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Corn Stewed with Cream
Select half a dozen ears of Indian corn, remove the silk and outer leaves and place them in a saucepan covering with water, cook, drain and cut off the corn from the cobs with a sharp knife, being very careful that none of the cob adheres to the corn, and place it in a stewpan with one teacupful of hot bechamel sauce, one-half breakfast cupful of cream and about one-fourth ounce of butter. Season with pepper and salt and a little grated nutmeg. Cook gently on the stove for five minutes, place it in a hot dish, and serve. Cucumbers as Cardoons Quarter some cucumbers lengthwise, scrape out the seeds and slit the outsides so that they may resemble cardoons. Blanch them in boiling water, stew in strong broth with two or three tablespoonfuls of Spanish sauce and boil over a sharp fire. Should the broth taste bitter, put in a little piece of sugar. Serve hot.
Cucumbers, Bechamel Take one or two cucumbers; remove the peel and seeds, cut into slices, blanch in hot salted water, drain and plunge them into cold water; take them out and dry. Pour some bechamel sauce into a saucepan on the side of the fire, warm the slices of cucumber in it without letting the sauce boil. Turn the whole out on a dish, and serve.
Cucumbers, French Style Peel a green cucumber, slice it very thin, put in a basin with half an ounce of salt, and pickle for four hours. Drain well and arrange the slices on a dish with pepper, oil, vinegar and one tablespoonful of chopped herbs, such as parsley, chervil and tarragon put over the slices.
Four short vegetable preparations run together on one page, all leaning on the classic sauces a hotel kitchen kept ready. The measurements are period cup sizes and the sauce names are the French repertoire.
- Cup sizesA teacupful in this era is roughly 3/4 cup (6 fl oz); a breakfast cupful is the larger vessel, about 8 to 10 fl oz, so half of one is 4 to 5 fl oz — call it 1/2 cup of cream. Neither is exact, so season and thin to taste rather than chasing the numbers.
- Indian cornHere it most likely means ordinary sweet corn on the cob, not the hard ornamental flint corn the phrase suggests today. Six ears yields roughly 3 to 4 cups of kernels; the recipe itself gives no number of servings.
- Boil the cobs brieflyModern sweet corn is bred for high sugar and tender pericarp, so 3 to 5 minutes in boiling water is plenty; the recipe gives no boiling time. Overcooked kernels turn starchy, and the five-minute simmer in the cream will finish them.
- Cutting the kernelsThe warning about cob fragments is the hinge of the dish. Stand the drained ear upright in a wide bowl and cut downward with a firm knife, then scrape the cob with the back of the blade to release the milky pulp, which thickens the cream.
- Bechamel and Spanish sauceBechamel is the milk-based white sauce; Spanish sauce is sauce espagnole, the brown veal-and-tomato mother sauce. A hotel had both in the larder; at home, a small quantity of good demi-glace or a reduced brown stock stands in for the espagnole.
- CardoonsCardoon is the thistle relative grown for its celery-like ribs, common in French and Italian cooking and scarce in American markets. The instruction is purely about shape: cut the cucumber into long ribbed batons so they look like the real thing.
- Do not boil the bechamel cucumbersThe sauce is held at the side of the fire deliberately. Bechamel that boils with watery cucumber slices in it will thin and break; keep it below a simmer and warm the slices through only.
- French style timingHalf an ounce of salt (about 1 tablespoon) on one sliced cucumber for four hours draws out a great deal of water. Drain thoroughly and taste before adding more salt to the dressing; an hour is usually enough for thin-skinned modern varieties.
- Heat control"A sharp fire" means a hard boil to reduce the broth quickly — high heat, uncovered, on a wide pan.
Oscar Tschirky's book catalogues the Waldorf's kitchen as a system rather than a set of dishes: the vegetable entries on this page are plain boiled or blanched items finished in one of the standing mother sauces, which is exactly how a large brigade kitchen worked. Corn was the American note in an otherwise French repertoire, and "Indian corn" was one of the terms in print for it in the 1890s, alongside "corn" and "sweet corn." The cucumber trio shows the other habit of the period u dressing a cheap, abundant vegetable in the manner of a costlier one. Cardoons were a prestige vegetable in French cooking and rare in New York markets, so cutting cucumber to resemble them was a piece of visual economy.