Cooking a la Bettina: A Thousand Ways To Please A Husband Revisited: Chapter 30 A Cool Summer Day

Introduction

It’s a red-letter day for Bettina: a visit from her friend Ruth and another opportunity to show the world that “Bettina knows how to keep house!”

Let potential doubters be forever silenced! Throughout an afternoon Ruth pays full tribute to our heroine’s varied domestic skills: cook extraordinaire (“Bob, you’re going to have a good dinner tonight!”), medic (“[My burn] feels better already!”), and expert laundress (“I had a chance to refer last night to something you made me copy and put with my recipe cards. ‘How to Remove Grass Stains’!”).

We’ll never be certain the efficaciousness of the town grapevine after Ruth took her leave, but it’s hard not to imagine visitors crowding the bungalow windows to watch Bettina in a pristine house dress laying a “good” dinner of pork chops and baked apples before an appreciative Bob!

Part 1

The Menu

Pork Chops

Escalloped Potatoes

Baked Apples

Head Lettuce with Congressional Dressing (1932 edition)

Bread

Butter

Rhubarb Pie

Tea

Preparing the Food

Pork Chops

Because my last Bettina-inspired pork chops wasn’t entirely satisfactory (like strips cut from a car tire, in fact) I’m rather pleased to see these on the menu again.

In retrospect I believe my cooking technique last time was fine and the chops themselves were to blame. They were cut from the loin (usually a good cut) but incredibly thick—too thick to be tenderized by simply browning/poaching in a skillet filled with water.

These new chops are also cut from the loin but far thinner than the last.

Certainly Bettina’s method for cooking chops is simple enough: season, brown on both sides, add a bit of water to the skillet, and pop the lid on. Seasonings are minimal too, just salt and paprika.

Hard to see how these could fail, but of course one never knows…

Escalloped Potatoes

Standard Idaho potatoes—no elaborate fixin's here!

The recipe says the potatoes are to be cut “very thin”—a torturous process if one uses a knife.

Fortunately my vegetable grater has special grooves meant just for spuds and so this shouldn’t be a problem. True, the cutter’s a little dull and tends to produce rather war-torn bits rather than neat slices, but anything is better than slicing all those potatoes by hand!

Adding flour, salt, pepper, and butter to the potatoes.

Mixing.

And into a buttered pan with some milk (“Usually one cup suffices”).

Depositing the pan into the oven should have been the last step before serving, but I realized fairly quickly that a pan of raw potato slices wasn’t going to bake sufficiently in just fifty minutes—particularly as the milk wasn’t preheated.

So, after some thought, I drained the potatoes, heated the milk to the boiling point, poured it back over the potatoes, and returned the pan to the oven.

Frankly, it goes against the grain to deviate from Bettina’s cooking directions. She’d be horrified, no doubt--but DH and Son would be even more appalled to find a dish full of half-raw potato slices on the table.

Baked Apples

Another Bettina dish that isn’t unfamiliar to me. In fact, I made these just a few weeks ago but, as with the chops, they weren’t a complete success.

At the time common sense told me that, as the hollows in the apples were to be filled with sugar, it was foolish not to leave a bit of the core at the bottom to act as a plug. But because the recipe made no mention of this I dutifully disemboweled the apples from stem to stern and stuffed them with sugar…and, as expected, the sugar ran straight through into the water surrounding them.

End result: four withered apples drowning syrup sugar water (my family was not impressed).

For this recipe I chose Honeycrisp apples—they’re appropriately tart and probably closer in size to the pygmy fruits Bettina generally serves up.

Coring the apples was far easier this time—and of course I left a "plug" at the bottom.

Filling each apple with sugar, cinnamon, and a dab of butter.

Place the apples in a dish, add one cup of water, and bake for thirty minutes.

Head Lettuce with Congressional Dressing

No idea why this dressing is so named, but I find it interesting that it only appears in the 1932 edition of the book.

Unfortunately I was much less interested (and not at all happy) to see that it requires the dreaded Bettina-style chili sauce to prepare.

Frankly, this sauce is probably one of the least popular items in Bettina’s repertoire with my family. The name is certainly a misnomer—no chili peppers are incorporated in it but rather cinnamon plus ungodly amounts of vinegar (two cups!).

The main ingredient of the sauce is tomato. I was able to glean a few from my rapidly wilting backyard garden—the rest came from the supermarket.

As always a hot water bath helped loosen the tomato skins, but I did have to finish the job with a paring knife.

Pretty sad-looking specimens—tomato season it ain't.

In a break with Bettina tradition (one of many, I’m afraid) I used my electric chopper to cut up the onions.

½ cup chopped green pepper.

Sugar…

…and some cinnamon.

And onto the stove to cook down.

Later

And after all that fuss I only need two tablespoons of the stuff for the dressing! But at least it’s no problem to let the rest of the sauce sit in the refrigerator until I can think what to do with it—thanks to the vinegar it’ll keep for a million years. <grin>

Happily preparing the dressing itself was a simple matter despite the plethora of ingredients:

Chili sauce, spices, sugar, horseradish, catsup, salad oil.

Mixing the ingredients.

Done.

And now for the greens…

This lettuce has seen better days. Let’s hope the dressing is thick enough to conceal it.

Bread and Butter

The sleeper on the menu—something with which to fill our stomachs if the rest of the meal fails.

Rhubarb Pie

I had some doubts about this pie’s main ingredient—it may be August in Bettina World, but here in California it’s fall and rhubarb is hard to come by.

Fortunately I was able to locate a source—Whole Foods, which had a fresh crop for only $4.99 a pound.

Relatively few ingredients, thank goodness.

Suddenly I’m not quite so sure about this rhubarb—on closer inspection it appears rather old.

In the end I peeled only the stringiest pieces, diced everything, and mixed the lot with sugar, flour, and nutmeg.

Butter and flour for the crust (pre-measured and chilled).

Cutting the fat into the flour until the mixture ‘resembles cornmeal’ (the traditional metaphor—how did cooks describe it before corn was discovered in the New World?)