Cream one cup confectioner’s sugar with one cup softened butter and a teaspoon vanilla extract. Lightly whip 3 egg whites, room temperature; they just need to be a little frothy, not stiff at all.
Fold half the egg whites into the sweet butter along with three tablespoons plain flour. Mix well, then blend in the rest of the egg whites with enough flour to make a soft dough.
Pipe dough in 6-inch strips onto a baking sheet lined with lightly oiled parchment paper. Give them room to spread. Bake in a medium (350) oven until edges are browned.
Cool on a rack. For black cat tongues, dip in melted chocolate.
In the decades following the Great War, American culture shook itself out of the Nineteenth Century and woke to fresh ideas and new possibilities. Youth, having liberated Europe and ended war forever, had a voice for the first time in our history. Cynicism and joi de vivre found ways to cohabit, and under their common roof, Youth created a new way of living. Jazz was the soundtrack. Flappers in short skirts, long beads swinging, danced the Charleston, the Fox Trot, the Shimmy: girls smoked cigarettes and drank gin in public and were picked up from Mama’s house by sheiks in fast cars. The Imagists’ admonition–“Make it new!”–resonated everywhere.
Downtown, the staid dignity of the Chicago School gave way to soaring silver skyscrapers that transformed city skylines. In the suburbs, new houses traded a classical vocabulary for the sleek lines, portholes, and minimalist décor of the Moderne. Aluminum and glass replaced busy fretwork; cluttered, over-stuffed parlors vanished, and porches disappeared; tall Lombardy poplars, nature’s answer to Arts Decoratif, graced the landscaping. Even everyday objects like radios, toasters, pencil sharpeners, vases, clocks, mirrors, and telephones took on new forms in the up-to-date household. The automobile industry, ever alert to the public’s whims, abandoned the boxy bodies and spoked wheels inherited from horse-drawn carriages and began to experiment with streamlining, a movement that culminated in the startling 1936 Chrysler Airflow.
When that car and others like it appeared on showroom floors, they represented not only a revolution in style, but in movement as well. Newly-paved highways beckoned, and the motorcar, liberated from Sunday drives and trips to the park, was recast as a ship of dreams. The world was opened up in an unprecedented way: as Dinah Shore would sing in 1953, “See the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet! America is asking you to call!” Travelers, once bound to the railroads, could now set their own schedules, carry as much baggage as they wanted (no charge!), and rest in the friendly motor hotels springing up in the wilderness.
American railroad companies looked on this newfound Freedom of the Road with misgivings. Railroads had bullied steamboats off the inland rivers, now, in their turn, they were threatened by the automobile. Passenger revenue was still high, but the Detroit competition was available, cheap, and attractive to the public. In 1882, when the railroads were at the height of their tyrannical power, Commodore Vanderbilt of the New York Central could proclaim, in an unguarded moment, “The public be damned!” Needless to say, by the mid-1930s, this sentiment was no longer viable.
To meet this challenge, railroad engineering and PR departments tapped into the Moderne craze and created the Streamliner: a first-class, air-conditioned train with sleek aluminum coaches, specially assigned engines, and a color scheme that ran from the locomotive pilot to the end of the observation car. Design luminaries like Henry Dreyfuss and Raymond Loewy brought steam locomotives into the realm of high art: when the New York Central’s Twentieth Century Limited (Dreyfuss) and the Pennsylvania’s Broadway Limited (Loewy) raced each other eastbound out of Chicago on parallel tracks, they represented a pinnacle of design unequaled for American industry.
Another innovation was the articulated “trainset,” the railroads’ first great experiment with diesel-electric power. Articulation meant that the power car” (that is, the locomotive) and all the coaches shared wheel trucks and were permanently coupled together, save when they went to the shops for maintenance. Trainsets were short–five or six cars in the consist–ran on tight schedules, and were well-appointed. The CB&Q fielded several silver, shovel-nosed Zephyrs. The UP and C&NW ran a joint City of Denver, the Santa Fe’s Chicagoan/Kansas moderne aesthetic.
The schedule of the Green Diamond was ideally suited for businessmen traveling between the great cities of St. Louis and Chicago, with a stop at Springfield, Illinois’ capitol. Northbound, the train departed St. Louis at 8:55 A.M. and arrived in Chicago five hours later. Southbound departure from Chicago was at the close of the business day, 5:00 P.M., with a St. Louis arrival at 9:55 P.M. Along the way, passengers enjoyed such amenities as air-conditioning, a radio in every car, and excellent dining (see Jesse Yancy’s article below). In addition, the train carried a stewardess trained in dictation, and a registered nurse for the hangovers and heart attacks common among Capitalists in the Great Depression years.
The Green Diamond must have been quite a sight as she glided through the cornfields on a summer’s day, or flashed her green against the snow of winter. People accustomed to a steam engine’s mournful whistle no doubt looked up when #121 blatted her air horn at grade crossings: perhaps they heard in it the sound of the Future, but probably not. Locomotives would always and evermore be driven by steam, just as the Great War had ended all wars, and drugstores would always sell Paregoric.
In the end, the very success of the Green Diamond led to her demise. The St. LouisSpringfield-Chicago schedule proved so popular that passenger traffic began to exceed the limited capacity of the trainset, which could not accommodate the addition of extra cars during a surge of ridership. In 1947, eleven years after her glorious debut, IC #121 and her articulated companions were replaced by conventional, more practical diesel locomotives and coaches. The train’s name and schedule remained, but the moderne novelty was gone forever from the Land of Lincoln.
The final chapter of the trainset’s story began at the Illinois Central’s Paducah shops, where she was given an overhaul. When she emerged, she was freshly-painted in the same two-tone green, but the Green Diamond banner had been erased from her sides. Train crews, doubtless Bemused by the assignment, took her across the various divisions to Cairo, Memphis, and at last to her new home of Jackson, Mississippi. Why she was sent there instead of somewhere else is lost to history, but for the next three years–until she was sold for scrap–she traveled the Louisiana Division between Jackson and New Orleans. Now called the Miss-Lou, her timecard schedule was almost identical to that of the Green Diamond, and she once again provided the reliable, courteous service for which the Main Line of Mid-America was famous. The Miss-Lou moniker derived, of course, from the states through which she traveled, but, as Yancy explains below, it was by another name that she entered the folklore of the Deep South.
We are given some things in life–the Iris, for example, or a young girl’s face–that seem the more beautiful because we know their flowering will not last. We treasure less, perhaps, those things we foolishly believe will last forever. So it was with the great passenger trains that once flowed majestically across the Republic: colorful carriers of Dream and Promise in a time when pride was still part of the national character and anything was possible. They are vanished now, every one scattered across the trash-heaps of memory, and few remain who remember them at all. They will not come again; that they once passed among us is testimony to what we had, and to what we can never have again.
(Along rails running among the homesteads of south Mississippi, the farmers along its route noted the green train’s resemblance to a pest, and before long became affectionately known the Tomato Worm. The Diamond was retired on August 8, 1950.)
Chances are you have a bottle of liquid smoke parked in the cabinet where you keep the vanilla and box salt. It’s also likely that you know a grill professional—or a fanatic amateur—who’ll suggest exorcism and ritual burning if he or she finds out.
Liquid smoke has been around since people began making charcoal. Condensing the hot, moisture-filled smoke from low-oxygen burning charcoal produces a watery liquid (pyroligneous acid) that for centuries was called wood vinegar and was customarily used in everyday cooking–not just your occasional Renaissance barbecue–much as you would any other kind of vinegar.
Methods for making wood vinegar were refined in the 17th century. In 1895, E. H. Wright inaugurated the era of commercial manufacture and distribution of wood vinegar as liquid smoke. Batch smokehouses use regenerated atomized liquid smoke to process meat, cheese, fish, and other foods.
Liquid smoke is a fast, easy way to make good smoky foods and barbecue-style meats. Detractors—and there are many—seem to have a lot of reasons for not using liquid smoke, but most of their objections center around a negation of the “barbecue experience,” by which they mean the quasi-ritualized time and effort it takes to prepare and smoke meat.
Using liquid smoke takes practice and an understanding of the less-is-more rule. My standard is no more than a teaspoon in a cup of sauce or marinade.
Mix a half cup light brown sugar with a teaspoon of cinnamon, a stick of melted butter, and 3 cups chopped pecans. Spread on a pound of buttered phyllo. Cover with another pound of buttered phyllo and bake until golden. Stir a cup of sugar into a cup of water. Add a half cup honey, a half cup corn syrup, and the juice of three lemons with zest. Bring to a boil until slightly thickened. Pour evenly over phyllo, and cool before slicing and serving.
We speak of cult musicians or novelists, and while it might seem odd to speak of a food writer that has such a following, Laurie Colwin does, primarily I think because Colwin has what other food writers in this age of kitchen glamour don’t: candor and a total lack of pretension.
Colwin, who died in 1992, the year before the Food Network was founded, wrote in an era when food and cooking were still relatively pedestrian topics. Sure, Stewart had spread her pristine wings, Prudhomme was burning up the scene and of course Claiborne, Child, and Beard had blazed the way, but Colwin wasn’t a media personality. Far from it; she was a working writer and mother. In addition to her two collections of culinary essays, Home Cooking (1988) and More Home Cooking (1993), which were inducted into the James Beard Hall of Fame in 2012, Colwin published eight novels, and her work appeared in The New Yorker, Mademoiselle, Allure and Playboy.
As a food writer, Colwin doesn’t have a style so much as she does a voice, which some might say is much the same thing, but no: she writes as if she were talking to you across a picnic table or at a bus stop, intimate but breezy, alternately tongue-in-cheek, insistent and certainly droll at times, always warm; somehow when reading her my mind hears her as what the Brits would call “fruity”, though not strained or shrill.
“Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant” is usually cited as a signature piece, but “Kitchen Horrors” is essential, as is “How to Avoid Grilling” and my favorite, “How to Cook Like an American”. Colwin writes a great deal about how to (and not to) cook for children and how to feed a multitude with grace under pressure, but speaks most about how much of our lives revolve around the things we see, touch, hear, and eat every day.
Colwin’s fans constitute a cult in that they are devoted to her writing as a source of discovery as well as comfort, and acknowledge self-effacement as a virtue in those who know their craft and practice it with modest aplomb.
Once after a truly happy hour at a local bar, a companion and I stopped at the store on our way home and there found a mound of beautiful artichokes neither too tight nor too loose and with a bit of a purple blush.
I just had to get a couple. I called to my drinking buddy, who was cruising the cucumbers, to grab a bud of garlic and a couple of lemons. After picking up a few more items, we headed for the checkout counter where he espied my artichokes.
“And what are you going to do with these?” he asked. He admitted that he’d never eaten a fresh cooked artichoke.
Inebriation, dear hearts, is a great initiator but a poor executor, which is how, about ten minutes later, I found myself alone in the kitchen with two beautiful artichokes, diminished incentive, and a hungry guest. Persevering, I heaved a vast sigh, and began cooking.
To cook fresh artichokes, bring a half a quart of salted water to boil in a 2-quart saucepan, add no more than four truncated, trimmed, and stemmed artichokes, cover, bring to a rolling boil, and steam for about 20 minutes.
When you can stick a toothpick in the heart of the bud without a lot of resistance, remove artichokes and plunge into cold water until cooled. Invert into a colander to drain.
Serve with warm garlic butter, and teach virgin to eat. Be gentle. Be patient.
Grate and squeeze yellow, white, or green squash. For one cup grated squash and a quarter cup each of diced onions and poblanos, mix with two cups self-rising white corn meal.
Add a large egg, well-beaten, about ¾ cup whole milk, and ½ cup vegetable oil. Stir until just mixed and drop by spoonfuls into hot oil.
Puppies rise and turn as they cook. When brown, put pups on paper towels in a skillet and set them in a warm oven to crisp. Serve with a citrus-y comeback or a thin salsa.
Drizzle warm simple syrup with a squeeze of lemon over fresh figs and refrigerating overnight. Slit, stuff with Roquefort, and top with crushed pecans. These are good with iced coffee.
This recipe comes from my pal David Odom. Puree two peeled chopped cucumbers, one cup simple syrup, 1/4 cup of fresh lime juice, a pinch of salt and 5 basil leaves in ta blender, then press through a fine screen. Pour the mixture into a container, and float a cleaned egg in the mixture . If a quarter sized portion of the shell is showing you are good, if not add more syrup. Chill mixture then run in ice cream maker.
For best flavor, you must use bananas that are soft, aromatic, and with a light freckling. The vanilla wafers should just be broken up into small pieces, not reduced to crumbs. Some people top these with whipped cream and a banana slice, but that makes them soggy.
1/2 cup softened butter 1 cup cane sugar 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract 1 ripe banana mashed 1 package banana cream instant pudding mix 2 large eggs, lightly beaten 2 1/2 cups flour 1/2 teaspoon baking soda 1 cup white chocolate chips 1 cup smashed vanilla wafers
Preheat oven to 350, and line baking pans with lightly oiled parchment paper. Combine flour and baking soda, then set aside. Cream butter and sugar thoroughly, add the banana, pudding mix, and eggs. Mix until smooth and slowly stir in the dry ingredients, then blend in the chips and wafers. Use about a tablespoon of dough for each cookie. Bake until lightly browned, about ten minutes.
