The Depression Kitchen Blog

NOTE:  Wandering around aimlessly in my usual fashion last weekend, I encountered the incredibly interesting, fecund and, ironically, uplifting blog entitled The Depression Kitchen (link).  Its creators don't seem to have updated it much lately, but there's a wealth of good past material to troll through.  I've noted elsewhere on ACravan that I am not a sentimental person and feel almost no sense of nostalgia for anything.  I would like to amend and correct this by saying that a notable exception lies in the area of kitchens I have inhabited, and much on The Depression Kitchen reminds me of the kitchen in my maternal grandfather's house, which I considered an Elysian field of black-and-white, Art Deco pleasure and possibilities.  

I suspect the reality of that kitchen was probably not as grand as my "Top Hat"-inflected memories, but I'm content to live on those, on my ancient kitchen tools (extending back to the 1930s) inherited from my mother, and my collection of "Candlewick" Depression Glass.


From The Depression Kitchen Blog:

        "At first it was hard to detect what this advertisement, in Ladies Home Journal, April 1930 was selling. Crisco? Baking Powder? No and no. It’s sponsored by professional bakers, putting forward the idea that store-bought cakes could be just as good as homemade, and save the housewife hours of kitchen drudgery… when she could be out doing something much more worthwhile, like enjoying an afternoon in the country, golfing, or playing with her children. “Let the Baker cut you a slice of spare time – by doing your baking.”

 
An assortment of Candlewick Depression Glass. It's a great deal of fun and fairly inexpensive to collect, and even more enjoyable to use.

Timing Is Everything (Missed Connections)

        All of us have probably had occasion to feel or say that “it’s all a matter of timing, ” and fortunately we probably care in unequal degrees about the many things we may have “missed” through our inattention, miscues, missed cues, etc.

Peter Griffin, Example of "Post-Modern Architecture," Zhengzhou Green Fair, China

    I think I missed (am currently missing and will continue to miss) post-modernism.  The only thing the term has ever meant to me (that is to say, the image that forms in my mind whenever I hear it) is of the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan becoming overfull (even after its porcine over-expansion), over-capacity, and art marketers desperately meeting in secret committees to coin a new term to promote and sell subsequent "art events" and so-called "art developments."  Branding, after all, is everything these days.

 

      Today, while engaging in research concerning the weird and deplorable "human microphone" (the people control device/exercise being used at contemporary political rallies), I learned that I really must have missed "queer theory"  too (although I knew of its existence) because it is apparently in the process of being supplanted by "post-queer theory" (skip to end of linked article).

 

Scully and Mulder.  For some reaon, Mulder is identified in this photo as the "Post-Modern Prometheus." 

        I can survive without regret both of these losses or deficiencies.  Generally I am able, when I need or want to, to understand complicated, even insanely prolix, pieces of literature or technical writing, provided their authors are sincerely trying to communicate, are making a palpable effort to make themselves understood. 

M.C. Escher, Relativity, 1953.  Modern? Post-Modern? None of the above?  Queer, certainly, and proudly so.

        I cannot accomplish this, however, nor can I abide reading self-involved, neologism and jargon-filled academic or pseudo-academic writing that clearly seeks to impress, but is nothing more than grotesque and distorted Fun House mirror fare.

         I sincerely believe that this kind of work is intentionally self-deceptive and that it also seeks to deceive readers based on the authors' contempt, anger and fear.

Post-modern Chinese surgical needles (Actual caption label)

Mrs. Danvers must fit in here somewhere.  The rest is silence, except for:

Look At Me, I'm Wonderful  &

Tent

(Bonzo Dog Band links from Keynsham, 1969)


[Please Note 3 links in Paragraph 3]

The Island Of Sheep (John Buchan)

                 

    There was another spell of eerie quiet, and then it seemed the world was changing.   The clouds were drifting apart, and I suddenly saw a brilliant star-sown patch of sky.  Then the whole horizon turned from velvet-black to grey, grey rimmed in the east with a strip of intense yellow light.  I looked behind me and could see the outlines of the low coast, with blurs which I knew were woods, and with one church-steeple pricking fantastically into the pale brune.

 

        It was the time for the geese, and in an instance there were on us.  They came in wedge after wedge, shadowy as ghosts against the faintly flushing clouds, but cut sharp against the violet lagoon of clear sky.  They were not babbling, as they do in an evening flight from the fields to the sea, but chuckling and talking low to themselves.  From the sound, I knew they were pink-foot, for the white fronts make a throatier noise.  It was a sight that always takes my breath away, this multitude of wild living things surging out of the darkness and the deep, as steady in their discipline as a Guards battalion.  I never wanted to shoot and I never shot first; it was only the thunder of Samson’s 12-bore that woke me to my job.

    An old gander, which was the leading bird in one wedge, suddenly trumpeted.  Him Samson got; he fell with a thud five yards from my head, and the echo of the shot woke the marshes for miles.  It was all our bag.  The birds flew pretty high, and Peter John had the best chance, but no sign of life came from his trench.  As soon as the geese had past, and a double wedge of whistling widgeon had followed very high up, I walked over to investigate.  I found my son sitting on his mud rampart with a rapt face.  “I couldn’t shoot,” he stammered; “they were too beautiful.”

From:  John Buchan, The Island Of Sheep.  London, Hodder & Staughton, 1936.

Cold Cucumber Soup (Harlech)

Cold Cucumber Soup (Harlech)

¾ pint chicken stock

¾ pint buttermilk

½ cucumber

Salt and pepper

2 tablespoons mint chopped or dash Tabasco

Put the stock, which must be free of all fat, in a blender with the buttermilk.  When blended, add the cucumber, peeled and cut into chunks.  Blend again until it is in tiny pieces, yet not absolutely smooth.  Add salt and pepper to taste.  

Chill 2- 3 hours before serving, then sprinkle each bowl with chopped fresh mint or a dash of Tabasco.

NOTE:   On this crisp-apple Pennsylvania fall Sunday, I found myself wandering through one of my mother's old recipe notebooks and discovered her handwritten notes for this simple and appealing soup, which she attributed to "Harlech."  Based on the vintage of the looseleaf, I'm guessing that my mother copied this from a newspaper article concerning Pamela (Lady) Harlech's 1977 volume, Feast Without Fuss.  Undertaking further research, I discovered that Lady Harlech's (she was at that time the food editor of British Vogue, as well as the wife of David Ormsby-Gore, Baron Harlech) book provoked controversy upon publication and was cited as an especially grievous example of recipe plagiarism, a recurring problem in the cookbook publishing world and not only among "celebrity" authors.  Nonetheless, this soup looks very good to me (there's absolutely no reason that a "borrowed" recipe would be a bad one), and as someone who drinks iced coffee even on blizzard-y mornings, I can and do enjoy a chilled soup anytime.  I like the chopped mint vs. Tabasco alternative.  It's like having really cool reversible clothing -- two looks for the price of one.  Those familiar with the history of the Ormsby-Gores know that their story mixes high achievement with terrible family tragedies.

La Chansonette

        Planning anything, with the sole, small, chance exception of total confusion, was impossible.  

        Idea kleptomania and virtual murder seethed from the third and fourth floors.

        Pigs I like enormously.  For that reason, I won't say the malefactors were "raised in a sty." 

        I'm trying to communicate clearly here in order to avoid total confusion, which I abhor in the same way nature abhors a vacuum.

Key:

1. Eugène Atget, Impasse de la Baudorie, Rue de Venise, Paris, 1890. Vintage albumen print, 22.2 x 17.9 cms.

2. Eugène Atget, Ancien Hotel de Jumilhac 12, rue de l'Abbe Gregoire, 1905. Vintage albumen print, 21.8 x 17.5 cms

3.  La Chansonette -- Yves Montand performance at l'Olympia, Paris (Link)

 

A Pilgrim Dachshund's Progress (About A Boy)

“Half pound plain loaf”  :-  Half a pound of flour, two tea-spoonfuls of Yeatman’s powder, a salt-spoonful of salt, and four or five teaspoonfuls of water.  Work this as above*, reserving the baking powder to the last, set the dough in a tin, or form it in the well-known “cottage” shape and bake.  

 

      I furnish this recipe for its “found poetry.”  At least that’s the way it seemed to me when I first read it, half-asleep on the daybed near Andy’s crate yesterday evening.  The two martinis I drank a little earlier at Paramour, the oddly named but excellent (as well as highly anticipated and wholeheartedly welcomed) restaurant in the Wayne Hotel, may have contributed to my poetry – bread recipe reverie.  Absolutely exhausted from a week of caring for our recuperating dog (we first visited Paramour the evening before Andy’s surgery, when everything seemed completely tenuous; we were already past exhaustion then from worry),  I fell asleep quickly (I think) and woke up with Wyvern’s verse - recipe still on my mind.

 

      I wasn’t sure what a “cottage” shaped bread loaf was, well-known as it might have been to Wyvern.  When I found pictures of one, I immediately recognized it as the type of loaf the character Marcus used when he (accidentally) killed the pond duck in About A Boy.  Although I normally strongly object to animals being used as comic props in this way, the incident develops into a funny, touching scene in an excellent, sensitive film, and it's clear that no actual duck was harmed in production.  I'm pleased to see that Nicholas Hoult, the young actor who played Marcus with such restraint and depth, is now definitely “hot,” "picked to click" and “poised for stardom,” as they say.

      Andy is doing very well – growing stronger every day, balance clearly re-balancing, attitude of a champion.  I will do my best to emulate him.

*N.b., Wyvern’s kneading instructions are rudimentary but, for the experienced bread baker, intuitive.  Essentially, he sensibly counsels against over-kneading and his loaves all seem to be of the “single-rise” variety.  The Great Man seems to provide no baking instructions, unusual for him, but I must admit I haven’t read this section of Culinary Jottings From Madras thoroughly.  

Another Great Man aka The Best Dressed Chicken In Town aka The Ital Surgeon aka Winston James Thompson

General Grudger

Not General Grudger

      

            It isn't that I'm entirely literal and, therefore, susceptible to being blindly obedient to others' commands, but this morning at 3:44 am, while reading Peter Graham's Classic Cheese Cookery (which Lizzie Spender, the illustrious Stephen Spender's daughter called "a delight to read and a must for insomniac browsers" in the Sunday Times), I encountered this unusual recipe for General Grudger, and felt compelled to share it with you.

       I have covered Anglo-Indian cuisine here previously and probably will do so again because the recipes are so appealing and the history is so colorful.  But I include this recipe (and I imagine Graham included it in his book) because it's an off-beat surprise and "conversation piece" that I think will appeal to contemporary tastes.  Personally, I tend to get turned off by the sticky and often sweetened "baked brie" confections that began cropping up in restaurants and at cocktail parties about 10 years ago.  The General Grudger combines sweet and savory, but also incorporates textural and flavor elements reminiscent of kedgeree and shepherd's pie.  It's simple to make, almost ancient and looks worth trying.

        General Grudger seems to be a baked cheese recipe with a notable difference, edge and style that could serve as an unusual, much better alternative:

GENERAL GRUDGER

"An Anglo-Indian curiosity from E.H. Parry's Cookery and Other Recipes (Allahabad, 1910), a book heavily redolent of the British Raj, with its advertisements in the front for "improved 'Cawnpore Tent Club' pith helmets, Madame E. Thick's drill skirts and Charles and Co., chemists whose 'dispensary is entirely under European control'."

 

           The publishers interleaved the book with blank ruled pages for notes and recipes.  My kitchen-soiled, battered (possibly in both senses) copy enables one to chart the itinerary of an anonymous family (diplomats? soldiers?) as they moved around the British Empire:  on the interleaved pages, written in at least three different anonymous hands (grandmother? mother? daughter?) there are Australian, Indian, Singhalese and South African recipes.

Lord Wavell (l), not General Grudger

           One such manuscript recipe is for General Grudger.  I must confess that I have no idea how the dish came to acquire its curious name.

      The 'other recipes' of the book's title include cocktails (e.g., 'P & O', 'How to keep cheese from drying in India', 'How to clean ivory knife handles', and other household hints.

      For 4-6

      30 g. (1 oz) sultanas

      3 tbsp. milk

      1 kg (2 lb 3 oz) potatoes

      salt

      freshly ground pepper

      60 g (2 oz) unsalted butter

      3 tbsp mango chutney

      110 g (4 oz) freshly grated Cheddar

      20 prawns cooked and shelled

      3 hard-boiled eggs, shelled and sliced

      4 tbsp breadcrumbs

      2 tbsp good curry powder

      2 tbsp fresh parsley, chopped

Put the sultanas to soak in the milk.  Wash and cook the potatoes in plenty of boiling salted water until tender.  Peel and mash, adding salt and pepper to taste.  Butter a pie dish with half the butter.  Put a thin layer of mashed potato on the bottom of the dish and follow this with layers of chutney, cheese, potato, prawns, hard-boiled egg, cheese and potato, in that order.  Fry the breadcrumbs gently in the remaining butter.  When crisp, add the curry powder, sultanas and parsley.  Make a small well in the center of the layered pie dish and fill with the mixture.  Bake in a fairly hot oven (190 C/ 375 F/Gas mark 5) for 20 minutes.

Not General Grudger; Lord and Lady Mountbatten and daughter with Nehru -- a "whole other story"

From:  Peter Graham, Classic Cheese Cookery.  London, Penguin, 1988, 1995.

A Colonel, not a General