Chapter 7 (A New-Fashioned Sunday Dinner)

Introduction

It’s Sunday, the official Day of Rest—but is it really?

Once again Bettina is facing a particularly challenging guest in the person of one Rev. Henry Clinkersmith, a puritanical minster with an eager appetite and an equally keen desire to promote his version of Christianity. Will Bettina be able to follow Clinkersmith’s dictum to “obey the fourth commandment and give [her] family a good Sunday dinner, too”?

Part 1

The Menu

Leg of Lamb with Potatoes

Lamb Gravy

Head Lettuce

Thousand Island Dressing

Mint Sauce

Bread

Butter

Currant Jelly (1932 edition)

Pineapple Sherbet

Bettina’s Loaf Cake

Coffee

Preparing the Meal

Leg of Lamb with Potatoes

I noticed two major differences between the 1918 and 1932 versions of this recipe and was initially puzzled about how to proceed. By 1932 the leg of lamb had swelled from four to seven pounds, and the fireless cooker originally used had been replaced with a conventional oven.

It’s a bit difficult to square Bettina’s desire for a relatively labor-free day with the frequent basting and attention a seven-pound leg of lamb in an oven requires, but OK…I’m not particularly eager to prepare a large chunk of meat in a device powered with retained heat—none of Bettina’s books offer any remedies for food poisoning!<grin>

I was fortunate enough to find a 5-pound lamb roast (cut from the center of the leg) in the supermarket, thus sparing me a time-consuming trip to the butcher shop. The lamb is from Australia and seemed formidable after I freed it from the packaging.

(Looking at it it’s pretty obvious why the fireless cooker originally used to prepare the dish calls for a smaller chunk of meat—no way a seven pounder with a complete and untrimmed shank would fit, not even in my larger-than-average model)

Lamb Gravy

A brew of meat drippings, flour, water, salt…not particularly healthy by today’s standards (is any gravy?), but simple enough to prepare (or so I thought!)

Head Lettuce with Thousand Island Dressing

I decided to splurge here and give everyone a full bowl of greens instead of the leaf or two Bettina generally deems sufficient.

Having made any number of homemade salad dressings under Bettina’s tutelage I was beginning to feel like an old kitchen hand as I poured the ingredients into a bottle and began to shake it up…until the cap flew off and the dressing splashed all over the floor.

Mint Sauce

The menu calls for mint sauce, not the jelly most of us are familiar with. I cheated here and used my electric chopper to cut the mint leaves as fine as possible, but something didn’t come out quite right:

Yummy—not!

In desperation I dumped this concoction in my electric blender in hopes that some frantic pulsing would get this mess to congeal.

Nope—but maybe a few hours in the refrigerator will improve it.

Bread with ----?

I had my choice here of butter (1918) or currant jelly (1932) and in the end chose to serve both.

Pineapple Sherbet

This item (purchased, as per Bettina’s instructions) seemed like it would be a snap, but I had a devil of a time locating it. After checking a number of supermarkets and finding every other possible flavor (orange, lime, raspberry, grape, berry) I gave up and purchased rainbow sherbet with a strip of pineapple in it.

Bettina’s Loaf Cake

A relatively simple loaf cake recipe—unfrosted in the 1918 edition of the book, slathered with caramel icing in 1932.

Making the cake itself was no problem but, as always, the boiled icing was a headache. I cooked the sugar, milk, and butter without incident to the soft ball stage and, as the recipe instructed, pulled it off the stove to cool down.

Everything was fine until I added the vanilla and then—disaster! My fine-grained icing instantly turned into a dense and crumbly mess—the result, I suppose, of adding room-temperature flavoring to the still-too warm syrup.

Refusing to give up I added a tablespoon of hot tap water, turned on the electric mixer, and tried to lube it up. It didn’t help much, but nevertheless I went ahead, frosted the cake, and threw on a handful of ground pecans. Maybe the crunch of this gritty frosting will be disguised by the crunch of the nuts?

How It Looked