The I Hate to Cook Book (45 page)

You may use tall beer glasses for your parfaits, too. Or middle-sized brandy snifters. Or ordinary water goblets. The only thing to be careful of here is to make sure you have a fine complete glassware service, containing parfait you
could
have used. Otherwise you just look terribly valiant.

Then there are napkin rings. The ordinary person puts napkins in them, but the clever hostess has bottoms put in hers and uses them for cigarette cups. Or instead of serving a liqueur in her elongated liqueur glasses, she puts one or two little flowers in them, like hyacinths or pansies, and puts them between each pair of place settings, instead of having one floral centerpiece. This, of course, uses up her liqueur glasses, but we can assume that she’s serving Irish Coffee.

However, this is far too big a field to cover in the small space available here. To sum up: When you are looking for something to put something in, think of an
unlikely
object to put it in—jam in the eggcups, flowers in the chamberpot, bats in the bird cage—and then
do
it.

And so, back to food, and conversations about it. There are four handy words to remember:
OF COURSE I ALWAYS
… This is your lead-in for any of those little touches you want to get across. Never cry, “Girls! I tried the darnedest thing the other day, and it tasted just marvelous! What I did was…” No, you understate it, you throw it away, with “Of course, I always mix my dry mustard with white wine,” and if you’re among people who’ll believe anything, you can substitute champagne for white wine, for this is highly regarded in certain circles I don’t belong to.

The big thing is to remember those four little words,
OF COURSE I ALWAYS
…

… add a quarter of a cup of sesame seeds to my sage-onion chicken dressing

… drop a couple of chocolate bits into my demitasse for a good mocha taste

… dip fish and chops in biscuit mix or pancake flour before I pan-broil them

… brush steaks or chops with soy sauce before I broil them

… add some tarragon or savory to my scrambled eggs

… add a little oregano to the garlic in my garlic bread

… add a little chervil to my ordinary biscuit mix

… add a little brandy to my pumpkin pie

… put a little grated orange peel in my cranberry sauce

… blend chopped parsley and a dash of lemon juice with butter and put a dollop of it on broiled steaks

… put a little red wine in my onion soup

… fatigue my lettuce

This last, incidentally, is a nice gambit in conversations of this sort, because chances are good that someone will ask you what it means. It means to toss your salad greens with just a drop or two of oil—so that each leaf gets a microscopically thin coating—
before
you add your salad dressing. For some reason, it makes the greenery crisper.

Now, there is one more thing we must consider in this chapter:
THE SPECIALTY
.

These days it is important to have a specialty, because you never can tell on what bright sunny morning you may wake up and discover that you are a celebrity. Perhaps you were the eleven-billionth person to go through the Holland Tunnel, or maybe you had ten children in two years, all quintuplets.

No matter. The reporters will be around, and the second thing
they’ll ask you for, after your measurements, is your Kitchen Specialty. You owe it to yourself and to your public to have something on tap besides tuna sandwiches.

… Miss Sugar Belle, 37-22-35, star of the current Broadway hit
Holler Down a Rain Barrel
, writer, producer, and star of her own daily TV show, author of the current best seller
Wheee for Me!,
wife of handsome TV tenor Vic Ricotta, and mother of four strapping teen-age boys, was interviewed in the rambling oak-beamed sewing room of her rambling oak-beamed farmhouse in Connecticut.

“My, yes, I always design and make my own clothes,” she told this reporter, “as well as breeding Bedlingtons and doing all the electrical repairs around the place.”

“But as busy as you are, Miss Belle,” we asked, “how do you find time to keep that big, good-looking husband of yours happy?”

Sugar Belle twinkled that famous Sugar Belle twinkle, got up, and moved out to the rambling oak-beamed kitchen.

“Why, honey child,” she said, “I just whomp him up a batch of my little ole Cotton-pickin’ Jam Tarts!”

     COTTON-PICKIN’ JAM TARTS     

4½ ounces cream cheese

½ cup butter

1 cup flour

jelly or preserves

Sugar Belle melts her butter, blends it with the cheese, and stirs in the flour to make a nice smooth dough. Then she puts it in the freezing compartment for about an hour, until it’s firm. Next,
she nips little pieces off, about the size of golf balls, rolls them out, trims them into squares, and puts a teaspoon of jelly on each. (If you wonder why Sugar Belle doesn’t just roll the whole thing out and cut it into squares, it is because the dough is hard to handle that way.) Then she folds them into triangles, seals the edges with a floured fork, and bakes them on a greased cooky sheet at 450º until they’re brown, which is from ten to fifteen minutes. And when she puts a big plateful of these in front of her husband, you just ought to see his face light up!

You see, the recipe for your specialty needn’t be complicated. In fact, it better hadn’t be, because there is always that off chance that someday you might have to demonstrate. It just needs to be good and a little bit interesting, that’s all. Any of the following four recipes would work out all right for you, too.

     SUGAR BELLE’S RYE DROP CAKES     

(And believe me, everybody in Sugar Belle’s family gets up early for these.)

1 egg

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 cup buttermilk

1 cup rye flour

½ cup white flour

pinch of salt

deep fat for frying

She beats that egg with enthusiasm. Then she mixes the baking soda with the buttermilk till it fuzzes up. Deftly, she adds this
to the egg, then sifts the flours and salt, and mixes everything together. Finally, she drops spoonfuls of it into hot fat—at doughnut temperature—and lets them bob around till they’re brown. Then she serves them with butter and individual saucers of maple syrup to dunk them in.

When Sugar Belle is having some famous directors and writers and everybody over for an
intime
after-the-theater supper, she loves to serve

     SUGAR BELLE’S SOUR CREAM MUSHROOMS     

4–5 servings

4 cups mushrooms, fatly sliced

3 tablespoons butter

1 cup sour cream

salt, pepper

She sautés the mushrooms in a skillet. When they are
barely
tender, she adds the sour cream and cooks it very slowly, or else it might curdle up and embarrass her to no end. When the sauce has thickened, she adds the salt and pepper and serves it on toast.

Sugar Belle is a great girl for jam, too, and with all those growing boys—
well!

     SUGAR BELLE’S APRICOT-BANANA JAM