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Dinners for Self and Friends
We shall have to admit that the business woman is at a disadvantage when it comes to cooking dinners - for there is no gainsaying the fact that a dinner really worthy the name is hard to prepare when it is known to be intended for but one - so when the mood for real dinners is on, the business woman is apt to search for victims among her friends.
A kitchenette dinner, even when the victim is secured, is a type all its own.
There is the necessary informality of service, too, that adds to rather than detracts from the charm of a kitchenette dinner party. My guests have usually counted it great fun to arrive in time to watch a part of the play of preparation - and as the WHEN A DINNER IS SERVED THE BIG DOORS CAN BE CLOSED TO HIDE THE KITCHENETTE.
Dinners for Self and Friends kitchenette opens right into the living and dining room, it is impossible for the cook lady to hide.
As the dessert and salad - when the latter is to be served as a separate course - are prepared, they are placed on the tea wagon with the sugar bowl and cream pitcher. The tea wagon is then pulled to the left of the hostess's place so that she can change the courses without getting up from the table.
A LUSCIOUS ROAST BEEF For this dinner I secured a three and three-quarter pound porterhouse roast — that is the first cut of rib roast - which that day was twenty-two cents a pound. It came rolled and tied, as I had asked the butcher to prepare it. Lighting the gas under the oven that it might have ten minutes or so in which to become very hot, I wiped off the meat with a piece of paper toweling dipped in water, and placed the meat on a wire rack in my large aluminum pan (to be used as a roaster) with the skin side up. This was put in a hot oven and the meat turned once during the first fifteen minutes, then dredged with flour, salted with a teaspoonful of salt, peppered with a shake of the pepper shaker, and basted with the fat that had melted out. The flame was then turned down, as after the first searing in a hot oven, to make the meat retain all its juices, a roast or a steak should continue its cooking slowly.
No water was added to the pan, as it changes the flavor, and we wanted a truly roast this time. Every ten or fifteen minutes the meat was basted and dredged with flour and in just an hour and a half was ready to serve - not roasted to death but cooked through. Sometimes, for the last half-hour's cooking, I invert the other aluminum pan over the meat, Dinners for Self and Friends making a roaster, although when not too busy to baste the meat I prefer the flavor of a basted roast.
As this was to be an oven dinner, the potatoes were sliced and allowed to stand in cold water while the biscuits were mixed and set into the ice box until the meat was ready to come out of the oven. The biscuits, cut with a very small cutter, were then placed in the oven where they would be baked by the time the other things were on the table. The dish of escalloped potatoes was ready to go into the oven when the heat of the oven was turned down for the meat. This gave them time to be thoroughly cooked.
The Menu as Served Roast Beef Escalloped Potatoes String Bean Salad Hot Tea Biscuits Celery Strawberries and Cream Snowdrift Angel Cake Coffee 4 potatoes cupful milk Escalloped Potatoes teaspoonful salt 1 tablespoonful butter 1 tablespoonful flour Pare and slice the potatoes and drop them into cold water; drain and place half of them in a baking dish of earthenware or glass; add half the flour and salt, then the rest of the potatoes with the remainder of the flour, salt, and the butter. Add the milk, which has been heated, and set into a slow oven to cook until the potatoes are soft. Serve in the dish in which cooked.
Hot Tea Biscuits 1 cupful flour cupful of milk teaspoonful salt 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder 1 tablespoonful shortening Sift the flour, baking powder, and salt and cut into it the shortening; add the milk gradually, mixing with a knife to a soft Dinners for Self and Friends dough. Turn on to a floured board, give two or three turns on the board, and roll out to half an inch in thickness. Cut in rounds, place in pan, and bake in a hot oven ten to twelve minutes.
Snowdrift Angel Cake 1/2 cupful egg whites (about 5 eggs) cupful sugar tar 1 teaspoonful cream tar- 4 tablespoonfuls wheat flour 4 tablespoonfuls potato flour ½ teaspoonful vanilla extract Beat the whites of the eggs until light and foamy, add the cream of tartar, and beat until dry. Sift both sugar and flour at least five times and fold in the sugar first and then the flour with a spoon or a spatula. Add the vanilla and pour into the small-tube pan, size number five, which has not been buttered, and bake forty minutes in a moderately slow oven. The cake should rise but not brown during the first fifteen minutes and is ready to come from the oven as soon as it begins to shrink from the edge of the pan. Take out and turn upside down on a wire rack to allow it to hang from the pan for at least half an hour.
Remove from the pan and dust with powdered sugar.
A CHICKEN À LA KING DINNER As dinners are built around the meat dish, and for the informal service of a kitchenette apartment must necessarily consist of but two or at most three courses, the combination dishes of meat, fish, or fowl with vegetables, such as chicken à la king, casserole of veal, or creamed salmon in rice, are especially adapted to our purpose. For the dish of chicken à la king the thighs, legs, and part of the breast were steamed for ten minutes under ten pounds of pressure in the pressure cooker and cut up into small pieces.
Dinners for Self and Friends Menu Chicken à la King Potato Chips Clover Leaf Rolls Beet Salad Fruit Cup Coffee Chicken à la King for Two 1 cupful cubed chicken cupful chicken stock 1 cupful mushrooms green pepper (or canned chicken soup) 2 tablespoonfuls butter 1 tablespoonful flour 1 yolk of egg teaspoonful salt teaspoonful paprika cupful thin cream 1 teaspoonful lemon or kumquat juice Skin the mushroom caps and cut the green pepper into strips; cook together in one tablespoonful of butter until slightly browned. While these are cooking, in another saucepan melt a tablespoonful of butter and stir into it the flour, salt, and paprika. Add the chicken stock and cream, stirring constantly, and add the peppers and mushrooms. When it has boiled for three minutes, add the lemon or kumquat juice and chicken. As it boils up again, stir in the well-beaten yolk of egg until evenly blended and serve on toast points at once.
For the beet salad cut the beets into small balls and place them on a bed of shredded lettuce. To shred the lettuce, wash thoroughly to remove grit, dry on a paper towel, and cut into strips with the kitchen scissors. Lettuce for salads is much crisper if it has lain in a piece of cheesecloth on ice for an hour or more before serving. Pour over this a French dressing.
Clover Leaf Rolls 3 cupfuls flour 1/2 cake of compressed 1 cupful scalded milk yeast 1 tablespoonful sugar White of one egg teaspoonful salt 2 tablespoonfuls butter Dissolve the sugar, and salt, and melt the butter in the hot milk. Cool until it becomes lukewarm, then add the stiffly beaten Dinners for Self and Friends white of egg, and the yeast, which has been dissolved in two tablespoonfuls of lukewarm water. Add flour and beat thoroughly.
Add the rest of the flour, turn out on a bread board, and knead until smooth and elastic to the touch. Let rise in a warm place until double in bulk, cut down into tiny rolls. Place three balls together to form the clover leaf and set to rise until twice as large. Brush the tops with milk and bake in a quick oven.
This is a chapter of linked menus rather than a single recipe: an oven dinner built around a small rib roast, then a chicken à la king dinner. The cooking is sound, but the quantities and oven language need translating.
- Missing fractionsSeveral quantities in the ingredient lists have lost their fractions and read as bare "cupful" or "teaspoonful." For the escalloped potatoes use about 1 cup hot milk and 1 teaspoon salt; for the biscuits, about 1/3 cup milk and 1/2 teaspoon salt; for the chicken à la king, about 1/2 cup stock, 1/2 cup thin cream, 1/2 green pepper, 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon paprika; for the rolls, 1/2 cake yeast and 1 teaspoon salt. Treat these as reconstructions, not as the author's figures.
- Oven temperatures"Hot" or "quick" is 425-450F, used here to sear the roast and to bake the biscuits and rolls. "Moderately slow" for the angel cake is 325F. The "slow oven" for the escalloped potatoes is 300-325F; they go in when the heat is turned down for the meat, so they get roughly the remaining hour and a quarter of the roast's time to cook through.
- The roast, in modern termsA 3 3/4 lb rolled rib roast started hot then finished slow will reach medium in roughly the hour and a half given, but the only reliable guide is a thermometer: 130-135F at the centre for medium rare, 140-145F for medium. Rest it 15 minutes before carving. Ignore the "porterhouse roast" label -- porterhouse is a steak from the short loin; what is described is a first-cut rib roast.
- Dredging with flourRepeated flouring during basting was a period habit meant to build a crust and thicken the drippings. Flour can scorch at searing heat, though here all but the first dredging happens after the oven has been turned down. Flour once at the start if you want the effect, and otherwise simply baste with the rendered fat.
- Angel cake floursPotato flour here means potato starch; buy it labelled potato starch, since modern potato flour is a different, whole-potato product. Combined with a little wheat flour it gives the very fine crumb the recipe is after. "Tube pan, size number five" is a manufacturer's size we cannot now pin to inches, but it must be a small pan -- the batter from about five egg whites will not fill a full-size 10-inch tube pan.
- Compressed yeastHalf a cake of compressed yeast is about 1 1/4 teaspoons of active dry or instant yeast. Compressed cake yeast is now rare outside bakeries; dissolve dry yeast in the warm water as written.
- The egg yolk in the sauceThe yolk goes in off the heat or at the barest simmer and must not boil, or the sauce will curdle into threads. Blend it with a spoonful of the hot sauce first, stir it back, and serve immediately.
- Pressure-cooked chickenTen minutes at ten pounds needs somewhat less time in a modern stovetop pot running at 15 psi, on the order of six to eight minutes; an electric cooker runs nearer 11-12 psi, so the original time is about right. Bone-in thighs and legs are safe at 165F and pull more easily from the bone nearer 175F.
- YieldEach menu serves two generously. The escalloped potatoes and the biscuit dough (one cup of flour, about eight small rounds) are two-person quantities; the angel cake and the roll dough both make more than two people will eat at one sitting.
Kitchenette cookery books appeared in numbers in American cities in the 1910s and 1920s, when apartment buildings began offering the single working woman a one-room flat with a curtained or folding-door cooking alcove instead of a kitchen. The constraints are visible in every line here: one oven, two aluminium pans that double as a covered roaster, a tea wagon standing in for a sideboard, and menus that often turn on a single combination dish so that the hostess never has to leave the table -- though not always, as the roast beef dinner, a multi-dish oven meal, shows. Chicken à la king was the ideal apartment dish of the era -- rich, made from cooked meat, served on toast, and requiring only one pan and no carving. The stray mention of kumquat juice as an alternative to lemon, and of twenty-two-cent-a-pound rib roast, suggests, though it cannot establish, a time when a small city household could still treat beef as an ordinary weekday extravagance.