Bareass Cupid

Soup of the Evening, Beeeyoootiful Soup

Tonight we have A Very Special Bareass Cupid: Creamless Creamy Tomato Soup, courtesy of a cooking mag for whom I have volunteered to be a recipe tester. As an extra bonus, it comes with a crouton-making recipe.

(Nope, it's not from the Betty Crocker cook book, and nope, I haven't been cooking Betty Crocker six nights a week. It turns out that an all-vintage menu doesn't make the Cupid family all-happy. So the rules have changed; the recipe schedule is whimsical, and the source of the recipes may vary. Life's like that.)

The "cream" factor in the soup is--wait for it--bread! Ordinary white bread, soaked in crushed tomatoes and then pureed. Add some chicken broth, seasoning, garlic, onions, and ta-dah! you have a creamy soup. Well, "creamy" as in "a thickish texture". Not "creamy" as in "mellowing out the bright tomatoey taste". It's brightly tomatoey, all right, and though it's quite good (going-back-for-seconds good), I can''t shake the feeling that it's only a teaspoon full of Italian seasoning away from being a quite good spaghetti sauce. I'm tempted to throw the leftovers over some ziti . . .

The croutons were made of the same white bread that thickened the soup. Cubed, drizzled with olive oil, salted and peppered, and toasted lightly. I think they'd have been much tastier with some garlic salt and grated parmesan.

Tastes like Chicken Curry

When I read the ingredients list for tonight's dish, Curried Chicken, I was concerned about the wee, almost homeopathic amounts of spices. An eighth of a teaspoon of powdered ginger? Three-fourths of a teaspoon of salt? Do I wave the spice jars near the pot and declare it "imbued with essence"? But part of this adventure is not letting common sense get in the way of a vintage recipe--I have to make it as accurately as possible, given time and ingredient restraints.

The sauce was simple, again a variation on a white sauce, and the recipe called for the curried chicken to be served over rice, so I tweaked the flavor of the basmati rice by using chicken broth in place of water. The curry turned out a lovely light lemon-yellow, creamy of sauce and, as I'd feared, nearly devoid of flavor. (Remember, in 1961 in the United States, a curry this bland was seriously exotic food.)

As we dined to a soundtrack of Bollywood movie music Sous-Chef added raisins to her curry; Tallboy made his palatable by a liberal dusting of coriander and cayenne. I ate mine unadorned, and Niblet hoovered up a couple of helpings, carefully segregating her rice from any taint of curry sauce.

I'd make this again, but I'd add more curry spices. Great heaping fistfuls of curry spices.

Favorite Gingerbread, Bertha Style

Bertha Connyers was a lovely soul, tiny and opinionated. She'd call "bullshit" on things what needed callin', but she was kind to animals, and was known to feed anyone or anything that showed up on her doorstep. This included stray cats, stray dogs, stray skunks, and stray grandkids.

Bertha had lived through the Great Depression, and it forever altered the way she regarded food: there was no such thing as a leftover at Bertha's house, it was just somebody else's next meal. If she invited you to eat you never really knew what you were getting--but you could be sure someone had got there before you. And if you left anything on your plate, you knew it would be carefully scraped into one of many aluminum foil tv dinner trays she'd saved over the years, frozen, and reheated another day.

Waste nothing, Grandma Bertha said, and waste nothing she did. If the Chee-Tos in the candy dish she set out for guests didn't get eaten at Christmas, you knew you'd have another crack at them come Fourth of July.

One day Grandma Bertha declared she'd make us kids a rhubarb pie. Rhubarb pie! "Hot diggety!" we said, heading off for a hiking trail with the promise of sweet-sour golden pie goodness awaiting us on our return. And there was indeed pie, of a sort.

"I didn't have any flour for pie crust so I made a crumble instead, " said Grandma. "And that called for oatmeal, but I didn't have any oatmeal so I used Malt-O-Meal." While the resulting concoction probably tasted suitably rhubarbish, the color, texture, and fresh-from-the-oven warmth all added up to an overwhelming and undeniable resemblance to, er, vomit.

Grandma Bertha is gone, but her thrifty legacy lives on: any time we find ourselves short of an ingredient and making dodgy substitutions, we append the dish title with "á là Bertha". And so today's dish is Favorite Gingerbread á là Bertha.

A simple, standard gingerbread recipe, but I ran out of molasses halfway through and had to substitute dark Karo syrup: similar color, texture, and mass, but none of that lovely molassesy taste. Part of the boiling water called for in the recipe got swished around in the molasses jar to free up what residue possible, and then dumped into the mixing bowl. I threw in an extra teaspoon of powdered ginger (the Cupids often find gingery recipes underspiced) and popped the mess in the oven.

Hot out of the the oven, the gingerbread was pronounced, "Okay." "Not the modern super-sweet or ultra flavored or fusion anything." The real surprise was the next day: the texture changed from bready to slightly sticky, and the ginger flavor really bloomed. Wow, much tastier. I'll make this again with the full complement of molasses and see what happens.

King Zog of Albania, maybe

My Year of Cooking Stupidly commences with that mainstay of Eisenhower-era buffet tables and Ladies' Luncheons: Chicken á là King.

Basically leftover chicken in white sauce, I have to make a few alterations: fresh mushrooms instead of (ook) canned, and deep-six the quarter cup each of chopped green pepper and cooked pimientos in favor of a like amount of frozen green peas. (The Cupid family dislikes green pepper, and because I've never encountered a cooked pimiento outside of a Spanish olive I hold pimientos in deep suspicion. But peas, everybody likes peas.)

The Cook Book has a little asterisk next to the request for "1 cup diced cooked chicken": it directs me to a Stewed Chicken recipe, which calls for a stewing hen, lotsa veg, and an afternoon's worth of prep. But I don't have an afternoon's worth of time, so I shortcut with boneless skinless breasts poached in stock and veg, including mushrooms, saving the excess for another day.

And now to build the sauce: butter and flour for roux, the enhanced stock I made, a cup of heavy cream, salt, pepper, and that's it. Cook until bubbly, toss in chicken and peas to heat, serve in attractive puff pastry shells (thank you, Pepperidge Farms).

I worry that it's going to be bland, and the sauce is so thick it's almost gluey, but the dish is greeted with enthusiastic yums. And it is good--the multi-veg stock adds a nice depth, the cream and butter give that mouth-round fullness--and rich. Really, really rich. Sous-Chef bails with two forkfuls left. Tallboy manages two helpings, but just barely. I eat mine, and Sous-Chef's leftovers. I'd lick the plate if no one were watching; I wasn't expecting to like this .

Later, we watch season two of The IT Crowd and compare how the Chicken á là King is sitting with us: "Like a big fist up under my ribcage." "Like a baseball sized wodge of silly putty in my intestines." Yes! the adventure begins!

My Year of Cooking Stupidly

We here at Bareass Cupid are inordinately fond of vintage cookbooks: fond enough to have a basement full of them. We relish the musty-attic smell of pages tan-splotched with forgotten meals, the lurid Ektachromes of organ meats creamed with peas and baffling combinations of ingredients entombed in Jell-O--and all of it cheerfully proffered by immaculately coiffed housewives in pumps and pearls!

"Hey," I said to my intrepid Sous-Chef, late of an evening, "wouldn't it be cool to cook an entire year's worth of dishes from just one funky old cookbook?"

"You mean like Julie Powell's My Year of Cooking Dangerously where she cooked all of Julia Child's recipes and not only Mastered the Art of French Cooking but Learned to Live Her Life With Gusto?"

"Oh." I said, cursing (not for the first time) the really, amazingly well-informed-ness of Sous-Chef. Also, her ability to speak in capital letters. "Um, yeah."

Never before having let "it's been done" dissuade me from courses of action both ill-advised and futile, I decided to proceed. And you, dear reader, shall reap the weirdness: the cookbook is Betty Crocker's New Picture Cook Book, 1961 edition.

Why that cookbook? I love the Kitchens of Tomorrow photos in the introduction. I love the cheery line drawings throughout. I love the advice to "comb hair, apply makeup and a dash of cologne" before cooking. I love the enthusiastic variations on the chiffon cake, "the first new cake in a hundred years!" Is it Atomic? Very Atomic! And I'm gonna cook the bejeezus out of it. Bomb Appetit!

The rules: one dish a day, six days a week. Sous-Chef chooses, I cook it, and the Cupid family taste tests it.