The Food of a Younger Land (13 page)

Open 35 raw clams, saving the clams and also the juice. DO NOT STEAM TO OPEN.

Chop the vegetables, (raw) onions, potatoes, carrots, celery, tomatoes and turnip. Cook them for about 1½ hours or until cooked, then add the clam broth and grease from the 6 strips of bacon but not the bacon (having fried the bacon while the vegetables were cooking). Season this with salt, pepper and thyme to suit taste. Add the rest of the 3 quarts of water. Put the clams through the meat chopper and then into the pot containing the vegetables, etc. Let come to a boil and set aside in a warm place. Reheat before serving. Serve with crackers and butter on the side.

Recipe by Mrs. Margarite Gross, Greene Avenue, Sayville, L.I., N.Y.

A successful dispenser of seafood for over forty years.

MABEL G. HALL

C
howder is a staple dish—and ranks next to eggs as a make-shift meal for unexpected guests. The base is always the same: diced salt pork in the bottom of the kettle—while this is “trying out,” the onions and potatoes are peeled. Then the onions are sliced or diced into the fat and cooked for at least half an hour, needing to be stirred from time to time. A small amount of water is then added and the potatoes diced or sliced into the brew, with sufficient water to cover the potatoes. A generous amount of salt is added and the chowder is left to cook for another half hour. Any of the following is added: clams, cut fish, or stewed corn; and at least a cup of milk. If none of these are available the dish is served as potato chowder. Seafood to be served in any form must be not more than six hours out of the water.

ALLAN ROSS MacDOUGALL

T
o judge by the figures New York is the ostreaphilic capital of the world. Over 10,000,000 pounds of shell oysters and 1,000,000 pounds of shucked ones pass through Fulton Fish Market each year. The greater part remains within the city to be consumed in various forms.

For as long as there has been written history of the city there has been mention of oysters. Colonial records tell of the plentiful supply about the small islands of the Upper Bay. Today the oyster beds are cultivated in specially selected waters around Long Island and from these come a tremendous yearly harvest which supplies not only the neighboring cities but many inland and foreign markets.

Connoisseurs know Gardiner’s Island Salts from Blue Points and can distinguish the sweet, dark-flavored meats of Oyster Bays from those, also sweet, of Greenports. The Long Island varieties are many, some highly publicized, others known only to a few. Some are sought after for their marine flavor, others, sent to market already shucked, are thought to be more desirable for cooking in ways perfected through the years by culinary experts.

Of the many distinctly American methods, none is more satisfactory to the average man’s taste than the Oyster Stew. Indeed, many who cannot abide the sight of a raw oyster admit a passionate fondness for the creamy goodness of a well-made oyster stew. Oyster-lovers who can take their favorite bivalve in any form also consider the stew the most acceptable method of cooking.

There is one place in New York where this stew is a supreme delight: the Oyster Bar of the Grand Central Terminal, known as a landmark on the American epicure’s map. Well-travelled gourmets have been heard to say: “Prunier’s of Paris for Lobster Thermidor; Scott’s of Piccadilly for Devilled Crab; the Grand Central Oyster Bar for Oyster Stew.”

In 1913 when the terminal was opened the Oyster Bar was a small counter with 3 or 4 seats, set off in a corner of the restaurant. The Oyster Stew served there soon, like the proverbial mouse-trap, brought the world in a well-beaten track to this counter. It was extended and extended again. The number of seats and specially contrived cooking bowls were both augmented. Today there are 42 seats, which never seem sufficient to accommodate the hungry crowds that in rush hours sometimes stand three deep. Commuters, snatching a hasty snack to tide them over until dinner at home, form a large portion of its regular customers.

The recipe for the Grand Central Terminal Oyster Stew has been given as follows:

Melt ½ ounce of butter in double boiler; add ⅓ teaspoon of salt, ⅓ teaspoon celery salt, ⅓ teaspoon paprika, one shake of white pepper, 8 drops of Worcestershire sauce, 2 large tablespoons of oyster (or clam) liquor.

Boil briskly for a few minutes with constant stirring. As mixture bubbles high, add 8 large oysters and cook 3 minutes more, all the while turning the oysters gently. Add ½ pint of rich milk and continue to stir. When mixture begins to boil, pour out into a bowl, add a pat of butter and a shake of paprika. Serve with small round oyster crackers.

HENRY MANCHESTER AND WILLIAM BAKER

T
o Rhode Islanders born within breeze-cooling distance of lower Narragansett Bay and the Atlantic, the ability to differentiate between genuine, honest-to-goodness jonny cakes and the palate-insulting commercial substitutes is a natural inheritance. Upon them has fallen the divine blessing of recognizing corn bread as corn bread, fried mush as fried mush, and the steaming, golden-brown jonny cakes as ambrosial crumbs graciously brushed from an angel’s ethereal platter. Patterned by the weaving shadows of creaking vanes on the several extant wind-mills that still grind their corn into meal the “right way,” this boon to man’s stomach receives the chanted praises of the natives of old South County and of the historic Island of Rhode Island. The melody is the same but the words are at variance: the Islanders like thin cakes with crisp crust; the Mainlanders prefer more substantial matter separating the crispness.

The people of southern Rhode Island do not claim to have originated the delicacy, it being an Indian dish. But they do assert, and with seeming justness, that locally-grown corn ground between local millstones produces the finest meal obtainable. Not all of the state’s meal is suitable for use, some being gray, coarse, and yellow.

Columbus was the first European to make note of jonny cake meal. When in Cuba, in 1492, he sampled the
Madis
of the natives and found it delightfully taste-tingling. Soon the Indians, like the proverbial builder of a better mousetrap, found a path being beaten to their door. Staunch jonny cake fanciers argue that the only possible reason civilized Europe flocked to primitive America was because of the irresistible magnetism of the jonny cake.

Be that as it may, in the deprivation of the red man of everything he possessed, the white man did not neglect the maize. Colonial epicures soon ascertained it took little time for a squaw to whip up a concoction of corn meal and cold water and place it before an open fire, or on a heated rock, to bake. The corn meal was always in the brave’s meal bag as he took the trail on hunting or fighting expeditions, often being his only food supply. White wayfarers continued the custom, the meal, however, being baked in cake form and known as journey cake. From this appellation came jonny or johnny cake.

More fastidious than their teachers, the early settlers could not condone the stray dog hairs, wood ashes, and little crawling things that somehow managed to be found in the Indian dish—they were too hard to digest. They improved the jonny cake by using a board to cook it upon, adding salt (perhaps), by scalding the meal, using milk in the mixture, and by basting it with cream while it baked.

Between the dim recollection of a pre-colonial squaw squatting before her fire tending her maize and her streamlined current equivalent, the modern housewife, looms the imposing figure of Shepard Tom, nineteenth century authority on the
proper
and
only
way to prepare jonny cakes. And if there ever was anyone who loved the tongue-burning tidbits more than South County’s beloved Thomas Robinson Hazard, well, written history has been delinquent.

Mr. Hazard’s whimsical voice has been stilled these many years, but his directions as to the making of his favorite farinaceous food, as it was cooked in his day by Phillis, his grandfather’s cook, are available to all in Jonny Cake Papers. The only drawback to following them implicitly is in the collecting of needed equipment: a red oak barrel-head and an old-fashioned flat-iron to support it, together with a quick green hardwood fire roaring in an open fireplace.

After Shepard Tom’s Phillis had sifted the meal for her jonny cake, she scalded it with boiling water, kneaded it in a wooden tray, and added new milk or water to make it of the right consistency. Then anointing it with sweet cream, she placed it on the jonny cake board and set it before the blazing fire. Phillis claimed there never was a genuine jonny cake that was not baked on a red oak board taken from the middle part of the head of a flour barrel. In her eyes, too, the value of a heart-shaped flat-iron for laundry use was secondary to its special adaptability as a support for her jonny cake board. First the flat’s smooth and glistening surface would hold the board in a perpendicular position until the main portion of the cake was baked. Then its slanting side would support it while the top and bottom cooked. Lastly the flat’s handle partly held the board as the ends received the heat. Sufficiently baked on one side, the process was repeated when the cake was turned.

Shepard Tom insisted upon the term “jonny cake” in preference to johnny cake. As to the spelling, he may have been right, but his dismal contention that, although a decent jonny cake could be baked on a stove, all good painstaking cooks are extinct is a decided breach of good taste.