The Hemingway Cookbook (2 page)

The sources for the recipes themselves are varied. Several, such as the Roast Suckling Pig and the
Paella de Langosta
, come from the original restaurants where Hemingway enjoyed them. Other recipes, primarily those from the Cuba and Idaho years, are based on written records or interviews with Hemingway’s closest friends from those days, such as Forrest “Duke” Mac-Mullen, Tillie Arnold, Gregorio Fuentes, and his
fourth wife, Mary. Of the remaining recipes, the very traditional ones are based on cookbooks from that time.

It is my hope that by preparing the recipes in this book you may revisit the first time Hemingway’s, or any author’s, prose truly touched you. One of the wonders of Hemingway’s work is that it may be enjoyed on so many levels, from the starkly empirical to the analytically profound. Through preparing these dishes, a new dimension of enjoyment may be added, strengthening the personal ties that each reader once had with the fiction alone.

I have written a book that I believe will satisfy the full spectrum of Hemingway readers and will help everyone enjoy the world he created for us. Maybe you will read a book of his you never read before. Maybe you will see something new in your favorite short story that reminds you why it’s your favorite. Regardless, I wish every reader the wonderful experience of cooking these meals and spending some more time in the thralls of your own imagination, sated and rapt, at the feet of a master storyteller.

1
THE EARLY YEARS
A Taste for Life

“Don’t be afraid to taste all the other things in life that aren’t here in Oak Park. This life is all right, but there’s a whole big world out there full of people who really feel things. They live and love and die with all their feelings. Taste everything, Sis.”

—Ernest to his sister Marcelline, 1919

A family portrait of the Hemingways in 1909
.

(Top row, left to right) Ernest, Ed, Grace, (bottom row) Ursula, Sunny, and Marcelline.

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born July 21,1899, and ate meat, vegetables, eggs, and fish shortly thereafter. His father, Dr. Clarence Edmonds Hemingway (known commonly as Ed), believed such foods were essential for nursing babies to grow up strong and healthy. His mother, Grace Hall Hemingway, lamented the decision. She noted in her daughter Marcelline’s baby book her annoyance at receiving the babies for nursing with onions on their breath.
¹

Ernest Hemingway and his sister Marcelline, 1916.

The Hemingways lived in the affluent and proper Chicago suburb of Oak Park. Grace Hemingway, once an aspiring opera singer, remained ambitious in her endeavors as a music teacher, suffragist, and painter. Mothering six children did not lessen her distaste for housework, and she continued her pursuit of the fine arts over the culinary arts. In fact, she was such a stranger to the kitchen that when she finally mastered a recipe from her mother’s cookbook, she decided to quit while she was ahead. When Marcelline suggested that she learn to make a layer cake, Grace replied, no doubt with chin up and eyes beaming, “I proved I could cook with my tea cake, and I’m not going to take a chance of spoiling my reputation by trying anything else.”
²

This recipe is based on Grandmother Hall’s English tea cake recipe, which Grace contributed to the 1921 edition of the
Oak Park Third Congregational Church Cookbook
. The author would like to thank Jennifer Wheeler and the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park for their generous assistance in obtaining this recipe.

Grace Hall Hemingway’s English Tea Cakes

The original recipe for these tea cakes is rather vague in its instructions. Grace shared the recipe with Liz Dilworth, the mother of Ernest’s best friend from upper Michigan, where the Hemingways had a summer cottage on Walloon Lake. The Dilworths lived in Horton Bay on Lake Charlevoix. Mrs. Dilworth, known as Aunty Beth to the Hemingway children, ran a small restaurant called Pinehurst Cottage, famous for its fried chicken dinners. Mrs. Dilworth worked out the exact proportions of the recipe and taught Grace how to prepare it. After secretly mastering the recipe at the Dilworths’, Grace finally prepared the hot bread in the Hemingway kitchen and served it with great pride and joy. Ed could hardly contain his praise: “Delicious! Grade, delicious!”
³

12
SERVINGS
(4
TO
6
9-INCH CAKES
)

1½ teaspoons active dry yeast

½ teaspoon salt

1½ cups warm water (110° F)

4 cups all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon butter, melted

2 teaspoons lard or shortening

2 large eggs, beaten

½ cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar

¼ cup warm milk

1 cup dried currants or raisins

Plenty of extra melted butter for swathing

To set the sponge, whisk together the yeast, salt, and water in a mixing bowl for several minutes until the yeast is completely dissolved. Stir in l½ cups of the flour and mix until smooth. Cover with a towel and let stand in a draftfree space for 2 hours.

When the sponge has risen, stir in the butter and lard, along with the remaining flour, beaten eggs, sugar, milk, and currants or raisins. Mix thoroughly to form a stiff batter. Cover and let stand up to 1 hour.

Preheat the oven to 350°F
.

Divide the batter evenly into four buttered pie tins and let rise for at least 2 hours. Bake in the center of the oven for about 20 minutes, or until golden brown. Remove the cakes to a cooling rack, brush with a lot of melted butter, cut into wedges, and serve while still warm.

Grace’s tea cake recipe was also published in
The Nineteenth Century Women’s Club Historical Centennial Cookbook
, along with a recipe for “Ernest Hemingway’s Cold Cucumber Soup.” Ernest’s connection with this sweet cucumber and leek broth is unclear, but here it is:

Ernest Hemingway’s Cold Cucumber Soup

4
TO
6
SERVINGS

3 cucumbers

1 tablespoon butter

1 tablespoon chopped fresh dill or mint

1 leek, white part only, sliced, or ¼ cup chopped onion

1 bay leaf

1 tablespoon all-purpose flour

2 cups fresh chicken stock or canned broth

1 teaspoon salt, or to taste

White pepper (optional)

1 cup half & half

Juice of ½ lemon

1 tablespoon honey (optional)

Peel and slice two of the cucumbers. Peel, seed, and grate the remaining cucumber. Heat the butter in a large, heavy saucepan. Add the sliced cucumbers and cook over low heat for a few minutes. Add the dill or mint, leek, and bay leaf and cook over low heat until tender, about 20 minutes. Stir in the flour and cook for a few more minutes, stirring constantly. Add the stock and salt and simmer gently for 30 minutes. Remove the bay leaf and let the mixture cool slightly. Purée the mixture, half at a time, in a blender or food processor. Return to the pan and add the white pepper to taste. Add the half & half, lemon juice, and honey; then taste and adjust the seasoning. Stir in the grated cucumber. Refrigerate until ready to serve. Serve in a chilled bowl.

Ed Hemingway extended the same moral sense of discipline and responsibility that ruled all aspects of his life to food and eating. He was a passionate outdoorsman, hunting a vast array of game for the Hemingway table. This was particularly useful when the family would retreat from Oak Park each summer to their cottage on Walloon Lake in upper Michigan. Dr. Hemingway would often stay behind to work at his family practice, but when he was out in the country he was truly in his element. He quickly began to share his passion with his young son.

Ernest at age 5 with his first gun.

Ed Hemingway believed in hunting for food and eating everything that he killed. So, in Ernest’s fourteenth summer, when Ernest and summertime chum Harold Sampson returned triumphant after hunting and killing a porcupine that had injured a neighbor’s dog, Dr. Hemingway did not shower them with praise as expected. Instead, in his typical firm and unforgiving tone, Dr. Hemingway made them eat the animal, which turned out to be “about as tender and tasty as a piece of shoe leather.”
⁴

Ed Hemingway in the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina, 1891.

Ernest’s older sister Marcelline, in her memoir
of those early years,
At the Hemingways
, shares one of her father’s anecdotes that displayed his skills and experience as a chef and outdoorsman. It is a story that Ernest no doubt heard repeatedly and loved, for details of Ed’s youthful adventure show up years later in his son’s early writings. It was not the last time that Ernest would take the stories of others and make them his own.

In the summer between his graduation from Oberlin College and his medical training at Rush Medical College in Chicago, Ed was asked to participate in a geological expedition in the Smoky Mountains. The expedition lasted longer than expected, and the supplies began to run low. Determined to provide a good meal (he was, after all, asked on the trip because he could cook), Ed shot some partridge and a few squirrels, coaxed honey from a bee’s nest, and whipped up a meal of fried game, biscuits, and blackberry pie. To his fellow campers’ amazement, Ed explained how he rolled out the piecrust using a beer bottle as a rolling pin.
⁵

His father awakened Ernest’s love of the outdoors, of fishing and hunting, in those first summers on the lake. Ernest would eventually take that same, all-consuming passion for sport and adventure and apply it to the bullfights, deep-sea fishing, big game hunting, and virtually any endeavor upon which he embarked. As a young boy, though, the cottage door opened into deep woods, trout streams, campfires, and endless adventures. He saved the sights, sounds, and smells, as he would throughout his life. Eventually he would return through that same door, this time into his imagination, when his gift beckoned and he could not resist.