The Hemingway Cookbook (4 page)

Nick put the frying pan on the grill over the flames. He was hungrier. The beans and spaghetti warmed. Nick stirred them and mixed them together. They began to bubble, making little bubbles that rose with difficulty to the surface. There was a good smell. Nick got out a bottle of tomato catchup and cut four slices of bread. The little bubbles were coming faster now. Nick sat down beside the fire and lifted the frying pan off. He poured about half the contents out into the tin plate. It spread slowly on the plate. Nick knew it was too hot. He poured on some tomato catchup.
¹⁴

Pork and Beans and Spaghetti

Never before have pork and beans been afforded such heroic status as when Nick Adams settled in to eat by the shores of Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River.” While this dish may seem simple and common, when eaten alone in the bush by a favorite trout stream after a long journey you may understand its ascension into the pantheon of
haute cuisine litéraire.

2
SERVINGS

1 can prepared pork and beans

1 can prepared spaghetti

Ketchup

4 slices bread

Pour the can of pork and beans and the can of spaghetti into a saucepan. Warm over a medium fire until the bubbles come fast to the surface. Pour half out onto a plate (preferably tin). Add ketchup to taste. Allow to cool sufficiently before eating. Serve with bread for wiping up the sauce.

Canned Apricots

Nick Adams also brings apricots along on his camping adventure. Contrary to Hemingway’s suggestion in “Camping Out,” Nick enjoys canned apricots rather than stewed. One need only imagine the sweetness of the syrup from the can to understand his preference for this canned version. Either way, apricots provide a succulent dessert, simply prepared and profoundly enjoyed by the fire.

Coffee According to Hopkins

Hemingway closes Nick’s meal and Part One of “Big Two-Hearted River” with a pot of coffee. Not just any coffee, but coffee according to the specific method of Nick’s friend Hopkins, a “very serious coffee drinker.”
¹⁵
Most likely Hopkins is loosely based on Charlie Hopkins, Hemingway’s friend and editor at the
Kansas City Star.
Hemingway made the fictional Hopkins an oil millionaire who had a particular penchant for coffee making. Nick argued with him at every point but eventually saw the light. The following recipe is “straight Hopkins all the way.”
¹⁶

2
SERVINGS

2 cups cold water

3 heaping spoonfuls ground coffee

Sugar

Pour the water into a coffeepot. Use ice-cold stream water, if available. Add the coffee. Bring the water to a boil, allowing it to overflow and run down the side of the pot just to assure yourself that it is, in fact, boiling. Remove the pot from the fire and sprinkle in a little cold water to settle the grounds. Pour coffee into apricot cans or coffee cups as per your preference. Do not let the coffee steep in the pot. Add sugar to taste.

These were the foods of Ernest Hemingway’s youth, expressions of the characters of his mother and father, and symbols of the freedom and adventure of the Michigan woods. He would return again to Michigan, and its summer people would be on his mind for years to come as he lived and wrote. He would rarely return to Oak Park and would never write explicitly about his hometown. He lost his father to suicide in 1928, and grew continually more distant from his mother, who died in 1951.

Growing up in Oak Park and Michigan, his father had instilled in him a voracious appetite for new experiences. He had tasted adventure, and he longed for more and greater ones. He could never have imagined what awaited him in northern Italy and later in Paris and beyond. And yet in many ways he was always well prepared for what lay ahead.

2
ITALY
Remembrance and War

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

‘We drink it now. Tomorrow maybe we drink rainwater,’ Aymo said.

‘Tomorrow we’ll be in Udine. We’ll drink Champagne.’”

—
A Farewell to Arms

Ernest in uniform
.

Ernest graduated from Oak Park High School in 1917 and faced the prospect of work, college, or war in Europe. Through his uncle Tyler (Hemingway), who was in the lumber business in Kansas City, Ernest learned of a position with the
Kansas City Star
that would be available in the fall. After yet another joyous summer in Michigan, Ernest left for Kansas City. His work at the
Star
was as close to a formal education in the fundamentals of writing as he would ever have. “Use short sentences,” the
Star’s
stylebook said. “Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English, not forgetting to strive for smoothness.”
¹
He acquired his first tools. The raw material from which he “whittled a style for his time”
²
lay in wait close by, though never close enough until it was upon him in a blanket of fire, earth, and metal.

In the spring of 1918, the war in Europe beckoned. Ernest could not imagine missing out on “the most exciting drama ever produced.”
³
Although his poor eyesight kept him out of the armed services, he quickly volunteered when the American Red Cross began recruiting ambulance drivers.

On the morning of May 22,1918, Hemingway left New York on the French liner
Chicago
, bound for Bordeaux. After chasing incoming German shells around Paris and taking a spectacular train ride through the Alps, he was assigned to ARC Section Four in Schio, 24 kilometers northwest of Milan.

After three weeks with Section Four, Ernest was impatient to get out and find the war. His opportunity came when the Austrians increased their assault on the Piave River Valley above Venice and volunteers were needed for emergency canteens. About two weeks later, as Ernest was delivering cigarettes and chocolate to soldiers in a riverside trench, the war found him. Everyone heard the dull, rhythmic flutter of the 420-caliber projectile. When it struck the ground, “… there was a flash, as when a blast-furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white and went red….”
⁴
Ernest was badly wounded in both legs by the trench mortar and by machine-gun fire that struck him hard as he attempted to carry a wounded Italian soldier to safety.

After the first of several operations to remove the shrapnel, a brief stay in a field hospital, and a grueling train ride to Milan, Ernest eventually found comfort in the American Red Cross hospital, where he found his first love. She was Agnes von Kurowsky, an American nurse seven years older than Ernest.

The true details of their love affair remain obscured beneath Ernest’s youthful bragging and his eventual fiction. This woman, and this chapter of his life, became the basis of one of the great novels to emerge from the trenches of World War I—
A Farewell to Arms
. This novel, along with
Across the River and into the Trees
, whose main character could very well be Frederic Henry 30 years later, reflects Hemingway’s lifelong, bittersweet love of northern Italy. Both of these books offer a rich and wonderful selection of Italian cuisine, providing for us, amidst the sorrow of lost battles, an indulgent sustenance.

Recovering in the Red Cross Hospital, Milan, July 1918.

A Farewell to Arms

It was almost 10 years after Ernest limped home from Europe before he had obtained the emotional distance and the skill to use his wartime experience for his fiction. He was bitter and hurt when Agnes, who remained in Europe, wrote that she had fallen in love with another. When the fiction finally came, he created Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley and gave them evenings together and tense hours apart, much as he may have either experienced or hoped to experience with Agnes.

As Frederic was about to return to the front, he and Catherine took a room in a hotel across from the Milan train station and spent an evening together before they had to part. In this scene of passion, heightened by their imminent separation, Hemingway provides for Frederic and Catherine a meal befitting their love:

“Monsieur and Madame wish dinner in their rooms?”

“Yes. Will you have the menu brought up?” I said.

“You wish something special for dinner. Some game or a soufflé?”

The elevator passed three floors with a click
each time, then clicked and stopped.

“What have you as game?”

“I could get a pheasant, or a woodcock.”

“A woodcock,” I said. We walked down the corridor. The carpet was worn. There were many doors. The manager stopped and unlocked a door and opened it…

Hemingway with his first love Agnes von Kurowsky, in Milan, Italy, 1918.

Catherine wore my tunic over her shoulders while we ate. We were very hungry and the meal was good and we drank a bottle of Capri and a bottle of St. Estephe. I drank most of it but Catherine drank some and it made her feel splendid. For dinner we had a woodcock with soufflé potatoes and purée de marron, a salad, and zabalione for dessert.
⁵

THE MENU

Woodcock Flambé in Armagnac
Soufflé Potatoes
Purée de Marron
Salad
Zabaglione

Wines
Capri
St. Estephe

Woodcock Flambé in Armagnac

Hemingway shared his knowledge of wild fowl with Frederic Henry, who orders woodcock without hesitation. Frederic knows that woodcock is superior in delicacy to pheasant and is in season during the autumn frost. One can safely assume that Ernest also shared with Frederic his knowledge of hunting woodcock and the best way to prepare it as well:

While the woodcock is an easy bird to hit, with a soft flight like an owl, and if you do miss him he will probably pitch down and give you another shot. But what a bird to eat flambé with Armagnac cooked in his own juice and butter, a little mustard added to make a sauce, with two strips of bacon and pommes soufflé….
⁶

While the game connoisseur would demand that woodcock be prepared without being drawn (with the intestines still in the cavity), it may be difficult to find woodcock these days that are not drawn. Frederic and Catherine no doubt enjoy their birds accompanied with a sauce flavored with the bird’s intestines mixed with foie gras. The following recipe assumes that your birds have been drawn. If you are unable to find woodcock, you may substitute another dark-meat game bird, such as hazel grouse or snipe (2 snipes for each woodcock)
.