The Hemingway Cookbook (11 page)

THE MENU

Dinner at Prunier

Oysters

Crabe Mexicaine

Wine

Sancerre

Oysters

Hemingway certainly enjoyed his oysters. In
A Moveable Feast
he eats them on three separate occasions. When money was scarce, he went to “a good café on the Place St. Michel”for
portugaises,
the small very cheap oysters with their faint metallic taste. But when there was money he knew exactly the place for the finest oysters in Paris: Pruniers. Alfred Prunier founded his restaurant in 1872 in the Rue Duphot. It quickly became, as Julian Street noted in
Where Paris Dines,
“the most fashionable place in Paris for oysters, fish and crustaceans”
¹⁹
Later, when Ernest Walsh was paying for lunch, Ernest once again took advantage of the opportunity to enjoy the superior quality
marennes,
or cultivated oysters
. Marennes
are large and bright green in color. In the 1920s they were considered very expensive at about $1.50 a dozen
.

Preparing oysters on the half-shell at home is actually quite simple but takes some practice and understanding of this delicacy. Prepare about 6 oysters per person, although the portion is limited only by the oyster-passion of the eater
.

When purchasing live oysters, make sure the shells are tightly closed. If one is open, squeeze the shell closed a few times until it tightens up. If the oyster will not close, discard it. Also, avoid oysters that feel either too light or too heavy. Purchase the oysters shortly before you plan to use them
.

When home, store the oysters, covered with damp paper towels, with the larger sides down (allowing the oysters to sit in their juice). To open an oyster, hold it in your hand with the larger side down. Find a small gap in the hinge of the shell, and pry the shells apart with a pointed can opener. Run a small knife along the underside of the top shell, disconnecting the oyster. The oysters can be served on a bed of crushed ice. Be careful to retain as much of the oysters’ juices in the shell as possible. Serve with wedges of lemon. Or you may serve the oysters with a sauce made by simmering together ½ cup white wine vinegar and 2 tablespoons minced shallots, allowing the sauce to cool and adding 1 teaspoon chopped fresh parsley
.

Crabe Mexicaine

This recipe is adapted from
Madame Prunier’s Fish Cookery Book
It is rather complicated, but once you have made the sauces and stocks (the remainder of which may be used again and again), the assembly of the final dish is rather simple
.

4
SERVINGS

For the Fumet

3 tablespoons butter

2 pounds raw fish trimmings and bones

1 onion, sliced

2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley

12 peppercorns

4 cups white wine

5 cups water, plus a little more

Pinch of salt

For the Fish Velouté

¼ pound butter

1 cup all-purpose flour

For the White Wine Sauce

2 egg yolks

2 tablespoons heavy cream

1 tablespoon butter

For the Tomato Sauce

4 tablespoons butter

2 onions, diced

2 carrots, diced

2 inner ribs celery, diced

½ bay leaf, crushed

2 sprigs fresh thyme

1½ tablespoons all-purpose flour

4 pounds tomatoes, seeded and juice squeezed out

2½ cups tomato purée

Salt

Pepper

Pinch of sugar

Bouquet garni (parsley, thyme, and bay leaf tied together)

3½ cups vegetable or chicken stock

The Rest

4 large mushrooms

Olive oil, for brushing

5 tablespoons butter

2 tomatoes, peeled, seeded, and chopped

1 cup diced okra

1 sweet red pepper, diced

1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley

½ pound crabmeat

To make the white wine sauce, you must first prepare a fish fumet (or concentrated stock) and a fish velouté (a white sauce made with fish stock). To make the fish fumet, melt the butter in a large skillet. Cut up and add the fish trimmings and bones. Add the onion, parsley, and peppercorns. Cover and stew for about 5 minutes. Then add the white wine and water. Add a pinch of salt and bring to a boil. Boil the fumet gently for 25 minutes. Strain through a fine sieve. Set aside.

Note:
This recipe makes about 2 quarts, most of which will be used in preparing the
Crabe Mexicaine
.

Fish Velouté

First prepare a roux: melt the butter in a saucepan (do not use an aluminum pan) over low heat. Add the flour and stir with a wooden spoon until thoroughly mixed. Continue to cook the roux, stirring constantly, for 10 minutes, until the roux takes on a golden color. Transfer the roux to a stockpot. Whisk in 7 cups of the fish fumet (to avoid lumps, allow the fumet to cool thoroughly before adding to the warm roux). Bring the velouté to a boil and boil gently for 15 to 20 minutes. Pour the velouté into a mixing bowl and stir until well cooled.

White Wine Sauce

Now you’re ready to make the white wine sauce. Begin by whisking together
ll/2
cups fish velouté with 4 tablespoons offish fumet. Just before serving the dish, bring the stock to a simmer and remove from the heat. Add the egg yolks mixed with the cream. Stir until thickened. Stir in the butter.

Tomato Sauce

Make a
mirepoix
in a stockpot: melt the butter over medium heat. Add the onions, carrots, and inner celery, bay leaf, and thyme. Fry this slowly for about 5 minutes, without coloration. Add the flour and fry until slightly browned. Then add the tomatoes. Stir in the tomato purée, salt and pepper to taste, a generous pinch of sugar, the bouquet garni, and the vegetable stock. Cook the sauce, covered, over low heat for 30-45 minutes. Pass through a fine sieve and set aside. Reheat the sauce to a simmer just before serving. This recipe makes about 1½ quarts of sauce.

Crabe Mexicaine

Brush the mushrooms with olive oil on both sides and grill, either in a broiler or over coals, for about 15 minutes on each side. While the mushrooms are grilling, melt 4 tablespoons of the butter in a saucepan over low heat. When frothy, add the tomatoes, okra, and peppers and cook, covered, for 30 minutes. When the mushrooms are done, slice and arrange them decoratively on a warm serving platter, leaving an inch of space around the edge of the platter.

Melt the remaining tablespoon of butter in a skillet. Add the parsley and crabmeat and toss until hot. Arrange the crabmeat in the center of the mushrooms. Surround the crabmeat with the vegetable mixture. Do the final preparation of the white wine sauce, then cover the crabmeat and vegetables with the sauce. Reheat the tomato sauce to a simmer and pour a ribbon of tomato sauce around the edge of the platter.

Walking home from Pruniers, sated and very happy, the Hemingways strolled through
le Jardin des Tuileries
, a park he reserved for romance in his writing, and they admired the Arc du Carrousel and the Arc de Triomphe in the distant darkness. Far beyond, across an expanse of distance and time, through warm memories, they reminisced about days in Milan and Switzerland, again thinking of wonderful foods. Hadley recalls Biffi’s in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan, eating fruit cup with wine from a tall, glass pitcher (see Capri on page
163
). Ernest recalls a pension in Chamby, owned by a German Swiss family named Gangwisch, who served a wonderful trout dish, boiled “in a liquor made of wine vinegar, bay leaves, and a dash of red pepper.”
²⁰
They “ate out on the porch with the mountainside dropping off below and [they] could look across the lake and see the Dent du Midi with the snow half down it and the trees at the mouth of the Rhàne where it flowed into the lake.”
²¹

Trout au Bleu

By his mid-20s, Hemingway was a connoisseur of trout dishes. This method was one of his favorites, as “it preserves the true trout flavor better than almost any way of cooking.”
²²
Ideally, the trout should be alive immediately before cooking to produce the blue color in the skin and the freshest taste. You may, though, use very freshly killed fish from the market. Because of this necessity for very fresh or live fish, this dish is not very well known:

You have to go back in the country to get trout cooked that way. You come up from the stream to a chalet and ask them if they know how to cook blue trout. If they don’t you walk on a way. If they do, you sit down on the porch with the goats and the children and wait. Your nose will tell you when the trout are boiling. Then after a little while you will hear a pop. That is the Sion being uncorked. Then the woman of the chalet will come to the door and say, “It is prepared, Monsieur.” Then you can go away and I will do the rest myself.
²³

4
SERVINGS

1 pint vinegar

2 tablespoons salt

4 carrots, sliced

4 onions, quartered

Sprig of thyme

1 bay leaf

Sprig of parsley

Dash of crushed red pepper flakes

6 peppercorns

4 live or very fresh trout

2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley

4 tablespoons melted pepper

In a large pot, prepare a court-bouillon: to 5 quarts water add the vinegar, salt, carrots, onions, and herbs in a bunch (you may want to bundle herbs in cheesecloth). Bring to a boil, then decrease heat and simmer for 1 hour. After 50 minutes, add the red pepper flakes and peppercorns (if added earlier they will impart too much bitterness to the broth). When the court-bouillon is done, strain through a fine sieve and reserve the liquid.

Pour the liquid into a shallow pan and bring to a boil. For live trout, kill the fish with a sharp blow to the head (see
The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook
for an introduction to coping with the trauma of fishmurdering). With minimal handling, gut and clean the fish. Plunge the fish into the boiling broth and simmer for 6-7 minutes for small trout, 8-10 minutes for larger fish. Remove the fish, drain, garnish with fresh parsley, and serve immediately with the melted butter poured over the fish.

Hemingway after a successful day of trout fishing.

Fame Became of Him

The meal at Prunier shows that, even while relatively poor, Hemingway had an understanding of fine dining that would serve him well when he became “Papa” and abandoned the cafés of Montparnasse in favor of the Ritz or the Hotel Crillon on the right bank of the Seine. When the poet Ernest Walsh invited Hemingway to lunch “at a restaurant that was the best and most expensive in the Boulevard St. Michel quarter,” he once again took advantage of the oysters served at the finer establishments. Hemingway orders two dozen of the “expensive flat faintly coppery
marennes
, not the familiar, deep, inexpensive
portugaises
… picking them from their bed of crushed ice on the silver plate, watching their unbelievably delicate brown edges react and cringe as I squeezed lemon juice on them and separated the holding muscle from the shell and lifted them to chew them carefully.”
²⁴

When the lunch is ordered, Hemingway chooses tournedos with sauce bearnaise, french-fried potatoes, and a bottle of Châteauneuf du Pape, an ambitious selection from a man who could hardly afford the appetizer. Nonetheless, it once again shows Hemingway’s knowledge of gastronomy, both as a form of indulgence and as an expression of distaste toward his endowed host as he tempts young Hemingway with the promise of a literary award from the
Dial
, the most prestigious literary magazine in America at the time.