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Out of Nothing
While we were talking it over and making plans for the wedding another friend dropped in because he said our "light looked inviting."
An hour or so of talk and then one of us signalled to the other and received the shocking signal back, "There's not a thing to eat in the house." This called for an investigation of the larder in which all joined with the following result: Item-two cans of reed birds from China, each containing twelve of the little birds as large as your thumb. Item-one egg. Other itemsone onion, two slices of dry bread, one green pepper, rather small, one dozen crackers. Item-one case of imported Italian Vin d'Oro Spumanti. Item-six hearty appetites to be appeased.
The gentleman who saw our light saw another, and rushed off to a barber shop, and got four more eggs. Barbers use eggs, and they must be fresh ones, in shampooing, and our friend remembered it. The two young ladies and the young man prepared the table, and the other lady and the two gentlemen set about getting a meal. One of us made an omelet of the five eggs, the onion and the green pepper, with crumbs of bread, and this is the recipe:
Take five eggs and beat until very light.
Roll two slices of dried bread to crumbs and mix with the beaten eggs. Chop fine OMELET A LA PERUQUIER one onion and one green pepper, season with salt and pepper. Pour a tablespoonful of olive oil in an omelet pan and in this fry the peppers and onion to a light brown. When ready turn into this the beaten eggs, and cook until done. Follow the rule of never disturbing a cooking egg or a sleeping child. Serve on a hot dish.
Take two cans of Chinese reed birds, open them and take therefrom the two dozen birds contained therein. In a hot REED BIRDS A LA CHINOISE frying pan place the birds in the grease that comes around them and heat them through. Toast twelve square crackers and on each place two reed birds, and serve two on each of six hot plates. With both the omelet and the reed birds serve Vin d'Oro.
Two recipes are embedded in this anecdote: a pepper-and-onion omelet that any cook can still make, and a dish of canned reed birds that cannot be made at all today. The notes below cover the archaic terms and explain why the second half is closed to us.
- Reed birds are protected"Reed bird" was a market name for the bobolink and, loosely, for other small marsh songbirds sold by the dozen in nineteenth-century game shops. Bobolinks and virtually all other native North American songbirds have been protected in the United States since the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918; killing, possessing or selling them is a federal offence. Canned songbirds of the kind described here are no longer an article of legitimate trade, and importing wild songbirds is not something a cook can lawfully arrange today.
- There is no substitute that makes the dishQuail or squab are legal and roughly bird-shaped, but the recipe depends on a thumb-sized bird canned in its own fat and simply reheated. Treat the reed-bird half of this page as a historical document rather than a set of instructions.
- "A la Peruquier"From French perruquier, a wigmaker and by extension a barber. The joke is that the eggs came from a barber shop, where fresh eggs were kept for shampoos and scalp treatments.
- The omelet is a frittataFive eggs bound with dry breadcrumbs, cooked flat in a tablespoon of oil and turned out onto a hot dish, is what would now be called a frittata rather than a folded omelet. Expect a firm, sliceable round, not a creamy fold.
- "Cook until done"Over medium heat in a 10-inch pan, the crumb-thickened egg needs roughly 6 to 8 minutes to set through; the instruction not to disturb it is the whole technique. Finishing it under a broiler for a minute avoids having to flip it.
- Bread crumbsTwo slices of genuinely dry bread rolled to crumbs is about half a cup. Fresh bread will not roll and will make the egg heavy and wet.
- Vin d'Oro SpumantiAn Italian sparkling wine of the period; the name points to a golden-hued wine, though its sweetness is not recorded. Any dry-to-off-dry sparkling white stands in for the effect the author wanted.
- YieldAs written, the omelet and the birds together were meant to feed six. The omelet alone serves three or four.
Clarence Edwords compiled Bohemian San Francisco in 1914, after the fire, as a memorial to the city's restaurants and to the improvised hospitality of its artists and writers, and this chapter is less a recipe than proof of a thesis: that a Bohemian could set a table out of an empty larder and one case of wine. The detail that makes it a period piece is the canned reed birds from China. Tiny songbirds were legitimate market game across Europe and America into the early twentieth century, sold by the dozen for a few cents and eaten whole, bones and all, on toast or a cracker; San Francisco's Chinese import trade put them on the shelf in tins alongside the olive oil. Within four years of this book's publication the Migratory Bird Treaty Act had ended the American songbird trade outright, which is why a dish that struck Edwords as an ordinary pantry standby now reads as something from another world.