Lina Abarbanell
BESCHAMELL
4 lbs. haddock ½ lb. macaroni 1 pint milk I ¼ lb. Parmesan cheese, grated Season to taste 2 tablespoonfuls butter 1½ tablespoonfuls flour ½ pint cream 1 small onion, grated Cook haddock in salt water for twelve minutes.
When cool, skin and remove bones. Divide meat into pieces the size of an egg. Break macaroni into pieces about one inch long, cook in salt water till done.
Then strain.
Sauce: Melt butter, onion and flour together until light yellow; add milk, salt and pepper, then stir till smooth, glossy, well mixed and thick. Add macaroni and fish. Let it simmer for one-half hour. Add cream. Take a baking dish, put in a layer of this mixture, then a layer of Parmesan cheese, and repeat till dish is filled. Put this under broiler for five minutes. Then it is ready to serve for six people. 30 With beet repard hina Abarbanell Sketch by Gibbs Mason
CHICKEN PAPRIKA
Cut up 4 onions: put in pot 1 heaping tablespoon butter, brown with onions 1 teaspoon paprika Cut up a chicken and mix with it Add 1 tablespoon tomatoes A little green parsley 1 green pepper (cut up) A little garlic Season to taste This is my favorite dish and my favorite place for obtaining it is at home.
Yours truly,
JOE WEBER
PERFECT SWEETBREADS
Clean a pair of sweetbreads in cold salt water and pull off, gently, the rags of skin. Dry them and brown in hot butter. When a light brown, leave in frying pan with butter and add a cup of cold water, some pepper and salt and let cook SLOWLY for about fifteen minutes, COVERED. Remove from fire and make a little brown gravy with flour in same pan. To this add a small can of mushrooms and a small slice of lemon. Pour over sweetbreads and serve very hot.
This is a good dish for breakfast, dinner or supper. Very sincerely yours,
Three separate dishes share this page: a baked haddock-and-macaroni gratin under a béchamel, Joe Weber's chicken paprika, and a pan of sweetbreads. The fish dish carries most of the ambiguity.
- The quantitiesThe printed page gives ¼ lb. Parmesan, about 1¼ cups grated, and 1½ tablespoonfuls flour, as our text now reads. That is a slightly loose roux for a pint of milk plus half a pint of cream, so cook it a full minute or two and expect a thin sauce; add another half tablespoon of flour if you want it to hold a layer.
- Cut the dairyA pint of milk plus a pint and a half of cream is far more liquid than 4 lb of flaked fish and cooked macaroni can absorb. A pint of milk thickened with the roux, loosened at the end with half a cup of cream, gives a sauce that coats rather than floods.
- Don't simmer the fish half an hourThe haddock is already fully cooked from its twelve minutes in salted water. Simmering the assembled mixture for thirty minutes will reduce the egg-sized pieces to threads. Fold fish and macaroni into the finished sauce, warm through for two or three minutes, and assemble.
- Under the broilerFive minutes under a modern broiler at full heat browns the top Parmesan layer, but the dish must go in already hot — nothing in this method reheats a cold casserole. Position the rack about 4 inches from the element and watch it.
- Undercook the macaroni"cook in salt water till done" in a book of this vintage tends to mean softer than current taste. Pull it a minute short of al dente; it will take on more sauce and more heat in the dish.
- Joe Weber's paprikaNo quantities are given for the chicken, and "1 tablespoon tomatoes" is far too little to make a sauce. Figure a 3½–4 lb chicken cut into eight pieces, and expect to add liquid — the onions and a cup of stock, covered, for about 40 minutes. Use sweet Hungarian paprika; hot paprika at a full teaspoon will dominate.
- SweetbreadsModern practice soaks them in several changes of cold water for a few hours, then blanches and presses them before browning, which firms the texture and makes the membrane easy to remove. Fifteen minutes covered in the pan is right for a pair of veal sweetbreads; lamb sweetbreads are smaller and need less.
- YieldThe fish dish states six servings and means it — 4 lb of haddock with 1½ lb of dry macaroni is generous even for six. The chicken feeds four; a pair of sweetbreads serves two.
Lina Abarbanell (1879–1963) was a Berlin-born soprano who reached New York in 1905, sang Hänsel at the Metropolitan, and then crossed into operetta, most famously as the lead in Madame Sherry in 1910 — which is roughly the moment this sort of celebrity-contribution cookbook was in vogue, trading on the novelty of a star's handwriting reproduced beside a sketch. Her contribution is spelled "Beschamell," a German ear applied to the French béchamel, the flour-and-butter white sauce generally traced to the household of Louis XIV's steward Louis de Béchameil; layering it with macaroni, poached white fish and Parmesan and browning the top is a thoroughly Central European supper dish rather than a French one. The page also gathers Joe Weber, of the vaudeville team Weber and Fields, whose note that his favorite place to eat chicken paprika is "at home" is the sort of joke these volumes existed to collect.