The I Hate to Cook Book (37 page)

The British discovered this centuries ago, and no one has improved on it since. Put a bowl of semicracked English walnuts on the table. Put a bottle of tawny port or ruby port on the table. Put wine glasses and small individual plates on the table. Pour the port and pass the walnuts.

     SHERRY CHOCOLATE PUDDING     

4 servings

1 package chocolate-pudding mix

1¾ cups whole milk

¼ cup sherry

Combine the mix and milk according to directions on the package. When you take it off the heat, stir in the sherry, and pour it all into sherbet glasses. It’s good topped with whipped cream and lightly dusted with cinnamon.

Also, you might make

     COFFEE PUDDING     

Melt twelve marshmallows in two cups of strong black coffee. Then add enough unwhipped whipping cream to make it a pretty café au lait color, and pour it into a freezing tray. Leave it for eight
hours. Serve it in sherbet glasses with whipped cream on top, and some chopped nuts if you have them.

And finally we come to

     CAFÉ CHANTILLY     

Add one tablespoon of cognac to a cup of really stout black coffee. Top it with a teaspoon of unsweetened whipped cream.

To end this chapter on a high keen note, that’s only fifty calories per cup.

OR THEY ONLY CAME FOR THE BALLOONS

I
t is a lucky thing that little children can’t just decide, bang, they’re going to have a party, the way grownups do, and then have it. This is one area where what Mama says still goes. What little kids have is
birthday
parties, and that’s
it
. And actually they’re not quite so horrible close up as they are at a distance. The only thing to fear is fear itself.

In the first place, the decorations are easy. Little children are endearingly uncritical of such trivia. If it’s bright, it’s swell. And eight months of the year contain handy holidays for which the
crepe-paper people put out huge boxcars full of simply lovely decorations from paper jelly-bean cups to paper hats.

February—Valentine’s Day, not to mention Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthdays

March—St. Patrick’s Day

April—April Fool’s Day and Easter (when it isn’t in March)

May—May Day

July—The Glorious Fourth

October—Hallowe’en

November—Thanksgiving

December—Christmas

Always tie your Birthday Party to the closest holiday!
Then you won’t need to spend time devising dreadful things like Pirate Parties or Rodeo Parties. January can be a Snowball Party, whether there’s any snow or not: white balloons, marshmallow-men place-card holders, coconut-frosting-dipped cupcakes, white play dough for a snowman contest, et cetera, et cetera. And in June, August, and September, you can always make it a Hobo Party—see a little later on.

Now an important thing to remember is this: You are giving this party for the children, not for their mamas. That’s why you needn’t clean the house before they come, merely afterward. It also means that you mustn’t let a mother in, when she brings her little charge up to the door. Give her a harried mother-to-mother look and say, “I know you’d rather not set foot in this chaos, and we’ll bring Angela home in about two hours, when the party’s over.”

(Volunteering to bring the children home is the shrewdest move of your life, even though it means chauffeuring, because it enables you to end the party. When the little ones start throwing their birthday cake instead of eating it, and before the little Bates
boy has time to wreck any more of the birthday gifts, you clap your hands merrily and call out, “Party’s over!” Then you hustle them into their coats and home.)

The second big point to remember is this: Be wary of anything Amusing or Different! I know a fond mother who knocked herself out once to give her little boy a gala Mexican Christmas birthday party. Striped tissue serapes, Mexican hats, and big tissue-paper balloons hung around—one of them full of small surprises. The children took turns with a broom handle trying to knock the balloons down. But, as my friend reported to me, there was a certain grimness about the proceedings; and one wee guest finally announced to the group that this was a dumb old party, not a bit like Christmas.

Never forget that children are hidebound traditionalists, and never more so than in the matter of food. Just try to get Junior to taste the chestnut dressing if this is his first sight of a chestnut, and if that deep pure wisdom of childhood has informed him that chestnuts are icky.

The first birthday party my daughter ever had, at the age of three, is a case in point. I wanted it to be a nice party, a special party. So I served the three- to six-year-olds Chicken à la King minus pimentoes, but they still didn’t trust it. They didn’t eat the hot biscuits, either, because biscuits are for
breakfast
. The carrot strips were a howling success, comparatively speaking, because they each gnawed one. But the milk was a dead loss because they were all too excited about the oncoming birthday cake. If bakers would perfect a delicious birthday cake containing spinach, carrots, lean meat, and whole milk, they’d have a hit on their hands.

This chapter, therefore, contains six birthday lunch or supper menus which the little ones are apt to eat some of.

The questions might well be asked, If you hate to cook, why invite the kids for a meal at all? Why not cleave to good old-fashioned ice-cream and birthday cake and that’s
that
?

The answer is twofold: When your little child knows it is going to have a birthday party that afternoon, it gets all excited and won’t eat its lunch (and neither will its little prospective guests, once they’ve learned that they’re going to a birthday party). Then, if it gets a lot of ice cream and cake in the middle of the afternoon, it certainly won’t eat its dinner, and you are apt to be coping with collywobbles that night. Furthermore, you may be indebted to other mamas who have lunched or supped
your
child. Noblesse oblige.

Menu No. 1

(Until someone perfects a bubblegum-popsicle-peanut-butter casserole that really sings, the old tuna-mushroom stand-by does remarkably well.)

Tuna-Mushroom Casserole