Sometimes things work out, sometimes not. Sometimes improvisations work, sometimes not.
Last week I wanted to make some nice deviled eggs for a potluck gathering. As I learned afterward, to my sorrow, you’re better off using “old” eggs for easy peeling of the hard-boiled ones. I plunged these into cold water, as usual, but after making an unpeelable mess of four of them, I decided to change plans. I made an egg salad, plunked mounds of it on little squares of pumpernickel and decorated them with slices of radish, olives and chopped parsley. Culinary disaster averted.
On the other hand, improvisation sometimes results in just more trouble. My family used to love to read and quote from the recipes of Edward Lear. He’s the one who invented the limerick (“There was an Old Person from Ewell/Who chiefly subsisted on gruel….”) and who wrote “The Owl and the Pussycat.” Nonsense was his game. He was on my mind after I tried to make something useful out of the remains of an initially nice-looking, but eventually dry and stringy piece of beef brisket.
I had cooked, as I do from time to time, boiled beef, the dish that my mother recalled was served every weekday at lunch in her family’s apartment in Vienna. Her father, a match manufacturing executive, came home for lunch every day, a sit-down meal with the whole family.
Boiled beef was the central dish, but there were always different vegetables and garnishes. Sometimes potatoes, sometimes noodles or dumplings, sometimes cooked carrots, sometimes cucumbers in vinegar. Horseradish sauce rotated with mustard and mushroom and various other options.
My grandfather’s mother-in-law, a famously loud and hungry woman who was often in residence, would always complain, no matter what was on the table. She was said to have had a fine singing voice, but extremely bad manners. “Where is the red beet sauce?” are the only words I’ve ever heard quoted from her.
Usually I can make several meals from a chunk of brisket, followed by sandwiches and then soup with the stock and vegetables. As usual, I cooked the meat slowly for several — probably three — hours, before serving it for dinner. Even after chilling, the meat didn’t slice, but just disintegrated while remaining tough. Still, we resolutely chowed it down. Same the next night, even after more cooking.
At this point there was still about three-quarters of a pound of meat left, and I hate to waste food. So I decided to chop it up and make a salad on the lines of a tuna or ham salad. Tossed it into the food processor. Oops, a little too ground up. More like baby food. Never mind, I added mayonnaise and horseradish and it began to taste pretty good, even if the consistency was not great. I chopped some celery and pickles and added them. Now I had a really large bowl of this stuff.
It was at this point that I began to think of Edward Lear. Here is part of his recipe for Amblongus Pie:
“TO MAKE AN AMBLONGUS PIE
Take 4 pounds (say 4½ pounds) of fresh Amblongusses, and put them in a small pipkin.
Cover them with water and boil them for 8 hours incessantly, after which add 2 pints of new milk, and proceed to boil for 4 hours more.”
There follows a further elaborate procedure, with additions of various items. The recipe ends with the following instructions:
“Then, having prepared a paste, insert the whole carefully, adding at the same time a small pigeon, 2 slices of beef, 4 cauliflowers, and any number of oysters.
Watch patiently till the crust begins to rise, and add a pinch of salt from time to time.
Serve up in a clean dish, and throw the whole out of the window as fast as possible.”
“Throw whole thing out window” is how we’ve remembered that directive. I’m afraid it was the right solution for my beef salad.
Marietta Pritchard can be reached at mppritchard@comcast.net.