Charlotte Walker
SOUTHERN EGG-NOGG
I can't cook-I can't darn socks, except when I accent the darn. The only recipe I can give you is Southern Egg-nogg. Here it is just for two. Should be taken instead of tea, every afternoon.
Two eggs, beat yolks and whites separately. To the yolks add a lot of powdered sugar, I should say four tablespoons. Add brandy or whiskey, so strong that it not only cooks these eggs but is plainly discernible when the stiffly beaten whites are added.
Beat together and then add pure cream, enough to fill out two good-sized tumblers.
A little nutmeg grated on top is pretty nice, too.
I believe this is better for a tired lady than strong tea. Charatee waller
Cream one cup of oysters with a white sauce. Fold in the grated cheese and season with celery salt. Bake in a hot oven until brown and serve.
Yours sincerely, CHRISTIE MacDONALD
LIVER CROQUETTES
To a pound of chopped liver, add a medium-sized onion chopped, salt and pepper to season. Take two tablespoons of flour, add milk to form a thin batter, stir in the liver and drop by spoonfuls in a hot greased spider. Let brown quickly on one side then turn and brown the other. An egg added improves the dish. The patties should be thin so that the liver will be well cooked.
Three contributions share this page: Charlotte Walker's eggnog, Christie MacDonald's baked oysters, and a plain liver griddle-cake. The eggnog rests on a claim about alcohol that is simply untrue, and that is where to start.
- Alcohol does not cook an eggThe instruction to add spirits "so strong that it not only cooks these eggs" reflects a widespread period belief. Ethanol denatures some egg protein at the surface but does not pasteurise the yolk; it will not reliably inactivate Salmonella, and the quantity here is nowhere near enough to matter. The drink is a raw-egg preparation served cold, with no step that brings it to a safe temperature.
- Why this one and not other raw-egg dishesA raw egg beaten into a batter is later baked. Nothing here ever gets warm. If you want eggnog, use a current recipe built on a cooked custard base or on pasteurised eggs; that is a different procedure, not an adjustment of this one.
- Scale, for contextTwo eggs, four tablespoons of sugar and cream enough to fill two "good-sized tumblers" makes a substantial dessert drink rather than the light afternoon pick-me-up the note suggests. The original gives no volume, so the size of the glasses is guesswork.
- "A hot oven" for the oystersRead that as 425-450F. The oysters need only long enough for the cheese to brown, five to eight minutes in a shallow dish; drained shucked oysters toughen quickly once the sauce is bubbling.
- One cup of oystersMeasured shucked and drained, that is about 8 oz, or half a pint container. Reserve the oyster liquor and use it to thin the white sauce, which the original leaves unspecified — about a cup of medium white sauce suits this quantity, and it serves two.
- Grated cheese, unquantifiedThe recipe gives no amount. Half a cup of a firm dry cheese is right for a cup of sauce; more and the sauce is liable to break under the oven's heat. Fold it in off the heat rather than boiling it into the sauce; the original says only "fold in the grated cheese."
- A spiderA cast-iron frying pan, originally one with legs to stand over coals. Any heavy skillet does. The liver mixture behaves like a thin fritter batter, so keep the patties no more than a quarter-inch thick — the recipe's own reason for this is that liver in a thick cake will still be raw when the outside has browned.
- Liver croquettes, yieldThe recipe gives no yield. A pound of chopped liver with two tablespoons of flour and an egg should make something like eight to ten small cakes. Cook liver through to firm; the batter's thinness is what makes that possible over quick heat.
Celebrated Actor Folks' Cookeries belongs to a genre that flourished in the 1910s: the charity or novelty cookbook assembled from the contributions of famous names, where the appeal is the autograph and the joke rather than the instruction. Charlotte Walker was a Southern-born stage actress who moved into early films, and her entry does exactly what the genre invites: it opens with a disclaimer that she cannot cook, offers the one thing she can assemble, and gets a line about darning socks out of it. Eggnog itself is generally traced to the English posset, a warmed drink of milk curdled with ale or wine, which crossed to the colonies and acquired rum, brandy or whiskey and a firm association with Southern hospitality and the Christmas season. The confident claim that spirits "cook" the eggs is one the recipe makes on its own authority, and it is worth noting that the cooked-custard method now widely recommended is often linked to later concerns about egg-borne illness.