OLD GEEZERS

It seems that the age of old geezers may be coming back.

Don’t get me wrong. I am one of them myself, but at least I am not in charge of a nation.

Sometimes they have the title emeritus, because although dead for a safe number of years (Ronald Reagan) or centuries (John Evelyn and Robert May), they get to keep their titles.

Photo Courtesy of Natenal.com

Revisiting Ronnie means sliding into a caramel-colored booth at L.A.’s Nate 'n Al's for its Chopped Salad, Tuna Melt or Chicken Pot Pie. With the ghosts of Sid Caesar, John Wayne, Charles Bronson, Monty Hall, Danny Thomas, and Jack Lemmon. And remembering Jack’s best line in the movie “Some Like it Hot.” The one when Tony Curtis asks Jack (in showgirl drag) what makes him think he, a guy, can marry another guy (the old geezer millionaire with the yacht)? 

“Security!”  screams Jack.

Which is what I get not because the word “geezer” is sandwiched between “geese” and “gefilte fish” in the dictionary. But from reading the cookbooks of the two emeritus geezers, John and Robert. Because their two fabulous books live on and make good reading, giving them a certain “geezer chic” a term from Simon Doonan in The New York Observer.

Reading “Farmhouse Fare” from the Farmer’s Weekly (1950), the ingredients jumped out at me, and I wrote them down in my college culinary notebooks. “Gooseberry salad, apple-marigold custard sauce, edible seaweeds (laver and Irish moss) and samphire, rosemary sugar, syllabubs flavored with black currant leaves,” and so on.   But it was Robert May’s salad recipe in his The Accomplisht Cook (1685) that gave me the idea at Chez Panisse of doing a farm to raise the leaves, flowers and herbs as well as “watercress, sliced oranges, lemons, currants, new hawthorne, pears, oil, vinegar, sugar or none, alexander buds (black lovage), boil’d or raw.” And John Evelyn’s Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets (1699) that gave me the idea of a country inn. My 1968 notes are “grow elder trees for flowers, Meyer lemons, sweet briar roses or eglantine for perfumed leaves and hips, whortleberries for stuffing fame birds, medlars and rowan berries for jelly” and so on. I tried this in Massachusetts and failed. There is a reason Yankees left that soil and moved to California looking for agricultural gold. 

Photos Courtesy of archestrat.us & wikimedia.org

As did I.

Sooner or later, anyone writing about food brings up Apicius. It gives the writer a certain academic respectability, his being so long ago (Roman) and being “the first’ cookbook (always nice) unless you are an Arab or Chinese.

I think of him, however, just as an old geezer. The Nate n’ Al of Rome. Ignoring the stuffed dormice and grilled sow’s womb, the senate’s sumptuary laws against eating ostriches and parrots, or the possession of gliaria, those at-home vessels for fattening the dormice. Just look at some his dishes: “Vegetable Dinner Easily Digested,” “Another Laxative,” “Soft Cabbage,” “Boiled Cardoons,” “Fig-Fed Pork” (which gave us the idea years ago at Chez Panisse to feed our pigs garlic), “Boiled Fish,” and  “Nut Custard.” Now if that isn’t old geezer food, I don’t know what is.

What is the point of all this, you might well ask? “Satyricon” (the movie) is the point, specifically Trimalchio’s feast. Or its story within a story of the Roman beauty, one hand on her husband’s corpse and the other on a young guard, uttering the immortal line: “Better to hang a dead husband than lose a living lover.”

But it was the pig that stunned me the most, the one presented as the apotheosis of the feast. The chef is standing proudly by his pig, which looks to Trimalchio as if the animal hasn’t been gutted and stuffed. “Whip him (the chef),” he screams, a scene that became more piquant when I was later a chef to some of the more anxious rich patrons in San Francisco.

The chef grabs a sword from one of the guards and slices the pig open between its hind legs. Out pour “thrushes, fat hens, and lark livers,” as well as a celebration of everything that several of the pig’s cousins could produce in the way of sausages, galantines, stuffed snouts and all kinds of ears. 

Geezer food. 

The rest of the meal surges on, culminating in a huge platter of stewed lamprey. After seeing the movie, I wondered a lot about lamprey and it was then that I bought Apicius’ book Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome. But no lamprey. Leaving me wondering. Until in Galicia pursuing pig and octopus, I saw lamprey in a bistro window tank, and came to a screeching halt. In we went, and after a few finos, had the guts to order these slave-eating fish.

At first, I could not get past the taste, in my imagination, of their diet of slaves. But after the third bite and some local wine, I fell in love, almost. I saw and can see what attracted the Romans, whose lampreys must have tasted different from those I ate which had fed only on the carcasses of turbot instead of badly behaved slaves.

All that aside, here is a recipe from when Robert May was chef for the Countess of Kent (see her own book A True Gentlewoman’s Delight, 1653).

Robert May’s Gooseberry Fool

Photo Courtesy of This Vegan Life

Do the same, he says, with “strawberries, raspas, or red currans,” but lessen the cooking time. 

And I would add a teaspoon of orange or rose flower water to the puree.

 2 lbs (I kilo)         ripe pink or green gooseberries

½ pound (250 gr)   sugar

¼ teaspoon (large pinch) salt

1 cup (240 ml)       very fresh mascarpone

¼ cup (69 ml)         half and half

Put the gooseberries in a double boiler with the sugar and salt, cover, and cook over low heat for 30 minutes or until the berries are very tender.

Puree in a food mill, discard the seeds. Strain off the liquid and reduce by half  (so it will not thin the syllabub) and mix back in the puree. Taste for sweetness.

Mix the mascarpone and cream until smooth and will pour.

Put the puree in a chilled glass bowl just large enough to hold it with 2 inches to spare. Pour the cream on top. Garnish with herb (borage, sage) flowers, violets, or shredded rose petals, and serve with shortbread.

Shortbread

The better the butter, the better the bread. My advice for making one of my favorite things. And the most informative and it seems, authentic information on shortbread comes from www.christinascucina.com.

And its “Classic and authentic Scottish Shortbread recipe containing only three ingredients: flour, butter and sugar.”