsalted butter until completely amalgamated. Add the milk-farina-egg mixture and pour into well-buttered mould. Place mould in pan of water and bake in 350 ͦ oven. Do not allow the water to boil. When a knife put in the centre of the pudding comes out dry, remove pudding from oven and pan of water. Do not turn out until tepid. Lightly coat with honey the tops and sides. Decorate top with thin strips of angelica. Serve surrounded by 3 cups vanilla ice cream and 2 cups whipped cream flavoured with 2 tablespoons kirsch.

When we returned to Paris, Margit, who had always read the newspaper avidly and who was passionately interested in international politics, was worried. She said she did not know what her future plans were. She disturbed us by her preoccupation with what was obviously not her affair. Her cooking became careless as she became more and more absorbed in some difficulty we could not fathom. Suddenly one day she said she must leave and at once, she was being followed by the police. She would return to Finland where she would be safe. She bought her ticket, had her passport visaed, and said goodbye to us that afternoon. We never knew whether she had been in real trouble or if she had imagined the whole story. She sent us a postcard from Helsinki and that was the last of Margit.

After that and until the vacation of 1939 we had to accept the services of several temporary servants of whom nothing was memorable. The summer commenced more happily than it was to end, with the good Widow Roux promoted to the kitchen and a nice country girl for the housework. With the declaration of war we, like everyone else, adapted ourselves as best we could to the new conditions. The old life with servants was finished and over.

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11. Food in the Bugey During the Occupation



IN the beginning, like camels, we lived on our past. We had been well nourished. The Bugey is famous for its food and we didn't feel hungry until some weeks after strict rationing had been enforced. The meat allowance of a quarter of a pound a week per person was not altogether satisfying, but until the Occupation powers forbade fishing, the Rhone nearby supplied us with salmon trout and the Lac-de-Bourget with the rare salmon carp, ombre chevalier, lavaret and perch. From the vegetable garden we had quantities of all kinds of vegetables and fruits of an excellent quality, in the wine cellars a delicious dry white wine. We were really very well off. What was lacking was milk, butter and eggs. There was an infinitesimal amount of these on our ration cards, but by the time the Germans had collected their requisitioning there was nothing left to distribute to the inhabitants. The German soldiers were interested in butter. It appeared that many of them had never tasted it. Had not Hitler asked them if they wanted butter or guns and had they not given the right answer? One day, marketing for whatever unrationed food might still be for sale, a German soldier came into the shop. He pointed to a huge mound of butter and said, One kilo. One kilo, the clerk exclaimed. The German nodded his head impatiently. The butter was weighed and wrapped up. Unwrapping one end of the package the German walked out of the shop. From the open door where I was standing I saw him bite off a piece of the butter. It evidently was not what he expected it to be for with a brusque movement he threw it violently over the garden wall of the house opposite. The story got about. People came to look at it. No one would touch it. There it stayed.

The farmers about us would not sell their produce. They would barter it for coffee, sugar, men's boots and shirts and women's smocks. We of course had none of these things up in the attic as all French families had. One day the Germans forbade fishing so we went into Belley to see our nice butcher. He explained that the Germans rationed him to the amount of his clients' coupons. But he could regularly get us crawfish. They were caught higher up in the Valromey, preferably in an open umbrella with bait attached to the end of the ribs. That is the way we had been taught to fish them. The next morning the nice butcher came out on his bicycle to Bilignin with a sack on his back, two hundred crawfish which he emptied into the trough and covered with planks to protect them against the sun. He gave me a few scraps of meat with which to feed them. The sum I paid was astronomical. Three days later he came out with an equal number. We would commence to give lunch parties, and the piece-de- resistance would be

SWIMMING CRAWFISH

For 60 crawfish prepare a bouillon with 2 cups dry white wine, 1/2 cup cognac, 3 large carrots and one large onion cut in thin slices, 1 teaspoon salt, a pinch of cayenne and 3 chopped shallots. Boil covered for 1/2 hour. Then put in crawfish and boil for 10 minutes, turning them about three or four times. Serve hot, cold or tepid.

Our guests brought their own bread or gave me their coupons. Gertrude Stein's and my ration went to our dogs. When war was declared Gertrude Stein wheedled a military pass from the authorities to come up to Paris so that we might protect the pictures against concussion and get some papers and our passports. The pass was good for only thirty-six hours and Paris was three hundred and seventy miles away. There was little time to waste. In the flat in Paris we soon found that wall space was four times larger than floor space, so the idea of putting the pictures on the floor was abandoned. The passports were so safely put away that they were not to be found, but in hunting for them our poodle's pedigree turned up and I put it in my bag. Later the authorities gave a ration to pedigreed dogs and Basket was not too badly nourished during the years of restriction.

After the crawfish a vegetable salad was served with fruit for dessert. Swimming crawfish was the quickest and most economical way to prepare them but might easily become monotonous to some of the friends who would frequently be our guests. I then prepared a version

CRAWFlSH A LA BORDELAISE

For 60 crawfish chop 3 large carrots, 2 large onions, 4 shallots, the value of 1 tablespoon tarragon and the same of parsley. Put all these in a saucepan with 1/4 lb. butter, a twig of thyme, a laurel leaf, I teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon ground pepper. Cook over medium flame. Shell the raw crawfish and put them into the saucepan with a pinch of cayenne. Light 1/2 cup cognac and pour it in. Allow the crawfish to become red, then remove them. Add to the saucepan 3 cups dry white wine (preferably a Bordeaux). Reduce the sauce to about half. Then add the crawfish and 4 tablespoons tomato paste and cook for 10 minutes. Strain the sauce, bring to a boil but do not allow to boil, and add 1-1/2 cups butter in small pieces, stirring constantly.

Needless to say, the butter was omitted, the vegetables were cooked in 4 tablespoons olive oil, and 2 tablespoons were added at the last moment to make an unctuous sauce. Our reserve of 3 quarts olive oil was only exhausted shortly before walnut oil was purchasable on the black market. Walnut oil is delicious. Later it was replaced by hazel-nut oil which is more delicate.

The Germans disappeared after six weeks; we were in the southern zone. Requisitioning continued and before the autumn of 1940 any supplies that were not on the coupons were no longer to be found. The grocery stores were empty but before this had happened I had bought dried fruits, chicory to replace coffee, sardines, spices, com meal and cleaning materials. The autumn harvest in the vegetable garden would largely see us through the winter with the string beans and tomatoes I had put up. This is the way I learned to put up

TOMATOES AU NATUREL

Skin 28 lbs. tomatoes, cut through in both directions, then cut each of these four pieces in half. Put in a pan over a medium flame. Add 7 ozs. salicyclic acid which can be bought at any good chemist's. Carefully mix the acid and the tomatoes. Heat thoroughly, stirring constantly, but remove from stove before boiling point is reached. Fill jars with tomatoes. When cold pour 1/2 inch of oil on top of the tomatoes so that no air enters. Cover each jar with paper. This will keep the oil clean so that it may be used later in cooking the tomatoes. A foolproof recipe.

Our vegetable garden had been the prettiest one for miles about. I was very proud of it and of what it had produced. The hard work had exhausted me. Suddenly we realised that we were hungry but it was not mentioned. It was at this time that I dreamed one night of a long silver dish floating in the air and on it were three large slices of succulent ham. That was all. It haunted me for the six months that were to pass before the blessed black market was organised.

Friends would come out to have a cup of real China tea with us. With economy the ten pounds a friends had sent us from the United States in the summer of 1939 lasted until the Liberation. Gertrude Stein had bought for me all the American cigarettes she could find. If they weren't nourishing, they certainly acted as a stimulant at this time. Hospitality consisted in two cups of tea without sugar, milk or lemon and one cigarette. One sombre afternoon I saw the good Widow Roux who was our handyman going to the portals with a pail in either hand. What have you got there, I asked. Our dishwater for the Mother Vigne's pig, she answered. Listen, I said, you tell her if she isn't ready to sell us an egg a day you won't bring her any more dishwater for her pig. The Mother Vigne accepted the proposal and our diet was appreciably increased. It was manna from heaven. With reasonable calculation, if the Mother Vigne was now selling us one egg a day, in a short while when her hens began to lay normally again she would certainly be willing to sell us two a day. It was a comforting thought, but a few days before Christmas my hopes were shattered. The Mother Vigne's son told me that he was killing the pig [or the holidays. As they would no longer have any need for the dishwater his mother wanted to say that she was not selling us an egg each day. It was a blow. Perhaps something else would turn up.

The interminable winter dragged on. A friend or two ran the blockade and came down from Paris with news. But our most important news came from a friend, Hubert de R., who was in the Resistance. He would bicycle over from Savoie and lunch with us. The appetite of a husky man after pedalling eighteen miles in the snow on uncleared country roads had to be met as best one could. Hubert had a sweet tooth so a dessert was in order. One day I prepared for him what I called

RASPBERRY FLUMMERY

Two glasses raspberry jelly melted in a double boiler with 1-1/2 cups water to which is added the juice of 1/2 lemon and 2 or 3 sheets gelatine, depending upon their size, soaked in 1/2 cup water. Pour into a mould. When cold put in refrigerator. Turn out of mould to serve.

The flummery cried for cream. So did we.

Gelatine was rare but I had a large quantity in reserve. Hubert de R. enjoyed his dessert. Around the fire after lunch he said, That dessert was made with gelatine, wasn't it? Where do you find gelatine these days? There is none in Savoie. My wife no longer has any. His knowing anything about gelatine surprised me. When as he was leaving I gave him twenty sheets to take to his wife, he was more grateful than the small gift justified. It was not until some time later that he told us for what he had wanted the gelatine. He had needed it desperately for making false papers.

Gertrude Stein was still allowed to nm her car, transformed from gasoline burning to wood alcohol. One day we went over to take the Baronne Pierlot for a drive. She said she would like to stop at a little shop where she had heard they were selling rice on the black market. While her daughter-in-law was in the shop Madame Pierlot said, It remains to be seen what success she will have. Has she or has she not the right personality, for it is not with money that one buys on the black market but with one's personality. This was indeed true. Later Gertrude Stein when no one else did would return from a walk with an egg, a pound of white flour, a bit of butter. The cook and I would welcome her upon her return.

We heard nothing more of the black market until spring when a rumour reached us that across the valley in Artemarre the well-known chef B. was serving excellent food to his old clients. Gertrude Stein at once proposed that my birthday should be celebrated with a lunch party at Artemarre. We telephoned to B. and told him that we and some of our friends wanted to come over on a certain day to say how do you do to him. One was discreet on the telephone those days as one was everywhere else in public. He answered that he would be enchanted to see us all again, and as an afterthought asked how many we would be. So a dozen friends would meet us at Artemarre at one o'clock. Means of transportation were strange and varied. We would go over with the doctor and his wife in their little car -- doctors had a small ration of petrol -- and he would visit his patients on the way. Five of our guests drove over in their farmer's high two-wheeled trap driven by an enormous old nag the Germans had found useless at the time of the requisition. Two of our friends came in a miniature dog cart painted in all the colours of the rainbow drawn by a Shetland pony, all of which they had lately acquired for a large sum from a circus family encountered on the road. The others bicycled or walked over. In spite of the gloom of the Occupation we were delighted to meet again and to anticipate the feast B. was cooking for us. We had gone to see him in his kitchen where the unaccustomed fragrances and the menu he showed us were pleasurably exciting. This was the prodigious repast we sat down to:

Aspic de foie gras
Truites en chemise
Braised pigeons -- shoestring potatoes
Baron of spring lamb -- jardiniere of spring carrots -- onions -- asparagus tips -- string beans en barquette
Truffle salad
Wild-strawberry tart

B. obligingly had given me many years before his recipe for

TRUITES EN CHEMISE

Each trout is slit down the belly, emptied, washed and dried, and stuffed with as many chopped mushrooms as it will hold moistened with a squeeze of lemon juice, and I tablespoon cream per 1/2 lb. fish seasoned with salt and pepper. The opening is then carefully skewered together. Bake in enough melted butter to float them in a 480 ͦ oven for 15 minutes, basting three or four times. The fish should be cooked through but not browned. Take from the oven and drain. Roll in a crepe, folding the sides of the crepe in. Place on a metal dish over boiling water covered with waxed paper. Serve hot.

CREPES

Sift 2 cups flour into a bowl, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon, slowly add 5 slightly beaten eggs, 1/4 cup tepid water, 1/4 cup beer, 1 tablespoon rum, 1 tablespoon kirsch and 1/4 teaspoon salt. The paste should be perfectly smooth before putting aside for 4 hours. Then stir again thoroughly. Heat small iron sheet over medium flame. Melt butter the size of a hazel nut and spread with a pastry brush. Pour 2 tablespoons paste on the sheet and cook until the underside is pale gold. Turn over with a wide wooden spatula on to the sheet which has been lightly brushed with butter. When the second side is pale gold, take off, place on a heated platter, put a cooked trout on one end and roll the crepe around it. Trim off with scissors any unsightly ends. Put aside on the serving dish covered with waxed paper. Wipe the iron sheet clean and continue with each crepe in turn, not forgetting to butter the sheet for each side of the crepe.

It does not take much experience to become expert in making crepes. It requires a light quick movement. We had a cook who tossed the crepes high into the air. She liked our friends to come to the kitchen door and see her do her little trick. An Indo-Chinese cook we had did not use a spatula either. He simply turned them deftly by hand.

Before lunch was served we all talked at once. There was a great deal to tell each other of what had been happening during the many weeks since our last reunion. But as soon as lunch was served a silence of astonishment, contemplation and satisfaction descended upon us. This is typical of the French, particularly in the provinces. No one talks as the first course is served. Frank discussion of the food that is served is also characteristic of the French. It is not considered bad manners. What is, is the way we Americans do not eat all we have on our plates. This they consider unpardonable. They have, however, by taking a small portion, the opportunity of compensation from the invariable habit of a second serving. After so long a fast we were pleased to indulge in more food than was perhaps going to be good for us. Someone remarked that fasts should be broken by a glass of orange or tomato juice. Eat, drink and be merry, said I. Ah, if one were only certain in these days of dying from overeating. One remembered the packages of food one was sending to war and political prisoners and felt conscience-stricken at the overabundance of our feast. We did nevertheless recover our high spirits before we parted, having thanked B. for his sumptuous though delicate lunch and promised to return soon.

That lunch was the beginning of the excitement and gratification that came to us gradually from provisions secured on the black market. In late May our friend of the circus cart -- it was now sedately painted dark blue -- and pony drove over to see us. Would we share half a lamb with her. A farmer near her home was clandestinely killing two tomorrow, one for himself and one for her. She would be glad to divide hers with us. Naturally we accepted. She would make the best terms possible with the farmer. The next morning she drove over again with a sack at her feet. She, I and the good Widow Roux did our first butchering. Keeping out some chops for our lunch, we put the rest of the precious beast into the refrigerator. Would such a windfall reoccur? To our surprise it did. Not too soon to be sure for us not to have to return to lean days and even weeks, but we had mysterious visits from unknown men and women with odd bits of frequently unknown food -- that is, pigs in pokes. La Veuve Roux would come to say there was someone in the kitchen who wished to speak to me. Or she would have a quarter of a pound of butter, a sausage, a quart of milk, sweetbreads and brains, all greatly appreciated. A sheep's head was a feast for the poodle. For some time we had strange and varied food. Then we Americans came into the war, and our landlord, an officer in the French Army, required his home and we were forced to move. We were broken-hearted to have to leave Bilignin. Friends found us a house at Culoz and we moved there the day the Germans occupying the southern zone came into Belley. At Culoz we should be less favoured. We had no acquaintances there and the country round about was less productive, only there would be more fine dry white wine. On the large property there was no vegetable garden. It would be starting over from scratch. With the house went two servants, a very fine cook who announced at once that she could not cook with the scanty materials the coupons allowed. She was not encouraged when she was told that the black market would largely supplement them. She was old, tired and pessimistic. So it fell upon me to do most of the cooking while a great cook sat by indifferent, inert and too discouraged to pay attention when I tried to show her how to make

A RESTRICTED VEAL LOAF

One cup chopped veal, 3 cups breadcrumbs soaked in a dry white wine (Glory be for the inexhaustible provision of it)!, 1/4 teaspoon pepper, 1/2 teaspoon powdered basil, 1/2 teaspoon powdered tarragon, 1/2 teaspoon powdered chervil, 1 teaspoon powdered parsley, 1/4 teaspoon powdered bay leaf, 2 chopped onions, 3 chopped shallots and 1 treasured egg. Mix thoroughly, form into a loaf with a greased knife and place in greased earthenware dish. Bake in 375 ͦ oven for an hour basting with dry white wine.

The herbs were from the vegetable garden at Bilignin, dried and powdered and kept in airtight jars. They suggested a meat flavour. Their general use at this time, and not only in France, is I think the reason that herbs are so popular today.



HOME-MADE MUSTARD

Pound in a mortar 1 tablespoon chopped parsley, 1 tablespoon chopped tarragon, 1 teaspoon chopped chervil and 1/2 cup mustard seed. When reduced to a powder strain through a fine sieve and slowly add 1 tablespoon oil and 1 tablespoon vinegar. Stir thoroughly and keep covered. In season the strained juice of gooseberries or currants may be substituted for the vinegar. These make a delicious mustard but it will not keep long.

The mustard seeds had been a chance purchase one day when there was nothing else to be found. Two pounds of them permitted all our friends to partake of a relish that had disappeared long before.

In the village two of the shopkeepers were to become very useful to me. They said it was their patriotic duty to sell what the Germans forbade. In which case was it not mine to purchase what they offered? The country boys went down to the Rhone and fished clandestinely. They not only brought fish to the kitchen door but flour, lard, nuts in small quantities, and an occasional hare or rabbit. We gave lunch parties. The cook cheered up a bit, though she grumbled that there was nothing to cook anything with but the inevitable white wine.

Suddenly we had Germans billeted upon us, two officers and their orderlies. Hastily rooms were prepared for them in a wing of the house far removed from our bedrooms. Provisions were hidden, but there was not enough time to gather together and put away the many English books scattered throughout the rooms. In the best guest room there was a charming coloured English engraving of Benjamin Franklin demonstrating one of his discoveries on a lake in an English park. The Germans did not notice it, but one of the Italian officers billeted upon us later spoke of it appreciatively.

When the orderlies came into the kitchen to prepare their officers' meals the cook went white with rage. How the Germans cooked has no place in a cook-book, but their menu eaten three times a day is offered as a curiosity. Per man: 1 large slice of ham 1-1/2 inches thick heated in deep fat, the gelatinous-glutinous contents of a pint tin (replacing bread and potatoes?), the muddy liquid contents of a large tin (replacing coffee?). Three times a day the orderlies would carry these meals into an empty room adjoining their bedrooms. Apparently the officers sat at table and ate with their orderlies. One day an orderly gave the cook a tin of the substitute for bread and potatoes. She in turn gave it to our most treasured possessions, four hens. They ran eagerly toward it, pecked at it and walked away. The cook, delighting in the geste of her French hens, threw the mess into the mountain torrent that ran around two sides of the house.

After two weeks, the Germans billeted upon us left. We gave a deep sigh of relief.

The Germans had requisitioned the automobiles in Culoz, including the two taxis, but occasionally when the Mayor had to go over to Belley or someone had to go into hospital there Gertrude Stein and I would be tucked away in the car. And once in Belley we would have an orgy of seeing our friends and of running in provisions. The cake shop and confectioner was famous not only throughout the Bugey but throughout France, particularly for

TRUFFLES DE CHAMBERY

Melt 1/4 lb. chocolate over boiling water, add 2 tablespoons butter and 1-1/2 tablespoons powdered sugar. Stir until sugar is melted. Remove from boiling water and add the yolks of 2 eggs one at a time, stirring constantly. Add 2 teaspoons rum and mix thoroughly. Put away in a cool place (not the refrigerator) for 12 hours. Then shape into small balls and roll in powdered chocolate. This makes a very small quantity. They are exquisite.

Madame Peycru ran the store, her husband stayed in the kitchen. She had cakes under the counters -- what was shown was for the Occupation Forces -- not good enough for you, she said to me as she served them. She would gaily pass me a package with an outer wrapping of newspaper.

Finally the Germans relinquished two broken-down buses which made a daily trip from Culoz to BeIley and return. It was then that Madame Peycru proposed to send us cakes. I went to the bus stop to retrieve the first one. Intending to be discreet, she had addressed it to The Two American Ladies in Culoz. Not one of the two hundred and fifty Germans and their officers stationed at Culoz suspected our nationality, the French authorities having destroyed our papers and done everything possible to protect us. There was nothing to do but to hope for the best and to take the bus over to BeIley to warn Madame Peycru neither to put either of our names on the package nor to mention our nationality. The conductor of the bus would leave it at the cafe where one of us would pick it up.

As the dreary dismal months dragged on provisioning became easier and more abundant, except for meat and butter. More people came to see us, even from Lyon, which is seventy miles distant. All in the Resistance, naturally. They brought chicory to replace the bird seed our coupons provided as coffee. In return there were eggs for them, and if warned in advance the baker at Belley would send over a

BRIOCHE

Sift 2 cups flour into a bowl, add 3 eggs, stir with a wooden spoon until completely smooth. Continuing to stir add 1 more egg, 4 tablespoons milk in which 1 cup sugar has been mixed with 1 tablespoon rum and 3 teaspoons baking powder dissolved in 1 tablespoon water. Mix thoroughly. Add 3/4 cup softened butter. Mix well, put aside for 12 hours in a cool spot (not in the refrigerator). Pour into deep round buttered mould and bake for about 30 minutes in 375 ͦ oven. These brioches are very nice baked in very small muffin tins, for about 20 minutes in 350 ͦ oven.

Little by little we had a greater abundance of food. We acknowledged that we were no longer hungry, but there was a hopeless monotony in the menus. Fish was our most substantial and nourishing food. It was a protracted, indeed a perpetual, Lent. After a raid on Belley some exceptional delicacy might be the spoil. A few slices of sausage or an infinitesimal piece of cheese could only add a faint flavour to a dish. It was then that I betook myself to the passionate reading of elaborate recipes in very large cook-books. Through the long winter evenings close to the inadequate fire the recipes for food that there was no possibility of realising held me fascinated -- forgetful of restrictions, even occasionally of the Occupation, of the black cloud over and about one, of a possible danger one refused to face. The great French chefs and their creations were very real. Gertrude Stein had the habit of giving me for Christmas a very important cook-book -- even during the Occupation she would surprise me with one. When all communication with Paris was forbidden, the 1,479 pages of Montagne's and Salle's The Great Book of the Kitchen passed across the line with more intelligence than is usually credited to inanimate objects. Though there was not one ingredient obtainable it was abundantly satisfying to pore over its pages, imagination being as lively as it is. This is their recipe for

TOURNEDOS MARGOT

Allow for each person a slice weighing 1/4 lb., after fat and skin have been removed, of tender loin of beef from the centre. Fry in butter on both sides over a quick fire to sear the outside but leave the centre rare. Salt to taste. Remove from the pan when done and place on each slice the caps of very large mushrooms previously cooked in butter. On these place finely cut truffles in a cream sauce. The tender loin slices and their filled mushroom caps are served on a mound of Anna potatoes.

The truffles are peeled, diced and cooked in butter very slowly in a covered saucepan for 15 minutes, shaking the pan frequently. Add 1 teaspoon best brandy for 1/4 lb. truffles, cover with boiling cream and again bring to a boil. Remove the truffles. While the cream is reducing in the uncovered saucepan add 1 tablespoon thick white sauce. When the cream has been reduced to half its quantity replace the truffles in the sauce. Allow to come to a boil. Remove from fire and stir in I tablespoon butter cut in small pieces. Fill the mushroom caps with the truffles and their sauce.

Anna potatoes should be firm, the kind suitable for frying. Peel and cut into 1/8-inch slices. Put overlapping in layers in very well-buttered low moulds not much wider than the fillets of beef. Pour melted clarified butter between the layers and on top of the last layer. Cover hermetically and cook in a 400° oven for 20 minutes. Turn upside-down and cook for 10 minutes longer. Remove from mould, discarding superfluous butter. Place under the fillets with their truffle-filled mushroom caps and serve at once.

One day the cook told me she had in her possession the manuscript cook-book of the grandfather of our landlady, Monsieur Lucien Tendret, a well-known judge and a famous gourmet, author of Food in the Country of Brillat-Savarin. Gertrude Stein had been given a copy of this delectable book by a grandson of the author. We used to speak of translating it into English. It is of course not a proper cook-book, as the book the cook proposed to allow me to read was. The recipes are exciting to read but are not useful even today. Take for instance

LOBSTER, BREAST OF CHICKEN AND BLACK TRUFFLE SALAD

Pour into a salad bowl the best olive oil, white-wine vinegar, 4 tablespoons juice of roasted turkey, 1/2 teaspoon tarragon mustard, the interior of a lobster, salt and pepper. Turn until perfectly smooth. Put into this the sliced lobster meat, sliced breast of a steamed skinned capon, sliced breast of a roast turkey, also skinned, and of three young partridges (keep the finest slices for decorating), thin slices of truffles previously cooked in excellent dry white wine, the same of mushrooms and a quantity of shelled crawfish. Cover with a layer of the white leaves of escarole or endive. Arrange one more layer and on the second layer of escarole tastefully arrange the reserved slices of breast, a few narrow strips of ham from which the fat has been removed, some large slices of truffles and of mushrooms, a border of shelled crawfish, 1 tablespoon capers washed in white wine, and 1 cup stoned green olives. In the centre arrange a tower of very stiff mayonnaise surmounted by the largest truffle. With this salad the best dry champagne should be served very cold but not iced.

By the autumn of 1943 food was no longer a subject. We were impatiently waiting for the invasion and liberation. In 1940 I had accumulated amongst other prized provisions 4 lbs. citron, candied orange and lemon peel, pineapple and cherries and 2 lbs. raisins, all of which I had put into two well-covered glass jars. Our friends knew of this cache and that it was being saved for a Liberation fruit cake. From time to time I would look at the jars to see that the fruit was not getting dry. They cheered me greatly during the increasingly dismal days of that winter and the early spring of 1944. Spring finally did come. Even a potato blight on the early plants didn't discourage us -- we picked the wretched beetles off by hand. When the Resistance derailed the engine of a train entirely composed of huge vats of Spanish wine destined for Switzerland our Mayor, fearing he would be unable to safeguard it, requisitioned the wine. He divided it among the 250 members of the local Occupation Forces and the 1,500-odd inhabitants. We each received twelve quarts. Gertrude Stein's and my share were put aside for Liberation festivities. The servants, no mean connoisseurs, reported that it was indeed very good.

Just when the communiques were getting almost unbearably exciting, two officers and thirty soldiers of the Italian army were billeted upon us, the officers in the house naturally and the soldiers in the garages and chauffeur's quarters -- worrisomely near the vegetable garden and fruit trees. Would they respect what was missing from their army rations? Their captain said they would and surprisingly they did. Occasionally one of them would come to talk to me while I was working among the vegetables, the wind wafting savoury and tantalizing odours of minestrone from a huge pot cooking under the trees below. Presently the soldiers were selling me on the black market such cigarettes as they could spare, a most welcome relief from my tobacco less state. I had been smoking something called garden tobacco. The Germans gave a limited ration of tobacco plants to men, none to women. There were no proper facilities for drying or for cutting the leaves, but we smoked anything we could roll except fig leaves, which had poisoned a friend. The Italian tobacco was agreeable, convenient and plentiful; our young maid found the soldiers equally so. The two officers bil1eted upon us sent over three pounds of Parmesan cheese. We were overcome by the sight of it and invited everyone to a party to eat (an abbreviated)

FONDUE

Wash and peel 5 ozs. truffles cut in small dice. Cook in 2 ozs. butter stirring constantly. Put aside. Separate whites from yolks of 12 eggs and strain each into separate bowls. Stir the yolks thoroughly. Beat the whites until they no longer pour from the bowl. Add the yolks slowly to the whites. Salt and pepper. Add 1/4 lb. butter cut in small pieces, 1/4 lb. grated cheese and truffles. Put 1/2 cup good stock into a deep porcelain or Pyrex saucepan. When it boils, pour into it the eggcheese- truffle mixture. Beat with a wire whisk. When it commences to thicken remove from flame continuing to beat until the cream is perfectly smooth. Then add 1/2 cup more stock. Cut 1/2 lb. butter into small pieces. Replace on a very low flame continuing to whisk. It should be absolutely smooth. Add 1 small glass best kirsch. Serve on hot plates at once.

Only a quarter of the butter required was available, which made the fondue less unctuous than it should have been, but even so it was quite a feast to taste a fondue again.

The Italians stayed until their country accepted the Armistice. When they heard the news, they tore up their military papers and left singing. There were about six hundred Italian soldiers in the neighbourhood and the frontier was only 125 kilometres away. We hoped they would cross it safely. Later we heard that they had all been killed by the Germans.

Events were precipitating themselves in the happiest confusion. The northern landing had taken place. The Germans knew we knew. Discretion was thrown to the winds. We thought we heard someone singing the Marseillaise. That afternoon we were informed that over a hundred Germans were to be billeted upon us. Almost immediately they were at the gates, five officers and seven noncoms to be lodged in the house, the men on the terraces and in the gardens. Gertrude Stein with her manuscript and the poodle were whisked upstairs to the bedroom. The servants and I brought down the mattresses for the noncoms and prepared the beds and rooms for the officers, whose dogs were roving about the house as their nags and donkeys were roaming in the flower beds. It was a hideous confusion. That night the Germans ate cold army rations. The next morning they killed a calf on the terrace nearest the house and cooked it on an improvised spit. In the afternoon they left after helping themselves to our small supplies and souvenirs. The jars of candied fruits were safely hidden in the linen closet. That meant a lot to me -- they were a symbol of the happier days soon to come.

Within six weeks after the Germans left the southern landing had taken place. We were jubilant. Our army or at any rate part of it would pass us on the way north.

The Resistance had not only disrupted the railroad tracks but had blown up the main highway in several places. Gertrude Stein returned from the village one afternoon excitedly announcing that the Germans had placed machine guns all over the square and on the four roads leading from it and that soldiers were coming into the village. Well, said I, we won't sleep tonight. It will all be over by morning. But nothing happened. In the morning the guns had disappeared. When we heard over the radio that Paris was liberated we were wild with excitement. The end was near. So the boys of the Resistance came down quietly from their mountain top one morning, drove the seven hundred Germans from Culoz and the neighbourhood into the marshes, surrounded them and wiped them out. It was glorious, classic, almost Biblical. We celebrated by taking one of the liberated taxis to Belley. Home-made flags were flying from windows -- not only the tricolour but the stars and stripes, the number of stars and stripes varying according to the amount of dye procurable. Our friends were as excited as we were. There was a rumour that the First French Army and the Seventh American were at Grenoble, only forty-five miles away. Anything could happen now to the degree that when I thought I saw a jeep stop at the kerb I believed it was, and it was. It was the first jeep I'd ever seen, but it surely was one for there were undeniably two American soldiers in it. We flew over to them. They wanted us to put them on their road. We at once requisitioned them for dinner and the night -- as they would have to dine and sleep somewhere, why not at our house. We had a triumphant entry at Culoz and at the house. The servants cried and curtsied and hailed them as nos Liberateurs. Impossible to calm the cook. Finally she agreed to go back to the kitchen to prepare a dinner, the first in four years, saying, Do not worry, madam, now I can cook even if there is no cream and not enough butter and eggs. This was her menu:

Trout in aspic
Chicken a l'estragon
Tomato and lettuce salad
Chocolate souffle
Wild strawberries
Black coffee

For the liberators neighbours had been willing to sell her a chicken, eggs and butter. Our American colonel and his driver contributed the chocolate and coffee.

This is the way the cook prepared

CHICKEN A L'ESTRAGON

Put the neck, gizzard, liver, heart, two feet and two first joints 0'£ the wings into 2 inches more cold water than to cover. Put uncovered over very low flame and bring slowly to the boil. Skim very carefully. Do not cover until all the skim has been removed. Then add a carrot cut in small pieces, a medium-sized onion with a clove stuck in it, a small bunch of celery leaves, a stalk of parsley, 6 whole peppers, salt and a very small piece of whole nutmeg. The contents of the saucepan should be well covered with water. Cover and cook slowly for 2 hours.

Truss the chicken, brown lightly on all sides in butter in a Dutch oven over medium flame. When browned, cover, reduce flame, place water in the cover and allow the bird to sweat in its own juice for 20 minutes, then add 1/2 cup hot dry white wine, 1/2 oz. washed tarragon. Add when needed for basting a little of the giblet broth. The chicken should cook from 1 to 2 hours according to its size and age.

Before serving prepare enough washed tarragon leaves to decorate the breast of the chicken in an Indian tree pattern. It is a pleasing way to present it. Place the chicken on the serving platter. If necessary add more of the gizzard broth. Pour a few tablespoons of it into 3 well-stirred egg yolks and add this to the juice in the Dutch oven, stir carefully while heating thoroughly but do not allow it to boil. Serve in a sauce boat.

The next day two friends bicycled over from Belley to lunch with us and to taste the Spanish wine. The cook was in excellent form, she was cooking us the most fantastic food. For lunch she had suggested as dessert a puff-paste tart with a Frangipani cream. We were at table when the maid suddenly burst in crying, The American army, they are at the door. Tell them to come in, we said. They are washing their hands, she answered. Gertrude Stein and I went and welcomed them. One of them was Siberard, whom we had known in Paris, another was Frank Gervasi, for whom we felt an immediate friendliness. It was a very gay lunch indeed, though our French friends spoke no English. Siberard had come to ask Gertrude Stein to speak on the radio to the United States from the American station just installed at Voiron, which she was delighted to do. However did you know where to find her, I asked. We had a general idea, Siberard said, but we got lost. A jeep happened to come along and we asked them. The colonel seemed surprised we did not know the way. It was he who put us on the road here.

The Frangipani tart was a successful climax to the extensible lunch. The tart was a very large square one. On each corner were small French and American flags. The cook had made them of paper with two coloured pencils that she had borrowed. She had sat up until midnight making quantities of them, knowing the pencils were not going to last long.

FRANGIPANI TART

Bake a puff-paste crust in a square cake tin, lightly moisten the sides so the dough will adhere to them. It should be deep enough to hold plenty of cream. For the cream stir 4 eggs and 8 yolks, add 1 cup sugar and stir, 2 cups flour, stir until thoroughly amalgamated. Slowly add 1-1/2 quarts scalded milk. Place in double boiler. Stir until quite thick. Remove from heat and continue to stir while very slowly adding 1/2 cup butter cut in small pieces, 4 macaroons dried and rolled to a powder, 1 teaspoon orange-flower water and 2 tablespoons best Jamaica rum (this last was the invention of the cook). Shortly before serving spread evenly into completely cold puff-paste crust and sprinkle with powdered sugar.

Frangipani cream is supposed to have been created by an Italian named Frangipani who lived in Paris during the early seventeenth century.

They called for us in a jeep, in fact two jeeps, to go to Voiron where Gertrude Stein was to speak on the radio. We lunched at the Officers' Mess on almost forgotten American food -- ham and eggs, tinned corn, sweet pickles, biscuits and tinned California peaches, coffee with evaporated milk -- a memorable lunch it was with our liberators.

It reminded me that the long-promised fruit cake had not yet been made. So much had been happening that there had not been sufficient time to weigh and chop the necessary ingredients.

The day after the expedition to Voiron Gertrude Stein said we would go over to Aix-les-Bains without police papers to see how beautiful it must be without 8,000 Occupants. As we were walking out of the station, some American soldiers got out of a jeep and came up to Gertrude Stein to ask her for her autograph. They were evidently the first Americans in Aix-les-Bains for quite a crowd had gathered about them as she scribbled her name for them. One of them said, You live near here, don't you, Miss Stein. May we not come to see you if we ever get near here again. Then they introduced themselves, one major and three colonels Several colonels have come to see me, Gertrude Stein said. Now I would like a general. So far no general has come to see me. One of the officers said, We are on the staff of a general, General Patch, who commands the Seventh Army. I would like him to come to see me. You tell him I would. You tell him that if he does we will give him a chicken lunch. With that we parted and promptly forgot the meeting. To our surprise, about a week after, one afternoon another colonel came with a message from General Patch to thank Gertrude Stein for her invitation to a chicken lunch which he hoped to be able to accept when the war was over, for if possible he would then be going to Aix where he had spent a happy leave during the other war. There was nothing but a very plain cake indeed to give to the colonel to take to the general, but I got the latter's military address so that I might send him

LIBERATION FRUIT CAKE

A day in advance cut in slivers 1-1/2 lbs. citron, 1 lb. cherries. Wash, dry and cover with brandy 2 lbs. white currants. Put aside. Blanch, dry and chop 1-1/2 lbs. almonds. Put these aside separately. The next day, thoroughly cream 1 lb. butter, add slowly 1 lb. sugar stirring until very light. Add the yolks of 12 eggs one by one. Drain and dry the raisins. Add to the prepared fruits. Sieve 1 lb. flour, put enough of it on the fruits to which the raisins have been added to make sure they do not stick together. Put the fruits in a sieve and remove all the superfluous flour. Add the flour in the sieve to the remaining flour, to which add 2 teaspoons cinnamon, 1 teaspoon mace, 1 teaspoon nutmeg and 1/2 teaspoon cloves. Slowly sift the flour into the butter-sugar-egg mixture, stirring thoroughly after each addition. Add the ground almonds, 1 cup best brandy and 1/4 cup rose- or orange-flower water. Beat the whites of 12 eggs and fold lightly but thoroughly into the dough. Then fold in the floured fruits and raisins. Put into buttered pan or pans, lined with buttered brown paper. This quantity makes about 12 lbs. Bake for about 4 hours according to size of pan or pans.

A fruit cake should have an inch of almond paste spread over the top before frosting the entire cake. This is not gilding the lily, it is only bringing its perfume more pronouncedly to your attention.

ALMOND PASTE

Pound in a mortar until reduced to a paste 1/2 lb. blanched almonds that have been wiped dry. Put them in a heavy enamelled saucepan with 1 lb. sugar, 1 teaspoon orange-flower water and 1 teaspoon vanilla. Stir thoroughly over very low flame until the sugar is melted and the paste is smooth. Remove from flame, place on a marble slab or table lightly sprinkled with powdered sugar, knead in 2 tablespoons powdered sugar. Spread with a moist knife on top of the cake or cakes.

It had been possible to secure all the necessary ingredients for the Liberation Cake with the exception of the almonds. Hazel nuts and walnuts were the only nuts that grew in the Bugey. Walnuts were discarded because of their heavy flavour. The easiest way to blanch hazel nuts is to put them into the oven but that would have dried them. There was nothing to do but to remove their skins by plunging them a few at a time into boiling water -- two pounds in all. It took a long time but the substitution of hazel nuts for almonds was successful. When I have time, I still use it.

With the cake sent off to the general whose army had liberated the Bugey the Occupation was over -- whatever the unknown restrictions to come might be.

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Part 1 of 2

12. Recipes from Friends



APPETISER

FANIA MARINOFF
New York

HERB BUTTER

(to be spread on biscuits or crackers)

Grind or mince finely equal amounts of fresh parsley, fresh dill, 1 green pepper, raw spinach or dandelion greens, green tops of scallions, shallots or leeks, and watercress. Season with salt, pepper, paprika, garlic, thyme and tarragon (fresh, if you have it). Bind with soft butter and mayonnaise.

SOUPS

MADAME M. G. DEBAR
La Regie
Soye-en-Septaine

MUSSEL SOUP A LA REGIE

Put the scrubbed and washed mussels at once into a casserole that has been lined with minced onions and garlic, put between layers of mussels other minced onions, garlic and a few thin slices of carrots. Add some good white wine. Let the mussels cook for 1/4 hour. Keep the casserole hot. Remove the juice in which the mussels have cooked. Thicken lightly with flour, add slowly to this sauce 3/4 cup cream in which the yolks of 2 eggs have been mixed. Taste and add salt if necessary -- in any case add a powerful pinch of pepper!

Serve the mussels directly from the casserole, the sauce separately, as well as slices of bread browned in butter and generously rubbed with garlic.

With a Rhine wine, if possible, this dish can boast of being without reproach.

DORA MAAR
Paris

LAUREL-LEAF SOUP

Boil a branch of laurel with its leaves in a saucepan for 20 minutes. Remove the laurel. Stir 1 yolk of egg to every 2 cups of the laurel water. Add a little hot water to the yolk of egg, stir and add laurel water. Heat but do not allow to boil. Serve. Croutons may be added to soup.

An invigorating soup, served during the winter in Provence.

MADAME JOSEPH DELTEIL
Grabels

IBIZA SOUP

For 4. Heat in a little olive oil a little salted pork, or 3 slices of bacon. Add 1 medium-sized onion cut in very thin slices, add 8 or 9 cups water, salt and pepper, a handful of pounded almonds, a clove of crushed garlic and 4 large potatoes cut as for frying -- lengthwise -- about 10 slices to each potato. When the potatoes are cooked add the juice of 1/2 lemon and 1 wine-glass Malaga or any other sweet white wine, and 2 pinches of saffron. Finally drop 1 egg per person into the soup and let poach and serve.

Found and eaten with delight in the island of Ibiza.

ALGONQUIN HOTEL
New York

These two soups supplied by the chef through the kindness of the so amiable maitre d'hotel Georges at Gertrude Stein's request.

CREAM OF FRESH MUSHROOM SOUP

An equal amount of onions, leeks and celery chopped fine. Also fresh mushrooms. Mix together in a pot with butter and simmer partly. Then add 1 or 2 tablespoons flour. Stir while heating through. Add stock and cool for I hour. Strain and add some cream.

ALGONQUIN SPECIAL SOUP
(serve cold)

Put some butter in a pan with some Indian curry powder. Stir until curry and butter are mixed well. Then add some chicken broth and let boil for 10 minutes. Finally mix the yolk of 1 egg with plain cream for each cup of soup.

ENTREES

SIR FRANCIS ROSE, BART.

Paris

CHINESE EGGS

1. Boil eggs for 5 minutes.

2. Remove shells carefully and cook in sherry for 5 minutes.

3. Put eggs in covered casserole with butter and 3 large spoonfuls soya sauce, and cook until dark brown.

FROM THE SAME SOURCE

LEMON SALAD

Boil lemons until soft in a lot of very salty water. Drain and let cool and cut them. Mix them with cooked cut-up artichoke stems and hearts, salted almonds, 1 coffee-spoon honey and 2 large spoons oil. Sprinkle with lemon juice.

DR FERNANDA PIVANO-SOTTSASS
Milan

GNOCCHI ALLA ROMANA

3/4 lb. semolina.
3 ozs. butter.
5 ozs. Parmesan cheese.
1 glass milk.

Cook the semolina in water and milk for 40 minutes. Spread it on a wet marble slab stretching it well with a wet wooden spoon until it is about 2/3 inch thick. When it is quite cold divide it into small rounds. Grease a baking tin and put the gnocchi on it, spreading them with butter and grated cheese. Continue to put layers of them, covering each with butter and cheese. Put the baking tin in already warmed oven and leave for 30 minutes.

VIRGIL THOMSON
New York

SHAD-ROE MOUSSE

Remove the flesh from 2 lbs. fresh halibut and put the bones, odd bits, and skin into an enamel saucepan with a small lump of butter, onion chopped fine, a little bouquet of parsley, a bay leaf, a tiny pinch of thyme, a few peppercorns, 3 cups water and 1 cup white wine. Put on the fire to simmer. This liquid is to use later in the making of a sauce. Put the raw flesh through the meat grinder, add the unbeaten whites of 6 eggs, and mash the whole thing through a very fine sieve. Add some salt and pepper and stir until it thickens a bit, then gradually add 1 pint cream. In the meantime, cook for about 20 minutes 2 or 3 pair shad roes slowly in a frying pan with plenty of butter. Carefully remove the skin and veins. Mash the roe lightly and add to the fish-paste. Mix well. Add another cup of cream and then season to taste.

Butter two medium-sized fish-shaped moulds and decorate the bottom with strips of red pimiento. Fill the moulds with the mousse, packing it well down into all the crevices. Set the mould into the refrigerator and keep there until 40 minutes before you will be ready to serve. At that time place the moulds in a pan of hot water, cover with a piece of buttered white paper, and set in a moderate oven (about 400°) to cook.

In the meantime, make the foundation for your sauce by putting 1/2 cup butter into an enamel pan to melt. Stir in 3/4 cup flour and cook for a minute or two without browning. Add gradually the strained fish stock of which there should be about 3 cups. Continue to cook in a double boiler until ready to serve. Then, add the yolks of 2 eggs beaten up with 3/4 cup cream, stirring continuously and making sure it doesn't cook any more. At the last minute, add a little paprika and stir in I cup good sherry and the juice of 1 lemon. Pour around the mousses, which have first been carefully emptied from the moulds on to warm platters. Garnish and serve at once.

June Platt recipe

FROM THE SAME SOURCE

GNOCCHI ALLA PIEMONTESE

2 lbs. white potatoes (of the kind which fall to bits).
5 ozs. fine flour.
1/2 lb. fontina (soft, melting cheese).
1 egg.
3-1/2 ozs. butter.

Boil the potatoes for about an hour. Peel them and sieve them or mash them. Put them on the table and knead them with flour, adding the egg. Divide the mixture in small pieces, the size of walnuts. Curl them on the fork.

Meanwhile you'll have prepared the fontina, sliced finely and put in milk for about an hour to make it very soft. Plunge the gnocchi in a saucepan of boiling water and leave them to boil for about 3 minutes; they will come to the top by themselves. Get the dish ready with a layer of the finely sliced, milked fontina and butter and put the strained gnocchi in layers, covering each with fontina and butter, and mixing each layer before doing the next one.

FROM THE SAME SOURCE

PORK "ALLA PIZZAIOLA" OF CALABRIA

Enough for 5 people.

1 lb. sliced pork.
1 tin (2 ozs.) peeled tomatoes.
1 oz. salted anchovies.
1 oz. capers.
2 ozs. parsley.
A pinch of salt.

Brown the pork in 3 tablespoons butter and take it off as soon as done. Finely mince the capers, anchovies and parsley and put them into the butter. Add the tomatoes and about 1 wine-glass water. When the mixture begins to boil, add the pork which was put aside and cooked for an hour on a slow fire.

MADAME GASTON CHABOUX

Belley

TRUFFLE TURNOVERS

Prepare a short or puff paste. Roll it out to 1/6 inch thickness. Brush and wash the truffles without peeling them, cut them in dice of 1/6 inch thickness, place them on a slice of fat side of pork which has been heated in a frying pan, cover the truffles with a very thin slice of Swiss cheese, fold them in the dough in the shape of turnovers. Bake in the oven or fry in deep fat.

FROM THE SAME SOURCE

CHICKEN-LIVER CUSTARD

Pound in a mortar 2 or 3 chicken livers, add 4 or 5 eggs, 2 cups milk. Mix thoroughly, salt and pepper. Strain through a fine sieve. Pour into an oiled mould. Cook in the oven, the mould standing in a pan of hot water. Serve with a tomato or crawfish sauce.

GEORGES MARATIER
Paris

LIVER CUSTARD

1. Prepare a fairly thick Bechamel sauce.

2. Two chicken livers, or a rabbit's.

3. Chop fine: parsley, a clove of garlic.

4. Mix these together.

5. Add 3 yolks of eggs. Beat the whites, and pour all this into a well-buttered mould.

6. Put in a bain-marie in a medium oven for 1/2 hour.

7. Prepare a hot tomato sauce with butter and flour, black olives and chopped mushrooms.

8. Remove custard from the mould and cover it with the sauce.

Serve hot with a cold Alsatian wine.

FROM THE SAME SOURCE

VEAL KIDNEYS

1 veal kidney.
2 tablespoons butter.
1 dessertspoon cornflour.
1 tablespoon mustard.
1/4 cup gin.
Salt.
Pepper.

Clean and cut the kidney in dice. Put butter the size of a walnut in a cocotte, and lightly brown the kidney. Light the gin in the cocotte, having previously removed the blood. Cover the cocotte and remove from fire.

Make a sauce by melting the rest of the butter, add the cornflour which has been mixed with the blood, then add the mustard, salt and pepper. Pour this mixture into the cocotte and finish cooking without permitting it to boil.

MARY OLIVER

London

FONDUE DE BALE

Heat 1 lb. Gruyere cheese and 1 dessertspoon butter over chafing dish. Stirring carefully, add 1/2 bottle Riesling wine. Keep stirring, add 1 liqueur glass kirsch. Continue to stir and add 1 teaspoon powdered mustard. Serve with toast or bread cut in small squares. Place bread on fork and dip bread into fondue. Keep fondue warm but not so hot as to scorch. Riesling wine well chilled should be drunk with this. Fondue should not be served on plates. Each person should dip his bread into the communal bowl.

FISH

MRS. GILBERT WHIPPLE CHAPMAN
New York

SHAD ROE

1/2 cup lemon juice.
3/4 cup butter.
Salt and pepper.
1/2 bottle walnut catsup.
1/4 bottle (small size) Worcestershire sauce.
2 pairs shad roe.

Parboil the shad roes and cut them in half lengthwise. Lay aside to keep warm. Melt the butter in a frying pan, and pour in the lemon juice and cook for nearly 20 minutes until the acid liquid has boiled off the lemon juice and there remains a light-brown syrup. Pour in 1/4 bottle Worcestershire sauce (small size) and 1/2 bottle walnut catsup and cook for 2 or 3 minutes. Lay in the shad roes face up and cook for 2 or 3 minutes, basting at the same time. Place the shad roes on a platter and pour in a little more walnut catsup and cook sauce for a couple of minutes more and pour over shad roes and serve.

LADY ROSE
Nice and London

BARRIDA
(a Corsican fish dish)

For 8 persons: Make a mayonnaise with 1 quart olive oil, 12 yolks of eggs, 12 cloves of garlic. Boil 1 turbot or fresh cod, 1 sea eel or sea perch, and any other fish from Southern waters. Stir the water in which the fish has boiled into the mayonnaise so as to make a sauce the consistency of cream. Serve the fish and sauce with boiled new potatoes, carrots, string beans and hearts of artichokes. The sauce looks like yellow cream and is heaven.

The meal commences with a soup made of the sauce further watered down with the water in which the fish has been boiled, with pieces of bread floating in it -- pale yellow, nearly clear and delicious. With this is served a sparkling white wine, very dry. Really a lovely meal.

MARY OLIVER
London

PILAW STELLA MARIS DE PORTO FINO

Cut up one small octopus, remove bone from interior. Dip particles in honey, roll in paprika, then plunge in batter mixed with garlic. Boil in olive oil. Serve with rice; with a sauce made with tomatoes over it, white wine, green peppers and finely diced mushrooms.

PRINCESS D. DE ROHAN
London

SCAMPI PINO ORIALLI

Place scampi, Dublin Bay prawns, langoustine or giant shrimps on a mound of rice which has been washed in fourteen waters.

Cook scampi in cold water ... Bring to the boil ... Add cold water.

Cook rice in cold water ... Bring to the boil ... Add cold water ... Place in oven to dry. To serve, add shell-fish.

Serve with a sauce made of tomatoes, 5 big onions, 12 cloves and saffron to taste. On top of which add whipped cream.

LADY ROSE
Nice and London

MUSSELS WITH RICE
(a Corsican dish)

For 3 people: Clean 2 lbs. mussels and put them in covered casserole on fire until they open. Remove from shells. Pass juice from the mussels through a sieve. Cook rice (2 soupspoons per person) in casserole in olive oil until lightly golden. Cover rice with juice of mussels mixed with water, 4 soupspoons of liquid to 1 soupspoon rice. When water boils, lower heat and simmer for 1/4 hour. The liquid should by then have evaporated. Mix rice with mussels and serve.

MAURICE GROSSER
New York

SHRIMPS IN BUTTER

Fry a chopped onion in sweet butter, add peeled raw shrimps and the juice of 1/2 lemon (or more, according to taste). Cook for a few minutes until the shrimps have turned pink -- no longer -- sprinkle with chopped parsley, and serve on rice.

If the shrimps are fresh, unfrozen and without the awful preservative they are sometimes treated with they are unbelievably good.

FROM THE SAME SOURCE

BAKED FISH WITH STUFFING

A large fish, red snapper or red bass, stuffed with oysters, chopped onion and celery, the latter fried previously lightly in butter. The fish is baked and basted with grapefruit juice. In the dressing use parsley and a little bay leaf -- no thyme or sage.

MARY OLIVER
London

FILET DE SOLE A LA RITZ

Poach filleted sole in frying pan half full of water. Serve cold with sauce of whipped cream which has been mixed with grated horseradish.

MEAT AND GAME

HAROLD KNAPIK
Paris

This is the goulash that I mentioned. It is not bad but its origin on the Hungarian plain is reflected a little insistently.

SZEKELY GULYAS

1 large onion, chopped
2-1/2 teaspoons salt
3 tablespoons butter
6 peppercorns
1 green pepper, chopped
2 bay leaves
5 medium tomatoes, peeled
1/2 teaspoon capers.
1/2 lb. veal, cut in strips
1 tablespoon paprika
1/2 lb. tender beef, cut in strips
1/2 cup stock
1/2 lb. pork, cut in strips
(Cut excess fat from the meat)
1-1/2 lbs. sauerkraut
1-1/2 cups sour cream
1 teaspoon caraway seeds

Fry the onion until brown and then add the tomatoes and green pepper. Cook for about 15 minutes, very slowly, and then add the meat and the seasonings. Add the stock and simmer, covered, for 1/2 hour. Then add the kraut and cook for 1 hour longer. Before serving, add the sour cream.

FROM THE SAME SOURCE

VEAL-CHOPS PAPRIKA

To my knowledge this is my own recipe, but its resemblance to goulash is evident.

The ingredients for 4 people are:

4 thick, first-quality veal chops.
1/4 lb. very thinly sliced Hungarian bacon which is fat back, lightly smoked, with paprika pressed into the fat. Anything comparable will do in its place.
1 medium-sized onion, finely chopped.
1-1/2 teaspoons paprika. Real paprika, and not red dust, is required.
1-1/2 cups chicken stock.
1 cup sour cream.
1/2 teaspoon salt.

Lightly brown the bacon, push the bacon aside and brown the chops well. Turn down the fire and brown the onions gently with the paprika. Add the heated stock and salt and cook, covered, over a low fire for about 20 minutes or until done. Just before serving add the sour cream. A few croutons fried in butter and a little chopped parsley provide a reasonable garnish for this dish.

FROM THE SAME SOURCE

This is a Turkish dish, considerably modified. Combining them with the rice and the sauce is, for better or for worse, my own. In Turkey, the Kebabs are eaten alone as an appetiser.

KEBABS WITH RICE

This is a modified Turkish Kebab. It is usually made or formed on a number of small flat spits which unfortunately are very difficult to find. However, if the meat does not contain too much fat and the onions are chopped really fine, one can roll long, slender, pencil-like Kebabs that hold together very well. The ingredients for 4 people are:

2 lbs. shoulder of lamb or mutton, with a third of the fat rejected, and ground very fine.
2 medium-sized onions chopped as finely as possible.
1-1/2 tablespoons powdered cumin.
1/2 teaspoon salt.
1 strong pinch of cayenne pepper.
4 tablespoons mixed green herbs.

Mix vigorously all the above ingredients for at least 10 minutes, then roll the Kebabs. Place them on a grill and cook gently but well. If cooked too much they will dry. Turn over once while cooking.

They can be eaten with rice prepared in any manner, and are quite good with a sauce made as follows:

Fry gently in 1/4 lb. butter a finely chopped onion, a finely chopped green pepper and 1 tablespoon saffron. Cook for about 15 minutes and mix with some of the drippings from the Kebabs. Place the rice on a platter with the sauce thrown over it and the Kehahs arranged around the rice. Place quarters of lemon between the Kebabs.

MRS. NOEL MURPHY
Orgival

RABBIT WITH DUMPLING

Cut your Belgian hare!! in pieces. Roll in flour and brown in an iron pot in which you have slightly cooked 4 or 5 slices of bacon, adding bacon fat or lard. Put in a bouquet of herbs (I prefer rosemary, laurel and the greens of fresh garlic) and an onion stuck with cloves. When golden brown add thinly cut carrots, dust again generously with flour and add red wine and water. Cover and let simmer slowly. When cooked the meat should have the consistency of chicken, and not slimy restaurant rabbit. Add 1/2 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce, more water or bouillon if necessary. There should be much sauce. Add 1/2 cup cream before serving.

DUMPLINGS

Make a dough with 2 cups flour and 1 egg, 1/2 teaspoon salt and water. It should be like bread dough. Cut up very stale bread in squares to make 1 cupful. Mix thoroughly with dough and make oval bails. Boil in salted water for 1/2 hour. When drained cut immediately into slices. The dumplings should not be put into the rabbit sauce, but the sauce put over the dumplings at table.

REDVERS AND LOUISE TAYLOR
Bishops Lydeard

JUGGED HARE

Skin and clean, chop in small pieces. To 1 hare and its blood add 1/4 of a bottle of red wine, 1/2 gill vinegar, 1 large onion cut into six pieces, 2 carrots, a bay leaf, 12 peppercorns, pepper and salt well (at least a heaped teaspoon of the latter). Mix in a bowl. Press well down. Cover over and let stand for 24 hours, to pickle.

Put into a colander and strain dry. Fry in a frying pan (till brown) everything that was left in the colander. Then place in a casserole, sprinkle with 1 large tablespoon flour. Add 1/2 pint water and all the liquid that had strained through the colander and I tablespoon currant jelly.

Cook slowly from 40 minutes to 3 hours, depending on the age of the hare.

FANIA MARINOFF
New York

LAMB CURRY FOR SIX

3 lbs. lean lamb, in small pieces.
7 small apples.
4 onions.
2 cups stewed tomatoes.
2 cups rice.
2 glasses red wine.
2 tablespoons cooking oil.
2 tablespoons flour.
2 tablespoons curry powder.
1 cup raisins.

Mix uncooked lamb with curry powder. Season with salt and pepper. Brown the apples, onions and tomatoes in the oil and wine, add the uncooked lamb and cook slowly for 1 hour. Drain off juice, thicken with flour and return to pot. Cook rice separately and mix with raisins. Serve with chutney.

MARY OLIVER
London

ROAST PORK NORMANDY

Roast pork in 1/2 bottle cider. Baste constantly and keep adding more cider. Serve with fried apples that have been well sugared and dusted with powdered cinnamon. Fry apples in bacon fat.

FROM THE SAME SOURCE

ROAST BEEF FOR A RAINY DAY

First lard the roast with garlic, then soak for 2 hours in the contents of a bottle of sweet red wine and bay leaves. Place in basting pan with the wine poured over the meat. Cook in slow oven and baste every 15 minutes. Serve with the wine gravy.

VEGETARIAN

MERCEDES DA ACOSTA
Paris

STUFFED ARTICHOKES STRAVINSKY

Before cooking put a little garlic and lemon juice inside artichokes. Cook artichokes until tender, then take off leaves and put hearts in a baking dish. Prepare a fresh mushroom sauce as follows:

Separate the tops of the mushrooms from the stems. Mince the stems and dry them in the oven. Slice the tops of the mushrooms and sizzle in butter rapidly. Powder with flour, using flour sifter. Mix well and add 2 tablespoons sour cream. Season to taste. Stuff the artichokes with this mixture and powder it with dried, cut mushroom stems. Bake for 5 minutes.

SPANISH RICE

Cover bottom of pan with melted butter and oil, then cut purple onions into very very thin slices and place in pan. Put 1 handful of rice per person, and 1 for the pan, in hot water, then strain, mix well with oil and chopped pimiento. Put in pan with onions and cover, cooking in a very slow oven until done. If desired, tomato can be added.

CUBAN RICE

2 cups M.J.B. rice.
4 cups water.
6 tablespoons olive oil.
1 clove of garlic, chopped fine.

Mix well. Place in a very slow oven in covered kettle. Do not stir while baking. Cook for 35 minutes.

VEGETABLE ROAST LOAF

(recommended to confirmed meat-eaters who would like to imagine they were eating meat.)

1 medium-sized egg plant.
1 tomato.
1 cup ground celery.
1 tablespoon wheat germ.
1 cup cottage cheese.
4 tablespoons butter.
1 teaspoon ground pimiento.
1/2 teaspoon Savita.
1 ground medium sized onion.
1/2 cup soya-bean breadcrumbs.
1 egg.

Peel the egg plant and put it and vegetables through a food grinder. Melt 1 tablespoon butter in a frying pan, put all the vegetables in it and simmer until the vegetable juice is cooked in. Mix in Savita, remove to a mixing bowl and let cool. Add beaten egg, bread-crumbs, wheat germ, cottage cheese and 2 tablespoons butter. Butter baking dish and dust with breadcrumbs; pour mixture in it, and cover with breadcrumbs and melted butter. Bake in a hot oven for 25 minutes.



CHICKEN AND A BIRD

PIERRE BALMAIN
Paris

"VENT VERT" CHICKEN

Choose young chickens of about 1 lb. each (2 chickens for 3 people). Carve them uncooked as if they were cooked (legs, wings and breast -- put the carcass and the giblets aside). Make a strong bouillon-seasoned with thyme, laurel, cloves, onions, celery salt and Indo-Chinese pepper.

Half an hour before serving, saute in butter over low heat for about 1/2 hour the pieces of chicken, with salt and pepper. To serve place on a silver dish. Pour the prepared bouillon with a dash of brandy into the casserole. Stir to incorporate the glaze into the sauce. Then add a large handful of chopped fresh tarragon and let it come to the boil.

Cover the pieces of chicken, placed on the silver dish, with this tarragon sauce. Fresh cream may be added according to taste. (Personally I prefer the chicken without cream.)

Chicken to be served without vegetables, but to be accompanied by

"VENT VERT" SALAD

Cut in small right angles, not omitting the stalks, the hearts of young romaine salads. Add celery, endives, sweet green peppers and asparagus tips, a quarter of the volume of the romaine salad for each of these last ingredients. Add to this some leaves of corn salad from which the stalks have been removed to make little perfect ovals and about 1 tablespoon per person of Beaufort cheese, savoyard cheese of the Gruyere type cut into thin matches.

Prepare a salad sauce with salt, Indo-China pepper, white-wine vinegar and walnut oil (1 tablespoon vinegar to 2 tablespoons walnut oil). Carefully peel 2 fresh walnuts per person, cut them into very small pieces and sprinkle on the salad, which is to be served in a green unbaked earthenware salad bowl.

REDVERS TAYLOR
Bishops Lydeard and London

CIRCASSIAN CHICKEN

Fry 1 or 2 onions in 1/2 tablespoon butter until they begin to colour. Separately, boil a fowl and add the onions. Take 10 ozs. shelled walnuts and pass them through a mincing machine. Then mix in well 1 teaspoon red pepper.

Take the crumbs of half a loaf of bread and soak them in water in which fowl was boiled. Work them in with the walnuts with a wooden spoon, adding a little salt. If the mixture is too dry, gradually add the water in which the fowl was cooked until a thick cream-like consistency is obtained. Bone the fowl.

Arrange the filleted fowl in a dish and pour over the sauce. Decorate and serve cold with salad.

MADAME M. G. DEBAR
La Regie
Soye-en-Septaine

MESSY CHICKEN A LA BERRICHONNE

Brown a chicken cut in pieces in butter and diced fat back of pork -- half the pork fat should be fresh, the other half smoked -- chopped garlic, onions, shallots, parsley, chervil, tarragon, and a bouquet. Moisten with 1/4 cup brandy, 1-1/2 cups red wine of Bordeaux or of Burgundy, or another very good red wine, salt and pepper. At the end of the cooking, add 1/2 lb. mushrooms heated in butter. Thicken the sauce slightly with flour, add the blood of the chicken in which a few drops of vinegar was mixed when the chicken was killed. Add slowly to the sauce 1 cup cream in which the yolks of 2 eggs have been stirred. Serve surrounded by little puff-paste crescents.

THE LATE LORD BERNERS

ROAST CHICKEN IN CREAM

Brown 2 or 3 onions in butter, add chicken. When cooked remove chicken and keep hot. Add some cream to a little of the butter in which the chicken has cooked. Add salt, pepper, a little lemon juice, a little sherry or Madeira. Let the sauce reduce until it begins to thicken. Then carve the chicken, and pass the sauce through a very fine strainer over the chicken and serve.

NEJAD
Paris

BOILED CHICKEN

Cut 2 chickens into very small pieces. Put in a saucepan and cover with 5 cups and 3 tablespoons milk, add 1-3/4 cups sugar and 1 tablespoon rose water. Twenty minutes before the chickens are tender, add 2/3 cup rice. When the rice is cooked, serve.

PRINCESS D. DE ROHAN
London

CHOP SUEY
(from chicken left-overs)

(Recipe from Chong Ping Nam, one-time chef to the Chinese Ambassador.)

Dice chicken. Heat in soya sauce and butter. Add 1/2 pint peeled prawns or shrimps. Serve with bowl of rice and a cup of China tea, hearts of lettuce salad, lemon and oil dressing.

Diced roast pork can be used instead of chicken.

MARY OLIVER
London

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Part 2 of 2

LARKS A LA CONCHITA HERNANDEZ
(a gypsy singer of Madrid).

Place 2 dozen plucked larks in an oven with 6 rashers of Parma smoked ham or bacon and serve on platter in a bed of watercress. Surround by raw Spanish onions, raw tomatoes and red and yellow pimientos preserved in oil.

JOSEPH DELTEIL
Grabels

CHICKEN WITH RICE

Brown your chicken, then add an onion with 2 cloves stuck in it, 2 carrots, a bouquet, 2 cloves of garlic, 1 glass white wine, 1 quart water, salt and pepper. Let it boil. If she is not too old (say forty years) the hen should cook in an hour.

Apart, melt 1 tablespoon butter in a casserole. Add 1 finely chopped onion, stir over the fire, put into it 1 cup rice, give it a moment to heat and then add half the juice in which the chicken has cooked and which has been strained. Add salt and pepper, nutmeg and a good pinch of saffron. Let it cook covered very gently for 25 minutes.

Apart, put a piece of butter the size of a walnut in a saucepan. Add 1 tablespoon flour, stir a moment over the fire without allowing it to brown. Add the rest of the bouillon of the chicken and bring it to a boil. Add a thickening of the yolks of 2 eggs (from the same chicken), a little lemon juice, and serve your chicken with rice.

And good appetite to you.

SAUCE

DR FERNANDA PIVANO-SOTTSASS
Milan

PESTO ALLA GENOVESE

(sauce which can he served to flavour thick vegetable soup or pasta asciutta.)

Enough for 4 people.

3 ozs. good fresh basil.
2 ozs. Parmesan cheese.
1 oz. parsley.
1 oz. pine-nuts.
2 ozs. Pecorina cheese (strong goat Parmesan).
2 ozs. butter.
3-1/2 ozs. oil.
And, if liked, a clove of garlic.

Clean the leaves of the basil and parsley and leave them in water to keep them fresh. Grate the two cheeses together, mince the leaves of basil and parsley and the pine-nuts together (with the garlic, if you like it), add the cheese slowly so as not to blacken the mixture. The mixture has to be very light. Put it all in a bowl and add the oil, continuing to mix it. Just before using add the butter and a ladle or two of the boiling liquid which is to be flavoured (for instance, water of the pasta asciutta or broth of the soup).

VEGETABLES

MISS NATALIE CLIFFORD BARNEY
Paris

STUFFED EGG PLANT WITH SUGAR

2 egg plants
1/4 lb. dried breadcrumbs.
2 dessertspoons sugar.
1 large pinch of salt

Divide the egg-plants in half lengthwise. Remove the pulp, chop, add breadcrumbs, sugar and pepper. Stuff the four halves very abundantly. On each one place a piece of butter the size of a large walnut and 1 tablespoon of water and cook in a moderate oven for 1/2 hour.

THE LATE LORD BERNERS

STEAMED SPRING VEGETABLE PIE

Line a pie dish with puff paste, reserving the quantity necessary for a lattice. Bake the crust. Steam all the spring vegetables available -- peas, onions, carrots, string beans, asparagus tips and so on. As soon as the crust is baked, place on it the vegetables in bouquets of each kind, and sprinkle with a small quantity of butter. Bake until lattice is golden brown. Serve at once.

MISS KATHERINE DUDLEY
Paris

BROWNED-IN-THE-OVEN WHITE BEANS

Boil in water an onion with a clove stuck in it, 1 quart good white beans, fresh or dried; if the latter, they must be soaked for 24 hours in fresh water. They must cook very gently so that they will remain whole.

Put in a casserole a spoonful of good Bechamel sauce and a pint of cream, a spoonful of grated Swiss cheese, and a seasoning of salt and pepper. The sauce should be creamy but not thick. Drain the beans thoroughly. Place them on a deep fireproof dish. Cover them with the sauce in which they are cooked. Cover with grated cheese and put the dish on the grill of the oven to brown.

SIR FRANCIS ROSE, BART
Paris

STUFFED ITALIAN SQUASH (ZUCCHINI)
(a Chinese dish)

1. Blanch a very large Italian squash. Cut off the top and scrape out interior.

2. Fry half-cooked rice in butter with chopped meat for a few minutes and mix with chopped basil and onions.

3. Stuff the marrow and tie it up well, covering it with bacon and sprigs of parsley. Bake until bacon and parsley are crisp, basting often.

4. Shrimps or prawns are added in the Chinese style:

Shell the shrimps or prawns and put in earthenware dish. Cover with 1 large spoon honey and 1 large spoon sherry (or Suchow spice wine). Then add 2 spoon soya sauce. Let the dish stand for several hours, then put in oven for 25 minutes. Remove, add a covering of chopped spring onions and put back in oven for 5 minutes.

MARY OLIVER
London

STUFFED PEPPERS HAMMAMET

Boil barley in salted water until tender -- it should absorb all the water. Mix with chopped onions and parsley. Fill green peppers with this mixture, cover with olive oil, and put in oven. Serve with sauce made of lemon juice and paprika.

FROM THE SAME SOURCE

MASHED POTATOES LUXEMBOURGEOISE

Mash potatoes in butter, and red wine instead of milk.

MADAME GASTON CHABOUX
Belley

STUFFED SWISS CHARDS

Parboil the leaves of some Swiss chards. Prepare a forcemeat of left-over roast -- preferably mutton or chicken. Prepare a brown sauce with 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour, the gravy of the meat and cream added in small quantities at a time, salt and pepper, spices. In this sauce place the meat (chopped), and on the leaves of the Swiss chards place a tablespoon of this mixture. Roll and fold the edges. Put in a dish and cook in the oven.

MADAME BERTHE CLEYSERQUE
Paris

SAUTE OF MIXED VEGETABLES

(a Roumanian dish)

It will require:

1/2 lb. veal.
2 tomatoes.
2 onions.
2 Italian squash.
2 mushrooms.
3 ozs. tomato puree.
All of medium size.

The vegetables must remain whole. Cut out the insides, add to the forcemeat salt, shallots and parsley, all finely chopped, including the veal. Fill each vegetable. Put in a casserole a piece of butter a little larger than a walnut, brown the vegetables without turning them. Add the 3 ozs. of tomato puree.

Allow to simmer very gently for 1 hour. Just before serving pour 1/2 cup cream over the vegetables and pour the sauce over it. Serve very hot.

SALADS AND SALAD DRESSING

CARL VAN VECHTEN
New York

GARLIC ICE CREAM

(a dressing for salad)
4 small tomatoes, chopped to pulp.
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce.
1 teaspoon tabasco.
1/2 teaspoon salt.
1 teaspoon onion juice.
1 cup mayonnaise.
2 spoons Cowboy's Delight (may be procured from Old Smoky Sales Co., 124 West 4th Street, Los Angeles, California).

Beat till ingredients are well mixed. Freeze in icebox. DO NOT STIR WHILE FREEZING. Serve in avocados (cut in half).

MRS NOEL MURPHY
Orgival

SAFFRON RICE

Boil 2 handfuls of rice per person with a heaped soupspoon of powdered saffron and 2 cloves of garlic which you remove. (The rice should be yellow when cooked.) Do not overcook the rice. Take the stones out of 5 ozs. black olives, add 1/4 lb. shelled shrimps, about 6 fresh pink raw mushrooms cut in thin slices.

Make a generous French dressing with much olive oil and little vinegar and finely chopped chervil. Mix with rice and garnish with sweet peppers.

MARY OLIVER
London

14TH OF JULY SALAD

To a pint of mayonnaise add capers and chopped dill pickles. Mix well with 1 lb. boned white fish. Serve with a salad of nasturtium leaves and cucumbers with a dressing of olive oil and garlic mixed with tarragon vinegar. Garnish dish with nasturtium leaves and orange and red nasturtiums.

With this should be served chilled chives, or a cider cup with raspberries and cucumber rinds.

PRINCESS D. DE ROHAN
London

SALADE APHRODITE

Apples, quickly peeled and finely chopped, celery chopped fine, yoghourt, black pepper, salt.

The beauty of this salad depends entirely on how quickly the apples and celery are stirred into the bowl of yoghourt. This prevents their becoming brown. To be served on the crispest lettuce leaves.

This is inspired by the famous "Bicht's Moussle" of the Bicht Sanatorium at Zurich. Ideal for poets with delicate digestions.

MRS. CARLTON LAKE
Paris

ASPIC SALAD

1 can Campbell's Condensed Tomato Soup.
1 small package Philadelphia Cream Cheese.
2 tablespoons unRavoured gelatine dissolved in 1/3 cup cold water.
1/2 cup Miracle Whip Salad Dressing.
Chopped vegetables: 1.2 onion, 1 stalk of celery, 1 green pepper.

Empty tomato soup into saucepan, and heat over low flame, stirring until soup is almost hot. Add the cream cheese, and keep stirring until it is dissolved. Remove from fire, and add gelatine which has been dissolved in water. When mixture cools, fold in the salad dressing. Chop the vegetables -- onion, celery, green pepper -- and when mixture begins to set, fold in. Rinse out ring mould in cold water, but do not wipe dry. Pour mixture into mould, and chill in refrigerator for several hours. Serve on bed of lettuce leaves.

To serve, loosen salad along edges with sharp knife, invert, and tap mould. If salad does not come out of mould easily, wipe outside surface of mould with cloth wrung out in hot water.

BREAD AND CAKES

MRS. REDVERS TAYLOR
Bishops Lydeard and London

CRULLERS

Beat the yolk of 1 egg until stiff. Stir into it 2 heaped tablespoons sugar and 2 tablespoons melted butter. When very light beat the white of the egg very stiff and blend it with the mixture. Add nutmeg and salt. Mix to a stiff dough with flour, using enough to enable you to roll it out, 1/3 inch thick. Cut in squares, make three or four long incisions in each square. Cook in hot fat and sprinkle with sugar. In a stone jar they keep crisp for ages.

FANIA MARINOFF
New York

PECAN NUT CAKES

3 cups pecan nuts, chopped as finely as possible.
6 eggs.
1-1/2 cups sugar.
1 tablespoon flour.
1/2 teaspoon salt.
1 teaspoon baking powder.
1 teaspoon vanilla.
1/4 cup chopped seedless raisins.
Boiled white icing sugar.

Beat yolks until light, add sugar and beat again. Mix the finely chopped nuts, flour, baking powder and salt, and add to the yolks. Beat well and stir in the stiffly beaten whites. Bake in two layers in moderate oven. When. cold, assemble and ice with boiled white icing sugar, sprinkling a few chopped raisins on top.

NEJAD
Paris

COOKIES

Boil in a saucepan 1/2 cup and 2 tablespoons butter, 4 cups water and a good pinch of salt. Moisten with some of the water 5 cups rice flour. Gradually add it to the boiling water, stirring with a wooden spoon. Continue to stir until the mixture becomes stiff. Remove from heat and very slowly add 10 eggs one at a time. Incorporate each one thoroughly before adding another. Roll them into little sausages and place on buttered baking sheet in a moderate oven. When cold paint with a water icing flavoured with rose water.

REDVERS TAYLOR
Bishops Lydeard and London

BANBURY CAKES

Prepare puff pastry; 1/2 lb. flour will make enough for 20 cakes. Filling for cakes: 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger, 1/2 teaspoon lemon rind and juice, 1 oz. candied peel chopped, 1 oz. cake crumbs (or breadcrumbs with sugar added), 2 ozs. sugar, 2 ozs. sultanas, 2 ozs. currants, 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg, 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon, 1 egg, 2 ozs. butter. Warm bowl and then work butter, sugar and the spices into a creamy consistency. Then beat in egg and later the crumbs. Then add lemon juice, currants, etc., and lemon rind. Stir.

Cut pastry into rounds. Put some of the filling on to a round. Fold over to make a semi-circle. Egg-wash the joint and squeeze tight the ends. Place it joint downwards and tap it out to an oval shape. Make a few cuts in top. Bake for 20 minutes at 500°.

DR. FERNANDA PIVANO-SOTTSASS
Milan

PIZZA ALLA NAPOLITANA

2 cups flour.
1/3 oz. yeast (either of beer or bread).
5 ozs. Mozzarella (very soft, melting cheese).
1 two-oz. tin peeled tomatoes.
3 salted anchovies.

Knead the flour and the yeast together on the table with 1/2 glass milk, adding water if necessary, with a pinch of salt. Let it rise for 45 minutes, wrapping it in a woollen cloth. Stretch it into a round shape, and put it in a flat greased baking tin. Sprinkle on the mixture 3 tablespoons oil, pressing it with fingers. Spread on top first half of the thinly sliced Mozzarella, second the tomatoes halved, third the cut-up anchovies, and finally a pinch of origan and the rest of the Mozzarella.

Put it in the oven already warmed and cook for about 30 minutes, according to the heat of the oven.

MADAME GASTON CHABOUX
Belley

A GARNISHED SALTED BREAD OF THE BUGEY

On an ordinary bread dough place the following mixture: 1 or 2 minced onions, 2 or 3 tablespoons chopped walnuts, 1 cup walnut oil. Send it to the baker's to be baked in his oven after the bread has been removed.

CREPES AND PANCAKES

MRS. GILBERT WHIPPLE CHAPMAN
New York

CREPES NORMANDES

Melt a very thin layer of butter in a small frying pan over a hot fire. Spread 4 or 5 very thin slices of green cooking apples in the butter. Cook for 2 or 3 minutes. Pour over these a slight coating of thin pancake batter. Cook this a minute or two longer. Pour on this 2 heaped tablespoons sugar, and cook for 2 minutes more. Add 1 tablespoon butter, and turn the pancake over, and cook a little longer over a low flame, adding a little more butter. Take out and serve when fairly crisp. This makes one portion.

FROM THE SAME SOURCE

SALZBURGER NOCKERL

Made the easy way. This recipe is for people who cannot toss a souffle omelette in the air to turn it over in the pan.

Mix 1-1/2 tablespoons flour and 4 tablespoons granulated sugar, and 1 pinch of salt. Add these to the well-beaten yolks of 6 eggs. Blend well, and then fold into the well-beaten whites of 6 eggs. Melt 1/4 lb. butter in a large, deep, iron frying pan. Pour the mixture into this. Cook over a slow flame for 3 to 4 minutes. Then place under the broiler and cook slowly for 3 to 4 minutes longer. Put in a slow oven for 2 to 3 minutes longer. While you are cooking this, melt! lb. butter until it is brown. Turn your souffle over on a hot dish, and immediately pour the brown butter over it, and sprinkle well with icing sugar. Serve immediately.

CARL VAN VECHTEN
New York

VIENNESE CHEESE PANCAKES

2 yolks of eggs.
1/2 teaspoon salt.
2 teaspoons sugar.
2 cups milk.
1/2 cup, or more, flour.

Beat the yolks of the eggs and pour all together in large bowl. Make THIN pancakes and fill them with: pot cheese, raisins, yellow of one egg, vanilla, sugar. Bake for 10 minutes in rich butter.

Now, I hope, you have had enough recipes from US.

DESSERTS

SIR FRANCIS ROSE, BART
Paris

QUEEN ELIZABETH I APPLES

Cook in sugar without water whole unpeeled very fine apples until transparent. Then put the apples into jars filled with hot vinegar that has been boiled with honey, allspice and fresh rosemary. The jars should be hermetically closed, and the apples not served for a couple of months.

CECIL BEATON

ICED APPLES
(a Greek pudding, very Oriental)

Prepare a syrup with 2 cups sugar and 3/4 cup water and the rind of a lemon. Peel and cut in very thin slices 2 lbs. apples of a very good quality. Put them in the syrup and let them cook from 2 to 2-1/2 hours. Pour into a mould. Surround when removed from mould with a vanilla custard sauce. Decorate it with candied fruit. Serve very cold. Should be prepared the day before, or in the morning if served for dinner.

THE LATE LORD BERNERS

PUDDING LOUISE

Line a f1an ring with short pastry, then put 6 layers of red currant jelly at the bottom, then the mixture of 3-1/2 ozs. sugar, 3-1/2 ozs. butter, 2 ozs. flour, and cook in a very moderate oven for I hour until very brown.

MARY OLIVER
London

WEDDING ANNIVERSARY ICE CREAM

Take 12 crystallised mint leaves, 1 cup creme-de-menthe, 1 oz. crystallised ginger, 1 quart thick cream and freeze.

FROM THE SAME SOURCE

BIRTHDAY ICE CREAM FOR ADULTS

Toast 2 slices of dark brown bread, spread lavishly with butter on both sides. Cut into small cubes. Cover with egg nog made of 2 eggs and 1 cup rum. Add I quart cream and freeze.

MADAME JOSEPH DELTEIL
Grabels

VERY GOOD CHOCOLATE MOUSSE

1/2 lb. sweet chocolate.
6 eggs.

Grate the chocolate and melt it in a frying pan with 3 tablespoons water over very low heat. Add the yolks of eggs previously stirred and mix well. Remove from heat and add the whites of eggs beaten stiff. Put into the serving bowl and into the refrigerator overnight. Always liked. Rather sponge-like.

PRINCESS D. DE ROHAN
London

CREME BRULEE

Serves 4.

Stir, bring to boiling point, and boil for exactly 1 minute 2 cups heavy cream. Remove the cream from the fire. Pour it in a slow stream into 4 well-beaten egg yolks. Beat it constantly. Return the cream to the fire. Stir and cook it over a low flame until it is nearly boiling, or stir and cook it for 5 minutes in a double boiler. Place the cream in a buttered shallow baking dish and never stir again. Chill it well. Cover the cream with 1/4-inch layer of brown sugar. Place it under a broiler (keep the oven door open) to form a crust. Chill it again.

MRS. JOSEPH A. BARRY
New York and Paris

ORANGE AND LEMON DESSERT

Ingredients: 2 dozen lady fingers split, 1/4 lb. butter, 1 cup sugar, 1/2 pint heavy cream, 3 eggs beaten separately, juice of 1 large orange, juice of 1 lemon, 1 tablespoon orange rind, 1 teaspoon lemon rind, 1/4 cup chopped nutmeats ground very fine, rum.

Cream butter and sugar. Beat egg yolks with a whisk and add to creamed mixture. Add fruit juices, rind and nuts. Beat cream and add. Beat egg whites with a pinch of cream of tartar and add last.

Line a 1-1/2-quart porcelain souffle mould with buttered waxed paper. Then line bottom and sides of mould with split lady fingers. Sprinkle with rum according to personal taste. Add half of mixture, then a layer of lady fingers, the second half of mixture and a ceiling of lady fingers with more rum. Put in freezing compartment of refrigerator for 2 or 2-1/2 hours (not more). Believe it or not, rich as this is, men guests often take two helpings. It is the rum that keeps it from being unmanly.

BRION GYSIN

HASCHICH FUDGE
(which anyone could whip up on a rainy day)

This is the food of Paradise -- of Baudelaire's Artificial Paradises: it might provide an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies' Bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the DAR. In Morocco it is thought to be good for warding off the common cold in damp winter weather and is, indeed, more effective if taken with large quantities of hot mint tea. Euphoria and brilliant storms of laughter; ecstatic reveries and extensions of one's personality on several simultaneous planes are to be complacently expected. Almost anything Saint Theresa did, you can do better if you can bear to be ravished by 'un evanouissement reveilli.'

Take 1 teaspoon black peppercorns, 1 whole nutmeg, 4 average sticks of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon coriander. These should all be pulverised in a mortar. About a handful each of stoned dates, dried figs, shelled almonds and peanuts: chop these and mix them together. A bunch of canibus sativa can be pulverised. This along with the spices should be dusted over the mixed fruit and nuts, kneaded together. About a cup of sugar dissolved in a big pat of butter. Rolled into a cake and cut into pieces or made into balls about the size of a walnut, it should be eaten with care. Two pieces are quite sufficient.

Obtaining the canibus may present certain difficulties, but the variety known as canibus sativa grows as a common weed, often unrecognised, everywhere in Europe, Asia and parts of Africa; besides being cultivated as a crop for the manufacture of rope. In the Americas, while often discouraged, its cousin, called canibus indica, has been observed even in city window boxes. It should be picked and dried as soon as it has gone to seed and while the plant is still green.

4. Recipes

4.1. (I) The Amrita-Prâsa clarified butter (Hoernle, 2011, pp.: 90–91).

The numbers in brackets refer to the ślôka [sûtras], see also Srivastava (1954, p.: 153), while the superscript numbers are identical to Hoernle's text and refer to notes therein.

“The Amrita-Prâsa Clarified Butter,55 in 11 ślôka and 1 pâda. (Verses 108-119a.). I will now describe the ambrosia-like elixir, which increases the strength of men, the so-called Amrita-prâśa (or Food of the Immortals), a most noble kind of clarified butter. (109) Take one prastha each of the juice of emblic myrobalan [Phyllanthus emblica L., (Phyllanthaceae)], Kshîravidârî (Ipomoea digitata) [Ipomoea cheirophylla O'Donell, (Convolvulaceae)] and sugar cane [Saccharum officinarum L., (Poaceae)], and similarly of the milk of a heifer (110) one prastha, and add one well-measured prastha of fresh clarified butter. Throw in, also, pastes33made of one half pala each of the following drugs: (111) Rishabhaka56 [unknown and substituted], Riddhi56 [unknown and substituted], liquorice [Glycyrrhiza glabra L., (Fabaceae)], Vidârigandhâ (Desmodium gangeticum) [Desmodium gangeticum (L.) DC., (Fabaceae)], nPayasyâ (Gynandropsis pentaphylla) [Cleome gynandra L., (Cleomaceae)], Sahadêvâ (Sida rhomboidea) [Sida rhombifolia L., (Malvaceae)], Anantâ (Hemidesmus indicus) [Hemidesmus indicus (L.) R. Br. ex Schult., (Apocynaceae)], Madhûlikâ (Bassia latifolia) [Madhuca longifolia (J. König ex L.) J.F. Macbr., (Sapotaceae)] and Viśvadêvâ (Sida spinosa) [Sida spinosa L., (Malvaceae)], (112) both Mêdâ56 [unknown and substituted], Rishyaprôktâ (Sida cordifolia) [Sida cordifolia L., (Malvaceae)], Śatâvarî (Asparagus racemosus) [Asparagus racemosus Willd., (Asparagaceae)], Mudgaparnî (Phaseolus trilobus) [Vigna trilobata (L.) Verdc., (Fabaceae)] and Mâshaparnî (Teramnus labialis) [Teramnus labialis (L. f.) Spreng., (Fabaceae)], Śrâvanî (Sphaeranthus indicus) [Sphaeranthus indicus L., (Asteraceae)], cowhage [Mucuna pruriens (L.) DC., (Fabaceae)] and Vîrâ (Uraria lagopodioides) [Uraria lagopodoides (L.) DC., (Fabaceae)]. (113) Further add one kudava each of raisins [Vitis sp., (Vitaceae)], dates [Phoenix dactylifera L., (Arecaceae)], jujubes [Ziziphus jujuba Mill., (Rhamnaceae)], and half as much each of walnuts [Juglans regia L., (Juglandaceae)], Tinduka (Diospyors Embryopteris) [Diospyros atrata (Thwaites) Alston or Diospyros albiflora Alston, (Ebenaceae)] and Nikôchka (Alangium decapetalum) [Alangium salviifolium (L.f.) Wangerin, (Cornaceae)].

(114) Having boiled and strained the whole, let it stand in a clean vessel, and when it has cooled, add one prastha of well-clarified honey, (115) and sixteen pala of choice white sugar. Then take one half pala of black pepper [Piper nigrum L., (Piperaceae)] and one pala of small cardamoms [Elettaria cardamomum (L.) Maton, (Zingiberaceae)] (116) powder them finely, and, having sprinkled them over the whole, stir it with a ladle. Of this preparation a dose suited to the patient's power of digestion may be administered, (117) and when it is digested, rice-milk, together with the broth of the flesh of land-animals, may be given. This Amrita-prâśa is an excellent preparation for increasing the strength and colour of men; (118) it may be given in cases of weakness induced by consumption or ulcers, also to the old, the feeble and the young, also to those who are suffering from fainting, asthma, and hiccough. (119a) This preparation of clarified butter, being a composition of Âtrêya's, is famed under the name Amrita (or ‘ambrosia’).”

Hoernle states(55) that this formula, although with more ingredients and different proportions, occurs also in the Charaka VI and Âshtânga Hridaya IV. Hoernle(56) mentions that the eight drugs known to the ancients and now substituted are: 1. Jîvaka, 2. Rishabha, 3. Mêdâ, 4. Mahâmêdâ, 5. Kâkôlî, 6. Kshîra-kâkôlî, 7. Riddhi, 8. Vriddhi; 1 and 2: Root of Vidârî (Batatas paniculata [Ipomoea mauritania Jacq, (Convolvulaceae)]) 3 and 4: Roots of Śatâvarî (Asparagus racemosus [Asparagus racemosus Willd., (Asparagaceae)]) 5 and 6: Aśhvagandhâ (Withania somnifera [Withania somnifera (L.) Dunal, (Solanaceae)]), 7 and 8: Tubers of the Varâhî or Bhadramustra (Cyperus pertenuis [Cyperus articulatus L. or C. tenuiflorus Rottb., (Cyperaceae)]).

4.2. (II) The Amrita Oil (Hoernle, 2011, pp.: 106–107):

“(IV) The Amrita Oil,116 in 25 ślôka and 1 pâda. (287–312a.) The two truth-speaking Aśvins, the divine physicians, honoured by the Dêvas, have declared the following excellent health-promoting oil, (288) which relieves all diseases, is fit for a king, and is as good as ambrosia. It is known by the name of Amrita (or ‘ambrosia’), and is an oil able to make men strong. (289) At the time of Pushya117, after having said prayers118, performed purification rites, and asked the Brâhmans' blessing in a few words, take out liquorice-roots grown in a favourable place. (290) Of the fresh juice of these roots take four pâtra9, and add four pala each of the following drugs: Papaundarîka119 [a fragrant wood], Amritâ (Tinospora cordifolia) [Tinospora cordifolia (Thunb.) Miers, (Menispermaceae)], knots of lotus-stalks [Nelumbo nucifera Gaertn., (Nelumbonaceae)], Śatâvarî (Asparagus racemosus) [Asparagus racemosus Willd., (Asparagaceae)], (291) Śringâtaka (Trapa bispinosa) [Trapa natans var. bispinosa (Roxb.) Makino, (Lythraceae)], emblic myrobalan [Phyllanthus emblica L., (Phyllanthaceae)], Undumbara (Ficus glomerata) [Ficus racemosa L., (Moraceae)], Kaśêruka (Scripus Kysoor) [Actinoscirpus grossus var. kysoor (Roxb.) Noltie, (Cyperaceae)], the bark of each of the (five) trees with a milky sap120 [Nyagrôdha (Ficus indica) [Ficus sp., (Moraceae)], Udumbara (Ficus glomerata) [Ficus racemosa L., (Moraceae)], Asvattha (Ficus religiosa) [Ficus religiosa L., (Moraceae)], Plaksha (Ficus infectoria) [Ficus sp., (Moraceae)], Pârîsha (Thespesia populnea) [Thespesia populnea (L.) Sol. ex Corrêa, (Malvaceae)], (292) roots of Kuśa (Poa cynosuroides) [Desmostachya bipinnata (L.) Stapf, (Poaceae)], Kâsa (Saccharum spontaneum) [Saccharum spontaneum L., (Poaceae)] and Ikshu (Saccharum officinarum) [S. officinarum L., (Poaceae)], also of Śara (Saccharum Sara) [Saccharum bengalense Retz., (Poaceae)] and Vîrana (Andropogon muricatus)121 [Chrysopogon zizanioides (L.) Roberty, (Poaceae)], also roots of Gundrâ (Panicum uliginosum) [Sacciolepis interrupta (Willd.) Stapf, (Poaceae)], of Nadikâ122 [not identified] and of the lotus [N. nucifera], (293) Vadarî (Ziziphus Jujuba) [Z. jujuba], Vidârî (Ipomoea digitata) [I. cheirophylla], Vêtasa (Calamus Rotang) [Calamus rotang L., (Arecaeea)], Adurûshaka (Adhatoda vasica) [Adhatoda vasica Nees, unresolved (Acanthaceae)], Nîm [Azadirachta indica A. Juss., (Meliaceae)], Sâlmalî (Bombax malabaricum) [Bombax ceiba L., (Malvaceae)], dates [P. dactylifera], cocoanut [Cocos nucifera L., (Arecaceae)], Priyangu (Aglaia Roxburghiana) [Aglaia elaeagnoidea (A. Juss.) Benth., (Meliaceae)], (294) Patôla (Trichosanthes dioica) [unresolved ev. Mukia maderaspatana (L.) M.Roem, (Cucurbitaceae)], Kutaja (Holarrhena antidysenterica) [Wrightia antidysenterica (L.) R.Br. or Holarrhena pubescens Wall. ex G. Don, (Apocynaceae)], raisins [Vitis sp.], leaf-stalk of the lotus [N. nucifera], sandal [Santalum sp., (Santalaceae)], Kakubha (Terminalia Arjuna) [Terminalia arjuna (Roxb. ex DC.) Wight & Arn., (Combretaceae)], Aśvakarna (Shorea robusta) [Shorea robusta Gaertn., (Dipterocarpaceae)], Lâmajjaka (Adropogon laniger) [Cymbopogon jwarancusa subsp. olivieri (Boiss.) Soenarko, (Poaceae)], and plumbago-root [Plumbago zeylanica L., (Plumbaginaceae)], (295) also other astringent, sweet or cooling drugs, as many as may be obtainable. Boil all these in two drôna of water, (296) and when the whole is reduced to one-eight of the original quantity, boil in it pastes made of fine powder of one pala each of the following drugs: Balâ (Sida cordifolia) [Sida cordifolia L., (Malvaceae)], Nâgabalâ (Sida spinosa) [Sida spinosa L., (Malvaceae)], Jîvâ (Dendrobium multicaule) [Conchidium muscicola (Lindl.) Rauschert, (Orchidaceae)], cowhage [M. pruriens], Kasêruka (Scirpus Kysoor) [A. grossus var. kysoor], (297) Nata (Tabernaemontana coronaria) [Tabernaemontana divaricata (L.) R.Br. ex Roem. & Schult., (Apocynaceae)], juice of sugar-cane123, Sprikkà (Trigonella corniculata) [Trigonella balansae Boiss. & Reut., (Fabaceae)], small cardamoms [E. cardamomum] and cinnamon-bark [Cinnamomum sp., (Lauraceae)], Jîvaka56 [unknown and substituted] Rishabhaka56 [unknown and substituted] Mêdâ56 [unknown and substituted], Madhuka (Bassia latifolia) [M. longifolia var. latifolia, (Sapotaceae)], and blue lotus [Nymphaea nouchali var. caerulea (Savigny) Verdc., (Nymphaeaceae)] (298), the colour producing saffron [Crocus sativus L., (Iridaceae)], aloe-wood [Aquilaria sp., (Thymelaeaceae)], and cinnamon-leaves [Cinnamomum sp.], Vidârî (Ipomoea digitata) [I. cheirophylla], Kshîrakakôlî63 [said to be unknown], Vîrâ (Uraria lagopoides) [Uraria lagopodoides (L.) DC., (Fabaceae)], and Śârivâ (Ichnocarpus frutescens) [Ichnocarpus frutescens (L.) W.T. Aiton, (Apocynaceae)], (299) Śatâvarî (Asparagus racemosus) [A. racemosus], Priyangu (Aglaia Roxburghiana) [A. elaeagnoidea], Gudûchî (Tinospora cordifolia) [Tinospora cordifolia], filaments of the lotus [N. nucifera], Lâmajjaka (Andropogon laniger) [C. jwarancusa subsp. olivieri], red and white sandal [Santalum spp.], and fruits of Râjâdana (Mimusops hexandra) [Manilkara hexandra (Roxb.) Dubard or Mimusops coriacea (A.DC.) Miq., (Sapotaceae)], (300) pearl, coral, conch-shell, moon-stone, sapphire, crystal, silver, gold, and other gems and pearls, (301) liquorice [G. glabra], madder [Rubia tinctorum L., (Rubiaceae)], and Amśumatî (Desmodium gangeticum) [Desmodium gangeticum]. Boil the whole slowly over a gentle fire (302) with four pâtra of (sweet) oil and eight times as much of milk, adding also tamarind juice [Tamarindus indica L., (Fabaceae)] and vinegar of rice124 one half as much as the milk. (303) This boiling should be repeated a hundred or even a thousand times; and when it is thoroughly done, it may be known by this sign, (304) that on the approach of the proper time the oil stiffens by exposure to the rays of the sun.125 After asking the Brâhmans’ blessing, performing purificatory rites and saying prayers, (305) this Amrita (or ‘ambrosial’) oil, highly esteemed by the Dêvas, may be administered to the patient, in the form of an injection per anum or per urethram,110 or as a draught, or an errhine, or a liniment.

(306) It serves the purpose of relieving disease and imparting strength to the organs of sense. For those who suffer from morbid heat and thirst it makes an excellent and beneficial liniment. (307) It promotes the growth of the hair in the old and that of the body in the young; it produces loveliness and grace in women; and also ensures numerous offspring, (308) for, by the use of this ambrosial oil, women are predisposed to conception. It cures the eighty nervous diseases109, also those due to derangement of the blood or the bile (309) or the phlegm or all the humours concurrently.126 By its use as an errhine or a liniment the eyes become as sharp as those of an eagle. (310) It keeps of calamities, averts all fortune, and promotes prosperity. By the use of this oil the Maharshi Chyavana92 regained (311) his youth, and was delivered from decrepitude and disease; and the blessed Maharshi Mârkandêya127, who was desirous of a long life, (312a) obtained his desire by the regular use of this oil.”

Hoernle(116) was not able to find this formula elsewhere and notes that it is a “phenomenally long one” containing 83 ingredients. Hoernle(9) gives some explanations on the measures and states that pâtra is also called âdhaka. Paramhans (1984) explains the medieval Indian weight measurement system as follows: 2 pala = 1 prasrti, 2 prasrtis = 1 añjali or kudava, 2 añjalis = 1 śaravâ, 2 śaravâs = 1 prastha, 4 prasthas = 1 âdhaka, 4 âdhakas = 1 drôna. Since over the course of time the overall mass changed but the proportions within the Indian weight measurement system remained the same, a translation into Western weight equivalents makes no sense.

-- Soma, food of the immortals according to the Bower Manuscript (Kashmir, 6th century A.D.), by Marco Leonti and Laura Casu, 2014

BEVERAGES

REDVERS TAYLOR
Bishops Lydeard and London

SLOE GIN
(use unsweetened London gin, not Plymouth)

To each bottle of gin allow 1 pint sloes and 1/2 lb. rock candy (as white and clear as possible). Have ready two empty quart bottles. Prick the sloes with a fork (silver for preference). Put 1/2 pint sloes and 1/4 lb. rock candy, crushed fine, followed by 1/2 bottle gin into each bottle.

Allow to stand for three months, shaking every day. Then strain off through muslin and bottle. Seal the cork. Leave at least 1 year before drinking. The longer the better -- at seven years it's a dream.

PRINCESS D. DE ROHAN
London

HOT TODDY FOR COLD NIGHT
(Attributed to Flaubert)

2 jiggers Calvados.
1 jigger apricot brandy.
Warm over flame. Slowly pour in a jigger cream. Do not stir.

This is the recipe of the eighteenth-century Auberge du Vieux Puits at Pont Audemer.

FROM THE SAME SOURCE

DUBLIN COFFEE JAMES JOYCE

2 jiggers Irish whiskey in a balloon wine glass.
1 teaspoon sugar.

Pour in black coffee, stir; as contents revolve, add jigger cream slowly in circular motion. Allow cream to float on top of coffee. Do not stir again.

Excellent for after-dinner conversation.

MISS ELA HOCKADAY
Dallas

EGG NOG OF THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB, RICHMOND, VIRGINIA

2 dozen eggs.
4 ozs. rum.
2 quarts cream.
4 ozs. brandy.
1 quart whipping cream.
1-1/2 lbs. sugar.
2 quarts whiskey.

Separate yolks and whites of eggs. In a large bowl beat thoroughly the yolks of the eggs, then add and mix well the sugar, adding slowly. Stir and heat mixture well and stir in well the whiskey. Add cream slowly and mix thoroughly. Beat whites of eggs till stiff and mix in thoroughly, then lastly the whipped cream.

This has been used in this club for more than a hundred years, I am told. Always served Christmas morning -- and many other times!

PRESERVES AND A CHUTNEY

REDVERS AND LOUISE TAYLOR
Bishops Lydeard and London

ORANGE MARMALADE

Three oranges and 4 lemons. Cut into thin slices taking out the seeds. Put in 2 quarts water and let stand for 24 hours. Then boil for 1 hour and let stand again for 36 hours in a cool place. Add 4 lbs. sugar and boil for 1 hour or until it jellies.

FROM THE SAME SOURCE

RHUBARB PRESERVE

Six lbs. rhubarb, 6 lbs. sugar and 6 large lemons. Cut the rhubarb in small pieces. Slice the lemons very thin. Put the fruit in a large bowl and cover with the sugar. Let stand until it has drawn out the juice. Then boil for about 3/4 hour. Do not stir more than necessary as its great beauty is in its not being all broken up. Place the leaf of a scented geranium in the bottom of each jar before bottling.

THIS TOO FROM THE SAME SOURCE

APPLE CHUTNEY

3 dozen cooking apples.
3 lbs. onions.
3 lbs. brown sugar.
1/2 lb. sultanas.
2 ozs. mustard seed.
1/2 oz. chilis.
1/4 lb. salt.
2 quarts vinegar.
1 oz. ground ginger.

Chop the apples and onions very small. Mix the whole together and simmer all day until it becomes a dark pulp.

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13. The Vegetable Gardens at Bilignin



FOR fourteen successive years the gardens at Bilignin were my joy, working in them during the summers and planning and dreaming of them during the winters. The summers frequently commenced early in April with the planting, and ended late in October with the last gathering of the winter vegetables. Bilignin surrounded by mountains and not far from the French Alps -- from higher ground a few miles away Mont Blanc was frequently visible -- made early planting uncertain. One year we lost the first planting of string beans, another year the green peas were caught by late frost. It took me several years to know the climate and quite as many more to know the weather. Experience is never at bargain price. Then too I obstinately refused to accept the lore of the farmers, judging it, with the prejudice of a townswoman, to be nothing but superstition. They told me never to transplant parsley, and not to plant it on Good Friday. We did it in California, was my weak reply. They said not to plant at the moment of the new or full moon. The seed would be as indifferent as I was, was my impatient answer to this. But it was not. Before the end of our tenancy of the lovely house and gardens at Bilignin, I had become not only weather-wise but a fairly successful gardener.

In the spring of 1929 we became tenants of what had been the manor of Bilignin. We were enchanted with everything. But after careful examination of the two large vegetable gardens -- the lower on a level with the terrace garden in front of the house, and the other on a considerably higher level and a distance from the court and portals -- it was to my horror that I discovered the state they were in. Nothing but potatoes had been planted the year before. Poking about with a heavy stick, there seemed to be some resistance in a comer followed by a rippling movement. The rubbish and weeds would have to be cleaned out at once. In six days the seven men we mobilised in the village had accomplished this. In the comer where I had poked, a snake's nest and several snakes had been found. But so were raspberries and strawberries.

A plan was made for plots and paths. The French are adroit in weeding and gathering from paths a few inches in width. It was difficult for me to accommodate myself to them. A list of what vegetables and when they were to be planted had to be made. We had brought with us sacks of seeds of all the vegetables Gertrude Stein and I cared for and some with which we would experiment. To do the heavy work a boy from the hamlet had been found. After fertilisers had been turned into the ground and the topsoil raked to a powder, with a prayer the planting commenced. The seeds for early gathering had scarcely been disposed of when it was time to plant the slips bought from farmers' wives in the square at Belley at the Saturday-morning market. There were two horticulturists in Belley, one an over-educated ambitious pretentious youngish man who never ceased believing he was to be the next Minister of Agriculture, and an old woman who had no more preparation for her work than experience which had taught her little. The slips we had from them were not all vigorous; we planted twice as many as we intended to grow.

The wind blew the seeds from the weeds in the uncultivated fields that surrounded the gardens. The topsoil was of made earth and heavy rains commenced to wash it away. These were the two disadvantages we should have to overcome. The weeds remained a tormenting, backbreaking experience all the summers we spent at Bilignin. After the autumn gathering was over, the topsoil would be renewed. Fortunately there was plenty of water. Only once was there a drought, when the ox carts brought water in barrels from the stream in the valley below. For watering we had bought three hundred feet of hose.

The work in the vegetables -- Gertrude Stein was undertaking for the moment the care of the flowers and box hedges -- was a full-time job and more. Later it became a joke, Gertrude Stein asking me what I saw when I closed my eyes, and I answered, Weeds. That, she said, was not the answer, and so weeds were changed to strawberries. The small strawberries, called by the French wood strawberries, are not wild but cultivated. It took me an hour to gather a small basket for Gertrude Stein's breakfast, and later when there was a plantation of them in the upper garden our young guests were told that if they cared to eat them they should do the picking themselves.

The first gathering of the garden in May of salads, radishes and herbs made me feel like a mother about her baby -- how could anything so beautiful be mine. And this emotion of wonder filled me for each vegetable as it was gathered every year. There is nothing that is comparable to it, as satisfactory or as thrilling, as gathering the vegetables one has grown.

Later when vegetables were ready to be picked it never occurred to us to question what way to cook them. Naturally the simplest, just to steam or boil them and serve them with the excellent country butter or cream that we had from a farmer almost within calling distance. Later still, when we had guests and the vegetables had lost the aura of a new-born miracle, sauces added variety.

In the beginning it was the habit to pick all vegetables very young except beetroots, potatoes and large squash and pumpkins because of one's eagerness, and later because of their delicate flavour when cooked. That prevented serving sauces with some vegetables -- green peas, string beans (indeed all peas and beans) and lettuces. There were exceptions, and for French guests this was one of them.

GREEN PEAS A LA FRANCAISE

Put in a saucepan over medium heat 4 cups shelled green peas, 12 spring onions, a bouquet of 1 sprig of parsley and several stalks of basil, 1/4 cup butter, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon sugar, 1 white lettuce cut in ribbons and 4 tablespoons water. Bring to a boil, cover and reduce heat gradually to low. Before serving remove bouquet and add 4 tablespoons butter. Tip saucepan in all directions to melt butter. Serve at once.

Or this one:

GREEN PEAS A LA GOOD WIFE

Put 12 young onions in a saucepan over medium heat with 3 tablespoons butter and 1/2 cup fat back of pork previously boiled for 5 minutes, drained and cut in cubes of 1/2 inch. When the onions are lightly browned, remove with the cubes of back fat. In the saucepan stir 1 tablespoon flour. Mix well and gradually add 1-3/4 cups veal bouillon. Allow to boil for 15 minutes and salt. Then add 4 cups shelled green peas, the diced pork fat and the onions. Cover and cook from 15 to 25 minutes according to the size and age of the peas.

Here is still another recipe for

GREEN PEAS AS COOKED IN PROVENCE BY THE FARMERS

Put in an earthenware casserole, which has a well-fitted cover and which is fireproof, 5 tablespoons olive oil and I medium-sized onion. Brown the onion over low heat. Then add 6 medium-sized potatoes cut in 1/3-inch slices. Stir the potatoes until they are covered with oil, and 4 cups boiling water, 4 cups shelled green peas, 3 cloves of crushed garlic, a bouquet of half a laurel leaf, a twig of thyme and a slice of fennel or a bunch of fennel greens, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon pepper and 1/2 teaspoon saffron. Cover and boil gently. When the peas are tender slide on the surface of the juice 4 eggs. They must not touch each other. Gently pour 2 tablespoons of the juice over the yolks of the eggs to form a film. Cut 2 slices of French bread 1/3 inch thick and place on the plates on which the peas and the sauce are to be served.

In summer there were about thirty different vegetables which had to be examined and gathered every morning as well as the berries. There were more berries than we could eat either in desserts or fresh, so I made jam of the little wood strawberries and jelly of the raspberries. The French have a perfect way of making

STRAWBERRY JAM (2)

Put equal weight of sugar and berries into an earthenware bowl. Stir gently not to bruise the berries until they are coated with sugar. Put aside for 24 hours. Pour off sugar and juice that has exuded from berries. Place over medium heat in enamelled saucepan or pot and bring to a boil. Boil gently for 3 or 4 minutes. Remove from heat. Skim and place berries in glasses. Replace syrup over heat and boil gently until spoon is thickly coated. Fill glasses.

Ordinary strawberries may be cooked in the same way. They must of course be hulled or stripped and preferably not washed. They will require from 12 to 15 minutes boiling, depending upon their size and their ripeness. The hulls of the little berries remain on the stalks when the berries are picked.

Most of our men guests had their breakfasts served on the terrace. The breakfast trays were my pride, though the linen and porcelain were simple. In the market place in Chambery we unearthed some amusing coloured glassware, 1840-1850, from Savoy, not at an antique dealer's but in a store that sold glassware. We bought all there was. Berries, fruits, salads and vegetables served in them were subjects for still-life pictures. For French guests an abbreviated American breakfast was served, somewhat more ample however than their usual coffee and rolls or croissants with butter, jam, marmalade or jelly. Croissants are a delicious accompaniment to breakfast or to tea.

CROISSANTS OR CRESCENTS

Heat 1/2 cup milk. When it is warm mix into it 1 package of compressed yeast. Sift 1 cup flour and mix with the yeast to make a sponge. Allow to rise, for about 1/2 hour. Sift 3 cups flour into a large bowl. Put the yeast at the bottom in the centre of the bowl and gradually work in 3-1/2 cups milk and the flour. Put aside until it has risen to twice its size. Then place it on a lightly floured board and knead thoroughly until the dough no longer sticks to the hands. Roll out and place 1/4 cup butter, which has been worked with the hands into a square, in the centre, fold the dough from the sides to meet in the centre. Roll with the hands into a ball and keep in a cool place for several hours or even for the night. Then roll out again and divide into pieces the size of an egg. Roll each one into a cylinder and put aside for 10 minutes. Then very lightly roll them out to 1/3 inch thickness. Roll from one corner, bend into the shape of crescents and put aside for 35 minutes. Place on a lightly buttered baking sheet, paint with pastry brush dipped in slightly beaten egg mixed with I tablespoon water. Bake in preheated 425 ͦ oven.

These are a typically French bread, though they were created in Austria.

String beans with a sauce is a desecration, especially string beans grown in France. Even in my well-loved California they were less tender, less flavoursome, and not as free from strings. Still they could be cooked -- with our French friends in mind -- disguised to my mind as

STRING BEANS IN THE PROVENCAL MANNER

Heat 3 tablespoons olive oil in frying pan. Add 1/4 cup capers, 1/4 cup boned anchovies, 1 crushed clove of garlic and 4 cups string beans previously boiled until tender in boiling water with 3/4 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon pepper in an uncovered saucepan. Toss them in the frying pan until they are well mixed with the various ingredients in it. Serve hot with chopped parsley and fine chopped spring onion sprinkled on them.

And this way:

STRING BEANS BROWNED IN THE OVEN

Boil in salted water uncovered 4 cups string beans. Do not overcook, but when tender remove from heat and drain thoroughly. Butter a fireproof earthenware dish. Sprinkle generously with grated Swiss cheese. Mix 1-1/2 cups Bechamel sauce with 2 yolks of eggs. Pour 1/4 cup of this on the cheese in the earthenware dish, then the string beans and on them the rest of the sauce. Sprinkle 1/3 cup grated Swiss cheese on the string beans, dot with 3 tablespoons melted butter and put in preheated 450 ͦ oven for 15 minutes.

These are very nice ways to cook string beans but they interfere with the poor vegetable's leading a life of its own. As for the cooking of lettuces, with or without sauce, the easiest way to accept this is to consider lettuce as two vegetables, raw lettuce and cooked lettuce. To me cooking lettuces is the sacrifice of the innocents. If cooked they must be, this way is always received with appreciation:

LETTUCE IN RIBBONS WITH CREAM

For 4 cups shredded lettuce put 4 tablespoons butter in a saucepan over medium flame, put the shredded lettuce in the butter and turn with a wooden spoon until all the lettuce is covered with butter. Reduce the heat to low, add 1/4 teaspoon salt. Cover and simmer until all the moisture in the lettuce has been absorbed. Add 1-1/2 cups thick cream sauce and 1 teaspoon onion juice. Stir well together. Place on a serving dish in a mound, and surround by large triangular croutons.



BRAISED LETTUCE WITH ITALIAN SAUCE

Wash and dry 4 large lettuces having removed the green outer leaves. Put into 4 tablespoons butter melted in a saucepan. Stir, reduce heat and cover. Simmer until all the water has evaporated, then add this sauce.

Chop coarsely 1/3 cup mushrooms. Place mushrooms in saucepan over low heat with 2 tablespoons olive oil and 2 tablespoons butter, 1 tablespoon chopped onion and 1/2 tablespoon chopped shallot. Mix well and add 1/3 cup hot dry white wine. Cover and simmer for 10 minutes, add 1/4 cup tomato puree, 1/4 teaspoon salt. Add 1/4 cup butter in small pieces. Melt and mix by tipping the saucepan in all directions. Do not allow to boil.

This is a change -- indeed a violent one.

There were lettuces for early gathering and for summer. For autumn not only Batavia and Romaine, but an endless variety of vegetables to be served raw or cooked. For the early raw vegetables we waited for tomatoes to ripen. Neither Gertrude Stein nor I cared for raw root vegetables, nor did we care for spinach in salad. Spinach and sorrel -- blessed perennials that they are -- could be gathered early. The second or third year at Bilignin I dug up the row of sorrel keeping only one plant. Sorrel is not a delectable dish, but from time to time a few leaves in a mixed salad add an agreeable tang, or chopped very fine and sprinkled on cold fish they have their place. At Bilignin a friend looking over the two vegetable gardens was surprised that there was no Henry IV spinach growing in either of them. It was the first time it had been spoken of to me. So obediently the next year Henry IV spinach was planted. There was no difference between it and ordinary spinach except that the Royal kind, as we got to calling it, grew on poles and one could gather it without stooping. On the other hand it bore less prolifically. For several years it was planted as a curiosity and amusement for our American friends. After three or four years it was no longer planted.

There was still another spinach which grew in the hot summer months without going to seed, called in French Tetredragon, which was known in the only American seed catalogues in which it was listed as New Zealand spinach.

The good Madame Roux, who in these early days of my apprenticeship would come into the garden when I was at work, interrupted the washing and ironing she was doing to give me tactful advice. From her I learned all that was taught me. It was not until the Occupation that she had the satisfaction of seeing the fruits of her effort. A propos of the New Zealand spinach, she said it required a good deal of fertiliser, that what suited it best was la creme de la creme, and when she saw that I had no idea what that was, she explained that it meant pig's manure. She came into the garden with a large wheelbarrow of it next morning, and having secured a second one, we hastily found space for two lines. The leaf is small and thick, shaped like the leaf of the ivy, and the plant has a tendency to creep and to climb. In the Bugey it grows on short poles, but it is wayward. Deliciously tender when cooked, it is best when boiled as it is, without the addition of water after washing. Ten minutes in a covered saucepan and drained, put under the cold-water tap and drained again, the water thoroughly pressed out and returned to the saucepan -- that is the right way to cook it. Then salt should be added and sour cream or butter in quantity. A half teaspoon of salt, and a pinch of ground nutmeg or a pinch of ground ginger or both, give the necessary flavour. There are so few people who care for spinach, but this way of preparing it has seduced a number of my friends.

From the United States every year a kind friend sent a little packet of sweet-com seed grown and gathered by his mother. It was a great treat for us. At that time there was no table com in France. The French grew corn for animals -- in the Bugey, for the chickens. When it was known that we were growing it and eating it, they considered us savages. No one was seduced by the young ears we gave them to taste. But what did astonish and please them were the giant globe tomatoes, not only red but yellow and white, and the very large Chinese globe egg plants, which held nearly a pint of stuffing each.

It was after seeing gumbo (or okra) growing in Meraude Guevara's garden in the south of France that gumbo seeds came to Bilignin. The plants flourished, almost alarmingly so. We couldn't eat half of what I gathered, and it was quite beyond our budget to keep the number of chickens with which to cook them. There were few lobsters and crabs in a small town so far from the sea as Belley. They were used, then, with river and lake fish, with veal, and in a mixed vegetable stew -- not because the vegetable stew requires more than a dozen different ones, but because one has to commence to eat them in rotation the next day.

This delicious dish does not include gumbos, but 3/4 cup of them thinly sliced and I cup hot bouillon could be added.

MACEDOINE OF VEGETABLES

Cooked with freshly gathered spring vegetables this mixed-vegetable dish is exquisite.

In a fireproof pot which has a well-fitting cover put 3 tablespoons butter and 3 medium-sized onions cut in rings. When brown, add 6 hearts of lettuce, 2 cups shelled sweet peas, 2 cups string beans, 2 small round carrots, 6 round turnips, 1-1/2 cups small new potatoes, 2 cups asparagus tips and 1 cup butter. Cover and cook over low flame. Shake the pot frequently and stir gently from the bottom occasionally with a wooden spatula or spoon. Be careful that the vegetables do not bum or scorch. After 1-3/4 hours add salt and pepper and cook for 1/4 hour -- 2 hours in all.

This is one of the very best of vegetable dishes.

This is a richer version of it:

MACEDOINE OF CREAMED VEGETABLES

Boil 1-1/4 cups shredded carrots, 1-3/4 cups shredded turnips and 1-3/4 cups shelled peas in 1 quart milk. Boil 1-3/4 cups string beans and 1-3/4 cups asparagus tips in salted water. Steam 3 large potatoes, peel and dice. Do not overcook any of these vegetables. In a saucepan over low heat melt 2 tablespoons butter, add I tablespoon flour, stir with wooden spoon. Slowly add the hot milk that remains after cooking the carrots, turnips and peas. Stir carefully so that the sauce is perfectly smooth. Allow to simmer for 10 minutes, stirring constantly, and then add 1 cup heavy cream. Bring to the boil and mix with vegetables, and salt and pepper. Bring to the boil again, stir to mix but do not allow to boil. Remove from flame and add 2 tablespoons butter. Do not stir but tip saucepan in all directions to mix. Serve at once.

Also an exquisite dish.

The summer vegetables were often cooked simply, but in late August and through the autumn more elaborately. Spiced and richer ways seemed appropriate. Often fresh herbs were boiled with them, or chopped, for those cooked in the oven. My taste for garlic is pronounced -- friends say exaggerated -- and there never seems to be too great a flavour of basil in vegetables, fish or meat. This is for country cooking; cooking in town does not admit of so much condimenting, or spicing for that matter.

Italian squash (zucchini) and egg plant (aubergine) can be prepared in the same way as

STUFFED BRAISED PEPPERS

Put through the meat chopper 1 cup raw lean veal and 1 cup ham. Mix well with the yolks of 2 eggs, 2 tablespoons fresh basil chopped fine, 2 tablespoons white wine, 1 tablespoon parsley chopped fine, salt and pepper, 1 cup chopped mushrooms previously cooked in 2 tablespoons butter, the juice of 1/2 lemon, salt and pepper, 3 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese, 1/2 teaspoon cumin powder and 1/4 teaspoon saffron. Cut in half, lengthwise, 3 red and 3 green sweet peppers, remove seeds and boil for exactly 2 minutes. Drain and wipe dry. Fill the peppers with the stuffing. Melt 5 tablespoons butter in a casserole with a tight-fitting cover. Place the stuffed peppers, not overlapping, in it. Moisten with a cup of hot chicken or veal stock. Add 2 cups chopped tomatoes. Cook covered over medium heat for 20 minutes. Remove peppers, place alternating yellow and red peppers on serving dish. Reduce sauce for a few minutes, then strain over peppers and serve.

This is a pleasant change from the too-frequently-served vegetable browned in the oven. The flavours marry well.

We were very proud of the artichokes the garden produced, too proud to do much to them until late autumn, when we ate this version of

ARTICHOKES A LA BARIGOULE

For 4 large artichokes put in a casserole with a tight-fitting cover over medium heat 5 tablespoons olive oil, 1 chopped onion and 2 diced carrots. Place the artichokes on these, leaves up, salt and pepper. Pour a little of the oil over the artichokes. Cover, stirring occasionally. When the carrots and onions begin to brown add 1 cup white wine, 2 cloves of garlic and 2 twigs of fresh rosemary or 1 teaspoon powdered rosemary. Cook over low flame until a leaf can be removed from artichokes. Serve hot with sauce poured over artichokes.

Oyster plants (or salsify), beetroot and Jerusalem artichokes can be made appetising, though not delicate. They were planted each year, though one wondered why. The Jerusalem artichokes are redeemed by their agreeable substance. Oyster plants have no excuse for existing: they are long, too clean, have little flavour and are deservedly unpopular. Here the sauce justifies the time spent in preparing

OYSTER PLANT (SALSIFY) WITH WINE SAUCE

Melt 4 tablespoons butter in a casserole with a tight-fitting cover. Lightly brown in it 1 cup diced raw veal, 1 cup diced ham, 1 diced medium-sized carrot, 1/2 finely chopped medium-sized onion, 1 tablespoon finely chopped parsley, 1 of tarragon and 1 of chervil. Add 1/2 cup hot dry white wine and 1 cup hot bouillon. Bring to a boil. Add a pinch of powdered laurel and 1/4 teaspoon pepper. Cover and cook gently for 2 hours. Clean and boil the oyster plant in salted water until nearly tender. Drain and tie in bunches like asparagus. Put in casserole and simmer for 1/2 hour. Add the juice of 1 lemon. Remove from flame and add 3 tablespoons butter in small pieces. Do not stir but tip casserole in all directions until butter is melted. Untie the oyster plants. Arrange neatly on preheated serving dish, pour the sauce over the oyster plants, and serve at once.

Celery root (celeriac) can be cooked in the same way. They will require not more than 1/4 hour to boil and should, after being well drained, be cut in strips like potatoes for frying.

As for beetroots, their excuse for being is the fine colour they add to pale dishes. As a vegetable this recipe combines the decorative with the tasty.

PUREE OF BEETROOT

Bake beetroots in oven till quite soft, peel and mash through strainer with a potato masher, add one-third their volume of thick cream sauce. Place over low heat in a casserole, add salt and pepper. When about to boil, add 1 tablespoon butter cut in small pieces to 2 cups puree. Do not allow to boil, do not stir but tip casserole in all directions. Serve in a mound on preheated dish. Sprinkle with chopped parsley. Or serve as a border around veal or pork roast.

Besides all the vegetables in the two gardens, there were the fruits and berries. Besides all the strawberries there were the raspberries which bore from the end of May all through the summer until December -- the first snow did not discourage them. They were in a protected corner and were a lovely sight, growing as grape vines do in Lombardy. Attached to three rows of wire, each root was allowed six branches, three on either side. When one came upon them unexpectedly, one did not know what all the pendent clusters of colour could be. They never seemed real to me, but a new and joyous surprise each morning. Every care they needed -- and little enough did one pay for their beauty and for their incredible fertility -- was more reward than labour. In spring the branches were tied on to the wires, and again later, so that the weight of the berries would not break the branches. Later still, there were new shoots from the root, and three or four of the healthiest were kept for the next year's bearing. The plants that were there when we came produced red berries. After we had secured a lease, we planted forty-eight white raspberries in the upper garden. They didn't thrive as well as the red, perhaps. As it was farther away from water and it was an exhausting effort to drag the hose so far, the upper garden had been chosen for the commoner vegetables -- potatoes, pole beans and the marrow, squash and cucumber family. There was not room for more raspberries in the lower garden. The white ones were planted in lines near the currants, red, white and black, and the gooseberries. Unquestionably they felt they were not favoured, nor were they. They were not in the sun all day and never received the same attention as the red family below. The berries were much smaller but much sweeter. What a happy life it would be only to cultivate raspberries.

In France as much attention is given to black currants as to red, and there are always a few bushes of white ones in every proper garden. The bushes of black currants have a very strong agreeable fragrance. Of them can be made a pleasant summer drink.

BLACK-CURRANT LIQUEUR

Wash and drain 1/2 lb. raspberries and 3 lbs. black currants. Mash them thoroughly. Cover with a cloth and put aside in a cool place for 24 hours. The next day add a handful of black-currant leaves that have been washed and dried, and 1 quart 90 per cent alcohol. Cover the bowl with a plate and put aside for 24 hours. On the third day place a sieve with a piece of fine linen over a bowl. Pour the fruit and the alcohol through, mashing with a heavy pestle or a potato masher. Put 3 lbs. sugar and 3/4 quart water in an enamelled saucepan. Stir until it commences to boil, over low heat. Boil for 5 minutes. Put aside until completely cold. Then add the syrup to the juice of the berries and the alcohol. Allow this to stand for several hours. Fit a filtering paper into a funnel and pour through it to fill the bottles. A filtering paper is bought at a good chemist's. This makes about 2-3/4 quarts.

This is not only served as a liqueur. In the Bugey it was poured into a glass filled with shaved ice. It was, a very refreshing summer drink. A mocha (coffee) liqueur was also used for an iced drink. There were vulgarians who put whipped cream on top, and it was then called a l'Americaine -- disparagingly, one is forced to acknowledge.

The gooseberries in France are four or five times larger than those grown in the United States, and very much sweeter. We grew a species that were raspberry coloured. They are cultivated like olive trees, the centre growths are removed as they appear -- to give light and sun. Every year hornets would make a nest in the trunk of one of the bushes and with a sharp knife I would have to cut it out. Wasps, hornets and bees rarely sting me, though my work with them has always been aggressive. Gertrude Stein did not care for any of them, nor for spiders, centipedes and bats. She had no violent feeling about them out of doors, but in the house she would call for aid. The instruments for getting rid of them were determination, newspapers, a broom and pincers. These were always effective.

A charming story of wifely and husbandly devotion was that of two of our friends. She did not wish her husband to be bored, annoyed or worried. When they were first married she allowed him to believe that she was very much afraid of spiders. Whenever she saw him disturbed she would call him with a wail, Darling, a spider; there, darling-don't you see it. He would come frying with a handkerchief, put it on the spot indicated, and, gathering up the imaginary spider, would throw it into the garden. The wife would uncover her face and with a sigh say, How good and patient you are, dearest.

Rhubarb grew in the upper garden too. Two or three spring rhubarb tarts each year were not worth the space the rhubarb occupied, so they were rooted up and put on the compost heap. Melons too were not attempted after the first year. They required too much care, putting under glass and suppressing trailers and buds. In Paris we had a small room Gertrude Stein called the Salon des Refuses after the famous one at which the Impressionist painters showed their pictures the year when they had been refused admittance at the regular salon. Ours held the pictures Gertrude Stein refused -- that is, pictures she had bought to find out what she felt about them and stored there when she found they did not interest her. In the garden it was simpler. When the refuses were rooted up and put on the compost heap, it caused no feeling from anyone involved.

Like all beans, pole beans flourish in French soil. In spite of reducing the number planted, there were always too many to gather. Then too they grew too high, nothing stopped them. Finally they were clipped at the top. To gather them was a problem not only because of the time it took but because of the narrow paths between rows. It wasn't practical to leave some steps out of doors, but by carefully balancing three very strong narrow wine cases one on top of the other and overlapping, the difficulty seemed overcome until one day we all came down in a heap dragging a pole and its garniture with us! A bruised leg put an end for a while to the beans talk problem.

Fruits were neither as plentiful nor of so good a quality as the berries. When we came to Bilignin there was one pear, one plum and one apple tree in the garden, and all of them were old. With the landlord's permission we had the plum tree removed at once. Everything was done, but to no avail, to save the deep-rose-coloured pear tree. That left one excellent large apple tree. For an orchard it was not excessive -- Gertrude Stein spoke of it as The Nucleus. We waited for three years until we secured a lease to plant apples, peaches, apricots and nectarines. The French like to plant fruit trees in the old-fashioned way, on the sunny side of the wall. There were only two such walls free, and a fine old laurel tree covered a part of one of them.

The laurel was a constant delight. There was a nameless mauve rose that cried for a border of laurel leaves. A bouquet of them was always in the bedroom of our young guests, writers and painters and occasionally musicians, as a symbol of a future wreath. None of them remarked the leaves.

The peaches, apricots and nectarines were not for long -- they deteriorated in three or four years. It was not a soil or a climate that suited them. We were slow to learn this. As the apples were thriving, more of them replaced the fruits we were discarding. The famous Calville, of which the equally famous Calvados, an apple brandy, is not made, and the resembling Belles-Fleur Jaune, grew quickly and well. But fruit trees on a wall are not prolific. The Calvilles, sold by the piece in Paris, grow no more than forty to the tree. It was necessary to find a commoner, more hardy apple and to plant it in open ground -- what the French, looking facts in the face, call open to the winds. And then we finally had an apple orchard. The forcing beds were returned to their sheltered home against the wall.

When autumn came, the last harvest was so occupying that one forgot that it meant leaving the garden for the return to Paris. Not only did the winter vegetables have to be gathered and placed to dry for a day before packing, but their roots and leaves had to be put on the compost heap with manure and leaves and packed down for the winter. The day the huge baskets were packed was my proudest in all the year. The cold sun would shine on the orange-coloured carrots, the green, yellow and white pumpkins and squash, the purple egg plants and a few last red tomatoes. They made for me more poignant colour than any post-Impressionist picture. Merely to look at them made all the rest of the year's pleasure insignificant. Gertrude Stein took a more practical attitude. She came out into the denuded wet cold garden and, looking at the number of baskets and crates, asked if they were all being sent to Paris, that if they were the expressage would ruin us. She thought that there were enough vegetables for an institution and reminded me that our household consisted of three people. There was no question that, looking at that harvest as an economic question, it was disastrous, but from the point of view of the satisfaction which work and aesthetic confer, it was sublime.

Our final, definite leaving of the gardens came one cold winter day, all too appropriate to our feelings and the state of the world. A sudden moment of sunshine peopled the gardens with all the friends and others who had passed through them. Ah, there would be another garden, the same friends, possibly, or no, probably new ones, and there would be other stories to tell and to hear. And so we left Bilignin, never to return.

And now it amuses me to remember that the only confidence I ever gave was given twice, in the upper garden, to two friends. The first one gaily responded, How very amusing. The other asked with no little alarm, But, Alice, have you ever tried to write. As if a cook-book had anything to do with writing.

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Index of Recipes

BATTER, 23

BEVERAGES

Black-currant Liqueur, 277
Dublin Coffee James Joyce, 261
Egg Nog of the Commonwealth Club,
Richmond, Va., 261
Hot Chocolate, 64
Hot Toddy for Cold Nights, 260
Noyeau, 183
Sloe Gin, 260

BREADS AND CAKES

Breads

Brioche, 214
Croissants (Crescents), 269
Garnished Salted Bread of the
Bugey, 255

Cakes

Banbury Cakes, 254
Corn-meal Cake (or Croquant), 115
Crullers, 253
Laekerlis, 71
Liberation Fruit Cake, 222
Macon Cake, 81
Pecan Cakes, 253
Pizza alla Napolitana, 255
Schankels or Schenkels, 70
Visitandines, 172

Cookies

Alice's Cookies, 99
Cookies, 254
Fried Cookies, 22
Nameless Cookies, 99

Pie

The Citrouillat, 114

Tarts

A Tender Tart, 46
Cream Tart, 174
Frangipani Tart, 221
Linzer Torte, 44
Sacher Torte, 44
Tarte Chambord, 69

DESSERTS, COLD

Apples

Apple Mousse, 163
Apples with Raspberry Syrup, 164
Iced Apples, 257
Queen Elizabeth I Apples, 257
Coupe Ambassadrice, 189

Coupe Grimaldi, 189

Creams

Bavarian Cream Perfect Love, 161
Charlotte Cream, 162
Creme Brulee, 258
Creme Careme, 163
Creme Marquise, 116
Creme Renversee, 74
Creme Renversee a la Cevenole, 162

Custard Josephine Baker, 118
Farina Pudding, 198
Floating Island, 18
Fruit Mousse, 164
Fruit Sorbet, 189
Haschich Fudge, 259

Ice Creams

Birthday Ice Cream for Adults, 258
Nora's Ice Cream, 98
Nougat Ice Cream, 117
Singapore Ice Cream, 12
Wedding Anniversary Ice Cream, 257

Iced Souffle, 134
Kalouga, 183
Orange and Lemon Dessert, 259
Peaches Glacees, 164
Raspberry Flummery, 206

Rice

Empress Rice, 116
Rice with Fruit, 115
Rice Pudding with Vanilla Cream Sauce, 125
Scheherezade's Melon, 98
Truffles de Chambery, 213
Very Good Chocolate Mousse, 258

DESSERTS, HOT

Apple Fritters, 165

Bird's-nest Pudding, 129
Crepes, 208
Crepes Normandes, 255
Croute a la Belle Aurore, 166
Dulce (1), 133
Dulce (2), 133
Flaming Peaches, 57
Fruit Souffle, 165
Millason, 59
Nora's Souffle Fritters, 97
Pudding Louise, 257
Salzburger Nockerl, 256
Viennese Cheese Pancakes, 256
Violet Souffle, 166

EGGS AND OMELETTES

Chinese Eggs, 229
Eggs Francis Picabia, 30
Mirrored Eggs a la Brahan, 177
Omelette Aurore, 104
Omelette a la Bourbonnaise, 165
Omelette in an Overcoat, 106
Omelette Sans Nom, 106
Poached Eggs a la Sultane, 177
Poached Eggs Babouche, 141
Tricoloured Omelette, 197
Vegetables and Eggs, 22

ENTREES

Canneloni, 196
Chicken-liver Custard, 232
Fondue, 217
Fondue de Bale, 233
Gnocchi alla Piemontese, 231
Gnocchi alla Romana, 229
Liver Custard, 232
Pork "alla Pizzaiola" of Calabria, 231
Quenelles, 6
Truffle Turnovers, 232
Veal Kidneys, 133

FISH

Baked Fish with Stuffing, 236
Barrida, 234

Bass

Bass for Picasso, 19
Pink Pompadour Bass, 111
Carp Stuffed with Chestnuts, 38

Cod

Fresh Cod Mont-Bry, 145
Salt Codfish a la Monegasque, 147

Crawfish

Crawfish a la Bordelaise, 204
Swimming Crawfish, 104
Turnovers with Crawfish -- Sauce Nantua, 91
Fish in a Spanish Pie, 113

Lobster

Lobster Archiduc, 128
Perpignan Lobster, 60

Mackerel

Stewed Mackerel with Paprika, 147

Meurette, 144
Mussels
Mussels with Cream Sauce, 113
Mussels with Fennel Sauce, 112
Mussels with Rice, 235
Oysters Rockefeller, 13

Perch

Grilled Perch with Fennel, 83

Pike

Supreme of Pike a la Dijonaise, 91
Pilaw Stella Maris de Porto Fino, 235
Ray with Black Butter, 147

Salmon
A Salmon Pate, 103
Salmon with Sauce Hollandaise au
Beurre Noisette, 76
Scampi Pino Orialli, 235
Shad
Baked Shad, 145
Shad Roe, 234
Shad Roe Mousse, 230
Shrimps in Butter, 236

Smelts
Devilled Smelts, 146

Sole

Filet de Sole a la Ritz, 236
Filet de Sole with Lobster Sauce, 19
Filet de Sole Perinette, 145
Sole de la Maison, 73

Trout

The Trout, 16
Truites en Chemise, 208

HORS D'OEUVRE, COLD

Cauliflower with Mustard Cream
Sauce, 141
Egg Plant a la Provencale, 139
Frogs' Legs a la Parisienne, 141
Mussels, 139
Small Fish in the Oriental Manner, 140
Stuffed Cucumbers, 140

HORS D'OEUVRE, HOT

Fried Cream with Cheese, 142
Fried Oysters, 143
Omelette Palermitaine, 142
Oysters Sauce Mornay, 142
Poached Eggs Babouche, 141

MEAT

Beef

Boeuf Bourguignon (1), 5
Boeuf Bourguignon (2), 154
Brown Braised Ribs of Beef, 180
Daube of Sliced Beef Nicolette, 156
Fillet of Beef Adrienne, 155
Gypsy Goulash, 44
Roast Beef for a Rainy Day, 240
Rolled Slices of Beef in Cream, 20
Rosettes of Beef, 156
Szekely Gulyas, 237
Tournedos Margot, 215

Frogs' Legs

Fried Frogs' Legs, 23
Frogs' Legs with Cream, 23

Game

Jugged Hare, 239
Pheasants with Cottage Cheese, 112
Roasted Saddle of Young Boar, 61

Ham

Morvan Ham with Cream Sauce, 79
Queches de Nancy, 66

Kidneys
Roast Kidneys with Ravigote
Sauce, 106

Lamb

Kebabs with Rice, 238
Lamb Curry, 240
Spring Navarin, 153

Liver

Foie de Mouton a la Patraque, 101
Kneppes, 63

Mutton

Gigot de la Clinique, 33
Kobbe, 21
Leg of Mutton a la Muscovite, 100
Mutton Chops in Dressing Gowns, 101
Mutton Croquettes, 22
Saddle of Mutton Maintenon, 72
The Seven-hour Leg of Mutton, 102

Oxtail

Haricot, 73

Pork

Rillettes, 84
Roast Pork Normandy, 240
Veal and Pork Meat Loaf, 191

Rabbit with Dumplings, 239
Sweetbreads a la Napolitaine, 64

Veal

A Restricted Veal Loaf, 210
Three-minute Veal Steak, 79
Veal and Pork Meat Loaf, 191
Veal Chops Paprika, 237
Veal Marengo, 155

NOODLES, 38

PICNIC LUNCHES

First Picnic Lunch, 77
Second Picnic Lunch, 77

POULTRY

Capon

Katie's Capon, 100

Chicken

Boiled Chicken, 245
Braised Chicken Stuffed with
Noodles, 148
Chicken a la Comtadine, 110
Chicken a la Reine Marie, 102
Chicken a l'Estragon, 219
Chicken Croquettes with Eggs, 176
Chicken in Half Mourning, 148
Chicken Montsouris, 150
Chicken Saute a la Forestiere, 76
Chicken Saute aux Ducs de Bourgogne, 90
Chicken with Rice, 246
Chop Suey from Chicken Leftovers, 246
Circassian Chicken, 244
Fried and Roasted Breaded Chicken, 190
Godmother's Chicken, 150
Messy Chicken a la Berrichonne, 245
Quadripartite Chicken, 107
Roast Chicken in Cream, 245
Steamed Chicken, 59
"Vent Vert" Chicken, 242

Cock

Cock in Wine, 149
Covered Cock with Cumin, 194

Duck

Duck with Bordelaise Sauce, 152
Duck with Orange Sauce, 42
Duck with Port Wine, 110
Duckling with Pan Wine, 184

Grouse

Braised Grouse, 14

Hen

A Hen with Golden Eggs, 109
Hen a la Provencale, 86

Larks a la Conchita Hernandez, 246

Pigeon

Braised Pigeons on Croutons, 40

Pullet

A Fine Fat Pullet, 149

Squab

Giant Squab in Pyjamas, 111
Minute Squab, 150
Roast Squab on Canapes, 151

Turkey

Young Turkey with Truffles, 153

PRESERVES

Apple Chutney, 262
Coco Marmalade, 175
Coconut Marmalade, 117
Gooseberry Jelly, 134
Orange Marmalade, 261
Rhubarb Preserve, 262
Strawberry Jam (1), 183
Strawberry Jam (2), 268

SALADS

Alexandra Salad, 185
Alexandre Dumas Junior's Francillon Salad, 118
Aspic Salad, 252
Cauliflower Salad with Shrimps, 16
14th of July Salad, 251
Lemon Salad, 219
Lobster, Breast of Chicken and Black
Truffle Salad, 216
Potato Salad, 160
Rossini's Salad, 118
Saffron Rice, 251
Salad Aphrodite, 252
Salad Bagration, 158
Salad Cancalaise, 159
Salad Livoniere, 161
Salad Meli-Melo, 160
Salad Nicoise, 159
Salad Port Royal, 159
Salad Raphael, 160
"Vent Vert" Salad, 244
Wild Rice Salad, 123
Winter Salad, 161

SANDWICHES

Mushroom (1), 109
Mushroom (2), 109

SAUCES, GARNISHINGS, FILLINGS

Cake Creams and Fillings

Almond Paste, 222
Butter Cream, 81
Kirsch Cream, 81
Mocha Cream, 81
Pistachio Cream, 81

Garnishings

Green Mayonnaise, 140
Herb Butter, 217
Home-made Mustard, 212

Sauces for Desserts

Hot Sabayon Sauce, 166
Vanilla Cream Sauce, 125

Sauces for Fish

Black Butter, 148
Cream Sauce, 24
Curry Sauce, 146
Devil Sauce, 146
Fennel Sauce, 112
Lobster Sauce, 19
Sauce Hollandaise au Beurre Noisette, 76
Sauce Mousseline, 16
Sauce Nantua, 91

Sauces for Meat

Cream Sauce, 274
Game Sauce, 62
Mustard Cream Sauce, 141
Pesto alia Genovese, 247
Ravigote Sauce, 107

Sauces for Poultry

Bordelaise Sauce, 152
Orange Sauce, 43
Sauce for Croquettes, 176

Sauces for Salad

Aioli or Aillloli Sauce, 124
Garlic Ice Cream, 251

Sauces for Vegetables

Cream Sauce, 274
Italian Sauce, 270
Sauce Momay, 85
Virgin Sauce, 62
Wine Sauce, 276

SOUPS

Algonquin Cream Mushroom, 228
Algonquin Special, 229
Bouillabaisse, 88
Cacik, 52
Chlodnik, 51
Clear Turtle, 126
Consomme with Parmesan Cheese
Croutons, 143
Cream of Green Pea, 143

Gazpacho

From Cordoba, 50
" Malaga, 50
" Segovia, 51
" Seville, 50

Ibiza, 228
Laurel Leaf, 228
Mimosa, 143
Mussel Soup a la Regie, 227
Onion, 144
Puree of Artichoke, 80
Soup of Shallots and Cheese, 67
Tarata, 52

VEGETABLES

Artichokes

Artichokes a la Barigarole, 275
Hearts of Artichokes a la Isman
Bavaldy, 11
Stuffed Artichokes Stravinsky, 241

Asparagus

Madame Loubet's Asparagus Tips, 82

Beets

Puree of Beetroot, 276

Celery Root (Celeriac)

Puree of Celery Root and Potatoes, 14
Puree of Celery Root with Cream
Sauce, 184

Chards

Stuffed Swiss Chards, 250

Cucumbers

Creamed Cucumbers, I57

Egg Plant

Stuffed Egg Plant (Aubergines), 248

Endives, 157

Green Peas
Green Peas a la Francaise, 267
Green Peas a la Goodwife, 267
Green Peas as cooked in Provence
by the Farmers, 267

Lettuce

Braised Lettuce with Italian
Sauce, 270
Lettuce in Ribbons with Cream, 270

Mixtures of Vegetables

Macedoine of Creamed Vegetables,
274
Macedoine of Vegetables, 274
Saute of Mixed Vegetables, 250
Steamed Spring Vegetable Pie, 248
Vegetable Roast Loaf, 242

Mushrooms

A Flan of Mushrooms a la Creme, 85
Mushroom Sandwiches, 109

Oyster Plant (Salsify) with Wine
Sauce, 276

Peppers

Stuffed Braised Peppers, 275
Stuffed Peppers Hammamet, 249

Potatoes

Gourmet's Potatoes, 20
Mashed Potatoes Luxembourgeoise,
249
Potatoes Crainquebille, 178
Potatoes Mousselines, 178
Potatoes Smothered in Butter, 158
The Real Right Way for French
Fried Potatoes, 158

Rice

Cuban Rice, 141
Rice a la Dreux, 108
Saffron Rice, 251
Spanish Rice, 241

Saute of Mixed Vegetables, 250

Spinach

Browned Spinach Daisy, 157

Squash

Baked Zucchini (or Italian Squash), 173
Stuffed Italian Squash, 149

Steamed Spring Vegetable Pie, 248

String Beans

String Beans Browned in the Oven, 270
String Beans in the Provencal
Manner, 269
Tomatoes au Naturel, 205

White Beans

Browned-in-the-Oven White Beans, 248