Chapter 22 (The Modern Refrigerator)

You are about to enter another dimension. A dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop, the Twilight Zone. [cue music]

An overwhelmed Mrs. Dixon has inveigled our heroine into meeting her downtown. “I don’t know a thing about refrigerators; that’s why I begged you to come,” she admits. And of course Bettina is only too happy to take charge—in fact has very specific qualifications for the ice box soon to grace the Dixon kitchen: 1.     It must hold a minimum of 100 pounds of ice 2.     The water trap should be located in the bottom of the ice compartment 3.     The Dixons (or rather Mr. Dixon, chancellor of the exchequer) had better resign himself to shelling out a bundle for the new box because “it will be most economical in the long run.” After laying out these conditions and giving plentiful advice about how to ensure proper air flow in the new refrigerator Bettina takes her leave and heads for home:

A crafty Mrs. Dixon lures Bettina to her house—ostensibly to indulge in an afternoon of sewing and gossip. But of course the truth will out: “…what I really invited you over for was to get some advice about buying a refrigerator,” confesses Mrs. Dixon. And Bettina, true to form, has plenty of advice to give. Her requirements for the new refrigerator are strict: 1.     It must be gas or electric 2.     It should be a large enough box to accommodate a soon-to-be growing family 3.     Mr. Dixon is to make the actual purchase for “he would adore to select the best on the market!” After laying out these conditions and giving plentiful advice about the cleaning and defrosting of the new refrigerator Bettina takes her leave and heads for home:

“I’ll have to go or Bob will get there first and I’m a little

 sentimental about being there to greet him at the door.”

Whew! Two Bettinas—two Mrs. Dixons—and two very different scenarios. What cataclysmic event caused this break in the time-space continuum? Alien invasion? A black hole? Last night’s hash-and-cauliflower dinner?

But one thing is certain: the Goddess Bettina has the power to heal such a rupture—dispensing a boatload of advice and/or submitting to her daily ritual of greeting Bob at the door is enough to repair the timeline and get the universe back on track!

The Menu

Broiled Lamb Chops

Boiled New Potatoes

New Peas in Cream

Vegetable Salad

Bread

Butter

Rhubarb Pudding (1918 edition)

Preparing the Food

Broiled Lamb Chops

I definitely feel a bit leery about serving these chops. The last time lamb appeared on the menu (Chapter 7: A New-Fashioned Sunday Dinner) it was in the form of a roast and so disconcertingly sweet I could almost see Hannibal Lector lurking in the kitchen.

At the supermarket the only chops I could find were excised from the shoulder of the lamb. Probably not the best cut (they were very inexpensive—suspiciously so) but the only kind available on short notice.

The chops as per the recipe are to be broiled in a “red-hot” pan. Unfortunately red-hot utensils  of any kind just trigger more unpleasant memories—namely, the Bettina steak (Chapter 2: Bettina’s First Real Dinner) cooked under a red-hot broiler that set off multiple smoke alarms.

Fortunately I now have a ceramic non-stick skillet at my disposal. Not a traditional utensil by any means but easier to manage (I hope) than a cast-iron frying pan.

The cooking process for the chops is straightforward enough: sear, turn, lower the heat, and keep turning until the chops are ready.

New Boiled Potatoes

No potato shortage at Safeway--something I almost would have welcomed after countless Bettina meals featuring these boring tubers. Even with knowing the ease of the potatoes’ preparation—skin, boil, plop in a serving dish, garnish with parsley—I can’t seem to muster any enthusiasm here.

Creamed New Peas

New peas were not to be found at the market (big surprise) so I had no choice but to substitute frozen:

Well, it does say “early harvest” on the package!

These frozen peas were a breeze to fix: just dump in a pot with a little water and simmer six minutes. But of course plain cooked vegetables are an anathema to Bettina and I was forced to cook up yet another white sauce.

Melt the butter *sigh*

Add flour

And of course the standard cup of milk…

Peas, meet cream sauce!

Vegetable Salad

This dish appears in both Bettina universes so it must be essential.

No arguments from me. A dish of raw vegetables sounds like pure heaven after all the cooked peas, beans, and carrots we’ve been eating lately.

Happily A Thousand Ways To Please A Husband lists a plethora of “vegetable salads”—some simply bowls of greens, others mixed with potatoes or peas and bound together with sauce. It didn’t take me long to decide on the simple ménage of tomato and cucumber combined with a plain vinaigrette.

Naturally the first step is to peel the tomatoes…make ready the hot water bath!

Skinned, and ready to be chopped to bits (although I personally prefer thin slices of cucumber and tomato over chunks)

Such a simple dressing: oil, vinegar, salt, and paprika. I love it!

Bread and Butter

Do I really need to talk much about this? Bread is bread--although for a change of pace I chose to serve pre-sliced French bread of decidedly commercial origins.

Rhubarb Pudding

Thanks to the split in the time-space continuum I had a choice of two desserts: rhubarb pudding or sour cream cake. The pudding was obviously a seasonal dish and seemed more interesting, so pudding it was to be.

Unfortunately the rhubarb situation at the supermarket was so dismal I realized pretty quickly I’d made the wrong choice:

Believe it or not this was the only rhubarb available. Absolutely pitiful.

The scraping, scraps, and whole stalks (amazing) fit only for the trashcan. Thanks goodness the recipe only calls for a single cup of the cooked stuff.

Mixed cleaned, sliced rhubarb with sugar and let sit for 15 minutes

And onto the stove. The rhubarb was tinged with red to begin with, but that didn’t last long…

Ugh. This doesn’t resemble any stewed rhubarb I’ve ever seen—it looks more like cooked apricots or sweet potatoes (or something I dare not name!). Not exactly what I was expecting.

Time for the secret weapon

It’s Christmas!

A paste of flour, water, and salt

Add the rhubarb and return to the stove for further cooking…

…and then mix with whipped egg white, spoon into small dishes, and chill

How It Looked

Chapter 21 (A Rainy-Day Dinner continued)

How It Tasted

Browned Hash

Filip: This tastes like hot beef jerky.

Hash [as defined by Oxford Living Dictionary]: A dish of cooked meat cut into small pieces and cooked again, usually with potatoes.

A dish of cooked meat cut into small pieces and cooked again, usually with potatoes.

A dish of cooked meat cut into small pieces and cooked again, usually with potatoes.

Ha. These cubes of beef and potatoes certainly qualified as leftovers—like bits scavenged from a Lego factory after a four-alarm fire. They tasted awful, looked worse, and my

Ha.Thesecubesofbeefandpotatoescertainlyqualifiedasleftovers—likebitsscavengedfromaLegofactoryafterafour-alarmfire.Theytastedawful,lookedworse,andmyHa. These cubes of beef and potatoes certainly qualified as leftovers--like bits scavenged from a Lego factory after a four-alarm fire. They tasted awful, looked worse, and my son and I were reduced to picking semi-edible nuggets of potato out of the mess on our plates.

Creamed Cauliflower

Neither Filip nor I are huge fans of cauliflower, but after struggling with that monstrous hash this dish was positively soothing. The white sauce effectively hid the strong taste of the vegetable, and we both had two servings.

Date Muffins

These muffins were surprisingly good—not at all rich despite the dried fruit in them. I never would have believed that sweet muffins would work as a meal’s main breadstuff, but these did—and a smear of butter made them even better.

Vegetable Salad with Celery Seed Dressing

One of the nicest things about this salad was that it livened up the inescapable beige-and-brown tone of all the other dishes.

The dressing itself was light and snappy, but it was something of a mistake using slabs rather than strips of (regrettably under ripe) green pepper as the salad’s base. Both Filip and I needed steak knives to hack the peppers to bits, and that alone made it almost more trouble than it was worth.

Apple Sauce Cake

This drab-looking cake was in fact very good, but by the time we arrived at this course my son and I were too full to eat more than a few bites.

Still, thanks to the applesauce and raisins the cake kept well, and over the next few days the whole dessert go eaten.

[Hot] Chocolate

Filip: Hot chocolate? Really?

Finding a steaming beverage on the table was something of a head scratcher for my son (it really was an incredibly warm day). But the chocolate was tasty despite the fact that I forgot to whip it with an eggbeater before serving—forgot too that a scoop of ice would made it perfectly suitable for such a hot and humid day.

Would I Make This Again?

Well…[shades of Ethel Mertz]

Of course the hash was an absolute disaster but, as so often happens, I feel strangely impelled to try again in an attempt to get it right.

The muffins and cake were great, and the chocolate would have been too had it not been such a blistering hot day.

In fact the heat put something of a damper on the whole meal. I’m sure we would have enjoyed everything (everything but that hash, of course) more had the weather been cooler. Heat + humidity = no appetite, I’m afraid—I could have saved a lot of time and trouble by just serving iced juice and popsicles.

Chapter 21 (A Rainy-Day Dinner)

Introduction

The secret is out.

Bob, everyone in his office, and probably the whole town now knows that Bettina saved Mrs. Dixon’s marriage by convincing her to rent a house and assume her God-given role as Wife and Homemaker.

“The only possible solution in that case,” Bob approves, showering his “good angel” with kisses before tucking into a rainy-day dinner of hash and cauliflower.

Part 1

The Menu

Browned Hash

Creamed Cauliflower

Date Muffins

Butter

Grapefruit Salad with Celery Seed Dressing

Apple Sauce Cake

Chocolate

Preparing the Meal

Browned Hash

Alas I had no leftover beef with which to make this. Doubtless Bettina used scraps from the Sunday roast, but I had no choice but to go out and purchase fresh beef from the supermarket.

Tri-tip seemed a reasonable choice and, since we’re in the middle of a heat wave, I decided to break with tradition and cook the beef in my decidedly modern Crock Pot.

Preparing the meat was simple enough—I just tossed it into the pot along with water and a little beef bouillon and let it simmer for 3-4 hours.

The potatoes too were easy: just boil, chill, and chop into cubes.

The first hint of trouble came when I tossed the beef and potatoes into the skillet and set about to fry them into a pancake of sorts.

Mistake #1—I used a non-stick skillet to fry the hash…God knows why as there was no chance of it developing the necessary crust on the pan’s ceramic lining.

Mistake #2—Pouring oil (lots of it) to the red-hot pan when the meat and potatoes refused to stick together. I didn’t get a snap of the enormous cloud of smoke that belched from the skillet, but it’s easy enough to visualize—think Indian smoke signals, or the firebombing of Dresden.

Mistake #3 (the biggest one of all)—Keeping the contents of the skillet on the burner three times longer than recommended. The stuff didn’t come close to browning—it shriveled, leaving me with a pan of frizzled cubes to serve up.

Creamed Cauliflower

Bettina’s recipe calls for a full head of cauliflower, but that seems like too much to be covered by a mere cup of sauce. Remembering that early-20^th century fruits and vegetable were inevitably smaller than today’s bouncers, I cut the head in half (or rather, snapped exactly half the segments off the stalk)

I’m not crazy about this vegetable, but the simplicity of its preparation is definitely a point in its favor—just boil in salted water until fork-tender.

The white sauce too proved to be a breeze. After undergoing Bettina’s intensive sauce-making course last week making a mere cup seemed like child’s play—I could probably do it now with my eyes shut.

Date Muffins

It seems a little strange to see date muffins and applesauce cake on the night’s menu. Too much fruit and/or carbs, in my opinion.

Happily the flour doesn’t need to be sifted this dish.

I’ve never cooked with or even eaten dates before…don’t they have seeds in them?

Yes

As always happens when I try to cut dried fruit, the bits stuck to each other, the knife, my fingers, etc. I tried dusting the bits of fruit with granulated sugar to keep them from clumping, but to no avail.

After mixing the batter I was instructed by the recipe to beat it for two minutes. Easier said than done.

Stringiest dough ever!

Added melted butter. Great. Now I have a stringy, greasy lump in the mixing bowl

Oddly enough no temperature was given for baking the muffins. I guessed (and it was a guess) that “moderate” (350 F) was appropriate.

Or maybe not. These muffins were supposed to bake for 20 minutes, but after just 15 they were indisputably “done”

Grapefruit Salad with Celery Seed Dressing

This salad is a no-go, at least the first part of it. Because of DH’s blood pressure meds I can’t serve grapefruit in any form—the only question is what to choose as a substitute…

Probably some sort of tart fruit salad—orange, maybe, or pineapple—would be the equivalent. But frankly, with so many fruit-based dishes already on the menu, I’m in the mood for something else. Bettina’s vegetable salad sound good—just slices of tomato and green pepper arranged on a lettuce leaf--and is supposed to go well with celery seed dressing.

Fortunately this salad dressing is a quick to make—no stovetop cooking required!

Very colorful, thanks to the paprika

Simply shake and serve. What could be easier?

Apple Sauce Cake

This cake is a good excuse for making homemade applesauce—a real treat I cooked a couple of months ago and promptly forgot about

The recipe calls for six apples but, as noted above, Bettina’s fruit tends to run smaller than mine. Given that fact I’m sure four modern apples will be more than enough.

A Thousand Ways To Please A Husband instructs cooks to always first core the apples first—a foolish waste of time, in my opinion. Trying to wrestle the core out of an uncut apple is almost impossible and leaves bruises on the fruit.

Four large apples cut into slices make for an amazing amount of pieces—so many, in fact, that I had to haul out my cast-iron bean pot to hold them all.

Took a long time (more than I had) to cook these down

Tried to speed the process up by using a potato masher

Worked great!

I left the cooked sauce warming on the back of the stove while I mixed up the batter. For whatever reason the recipe specified that the sauce had to be hot before being mixed into the muffin batter.

Looks and smells good

Into a parchment-covered pan and then the oven...

Chocolate

Chocolate? What kind of chocolate? Chocolate for drinking out of mugs, to spread on the cake, or what?

The menu doesn’t specify so, despite the maddening heat, I decided that hot chocolate would be taste good.

My, this brings back memories! Bettina prepared hot chocolate for the “pick me up supper” she and Bob ate on the night they returned from their honeymoon. A bottle of champagne or wine might have been more appropriate, but of course this was 1918—the eve of the 18^th Amendment and Federal Prohibition.

How It Looked

Dinner for two tonight as DH has to work late. Ordinarily I'd be disappointed by his absence, but given my doubts about that hash I'm rather relieved he won't be here to taste it!

Chapter 20 (Mrs. Dixon and Bettina’s Experiment continued)

How It Tasted

Spanish Buns

Well, these cakes tasted fine although referring to them as ‘Spanish Buns’ continues to annoy me. That name is certainly a misnomer. They’re muffins, like it or not, and the recipe is straight out of the Midwest.

But anyway, as noted above these buns *ahem, MUFFINS* came out well—far better than last time. For once I didn’t overmix the batter and thereby create tunnels in the finished product, and soaking the dried currants overnight kept them from drying up during the baking process.

The only real problem here was the icing. It really was more of a glaze: a simple mixture of powdered sugar, milk, and vanilla. Unfortunately the day I made it we were in the midst of a serious heat wave, and the icing ran like crazy. Even attempting to firm it up in the refrigerator didn’t help. The stuff dripped off the muffins and onto the dessert plates, our fingers, and ultimately the floor. Ugh.

White Sauces

Quite an comprehensive lesson in white sauce technique, and all four versions came out well. Unfortunately I had no idea what to do with the stuff afterwards—pour it into glasses and slurp it down like milkshake?

In the end, though, I did come up with a solution.: combine all the sauces; add sugar, cooked rice, and raisins; and call it rice pudding.

Eureka! Neither DH nor Son realized this was the same stuff they’d seem me slaving over the previous afternoon and both gobbled the “pudding” with no hesitation. Whew!

Would I Make This Again?

Foolish question. I’ve made Bettina’s white sauce countless times already, and this is my second try with the buns/muffins. So really, the operative word is “when” since muffins appear on Bettina’s table very often, and so many of her dishes call for a sauce.

Quoth Bettina: I think everyone should know the right way to make [white sauces], for they are useful in preparing so many good things.

Well, after concocting four consecutive version I feel now that I’ve learned—this student deserves an A (and then a nice lie-down)!