Lillian Walker
LEMON PUDDING
Stir in with yolks of five eggs one-quarter pound of powdered sugar. Add the juice of a lemon, then the grated rind of the lemon.
Put four teaspoons of Knox sparkling gelatine in half a cup of boiling water. Whip the whites of the five eggs to a cream, stir them in, add the gelatine, stir well until thoroughly mixed, then put it in the ice box until it is very cold.
This is my favorite recipe.
Sillians Dallmer
EGGS A LA FRED NIBLO
Thinly slice large Bermuda onion and fry well in plenty of butter until onion is quite brown but not crisp. Broil or fry thin slice of ham or bacon.
Take individual copper shirring dish and over the bottom lay layer of half the onion; on this lay the slice of ham and over the ham another layer of onion; on top of this carefully open two eggs, without breaking the yolks; season with salt and plenty of butter; place in hot oven and shirr. Sprinkle with Parmesan cheese and a dash of paprika and serve hot in the dish in which it has been cooked.
The above culinary symposium has been tested, tasted and found true, and if you do not believe that this recipe eats as good as it listens just try it sometime, and I'll be able to count on you as one of my best friends for life. Tha Mitto
SMOTHERED
CHICKEN
Broilers and other really young fowls are necessary for this dish. Split down the back when you have cleaned and washed them, lay them out flat on the grating of your roaster skin side down and put into a very hot oven, covered.
Have ready half a cup of melted butter and after five minutes baste the chickens well with this. Turn them as soon as the inside has colored slightly and baste again with the butter. When they are brown and the flesh is tender in the joints, they are done. Thirty minutes should be sufficient. Baste frequently and as soon as they are browned, you may add a little hot water to the butter. Take up the chickens and keep them hot, thicken the gravy with browned flour and boil one minute before serving.
Condrally yours May Sura
A BENGAL CURRY
Cut up a four-pound roasting chicken as for fricassee, flour and fry it until it is brown only; place in double boiler and add the following ingredients and cook slowly until the meat separates from the bones, stirring occasionally: 1 quart of onions, which have been fried to a crisp 1 large apple, peeled and sliced 1½ quarts milk 1½ pound butter 1 cup grated cocoanut Juice of half a lemon Salt generously At the end of half an hour's cooking, add a heaping teaspoonful of Cross & Blackwell's curry powder (mixed to a paste with water).
Serve with boiled rice very dry and Cross & Blackwell's Chutney. Curry is always eaten in India with a dessert spoon and fork.
This is my favorite dish, as it was made by my father's Hindoo cook, slightly modified to suit the tastes of those who are not Anglo-Indians. Trusting it will make some one happy. Bruce The Rae
L'OGNON-MARIE TEMPEST
One large Spanish onion. Cut slice off top and take out heart. In cavity put one lamb kidney, a lump of butter, pepper and salt and bind on with thread.
Bake slowly until onion and kidney are thoroughly cooked and the onion is permeated with the taste of kidney and the kidney with the onion. Serve piping hot.
This was given to me by an old actor in England. It is a favorite Saturday night supper and is really delicious. It is called "l'Ognon Marie Tempest" in this country by one or two maitres d' hotel to whom I have given this recipe.
CREAMED MUSHROOMS
Take fresh mushrooms. Wash and scrape them well before heating the chafing dish. Drop in a spoonful of butter followed by the mushrooms, as the butter sizzles. Keep the dish tightly covered until the mushrooms are thoroughly tender and then boil for five minutes with a cream sauce made as follows:
Two tablespoons butter and two of flour rubbed together with a cup of cream. Heat and add dash of salt and pepper as it steams. Beat up two yolks of eggs with half a wineglass of sherry and add to the mixture.
During the boiling process, see that the lid is kept tight, to retain all flavor.
This is a great dish for after the theatre.
Five recipes run together on this page, gathered from stage and screen names of the 1910s. One of them cannot be recommended today; the rest need only translation.
- The lemon pudding is uncooked eggYolks, sugar, lemon and raw whites are bound with gelatine and set in the ice box. Nothing in the method brings the eggs anywhere near a safe temperature — the half cup of boiling water is used only to dissolve the gelatine and is instantly cooled by the bulk of the mixture. This is a raw-egg dessert served cold and held cold, which is precisely the condition in which Salmonella in eggs is a real risk. If you want a set lemon cream, use a current recipe built on a cooked custard base or pasteurised eggs.
- Knox sparkling gelatinePlain unflavoured granulated gelatine, still sold under the same name. A modern quarter-ounce envelope is about 2¼ teaspoons, so four teaspoons is close to two envelopes.
- Shirring, and the dishTo shirr is to bake eggs in a shallow individual dish until the whites set and the yolks stay soft — figure a hot oven at 400–425F for roughly 8 to 12 minutes. A copper shirring dish is a small round gratin; any shallow ovenproof dish of about 5 inches works, and the eggs are meant to be served in it.
- Bermuda and Spanish onionsBoth are large, mild, sweet onions. A modern sweet onion — Vidalia, Walla Walla, or any large yellow Spanish type — is the same thing for these purposes.
- Very hot oven for the smothered chickenRead "very hot" as 450F. Broilers were young birds of about 1½ to 2½ lb, split and flattened; today's supermarket birds run larger, so thirty minutes covered will not always be enough. Cook to 165F in the thigh rather than to the clock.
- Browned flourFlour toasted dry in a pan or a slow oven until nut-coloured. It thickens less than raw flour, so allow roughly half again as much, and the one minute of boiling is not optional if you want the raw taste gone.
- The curry's butter figure1½ pounds of butter against a four-pound chicken and 1½ quarts of milk is almost certainly a compositor's error for a quarter pound or thereabouts. Use 4 to 6 tablespoons. Cross & Blackwell is Crosse & Blackwell, still trading; any decent curry powder and mango chutney stand in.
- Half a wineglass of sherryA wineglass in period cookbooks is about 2 fl oz, so half a wineglass is about 1 fl oz, or two tablespoons. Once the egg yolks go into the cream sauce, stop boiling it — hold it just below a simmer or the yolks will curdle, whatever the original says about the boiling process.
- YieldsThe Bengal curry serves four to six with rice. Eggs à la Fred Niblo is one serving per dish. The onion and kidney is a single supper. The creamed mushrooms give no quantity of mushrooms in the original, so the yield depends on how many you use.
Celebrity cookbooks are almost as old as celebrity itself, and this one belongs to the moment when the picture players were beginning to outshine the stage names they were printed alongside. Lillian Walker was a Vitagraph star billed as "Dimples"; Fred Niblo was a vaudeville monologist who would later direct Ben-Hur; Marie Tempest was a London comedienne of the first rank; Bruce McRae, whose signature the scanner has mangled into "Bruce The Rae," was a leading man of the New York stage. The contributions tell you what such people actually ate: chafing-dish suppers after the curtain, shirred eggs, a stuffed onion for Saturday night. The curry is the most revealing of the group — its author names a Hindu cook in his father's household and "those who are not Anglo-Indians," and specifies two branded Crosse & Blackwell products, which is how an imperial kitchen habit reached an American page. The instruction that curry is eaten in India with a dessert spoon and fork is a piece of Raj table manners, not Indian practice, and it dates the recipe as precisely as any postmark.