Tonight I celebrated the 65th wedding anniversary of my late parents, which was May 14, so the dinner included a few of what the late Ignatius J. Reilly would call “deft and tasteful suggestions” of a wedding dinner.
The four-course menu:
Moet & Chandon Nectar Impérial
Moulins à saumon Biscuits au cheddar sophistiqués
Soupe haricots noirs*
Salade vert
Poulet aux Clement
Pois continental Pommes de terre Duchesse perdu
Gâteau de mariage d'épicerie
First, may the gods heap many blessings on the head of the person who brought that exquisite bottle of champagne to my home before the quarantine. It has achieved the unthinkable; it has supplanted Veuve Clicquot Demi-Sec in my affections. Because there is no such thing as leftover champagne, and because my capacity is not infinite, this served me exclusively for the cocktail hour and dinner. On the soundtrack: Perry Como’s “Prisoner of Love,” which my father sung to my mother when they were dating, and Spade Cooley’s “Detour,” which he used to sing to us when we were growing up.
For the cocktail hour I had very much hoped to serve “Hubcap shrimp with roadkill sauce” to remember an incident from my parents’ honeymoon. Having been instructed in no uncertain terms not to damage the getaway car paint job (my grandfather’s best car), the best man (my younger uncle) filled the hubcaps with bad shrimp for that extra-special aroma. Alas, no shrimp were on hand at the market, so I had to console myself with some very traditional salmon pinwheels. The “well-bred” cheese biscuits were from a Victorian recipe pamphlet I bought in Newport almost 30 years ago and involve chutney, cayenne pepper, and staggering amounts of butter. Nice to have a hot hors d’oeuvres for a change.
Standard Banquet Dinner has always been chicken with cream sauce, green beans amandine, and mashed potatoes. Isn’t that right? It’s such an obviously unimaginative menu that everyone knows to stay away from it - or should. But using that basic formula, I omitted the cream sauce, switched one vegetable for another, and planned something showier for the starch, and should have had a complete meal. Should have.
Black bean soup garnished with parsley. I omitted the recipe’s garnish of chopped egg whites as being too much trouble just for myself.
In fact butter and sherry figured several times in the menu. The black bean soup included sherry in its ingredients. It would have been more Perfectly Proper, for a formal dinner, to serve a clear soup, but this thick soup recipe was easy (an important criterion for me) and perhaps a distant cousin of one of my mother’s soup recipes. And the Peas Continental is one of my favorite recipes of my mother’s from childhood (though she made it without sherry, of course). What makes it special is the nutmeg and marjoram, anyway, not the sherry. Butter showed up in everything, so I will clearly be eating celery and regret for the rest of the week. From The Pirate’s Pantry Cookbook, a gift from Mother years ago, Clement’s Chicken is only a breaded chicken breast seasoned with lemon juice and flung into a hot oven, like Crystal Allen’s lamb chops.
Potatoes are not a starch I cook at home, so I was interested to try something that’s an old standard for everyone else, Duchesse potatoes. And wouldn’t you know it, as I was straining the peas and preparing to dish up, I suddenly said to myself, “Hey! You forgot to make the potatoes!” There was a story - I think it’s from one of Judith Martin’s wonderful Miss Manners books - about a hostess who was so fixated on preparing the first course that she forgot to make the rest of the dinner. The most Perfectly Proper solution, whether dining alone or with guests, is to laugh loud and long, take another swig of champagne, and press on. (With guests, that also means making vast quantities of scrambled eggs as a substitute.) So I left a space on my plate in memory of the potatoes and may attempt them next weekend.
I left a memorial space on my plate for the potatoes perdu.
No wedding banquet can conclude without a wedding cake, and thank goodness most wedding cakes come from bakeries, because I found a Perfectly Proper and Simple White Cake at the market that kept me from forgetting to bake a cake as well as to make the potatoes.
A footed but stemless sherry glass. Notice also the dish of Jordan almonds in the background, since they are often given to guests at weddings.
I did have a thimbleful of sherry with the soup course, when it was usual to offer sherry. Aren’t those sherry glasses interesting? Footed, but with no stem, unlike the other glasses in the pattern. Most curious. Someone will probably write in and tell me they’re really just liqueur glasses or something, but then I have used them for liqueurs.
Champagne makes my hair grow larger.
For the table, a pale green tablecloth with matching napkins that had been my mother’s, and that we used many times for family celebrations in childhood, complemented with red and white flowers and red candles (I had forgotten to look for new white tapers). The traditional Thursday-Friday voting on a bow tie yielded a narrow lead for this Tiffany red pattern, but I will confess to have been hoping for the stripes to win. Frequent followers will now see why most of the choices were red!
And so a second month of Dress Dinner Challenge comes to an end. Perhaps the quarantine will be ending soon, too? Whether it does or not, I want you to behave prudently and patiently. There is still so much that we don’t know about the coronavirus, it would not be Perfectly Proper to yourself - or to others! - to go running amok at the first opportunity.
*Actual French speakers: is this really soup, or is it properly potage in French?
