Francis X Conlan
CHICKEN
CREOLE
A tender chicken -dissect it.
Put in saucepan and let simmer until parboiled. 1 chopped onion.
Season: 1/2 teaspoon pepper, 1/2 teaspoon salt. 1 pint milk and cream-mixed.
Chopped parsley -a little. lasit Denis 1 teaspoon curry-powder (cook for 20 minutes).
Thicken with a little flour-and-butter thickening.
Stir this thickening in very gently.
This is an East Indian dish and my favorite one.
RUTH ST. DENIS
PELOTAS AND SPAGHETTI A L'ITALIENNE
TOMATO SAUCE
One quart can of tomatoes. Put in kettle on top of stove, simmer or let boil slowly for one and a half hours. Add pepper, salt, two onions cut in fine slices, four allspice and four cloves. The cloves and allspice to be added after it starts to boil. After one and a half hours add:
PELOTAS
Two lbs. chopped meat-beef, as for Hamburg steak. Add one onion chopped fine, one cup bread crumbs, a little parsley, salt and pepper. Make into meat balls about the size of a
Two recipes have been run together here by the printer, and the second breaks off mid-sentence. The chicken is complete and workable; the pelotas need a modern hand to finish.
- The text is damagedThe curry-powder line appears twice, once stranded in the middle of the chicken recipe and once at the very end, and the pelotas instructions stop at "about the size of a". There is no direction at all for cooking the meatballs or the spaghetti. Treat the second recipe as a sauce formula rather than a complete dish.
- "Dissect it"Cut the bird into serving pieces at the joints: two legs, two thighs, two wings, breast halved. A 3 1/2 to 4 lb chicken is the right size and will serve four.
- ParboiledTo parboil is to boil only partway, so simmer the pieces in water barely to cover until they are part-cooked and will finish in the sauce, perhaps 15 to 20 minutes. The recipe gives no direction about the liquid, but it is the only stock the dish generates and a cup of it added with the milk will give the sauce body.
- Milk and cream mixedA pint of half-and-half is the modern equivalent. It will curdle if the pan is allowed to boil once the dairy is in, so hold it at a bare tremble for the 20 minutes specified.
- Flour-and-butter thickeningEqual weights of soft butter and flour worked to a paste, about 1 tablespoon of each, dropped in in small pieces and swirled rather than whisked. That is what "stir in very gently" is protecting: the chicken pieces are meant to stay intact.
- One teaspoon of curry powderBy the standards of the period that was assertive seasoning; by ours it is faint. Taste at the end of the 20 minutes and add more if you want the dish to read as curry, and bloom it briefly in the butter if you can, since raw curry powder stirred into milk tastes dusty.
- The tomato sauceA quart is 32 fl oz, and the nearest modern equivalent on the shelf is a 28 oz can. Ninety minutes of slow simmering is not excessive for canned tomatoes of the period, but modern canned tomatoes are already soft and 45 minutes gives you much the same reduced, sweet result. The count of "four allspice and four cloves" means whole spices; fish them out before serving.
- Seasoning the pelotas"Salt and pepper" for two pounds of beef and a cup of crumbs wants roughly 2 teaspoons of salt to taste properly. Fry or bake the balls to brown them before they go into the sauce, then let them finish in it for 20 to 30 minutes.
Both dishes come from an early twentieth-century collection of recipes contributed by stage performers, which explains the loose editing and the borrowed titles. The chicken is a good example of how freely culinary labels travelled: it is headed "Creole," is in fact a mild curry in cream, and its contributor, the dancer Ruth St. Denis, declares it "an East Indian dish" — she built her career on orientalist solo dances such as Radha and The Incense, and her Indian associations were part of her public persona rather than any claim to Louisiana cooking. "Pelotas" is Spanish for balls and appears in Spanish and Latin American cookery for dumplings and forcemeat balls, so the second recipe's name, its Italian subtitle, and its clove-and-allspice tomato sauce point to the same cheerful indifference to national boundaries that ran through American home cooking of the era.