Chapter 3 (Bettina’s First Guest)

Introduction

It’s Leftover Day…and Bob has invited Mr. Harrison—a genuine “woman hater”, he claims—to the feast.

Uh-oh.

Instead of barring the door against this impending home invasion Bettina cleverly plans her defense: invite the misogynist in, stuff him full of food, and offer up her friend Alice as a distraction. That and a pot of good coffee will surely convince Mr. Harrison that women aren’t “such nuisances after all!”

Part 1

The Menu

Boubons with Tomato Sauce

Potatoes Anna

Baked Green Peppers Stuffed

Bread

Butter

Head Lettuce—De Moines Dressing (1932 edition)

Cottage Pudding

Lemon Sauce

Coffee

Preparing the Meal

Boubons

As I don’t own a meat grinder with a crank I cheated here and used my electric chopper. It’s far more powerful than I realized and cut through that leftover steak in the blink of an eye.

The ingredients for the boubons (ground meat, bread crumbs, milk, spices, pimento, egg, melted butter) were easy enough to mix and place in glass cups, but I did have some trouble getting the water level in the baking pan correct. I had to boil an extra saucepan full after slopping water on the bottom of the oven—for a moment there my kitchen could have doubled as a sauna.

Tomato Sauce

This is one of those fiddly sauces that makes me thankful for convenience foods. The ingredients were simple, but the cooking sauce had to be watched carefully, and I had trouble forcing the end product through a sieve (in truth I used a sturdy colander with median-sized holes—still difficult). The resulting sauce was pale pink (from the flour, no doubt) and I wanted very much to doctor it with food coloring, but ultimately it went to the table au natural.

Potatoes Anna

Again not difficult to prepare, but the mix of potatoes, eggs, and white sauce didn’t look at all appetizing. I hope this ends up tasting better than it looks!

Baked Green Peppers Stuffed

I often make stuffed peppers, but my recipe (or rather that of my mother-in-law) involves stewing them in a pot of sauce until they’re limp and flaccid. Stuffed peppers is arguably my husband’s favorite dish, and he was puzzled and a little disturbed that Bettina’s version goes into the oven rather than on the stovetop.

“I don’t see how this can work,” he commented, eyes glued to the oven door.

Bread and Butter

The usual paper-wrapped supermarket loaf.

Head Lettuce—De Moines Dressing

This recipe for salad was added to the menu in the 1932 edition of A Thousand Ways to Please a Husband, and initially I was reluctant to prepare it. The menu seemed elaborate enough for a meal meant to use up leftovers, and the De Moines Dressing would force me to brew up not only chili sauce but another batch of that fantastically difficult homemade mayonnaise.

Ultimately, though, I did in the end decide to include it--the longing for a full bowl of greens instead of the stingy leaf or two Bettina typically doles out was just too tempting.

I did have to smile though at the early-20^th century version of chili sauce. No chili peppers were involved—no paprika—no ground pepper of any sort. The only “heat” came from some chopped onions and a tablespoon of cinnamon—this no-alarm sauce would make a baby smile.

Happily my second attempt at making mayonnaise went far more smoothly than the first. This time around I used a Bettina recipe involving whole eggs (rather than just the yolks), a little dry mustard, salad oil (instead of olive), and several minutes on the stovetop. It set up very quickly, tasted far better and, because the mixture was cooked, eased my fears about salmonella.

Cottage Pudding

Is this a pudding or really a cake in disguise? I honestly have no idea, but you’ll hear no complaints for me as it was one of the simplest dishes I had to prepare.

Lemon Sauce

This sauce was also something of a puzzler. In the 1917 edition of the book the recipe calls for “1 t-lemon extract or ½ t-lemon juice”—not equivalent ingredients by any means. Ultimately I plumped for the lemon juice--the ancient bottle of extract I fished out of the back of the cupboard smelled “off” bad and was immediately tossed in the trash.

How It Looked

Having no flowers Bettina arranged a centerpiece of red clover, and by the greatest of luck I had plenty of that (too much—time to weed the garden) in my yard.My husband Moske’s fork was stretching toward this bowl of greenery, and with a start I realized he was about to sample it. Fortunately our son chimed in just at that moment to ask why I’d put a bowl of weeds on the table.

Hmph!