The I Hate to Cook Book (26 page)

French Beef Casserole

Hot Rolls

Irish Coffee

     FRENCH BEEF CASSEROLE     

for 6–8

(This recipe looks pretty disastrous at first, with all those ingredients and instructions. But actually it’s only a glorified stew, which tastes rather exotic and looks quite beautiful. You can do it all the day before, too. Just be sure you remember to take it out of the icebox an hour before you reheat it, so the casserole dish won’t crack.)

1½ pounds lean beef shoulder cut in 1½-inch cubes

bacon drippings and butter

1-pound can tomatoes

6-ounce can big mushrooms

1 pound carrots cut in 2-inch chunks

2 green peppers cut in squares

1½ cups sliced celery

salt, pepper, flour, dried basil and tarragon leaves, instant minced onion

Brown the meat—which you’ve sprinkled with salt, pepper, and one and a half tablespoons of flour—in two tablespoons of
butter and two tablespoons of bacon fat. Put it in a big casserole. Put three tablespoons of flour in the skillet with the remaining fat, and add the juice from the tomatoes and mushrooms. Stir it till it thickens, then pour it over the meat, add the drained tomatoes, and cover it. Bake for an hour at 325˚. Then take it out and add all the other vegetables, plus three tablespoons of instant minced onion, and one teaspoon each of crumbled tarragon and basil leaves. Re-cover it, bake an hour longer at 325˚, cool it, add the mushrooms, and refrigerate.

To serve it, heat the oven to 350˚ and bake the casserole, covered, for forty-five minutes. Put the rolls in to heat as you sit down to your salad, and everything should go along sweet as a May morning.

But don’t be unduly upset if it doesn’t! If you forget to serve the rolls for a bit, it’s actually no great matter, and if your dinner is so dull that your guests have time to wonder where the rolls are, nothing is going to help it much anyway.

A thing to beware of, when you hate to cook, is the taut, dogged approach when you’re faced with cooking for company. Listen: if, by some odd happenstance, you should put together a perfect little symphony of a dinner, with no slips or absent-minded moments, you might scare some of your female guests to the point where they’ll never invite you to
their
house!

I, personally, know a lady whose cooking and co-ordination are superb, whose menus are inspired, and whose shishkebobs come flaming on the appropriate eighteenth-century rapiers; and I’d never in the world invite this lady to share
my
humble board. I’d hang first.

OR WAIT TILL YOU TASTE MAYBELLE’S PEANUT BUTTER ASPIC

F
ew things are so pleasant as a Ladies’ Luncheon, when the ladies meet in some neutral corner like the Carioca Room at the Sherry-Hinterland, or at Harry’s Bar and Grill.

There they may relax and swap tatting patterns, serene in the knowledge that they needn’t eat anything molded unless they order it. There, too, a lady can have an honest Scotch-and-soda instead of a pink-rum-and-maple-syrup with no fear of being stripped of her Brownie badge; and not one lady needs to jump up to change plates and miss hearing what Harriet said when Char
lotte told her what Thelma said when she saw that awful Henderson woman at the movies with that boy who used to date Eloise’s neighbor’s niece.

Furthermore, someone else is left to get the lipstick off the napkins.

However, as to the Ladies’ Luncheon at home, about the best thing that can be said for it is that—like the whooping crane—it is definitely on the downhill chute to extinction. More and more ladies are discovering that with only a little fast footwork, they can turn a luncheon into a Morning Coffee (with a lot of good little pastries, either bakery-bought or frozen-baked) or an Afternoon Tea (bread-and-butter sandwiches and rich cookies) or a Cocktail Affair (see Chapter 8)—any one of which is a lot easier. And when you hate to cook, your agility in this respect is truly remarkable. It is only once in a long long month of Sundays that the woman who hates to cook finds herself stuck with a Luncheon for the Girls.

This, accordingly, is a brief chapter. It consists of six luncheon menus: 1. The Soup-Sandwich; 2. The Soup-Salad; 3. The Salad-Sandwich; and, if you are so unlucky as to find yourself on the Patty-Shell Circuit, 4, 5, 6. The Hot Main Dish.

In each menu, only one thing takes any doing. Also, each menu, in its entirety, can be made in advance, which enables you to be with your friends in the living room until a minute or so before you eat. After all, if they’re your best friends, you want to be with them; and if they’re your second-best friends, you don’t dare not.

First, a general word about
DESSERT
.

It is wise to keep in mind that in any group of two or more women, at least one is on a diet, and several others think they ought to be. If you serve them a rich dessert, which you spent considerable time making, they will probably eat it, but they will
be annoyed with you. If they do
not
eat it, you will be annoyed with them. And, on the other hand, the nondiet-minded ladies will look at you squint-eyed if they have dutifully plowed through the main part of the luncheon only to find that there’s no dessert at all.

This poses a pretty little problem, which is best solved by a fruit dessert (see Menu No. 1,
here
)
plus
a plateful of store-bought petit-fours (or other rich little cakes), or a dish of good chocolates, or a bowl of nuts and raisins, or all three, hereinafter known as Oddments.

Everyone can eat the fruit dessert, you see, and you, as hostess, will not be miffed if they pass up the rich goodies. After all, you spent no time making them, and, also, there will be more left for you and the family to enjoy when the ladies finally go home.

Remember, too: If your luncheon is reasonably substantial or contains a good deal of fruit anyway, you can even skip the fruit dessert and just bring out the Oddments.

One other point, before we go on to the menus. I have noticed that it’s customary with most cookbook writers to throw in an occasional well-traveled paragraph, to indicate that they haven’t spent their lives huddled over their own kitchen ranges. “I first tasted this dish at Maxim’s,” they’ll write. “And how I wished I could hide like a little mouse in the corner of that famous kitchen and see exactly what went into that sauce! However, when I finally returned to the States (via Tivoli where I discovered a
fettuccini
secret, which I’m sharing with you in Chapter 33!) I did some experimenting on my own, and…”

Well, these cookbook writers aren’t the only people with credit cards. When I was in Edinburgh, I tasted the first of many a Celtic sandwich; and I am sure these were what the Earl of Sandwich had in mind when he thought up the idea in the first place. I didn’t have to do any experimenting to duplicate them, either. What they do is this: They cut good bread thin and saw
off the crusts. Then they butter one side each of two slices, and between the slices they put generous thick chunks of chicken, or ham, or beef, or all three. Then they cut the sandwiches into four triangles and they pile them on a platter and they serve them.

Notice, now! No mayonnaise to make the bread soggy. No lettuce to draggle down your chin. No green olives, black olives, piccalilli, potato chips, celery, parsley, or tomato slices, and not a sweet pickle in sight. Just the sound, pure, basic essence of the Sandwich, and a noble thing it is, too.

And so to Menu No. 1.

Luncheon Menu No. 1.
Soup-Sandwich

Cheese-Chicken Soup

Celtic Sandwiches

Honeydew Melon with a Scoop of Lime Sherbet

Oddments

Coffee

     CHEESE-CHICKEN SOUP     

for 6

2 cans condensed cream of chicken soup

1½ 8-ounce jars sharp processed cheese spread

parsley

Blend a can of water with the soup, in the top of the double boiler. Then stir in the cheese spread, and keep stirring until it’s
all smooth and hot. You can keep this waiting as long as you like, over hot water. Parsley it with a lavish hand before you serve it.