Peggy Wood
OMELETTE "PEGGY" 4 eggs 1 tablespoon of flour 1 cup of milk Beat eggs separately. To the yolks add flour which has been rubbed to a paste with a little of the milk, then add the rest of milk, and beaten whites and season with salt and pepper.
Put a tablespoon of butter into a hot skillet; when melted, pour in the omelette. Cook until brown on the bottom and firm. Fold over and slide onto a hot platter. Garnish with parsley.
This is a simple recipe, but I am sure that if you try it you will think other omelettes are nothing more than scrambled eggs. yours very hunly Peggy word
JANIS
"SAMBAL" A GREEN CHUTNEY-MALAY 3 quinces not wholly ripe 1 medium-sized onion 1 green chili pepper 3/4 teaspoonful salt Peel and quarter the quinces, add the onion, pepper and salt, and grind very fine in a food-chopper. Serve with a curry or roast.
Elsifanis
MAY BUCKLEY'S
VIENNA APPLE PANCAKE AND FILLING
2 peeled and sliced apples Powdered sugar 2 oz. sweet butter Currant jelly Fry apple in a half ounce of butter, covered with sugar, cream until tender, and set aside ready to use.
BATTER
1 cup flour 1 egg 2 yolks of eggs ½ pint milk 1 teaspoonful sugar ½ teaspoonful rum 1 whiskey glass cream Pinch of salt Pinch of cinnamon Whip egg and yolks together with cream and rum for three minutes. Add flour, sugar, salt, milk, cinnamon and whip well. Pass through a strainer.
Have frying pan very clean. Put a little butter in and let it get hot. Add enough pancake batter to cover bottom of pan with a thin layer. Let fry on one side and flop over.
Place on towel, fill with apple and jelly, roll and cover with powdered sugar and a little cinnamon.
Serve very hot.
I think these are marvelous.
Sincerely yours, MyBuckley
Three unrelated dishes share this page: a puffed egg omelette, a raw Malay-style quince relish, and a Viennese apple crêpe. Each needs a little translating.
- The omelette is a soufflé omeletteSeparating the eggs and folding the beaten whites into the yolk-flour-milk base is what Peggy Wood means when she says other omelettes are "nothing more than scrambled eggs." Fold gently and do not stir once it is in the pan, or the air goes out of it.
- A cup of milk is a lotOne cup of milk to four eggs and a tablespoon of flour makes a very loose batter that will take some time to set. Use a 9- or 10-inch skillet over medium-low heat, cover it for the last few minutes so the top firms, and expect 8 to 10 minutes rather than the two of a French omelette. It serves two.
- Sambal means relish, not chile sauceSambal means relish -- in Malay and Indonesian cooking usually a chile-based one -- and this is an uncooked example: quince, onion, one chile and salt run through a food chopper (a hand-cranked grinder; a food processor pulsed, not pureed, gives the same coarse texture). With no vinegar or sugar to preserve it, it will not keep, so make it the day you mean to serve it.
- Quinces "not wholly ripe"Quinces are hard and astringent raw even when ripe; the sourness may be standing in for the tamarind or unripe mango of a Southeast Asian sambal, though the recipe says nothing of the kind. Peel and work quickly, as the flesh browns fast.
- The pancake milk is almost certainly a misprintOne and a half pints of milk to one cup of flour would be soup. Thin pancake batters generally take somewhere between an equal volume of liquid and about half again as much per cup of flour; start there and thin only if needed. This is genuinely ambiguous in the original.
- "A whiskey glass" and "sweet butter"A whiskey glass is usually reckoned at about 1 1/2 to 2 fluid ounces, so 3 to 4 tablespoons of cream. Sweet butter means unsalted.
- "Cream until tender"The apple instruction is compressed and can be read two ways: fry the sliced apples in the half ounce of butter with sugar until soft, then either mash them smooth or add a little cream and cook down to a thick compote. Cool it slightly before filling, or the crepes tear.
- Pan discipline"Have frying pan very clean" is the hinge of the pancake recipe. A crêpe pan that is not scrupulously clean and properly hot will grab the thin batter; wipe with butter between pancakes rather than adding more each time.
This page comes from a celebrity cookbook of the kind that flourished in the early decades of the twentieth century, in which stage performers contributed a favourite dish and a signature. Peggy Wood was a Broadway singer and actress of the 1910s and 1920s, remembered by later audiences as the Mother Abbess in The Sound of Music; Elsie Janis, who signs the sambal, was the vaudeville star who entertained American troops in France and was billed as "the Sweetheart of the AEF." Sambals reached Western cookbooks by way of Dutch colonial and Anglo-Indian cooking, and this one uses hard European quince in place of a sour tropical fruit. May Buckley's dish is the Viennese apple pancake, Apfelpalatschinken, which is known under various names across Central Europe.