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A Cape Cod Luncheon
IN N remembrance of a happy two weeks spent in a little bungalow on Cape Cod, one of the girls of the "bunch" gave a quaint luncheon for the others during the year following.
The invitations bore a tiny spray of bayberry sketched in one corner and read like this:
May the bayberry dip and the odor of pine At this little reunion luncheon of mine, Bring back all our fun in the house by the sea, Where we were as jolly as jolly could be.
On the luncheon table homespun runners were used, crossed in the center where a brown wicker basket filled with the gray green of bayberry branches, brightened by the orange of bittersweet, stood on a mat of fragrant pine. [102] Green bayberry dips in the simplest of low tin candlesticks lighted the table and at each cover the place-card was a little outline map of Cape Cod with the situation of the summer camp conspicuously marked.
The menu consisted of clam cocktails, codfish cakes and tiny pots of baked beans, hot steamed brown bread cut in small round slices, blueberry tarts, and coffee.
The favors were wee bayberry "waxes" for the sewing basket, each with a bit of a bayberry twig peeping from its top. [103]
A reunion luncheon for a group of friends who had shared a rented bungalow, and the only party in this stretch of the book whose menu would still read well on a card. Everything in it is a real New England dish.
- The menu holds togetherClam cocktail, codfish cakes, small pots of baked beans, hot steamed brown bread, blueberry tarts, coffee. It is a coherent meal, almost all of it made in advance, and it is the exception in a book whose menus are usually jokes about a theme.
- Salt codCodfish cakes mean salt cod, which has to be soaked before it can be used — a day, with the water changed several times — then poached and flaked into potato. Fresh cod makes a different and much blander cake, and the difference is the entire character of the dish.
- Steamed brown breadRye, cornmeal and wheat flour with molasses, steamed rather than baked, which is why it arrives as a cylinder and can be cut into the small round slices the page calls for. A coffee tin standing in a covered pan of water is the traditional vessel and still the simplest one.
- BayberryThe grey-green branches in the basket and the candles on the table are the same plant. Bayberry wax is skimmed off the water the berries are boiled in, and a great many berries go into one candle, which is why the dips here are thin tapers and the favours are very small.
- BittersweetThe orange berries brightening the basket. American bittersweet is now uncommon and the Asian species that has replaced it in the wild is an aggressive invasive, so of everything on this table, the bittersweet is the piece to buy rather than gather.
- A place-card that does somethingAn outline map of Cape Cod with the camp marked on it. The device is the most portable idea in the book: a place-card carrying a piece of information about the group is the cheapest thing on the table and the only one anybody takes home.
The page is a small record of how a young woman’s social year was organised and what it was organised out of. A bunch of friends rent a bungalow for a fortnight; a year later one of them pays the fortnight back as a luncheon, with a rhymed invitation she wrote herself, a sketched bayberry sprig on the card, hand-drawn place-cards, and a favour for each guest to take away. None of it was bought ready-made and none of it was expensive, and all of it was work. The table is deliberately regional — bayberry, pine, bittersweet, tin candlesticks, homespun runners — at a date when a florist could have supplied something far more conventional, which makes the foraged table a choice rather than a necessity. What the party is actually commemorating is the holiday itself: two weeks in a rented house by the sea had become something worth building an entire afternoon around.