Almost two months into Dress Dinner Challenge, this Saturday’s menu took a scandalous - and ultimately unsuccessful - foray into The Myra Breckinridge Cookbook. The menu:
Cocktail “Golden Boy” sans sucre
Guacamole dans des tasses de maïs Saucisson et Brie
Salade d'épinards et de chou frisé
Poitrine de poulet “Gay Divorcée”
Riz brun Petit pois
Bleuets nature
The Golden Boy cocktail* turned out to be a successful, intriguing combination of flavors. Here’s the recipe:
Dissolve one sugar cube in one teaspoon of water (I omitted this.)
Add one dash Angostura bitters, one dash orange bitters, five dashes Pernod (I substituted absinthe), and one jigger of bourbon.
Stir and serve in an old-fashioned glass with one ice cube.
After all these weeks of celeri coupé and cheese and crackers the hors d’oeuvres needed a shakeup as well as portion control**. A perfectly ripened avocado with the juice of one lime and a bit of salt and pepper made passable guacamole to be spooned into scoop-shaped corn chips for an Aura of Fanciness Without All That Labor. Add to that half a dozen thin slices of saucisson with Brie on a toast round or something and you can just hear Doris Upson saying “These others are just jack cheese and chutney.”
“Gay Divorcée” Chicken is really chicken breasts marinated in sherry, wrapped in ham, and cooked with cream and mushrooms. With all that cream, and with saucisson on the hors d’oeuvre plate, the rest of the menu needed to be very low fat. There’s nothing more virtuous than kale - just ask anyone who loves it. Its virtue was reduced by adding more palatable spinach. Brown rice, my staple starch, and unadorned peas filled out the plate, and a very simple dish of blueberries finished off the meal.
But that chicken . . . really, the creators of the The Myra Breckinridge Cookbook must not have tested any of those recipes. Instead of “one hour at 350 degrees” it should have been “half an hour at 350 degrees” or “one hour at 300 degrees.” It came out practically in splinters. But the etiquette of new recipes demands that the failures be eaten cheerfully, and I did. The leftovers can be minced into chicken salad for the rest of the week. Mayonnaise hides a multitude of sins.
For the table, a color scheme that even Dorothy Draper, known for her bold combinations, might have found garish. On top of a dark green tablecloth, last week’s orange roses were lit by red candles (because that’s what I had) in Fiestaware ball-shaped candlesticks in the original, radioactive uranium oxide orange.
Next week, something more traditionally elegant!
*This from the “W.C. Fields Memorial” section of the cookbook.
**More cheese in this quarantine and Etiquetteer will turn into Etiquettone.