The Hemingway Cookbook (20 page)

THE MENU

La Perla de San Francisco Café Menu

Black Bean Soup
Beef Stew with Boiled Potatoes
Hatuey Beer

Black Bean Soup

I would like to thank Teresa Merenges-Berry for her assistance with this and several other traditional Cuban recipes in this chapter. She embodies the spirit and character of Cuba and its flavorful and spirited cuisine. Feel free to adjust all of the seasonings to taste. Teresa claims, happily and with a certain degree of pride, that her preparation of this dish has never tasted the same twice. This recipe will create a thick soup that is wonderful by itself or served over rice
.

6
SERVINGS

1 pound dry black beans

3 large green bell peppers

1 bay leaf

3 tablespoons olive oil

1½ cups chopped onion

3 cloves garlic, chopped

1 tablespoon cumin

1 tablespoon chopped fresh or ½ teaspoon crushed dried oregano

4–5 small cilantro leaves

Salt

1 tablespoon vinegar

Hot sauce

Rinse the beans, removing any stones. Place the beans in a large bowl and cover with cold water to about 2 inches above the beans. Let soak overnight. Rinse the beans and place them in a large stockpot. Cover the beans once again with cold water to 2 inches above the top. Add one whole green pepper and the bay leaf to the pot. Bring the pot to a boil. Reduce heat, cover, and simmer for about 1 hour, or until the beans are tender. Discard the pepper and the bay leaf.

Wash, seed, and cube the 2 remaining peppers. Heat the olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat. When the oil is hot, add the peppers and cook for 1 minute. Add the onion and cook for 1 minute. Add the garlic and cook for 1 minute more. Stir the vegetables into the beans. Add the cumin, oregano, cilantro, and salt to taste. Cook, uncovered, for about 30 minutes, or until thickened to taste. Add the vinegar and hot sauce and adjust seasonings to taste.

Beef Stew with Boiled Potatoes

This recipe for beef stew and potatoes is based on Gregorio Fuentes’s version. It is among the handful of treasured secrets that he shared with Mary Hemingway over the years of their acquaintance.
⁵
As was characteristic of Fuentes’s cooking style, it is simply prepared, with just a touch of magic. Mary recalls that Gregorio usually served this dish with white rice. While he never seemed to measure the rice, water, or timing, it always seemed perfectly prepared. She fondly remembers lounging on the afterdeck aboard the
Pilar,
when suddenly Gregorio would leap down to the galley and remove the pot from the fire. His secret was the smell. When the rice began to “smell faintly, barely noticeably, of mothballs,” then it was cooked to perfection. I would suggest following the directions on the package, as not all of us are blessed with Gregorio’s gastronomic inspiration
.

Mealtime aboard the Pilar

4
SERVINGS

¼ cup lard

2 onions, chopped

3 cloves garlic, minced

1¼ cups tomato purée

¾ cup chopped tomatoes

1 can, or 2 whole, pimientos, finely chopped

1 cup sherry

1 tablespoon crushed dried oregano

1 bay leaf

1 pound stew beef, cut into bite-size pieces

3 medium potatoes, cut into small chunks

First prepare the sauce, with plenty of garlic (feel free to add more if desired): heat the lard in a kettle over medium heat. When hot, add the onions and garlic and sauté until the onions are translucent. Add the tomato purée, chopped tomatoes, pimientos, sherry, oregano, and bay leaf. Simmer for 15 minutes, adjusting the seasoning to taste. Add the beef. Simmer the stew over low heat for 1 hour. Add the potatoes and continue cooking for an additional 20 minutes, or until potatoes are just tender. Serve over rice.

HATUEY BEER

Hemingway’s palate for wine and stronger drinks overshadowed his taste for beer. That is not to say he didn’t enjoy and write about beer frequently throughout his life. His favorite during the Cuban years was Hatuey, brewed in Cotorro, a town near his home in San Francisco de Paula, by the good people at the Bacardí Company. Aboard the
Pilar
there was always a generous supply of Hatuey (or another beer called Tropical) in the ice box that ran across the stern of the boat. Hemingway mentioned the brew in both
To Have and Have Not
and
The Old Man and the Sea
, when the owner of the Terraza sends along two returnable bottles of Hatuey along with the plates of food. The owners of Hatuey and Bacardí did not allow Hemingway’s endorsement to go unrecognized, although it’s likely he wished they had.

On August 13,1956, the owners of the brewery organized a tribute to Hemingway, in honor of his presence in Cuba and his receiving the Nobel Prize in 1954. Hemingway was celebrated for his friendship with local fishermen, his larger-than-life character and talent, and, of course, his assistance in promoting the cosponsors, Hatuey and Bacardí, in his novels.

Sloppy Joe’s: The Fiction and the Facts

“It’s a strange place,” said Professor MacWalsey. “Fascinating, really. They call it the Gibraltar of America and it’s three hundred and seventy-five miles south of Cairo, Egypt. But this place is the only part of it I’ve had time to see yet. It’s a fine place though.”
⁶

It is not clear exactly when Ernest first entered the little, cavelike bar on Green Street, although we could safely assume it was very shortly after checking into the La Concha Hotel in early April 1928. One thing we do know is that in many ways he never left. The bar has changed names a few times, but its legacy of intrigue, utility, romance, superstition, and literature has remained. When Hemingway first ordered a Scotch at the Silver Slipper, he hitched his youthful legend to a bar that could hold its own as far as legends were concerned. When Joe Russell, who owned the bar in the 1930s, cashed a Scribner’s royalty check for Ernest, the legends of man and bar would hence-forth be immutably intertwined.

In 1851, the Key West icehouse was built from disassembled pirate ships confiscated off South America. Shortly thereafter, well before its inventory would be used to chill whiskey, it was used to chill dead bodies. By the mid-1850s, the building was converted to the city morgue. Ten years later, a tremendous hurricane struck Key West, causing severe flooding and burying many of the morgue’s inhabitants under several feet of mud.

Hemingway with friends and a bottle of Hatuey beer.

There they remain to this day, under what is now the pool room. Not to worry, though—their spirits have been mollified. Several members of the large Bahamian population of Key West warded off any wayward spirits with bottles of holy water, the empty remains of which may still be found there today.

This nondescript little building also served as the first telegraph station of Key West and was home to the city’s hanging tree, both of which prompted its inclusion in the National Historic Registry. In the late 1870s, it first became a bar, the Silver Slipper. And there Hemingway found it on a hot spring afternoon, having just arrived from Paris.

After Joe Russell bought the bar in 1933, it became the successful young writer’s favorite watering hole, Sloppy Joe’s. There Hemingway found a setting for the barroom brawls of
To Have and Have Not
and met his eventual third wife, Martha Gellhorn, in December 1936.

Ernest in the
Pilar
trailed by Mary in the
Tin Kid
, sailing past Morro Castle in 1947, Cuba.

Sloppy Joe’s moved to Duvall Street in 1937, where it remains the epicenter in name, if not in place, of Hemingway’s presence in Key West. Where the original Sloppy Joe’s stood is now a bar called Capt. Tony’s Saloon, the oldest bar in Key West. In the 1960s Tennessee Williams lived upstairs, Truman Capote dropped by for a while, and Jimmy Buffett found a place to sing. To this day Hemingway’s legacy has been preserved at Capt. Tony’s. While Sloppy Joe’s may thrive on his name and face and the Papa Dobles they serve, Capt. Tony’s will always play host to Hemingway’s spirit in Key West.

Captain Tony’s Saloon was the original Sloppy Joe’s from 1933 to 1937.

Islands in the Stream

As he had done in Key West with Sloppy Joe’s, Hemingway began to mingle his legend with local institutions in and around Havana as well. He would later claim that his attraction to bars and restaurants like El Floridita and La Terraza in Cojímar was not solely the food or drink. Even though he would often go through a dozen Daiquirís in one sitting, it was more the characters that inhabited these places that he truly enjoyed. Many of them appear in
To Have and Have Not
as well as in the posthumously published
Islands in the Stream
, which was originally part of his Sea trilogy. This story, begun in the early 1950s, is about Thomas Hudson, a good painter who will not get better. Hudson bears a striking resemblance to his creator, not solely for his hunting for German submarines, as Hemingway did aboard the
Pilar
. In addition they share the pleasure of La Terraza, a bar in Cojímar “built out on the rocks overlooking the harbor.”
⁷
It was here that Hemingway may have founded his Royal Order of Shrimp Eaters and where he bestows upon Thomas Hudson the semifictional cat, Boise, with the presumptuous eating habits: