The Food of a Younger Land (40 page)

Yes, we’re thinnin’ out. I don’t calculate I’ll be at many more pioneer dinners. We’re goin’ pretty fast into that West beyond the sunset. What a grand time they must be havin’—talkin’ about early times. But, you know, I bet they miss our Chinook salmon!

JOSEPH McLAUGHLIN

T
he Bohemia district, in western Oregon, is a mining region. The inhabitants exchange their favorite recipes. Today, you will find everyone cooking more or less the same dishes. Two of the best are as follows:

Mock Baked Potatoes
. Since baking takes a long time—and lots of firewood, potatoes are frequently boiled in water in which 6, 7, or 8 tablespoons of salt (rook salt, if available) have been dissolved. The increased heat of the boiling water due to the presence of the salt cooks the potatoes as if they had been baked except that the skins are thinner. If placed in a hot oven for two or three minutes, they cannot be distinguished from true baked potatoes. Try it sometime yourself.

India Pickle
. (Not to be confused with India Relish.) The product of this recipe may be used to make Thousand Island Dressing, as the filler for Spanish Omelette, as a sandwich spread, as a sauce for meat loaves or in the loaf itself. It is also good with baked beans. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was used as a mustard plaster or as an axle grease for the farm machinery. Here it is: “12 apples, 10 ripe tomatoes, 9 medium onions, 3 cups vinegar. When this comes to a boil add 3 cups sugar, ¼ cup salt, ½ teaspoon cinnamon, ½ teaspoon cloves, ½ teaspoon black pepper. Cook till tender and seal.”

CLAIRE WARNER CHURCHILL

T
here ought to be a law, that’s what there ought, a law against mashed potatoes being served in restaurants. There ought to be a law against even the use of the words on menus. Somebody ought to sue someone for libel. Libel on mashed potatoes. Think of it. Tomorrow a million men, even ten million men, will sit down at tables and order merchant lunches. Whereupon there will appear ten million plates bearing what chefs will declare to be mashed potatoes. Mashed potatoes indeed! If grandma ever got to thinking what a reflection upon her cooking restaurant mashed potatoes are I tremble for the culinary locals responsible for serving them. Mashed potatoes! The beatings, the maulings, and the ultimate degradation to which an honest Irish potato must submit tomorrow turn me sad-eyed from my plate (Merchant plate, 65¢).

No, I am not to be fooled by your whipped potatoes, your fluffed potatoes, your watered pastes that pass in many restaurants for honest to God mashed potatoes. I know them for what they are: horrible travesties upon a self-respecting dish of mashed, and I mean mashed, not macerated potatoes.

I’ve eaten in places where they even thin them down, whip them up, or by some diabolical process known to and understood by only the restaurant trade, make them suitable for squeezing through a pastry tube. Believe it or not they squirt them around a wafery slice of prime rib au jus in an anemic looking ruffle or worse yet drop them off in disgusting rosettes around a sliver of ham. Even on the hoof ham would never recognize a spud in such a condition. Imagine how the potato must feel. A good old earth apple, once prized for its alleged aphrodisiac qualities, peeled, boiled, bruised, whipped, and squirted out of all semblance to its once lusty self. Come to think of it, what’s the matter with a potato in its original size and shape? Is anything tastier than a spud boiled in its own jacket or baked in its skin? But let that pass. Such tubers require no defense. I was speaking of mashed potatoes.

Never have I learned the secret of the three o’clock or so-called blue gray mashed potatoes. In some restaurants along toward the shank of the afternoon late lunchers often encounter this variety. It is not a true gray nor yet a veritable blue, but a suspicious looking color somewhere between the two. These gems it is said can be prepared in not less than three hours. The chef starts about eleven, plopping an unconscionable lot of peeled potatoes into boiling water. Somewhere near twelve it is said that he mashes them, and at one he pops whatever is left onto a steam table. When time permits or the spirit moves him he stirs them. Three hours of this treatment, or lack of treatment as the case may be, will remove every semblance of mashed potatoes, destroy the texture, ruin whatever flavor nature provided, and reduce the spuds to a nasty paste, but by golly, it will give you color. What color, even the chefs cannot predict, but color you’ll get—pied blue, pinto gray or pale saffron. The paste, however, is said to be useful in paper-hanging, or mixed with gesso is excellent for molding small figurines for your mantel. Of course, if it is flavor and texture you want, why, eat at twelve or order French fries. But heck, they even pre-fry French fries now-a-days. What chance has a potato?

Another restaurant mystery is the manner in which chefs inject lumps into mashed potatoes. Try as you may you can invest a given amount of mashed potatoes with just so many lumps. A chef knows no such limitations. He can get more lumps to the cubic inch of mashed potatoes than a Swiss can holes in cheese. There’s no limit to his ingenuity. He begins, perversely enough, by selecting the wrong kind of spuds. This requires nice discrimination, I’ve heard, only those grown in watery or badly drained soil being suitable for lumping, and culls being preferred.

With an experienced hand and a practiced eye an expert in this kind of mashing can predict almost to the dozen the number of lumps possible in one serving. Never have I learned the exact formula for this kind of cooking and mashing, but I do know the two fundamentals are the buying of the wrong kind of potatoes and their removal from the fire before they are done. From then on each chef permits his inventiveness to run hog-wild. Whether or not you want them you’ll get lumps. Lumps cunningly concealed in a thin coating of mashed potatoes and destined to take a grievous toll of disillusionment among diners.

To my notion the most insulting treatment ever accorded an underground rhizome (potato to you) in the name of mashed potatoes is that process known among tea room operators as whipped or fluffed potatoes. Their sole virtue is their snowy whiteness. In this respect they at least resemble mashed potatoes. Alas, here the likeness ends. Plunge your fork into a heap, a ring, a dab of whipped potatoes and what do you find? Nothing. Exactly nothing. Except for a complete lack of flavor you might as well be eating spun sugar candy like that sold on a stick at county fairs.

Whipped potatoes, thank heaven, are seldom encountered except in places catering to women. Eschew the Orange Lanterns, the Green Gates, the Blue Ducks; flee as from the fiend all cute signs and exotic nomenclature and you may be pretty certain of avoiding whipped potatoes. For completely frustrating a male I recommend nothing better than subjecting him to a ruffle of whipped potatoes around a heap of spinach. If the atmosphere of the place does not completely befuddle him the potatoes will. Thereafter he is your man. You may do with him as you will.

When I think what grandpa would have done if grandma had served him whipped potatoes in a frill—he’d have scooped up a handful and rubbed them into her pompadour, that’s what he’d have done. But grandma knew better. You’d never have caught her tempting grandpa or providence by doing anything to a potato but
mashing
it. Of course grandma had sense enough not to try to serve mashed potatoes the year round, something no restaurant chef appears to recognize as impossible.

There are some months in which a spud, understanding its destiny far better than modern cooks do, refuses to be mashed. If you attempt to mash a potato in late May or early June it rebels and despite your most artful efforts it will become a translucent paste. No person except him who would defy nature and the last judgment should try to mash a potato after June first.

Passionately opposed to being mashed in this verdant season it will submit, even will cooperate in French or cottage fries and escalloped dishes. Never have I witnessed a finer friendship than that exhibited between old potatoes and ham when they are tucked into a casserole of cream, sprinkled with pepper, salt, and parsley, and permitted the intimacy of a hot oven for fifty minutes or an hour.

During the summer months potatoes, wisely enough, defy all kitchen legerdemain. No cook, thank God, has ever yet devised a way of mashing new potatoes. If they are served they must be boiled whole. Having boiled them grandma introduced them to thickened cream made savory with butter, salt, and considerable pepper, or rolled them in melted butter and served with a garnish of fresh green pepper grass.

Grandma would have been shocked if anyone had ever intimated that a mashed potato could be served before autumn. She preferred October or even November for introducing to the table the first snowy mound. About the time hogs were killed and their pink carcasses hung out in the freezing air, or say, when the headcheese was in the making and a few pork chines were clamoring to be roasted to provide the makings for gravy, then grandma considered the season appropriate for making public the secret affinity of mashed potatoes and gravy.

She selected only upland spuds, raised in loamy soil and arrogant as to size. There was no fol-de-rol about cooking them. Sometime between peeling the carrots and pouring the syrup over the baking apples and near the time she mixed the dry ingredients for the biscuit dough she caught up a pan of potatoes, zipped of a thin layer of skin, popped them into a modicum of boiling salted water, and settled the kettle lid firmly into place. When I hear modern cooks talk about pouring the water off the potatoes I have to laugh. When grandma boiled the spuds there wasn’t any water left to pour off.

She went about her business for the length of time it takes to baste the roast just once more, to roll out the biscuit dough and slip it into the oven, to remove the glazed and reddening apples to a platter, to lift the roast and make the gravy and—well, then she just lifted the lid off the potatoes and there they lay, almost dry, their mealy hearts bursting and begging for a drink of cream. A few resounding thumps with the battered old wooden masher and it was discarded for a hickory spoon. You had to feel a mashed potato to be sure it was right, grandma said, as she tossed in the cream and butter and whisked the snowy heap onto a dish, cuddled a lump of butter on the crest and dusted it with pepper. Not paprika. God forbid. But coarse black pepper so fresh from the spice mill that it set us all to sniffing.

The memory betrays me. I find myself bursting into nostalgic tears. Tears of pity for myself, tears for our lost generation of restaurant diners who never will know the truth about mashed potatoes, for whom spuds are fluffed, whipped, paddled, pounded, beaten, bruised, crushed, flounced and shaken, but never—oh the pity of it—never mashed.

JOSEPH McLAUGHLIN

A
few years ago there lived in Yachats a retired blacksmith. His name was Dunkhorst, but was known to all as just plain “Dunk.” If he had a first name, no one knew what it was. Now Dunk fancied himself quite a poet and still a better cook. As a matter of fact he didn’t rate very high as either. He did have, however, one special dish that he was frequently called upon to prepare for community gatherings. He called it simply “Kow Kanyon” and claimed he invented it while camping in Cow Canyon, Eastern Oregon. It went like this: “For 40 people, prepare 25 pounds of spuds, 4 pounds of onions, 1½ pounds of cheese, 8 eggs, 6 pounds of bacon, ¼ pound of butter, and one large can of milk. Boil and mash spuds. Grind bacon and fry with onions. Melt cheese. Add bacon, onions, cheese, eggs, butter and milk to the mashed potatoes and bake.” This dish never failed to bring praise to its creator, and surprisingly it did taste much better than it sounds.

MICHAEL KENNEDY AND EDWARD B. REYNOLDS

 

 

 

E
ggs! She had none. The few hens she possessed were either burdened with the responsibility of baby chicks, or setting on eggs, dispositions ruined and cross-eyed with chagrin over confinement and hot weather.

Butter and milk! Ye Gods! Old Stubby had taken a leave of absence and followed a herd of whitefaces that were grazing over the West Fork, having observed a fine gentleman among them who appealed to her fickle heart. Ethel must remember to have Nick go after her right after the Fourth.

Ethel looked at the pan of raisins stewing on the stove. An idea entered her mind: it was worth trying, and she could experiment on her husband and brother. Necessity was the mother of invention.

When the raisins had partially cooled, she carefully measured a cup of the juice and poured them into a mixing bowl, adding a teaspoon of soda, a half a teaspoonful of cinnamon and nutmeg, a pinch of cloves, ginger and allspice. A heaping tablespoon of bacon drippings went next, and she watched the mixture bubble and froth, wondering if the stuff would explode. She sifted one and three fourths cups of common flour and a cup of sugar, a pinch of salt and a teaspoonful of baking powder, added them to the volcanic mass in her mixing bowl. After a moment of hesitation, she put in a teaspoonful of flavoring. What was it? A cake or pudding? She did not know.