Warren Kerrigan
GRAHAM
1/4 cup melted butter 1/2 cup molasses ½ cup milk 1 egg 1½ cups graham flour
PUDDING
½ teaspoon soda 1 teaspoon salt 1 cup dates or seeded raisins cut in pieces Mix butter, molasses, milk and egg in order given; add dry ingredients mixed and sifted. Mix a little of the flour with fruit and add last. Turn into a buttered mold, cover and steam two and one-half hours. 102 Pitt -Mohes very best Edna Hunter
CHILI CON CARNI
Clean, singe and cut in pieces for serving two young chickens. Season with salt and pepper, and sauté in butter.
Remove seeds and veins from eight red peppers, cover with boiling water, and cook until soft; mash and rub through a sieve. Add one teaspoon salt, one onion finely chopped, the chicken and boiling water to cover. Cook until chicken is tender. Remove to serving dish, and thicken sauce with three tablespoons each butter and flour, cooked together; there should be one and one-half cups sauce. Canned pimentoes may be used in place of red peppers.
Yours merrily,
Two recipes have run together on this page, with a stray line of a third: a steamed graham pudding and a chicken "chili con carni" that is really a mild red chile fricassee. Both are workable as written once a few period conventions are translated.
- Graham flourWhole wheat flour coarsely ground, bran included. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the closest match; ordinary whole wheat flour works but gives a slightly denser crumb.
- Soda and molassesThe 1½ teaspoons of soda react with the acid in the molasses. Use a mild unsulphured molasses rather than blackstrap, which is harsher in flavour.
- Steaming a moldButter a 2 to 2½ quart pudding mold or coffee can, fill it no more than two-thirds, cover tightly with the lid or foil tied down, and set it on a rack in a covered pot with boiling water halfway up the sides. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates over the two and a half hours.
- Doneness and yieldThe pudding is done when a skewer comes out clean and the top springs back; it serves six to eight. Puddings of this kind were commonly turned out hot and served with a hard sauce or a foamy egg sauce, though this recipe mentions neither.
- "Clean and singe"Singeing burned off the pinfeathers left after plucking. Supermarket birds need none of this: use two 2½ to 3 lb chickens, cut into serving pieces.
- The eight red peppersThese are most likely dried red chile pods rather than fresh bell peppers, and of a mild type. Eight modern hot chiles would be punishing; use eight dried anchos or guajillos, soaked and sieved as directed. The pimiento substitution the recipe offers suggests the intended heat level is low.
- Sieving the chilesRubbing the softened chiles through a sieve removes the tough skins, which a blender will not fully break down. Purée first if you like, but still push the result through a sieve or the sauce will be gritty.
- The thickeningThree tablespoons each of butter and flour cooked together is a blond roux; whisk it into the simmering cooking liquid off the heat, then return to a low boil for two or three minutes to cook out the raw flour. Reduce the liquid first if you have more than the specified cup and a half.
This has the form of the celebrity cookbooks in which players of the early silent era contributed a favourite dish over a signature — hence the "Yours merrily" and the stray "Edna Hunter" line, apparently where two contributions collided in the typesetting. J. Warren Kerrigan was among the most popular leading men of the period. The pairing is a steamed graham pudding, thoroughly New England and rooted in the nineteenth-century enthusiasm for Sylvester Graham's unbolted wheat flour, sitting beside a chicken "chili con carni" that is not the Texas beef chili of the chili parlours but closer to a red chile guisado; the note that canned pimientos may stand in for the peppers shows the compiler hedging for readers who could not buy dried chiles.