The Complete Book of Outdoor Cookery (1955) is a collaboration between the well-respected cooks and authors Helen Evans Brown and James Beard.
I often find the menus and attitudes more engaging than the recipes themselves:
That's an interesting assumption that readers have fancy friends, who are surely sick of common upscale dinners like Tournedos Béarnaise and must be treated to grilled eel or roasted kidneys at their own separate party. Readers with some prole friends might want to give those commoners Tournedos Béarnaise with new potatoes, green beans almondine, and a bottle Vosne Romanée as an act of charity, though.
A lot of these recipes remind me that I'm not looking through a Betty Crocker cookbook.
This one does start out with an electric skillet or chafing dish, so it might seem akin to some of the good old home-cooking books (if not actual outdoor cookbooks!), but then it ends with adding Cognac to set the steaks and sauce ablaze. That's not how Betty's recipes usually work! Serve this one with fresh asparagus, Cabernet Sauvignon, and fresh pineapple and berries mixed with eau de vie de framboise... Nope, not a Betty Recipe. She'd recommend canned asparagus and end with pineapple and raspberry sherbets.
The book isn't all upscale, though. There are a few recipes for rich people who want to pretend they're slumming.
Minute steak, sautéed onions, fried potatoes, beer, and apple pie with cheese-- it's less pretentious, though it sounds more like something to whip up indoors on a particularly blustery fall day than something to make for an outdoor party.
My favorite dinner might be this (maybe literally?) heart-stopping upscale/ downscale combo:
Salisbury Steak Béarnaise is basically a two-to-three-inch thick hamburger patty quickly seared on the outside, rare in the middle, topped with a buttery sauce, served with creamy fettuccini Alfredo, and accompanied by cherry tomatoes, pears, and Gorgonzola. I guess it's for people who don't mind cheaper ingredients as long as they are slathered in and surrounded by (often expensive) dairy.
You know, even as a prole, I can recognize the appeal of that.
So many mental images in this post, and all of them bad. On the cover of the book they talk about cooking over charcoal indoors and out. INDOORS? I suddenly had a flashback to a call where someone was reporting a home owner's claim because they tried lighting an old bag of charcoal for half an hour or so. They figured it was too old to use, and dumped it back in the bag and left it on the deck. An hour or so later, the deck was on fire. Go figure!
ReplyDeleteThen when you mentioned hamburger patties seared on the outside and raw on the inside, I remembered all those camp fire cookouts where the hamburgers were black on the outside and raw on the inside. Funny how all the girls in the group suddenly decided to be vegetarians all at the same time.
Definitely not a good idea to try to light the charcoal and then leave it somewhere flammable!
Delete