Hostess

Etiquette Wednesday at Lucindaville features the "hostess" section of Hostess. Here we are concentrating on Rosemary Hume's cookbook section. Since Constance Spry has alluded to the fact that formal cooks are no longer de rigueur for the average household, the new "cook-hostess" must now be adept at being the cook of the house.

Constance Spry was the author of numerous cookbooks, though most people recognize that Rosemary Hume was the actual "cook" and Spry was the "name". Hume "invented" one of the most famous culinary dishes of the 1950's -- Coronation Chicken. The dish was considered luxurious in the rather austere Fifties. It consisted of a poached young roasting fowl which has been cooked, cooled and deboned. It is swathed in a mildly spicy sauce of sautéed curried onions, red wine, tomato purée, lemon, home-made apricot purée, mayonnaise and double cream. Like many dishes, Coronation Chicken has been re-interpreted and butchered beyond recognition, until falling completely out of favor. With Queen Elizabeth's Golden Jubilee in 2003, the dish made a resurgence.

In Hostess, Rosemary Hume developed a series of several full menus for the cook-hostess to use for any occasion from a simple luncheon to a Coming-of-Age Party. Hume says:

"Though in some menus the preparation may look formidable it must be remembered that while certain things are cooking others can be in course of preparation.

If you are to achieve satisfactory results, with unnecessary inconvenience to yourself, then it is important that you should concentrate the time you spend in the kitchen."

My favorite recipe is for a savory little snack, basically fried bacon stuffed with cheese. It's a heart stopper, quite literally.

Bacon Savory

Allow two thin rashers of streaky bacon per savory and one thin slice of Gruyère or Kraft cheese
seasoned flour
beaten egg
dried white breadcrumbs
oil or good drippings for frying
watercress to garnish

Spread out a rasher and cut in half. Lay side by side on the board and place a thin slice of cheese on the top. Season well with pepper. Cover with another rasher cut in the same way -- press down well. dust with seasoned flour, then cover with the egg and roll in the crumbs. Press them well on.
Fry until golden brown in smoking hot oil or drippings. Drain well, then dish and garnish with watercress.

Well, it's not Coronation Chicken and eating a lot of this will ensure you will never see your Golden Jubilee, but once in a while...

Come Into The Garden, Cook

It was my birthday on Thursday, so guess what I got? Seriously, guess. I got some lovely music from Goddaughter!! And, surprise, I got cookbooks. I'm going to share them with you.

On my actual birthday, I received a little package from England with an old copy of a cookbook by Constance Spry. You may not know Constance Spry's name, but if you have ever called up a florist and ordered flowers, you owe a debt of gratitude to Mrs. Spry. She practically invented florists! In her first book, Flower Decoration from 1934 she observed:

"Intelligent women of today take the most intense interest in the decoration and furnishing of their houses. But in this general trend towards a greater care and love of beauty and suitability, I think that flowers have lagged behind."

Spry set out to make flowers in the home an everyday occurrence. By the mid 1940's she had joined with cookbook writer Rosemary Hume to form a Domestic Science School.

Come Into The Garden, Cook, written in 1942 addressed an England that was still suffering from rations and bombings. I was pleased to find in this book, that Mrs. Spry was a reader (and recommender) of Mrs. Dull's Southern Cooking, a favorite of mine.

I love Brussels sprouts, though my BFF, Beverly hates them. She did eat one when she came to visit, her first and only Brussels sprout which begs the question, how did she know she didn't like them?

This recipe uses a measurement that has fallen out of favor: the gill. Sounds like a girl's name, Jill. It is a scant 1/2 cup or about 4 ounces. It comes from the Latin, gillo, meaning a small wine vessel. A really small wine vessel!!

Pain de Choux de Bruxelles

2 lbs. Brussels sprouts
1 1/2 oz. stale bread crumbs soaked in 1.2 gill hot milk
2 yolks of egg
3 oz. margarine
1/2 pint gravy, bechamel, or other sauce
Salt, pepper, and nutmeg

Method: cook the sprouts, press gently to extract water, pass through a sieve, and put the puree in a saucepan. Add the margarine, a good pinch of salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Put on low heat to melt the margarine and mix it with the Brussels sprouts without letting it get too hot, working all the time with a wooden spoon. Add the soaked bread crumbs, which have been put through a sieve, and the egg yolks. Put into a greased souffle dish, set this in a pan of water, and cook for one hour in the oven. Turn out and pour sauce over the whole.

Mrs. Spry ended her book with a note to flowers and oils and sauces that were by her own admission, often impossible to locate. She realized that all this attention to recipes and flowers might seem frivolous to some, like running a cookbook blog during trying economic times. Here is what she said:

"Some of the suggestions in this chapter may have a touch of fiddling while Rome burns. To some working, maybe, as I did in the last war, close to a pneumatic hammer, quite a lot of the book will seem remote from present-day life. One the other hand, I have learned from experience that many women occupied directly in getting on with the war like to consider the lighter aspects of life."

Constance Spry did not believe in living a life "reduce to dullness" and neither do I.