Memorial Day Weekend! The pandemic continues, though quarantines are lifting in some places, but Dress Dinner Challenge continues.
A few patriotic elements entered the evening, starting with a red, white, and blue wardrobe. Memorial Day Weekend, of course, is when white shoes may be brought out with Perfect Propriety, as well as seersucker. The striped bow tie was the voter’s choice by a narrow margin over a red paisley, but it was my secret favorite for this weekend.
The menu included a couple recipes from The First Ladies Cookbook:
Highball gin et tonique
Celeri coupé Amandes Olives
Saumon bouilli, sauce aux œufs Sauté de courgettes
Salade vert
Gelée de vin
For me, Memorial Day Weekend is also the start of gin and tonic season, and a highball is always less heavy than a cocktail anyway. After last Saturday’s butter-rich menu, some effort needed to be made to lighten things up, so goodbye cheese. Olives aren’t that fattening, are they?
Remember, readers, that I am not even what Mrs. Bridges would have called “a good plain cook,” and I need things to be simple in the kitchen. One of the simplest recipes in this weekend’s cookbook turned out to be boiled salmon with egg sauce. And as luck would have it, it was a recipe from the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, which made it an opportunity to remember the White House Housekeeper We Love to Hate, Henrietta Nesbitt. Mrs. Nesbitt was famous for her bad food and bad housekeeping, for getting fired by Bess Truman, and for her self-justifying memoir White House Diary.
Oh dear. Parsley can only cover so many sins. At least it’s very easy to sauté a zucchini!
But let’s face it, boiling a piece of salmon in water with a bit of vinegar and salt couldn’t be easier. The egg sauce turned out to be a basic white sauce (flour, a bit of butter, milk, salt and pepper) but with a couple hard-boiled eggs mashed into it. The sauce could have been a bit thicker - you really do have to stir it constantly - and I should have actually mashed the eggs rather than put them through the egg slicer twice. But you could say that the result looked worthy of Mrs. Nesbitt. At least it was tasty.
Still haven’t found the doilies for the dessert plates.
The jewel of the menu, though, was the 19th-century wine jelly recipe from the Zachary Taylor administration. Basically an antique Jello shot, it involves unflavored gelatin, sugar, lemon juice and zest, a pint of sherry, a bit of brandy, and food coloring. I’d made this before years ago and learned the hard way that the jelly must be strained before pouring into molds to keep it from looking cloudy; this was not in the recipe. I’ve also learned through experience that a) brandy does not agree with me, and b) more than one serving of this jelly isn’t a good idea. For portion control I poured it into my grandmother’s hobnail coupes. Instead of brandy, this time I added triple sec from a dusty bottle at the back of the bar from a party in 2004. With strawberries and a bit of homemade whipped cream tinged with vanilla, it made a showy and delicate dessert.
For the table, in a gesture of economy, I was able to augment last Saturday’s flowers (which survived the week reasonably well) with a layer of lilac from my garden. That was also the closest thing I had to a blue flower.
It will be beautiful, once the quarantine is lifted and it’s safe to cook and serve food to other people in one’s own home again, to do this for more than one person! But as Mother used to say, “This is an opportunity to practice patience.” As frustrating and demoralizing as the pandemic has been, and as tempting as the weather is now to relax, we must be patient as the world’s scientists find a way out of this crisis for all of us.
During the cocktail hour in the parlor.