The Hemingway Cookbook (27 page)

Tillie Arnold recalls once preparing an excellent roast on a rotisserie, which Ernest loved. When Papa asked if he could take some home, Mary gently chided him that it was rude to ask such a thing. “Well,” Tillie fondly recalls, “Mary didn’t know it then, but Papa always had some to take home.”

Ernest and Mary were very fond of a delicious fruit compote for dessert, reminiscent of the fruit cup that Ernest and Hadley enjoyed in Milan in the early 1920s. This version is a little more elaborate and a lot stronger! Keep in mind that if any of the ingredients are out of season, you can substitute any favorite fruit that is available.

Fruit Compote

8
TO
10
SERVINGS

2 cups each honeydew melon, crenshaw melon, cantaloupe, and watermelon, cut into
¾
inch chunks

1 cup halved grapes

2 apples, peeled, cored, and cut into ¾-inch chunks

2 pears, peeled, cored, and cut into ¾-inch chunks

2 peaches, peeled, pitted, and cut into ¾-inch chunks

1 orange, peeled, sections cut in half

½ cup pitted and halved cherries

2 bananas, sliced

1½
cups kirsch

Cut all of the fruit over a large salad bowl or punch bowl, so as not to lose any of the juice. Stir the fruit to mix thoroughly. Pour the kirsch over the fruit and place in the refrigerator for several hours. Stir the fruit frequently. MacMullen recommends that you resist the temptation to throw away the fruit and just drink the sauce.

MOUNTAINSIDE PICNIC

During his frequent hunting trips, or any time hunger called in the mountains, Hemingway loved to picnic. In fact, his granddaughter, Joan Hemingway, wrote a wonderful book entitled
The Picnic Gourmet
(New York: Random House, 1977),
that recreates “a boating picnic” that she enjoyed as a young girl with Ernest and Mary in Cuba.

For Ernest, eating outdoors beside an open fire with a small group of friends was the only way to satisfy the hunger that the hunt and the mountain air inspired. As he had learned from his father never to shoot over the limit or waste what he killed, Hemingway’s hunting meals invariably included leftovers. After a dinner of venison, Ernest would look at a half-full platter and think aloud that it would make a “good sandwich in a duck blind.”
¹²
More often than not, it eventually did just that. The picnics, too, were nothing fancy and included mostly leftovers brought along by Mary or Tillie Arnold. Mary would bring her chili and Tillie a leftover roast, and they would cook them together and tailgate beside the road.

Forest MacMullen recalls taking along Cornish pasties, or deep-dish meat pies, when he and Ernest went down country hunting. This dish, perfectly suited for leftovers, is delicious either hot or cold.

Cornish Pasties

4
SERVINGS

For the Piecrust, see Campfire Apple Pie, page
11
, with below exceptions

For the Filling

¾-
to 1-pound round steak, cut into ¾-inch cubes

2 medium potatoes, cut into ¾-inch cubes

2 medium onions, chopped

¼ cup fresh, flat parsley leaves

2 tablespoons butter, softened

1 package Lipton’s French Onion Soup mix

To make the piecrust, follow the instructions for Hemingway’s Campfire Apple Pie (see page
11
) with the following alterations. First, before rolling the dough, form it gently into a ball, wrap it in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least 1 hour up to several days. Second, you need not spread the extra shortening on the crust. Third, you may want to use a rolling pin rather than an old bottle (although the bottle works perfectly well).

Preheat the oven to 350° F
.

For the filling, mix all of the ingredients, except the butter and the soup mix, together in a large bowl. Pour the mixture into the pie shell, press the mixture firmly into the shell, and smooth level. Rub the butter over the filling and sprinkle on the soup mix. Roll the top piecrust onto a floured rolling pin and unroll over the pie. Seal the edges of the crust with your thumb and cut two slashes in the top crust to let steam escape. Place the pie on the center rack and bake for about 1 hour. To test for doneness, stick a toothpick in the center. It should pull out easily. Remove from the oven and let stand 5 minutes before serving. Serve with plenty of ketchup to taste.

With this hearty meat pie as a starter, you may indulge in true Hemingway fashion whenever the opportunity to picnic presents itself. Take along some dishes from Ernest’s past. The recipes may be decades old, but a few minutes over the fire may render them, and the memories they evoke, more delicious than when they were first enjoyed. Take along some of the venison prepared by Frau Nels at the Hotel Taube in Schruns, Cipriani’s duck from Harry’s in Venice, Gregorio’s beef stew from Cuba, and some fruit cup from Biffi’s in the Galleria in Milan. It is a Hemingway buffet of sorts, leaping effortlessly across space and time, from real life to the reality of great fiction, igniting the senses to degrees only possible through indulgence in honest art and great food.

Hemingway, Forrest “Duke” MacMullen, and Mr. Owl, who was shot accidentally and then nursed back to health by Hemingway.

7
THE HEMINGWAY WINE CELLAR

“Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the natural things of the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection, and it offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other purely sensory thing which may be purchased.”

—
Death in the Afternoon

Hotel de la Mére Poularde, Mont-Saint-Michel, August 1944

(Left to right)
Time
magazine correspondent Bill Walton, Mademoiselle Chevalier, Hemingway, an Army Signal Corp photographer, Monsieur Chevalier, and
Life
photographer Bob Capa.

In his treatise on bullfighting,
Death in the Afternoon
, Hemingway included in his glossary of terms an entry for Vino. With the air of authority of a world-class sommelier, he provided to Spanish wine:

For any one who comes to Spain thinking only in terms of Sherry and Malaga the splendid, light, dry, red wines will be a revelation. The vin ordinaire in Spain is consistently superior to that of France since it is never tricked or adulterated, and is only about a third as expensive. I believe it to be the best in Europe by far.
¹

That Hemingway could speak with such authority in his early 30s is not surprising. He had been living in Paris through most of the 1920s and had traveled throughout Europe during that time. In addition, he had already developed a knack for speaking as an authority on subjects of which he knew far less than he knew of wine. Wine was a lifelong indulgence for Hemingway, from the days of his “boyhood when all red wines were bitter except port and drinking was the process of getting down enough of anything to make you feel restless,” to the time when he developed “a palate that will give me the pleasure of enjoying completely a Chateaux Margaux or a Haut Brion.”
²

The Hemingway Wine Cellar contains only a fraction of the wines associated with Ernest Hemingway and those mentioned in his work. I have chosen to include here only those wines that are given prominent mention in his writing, wines of which he was especially fond, wines that accompany recipes in this book particularly well, and wines around which intriguing anecdotes arose. Without further ado, let us adjourn to the cellar.

Algerian Wine

We ate very cheaply in an Algerian restaurant and I liked the food and the Algerian wine. The fire-eater was a nice man and it was interesting to see him eat, as he could chew with his gums as well as most people can with their teeth.
³

As Hemingway waited to meet Fitzgerald in Lyon in
A Moveable Feast
, he met a man who ate fire and bent coins with his gums for a living. It is fitting that they should choose Algerian wine to wash away the aftertaste of the gentleman’s vocation. Algeria’s dark, heavy red wines are highly alcoholic, as much as 15 percent, due to the high sugar content produced by extremely hot Algerian summers. These wines were often blended with French wines to produce deeper color, fuller body, and higher alcohol content.

Asti

On Saturday night, August 31,1918, Ernest and Agnes von Kurowsky dined together at the Du Nord restaurant in Milan. It was probably their first real date, at least in Ernest’s eyes. Agnes had just ended a relationship with an Italian captain and was being careful not to do “anything foolish.”
⁴
But Ernest’s charms and boyish enthusiasm eventually wore her down. Their love affair formed the romantic centerpiece of
A Farewell to Arms
.

At the Du Nord, Agnes and Ernest shared a bottle of Asti Spumante, the sparkling white wine that had become her favorite. If Ernest was able to stomach this often “sickly sweet”
⁵
low-alcohol wine in 1918, he certainly could not do so after living in Paris, marrying and remarrying, and sitting down to write his second novel. After Agnes betrayed his love, Ernest reserved a special place for Agnes’s favorite beverage in that novel of the war:

Later, below in the town, I watched the snow falling, looking out of the window of the bawdy house, the house for officers, where I sat with a friend and two glasses drinking a bottle of Asti, and, looking out at the snow falling slowly and heavily, we knew it was all over for that year.
⁶

Barbera

It is false to say that Ernest Hemingway wrote exclusively from his firsthand experience. What is true is that he created characters who appeared to have had such experiences even if their creator in fact had not. Hemingway was a great student of those things about which he wrote, be it war or revolution or bullfighting. In
A Farewell to Arms
, he re-created the retreat from Caporetto “so accurately that his Italian readers will later say he was present at that nation’s embarrassment.”
⁷
He was not. And yet, he was able to capture not only the events and the landscapes of the retreat, but also the essence of a national character. In one instance, Hemingway included a reference to Barbera wine—a heavy, deep red wine from the Piedmont region in the extreme northwest corner of Italy—to convey that character:

We ate in the kitchen before we started. Aymo had a basin of spaghetti with onions and tinned meat chopped up in it [pasta asciutta]. We sat around the table and drank two bottles of the wine that had been left in the cellar of the villa. It was dark outside and still raining. Piani sat at the table very sleepy.

“I like a retreat better than an advance,” Bonello said. “On a retreat we drink barbera.”
⁸

Beaune

Hemingway recalls in
A Moveable Feast
that this is the wine he and Hadley enjoy with dinner at home after they pay Sylvia Beach her book deposit and cannot afford to eat out: