Chapter 18 (Bettina Gives a Porch Party)

Introduction

Bettina had decided to throw yet another party for her lady friends and, with an unusual amount of foresight, she has Bob compose the invitations and then banishes him to his office.

With the King of Creamed Beef away Bettina is free to indulge her passion for dainty, ladylike food—and indulge she does! After cajoling her friends to embroider any number of silverware cases she wheels out her tea tray and presents them with one of the most jaw-dropping meals imaginable.

Part 1

The Menu

Sunbonnet Baby Salads

Nut Bread Sandwiches

Iced Tea

Mint Wafers

Lemon Sherbet

Tea Cakes

Preparing the Meal

Sunbonnet Baby Salad

One has to wonder at the guests’ reactions when presented with this salad. Perhaps, after sewing for hours, they were too blinded by eyestrain to see clearly?

Personally, I can’t imagine anything less appetizing than chowing down a likeness of a baby’s head, but the book’s editors are emphatic that this salad is “very effective and easy to make.” Sold!

The recipe doesn’t specify whether fresh or canned pears are to be used for the base of the salad, so I figured I’d make it easy on myself and picked up a tin at the supermarket.

Other ingredients: blanched almonds (for the ears), pimento (for the nose and mouth), whole cloves (eyes), and salad dressing to be formed into Sweet Baby’s spit curls.

*Gulp*

Time to make a baby!

Nut Bread Sandwiches

The creation of these sandwiches was something of a puzzle thanks to the (non-existent) directions. From the vignette I gathered they were no more than slices of nut bread spread with butter, but Bettina’s Best Salads described something a little more elaborate: nut bread, a butter and cream cheese spread, and pecan halves balanced on each sandwich.

Frankly, the thought of bread (even nut bread)-and-butter sandwiches sounds a little dull, so I decided to go with the second interpretation of the dish and create something more suitable for a dainty luncheon.

As always these teatime sandwiches are to be made with slices of day-old bread (yummy) so I had to begin preparations the day before the party.

I was a little surprised by how many ingredients and equipment this nut bread required…

…and of course a sifter was one of them (my hand aches already)

Chopping the raisins by hand was, as always, a sticky business. There must be an easier way.

Uh-oh. I followed the recipe exactly and wound up with a dry-as-dust jumble of ingredients in the bowl in. Only by adding extra milk was I able to mix up a relatively smooth dough.

The recipe calls for the dough to be pressed into two well-greased bread pans but, given the Lilliputian size of Bettina’s baking dishes, I found one modern pan sufficient.

I sure hope this rises in the oven…

Thankfully it did (Bettina would be proud). By tomorrow it should be firm (stale?) enough to make sandwiches with

Iced Tea

Bettina’s summertime staple and actually something I enjoy. Lord knows it’s easy enough to prepare, delivers a nice shot of caffeine, and with a lot of ice is a genuine pleasure to drink.

Mint Wafers

I wasn’t sure whether these wafers were in fact candies or cakes (and of course no recipe was given). It would have been simple enough to purchase a box of chocolate mints and dump them in a bowl, but being the adventurous kind (or perhaps just a glutton for punishment) I decided to make something more elaborate.

After a little searching on the Internet I found a recipe for mint wafers at foodnetwork.com

(All credit goes to Sandra Lee, the creator of both the picture and the recipe. These look luscious)

Nilla Wafers, chocolate chips, butter, and peppermint extract—certainly not Bettina-approved but simple and delicious-sounding.

Step 1: Lay out the wafers on a foiled-lined cookie sheet

Step 2: Melt the chips and the butter in a microwave (here I substituted the stove top as a heat source. It was easier than having to open the microwave up every minute or so to stir the melting chocolate) and then add the mint extract

Step 3: Drizzle chocolate over the cookies…

And here I ran into a problem. I hadn’t melted the chocolate sufficiently and it was too thick to coat the cookies evenly.

OK, these don’t look anything like Lee’s, but I’m going to assume that they taste more or less the same (fingers crossed)

Lemon Sherbet

I’m excited about this. I love sherbet and it’s so much easier to make than homemade ice (yes, it’s the height of summer and I know it’s still to come—I’ll be revving my manual freezer for takeoff soon).

So it’s a huge relief that this sherbet recipe is so simple: just boiled sugar syrup mixed with lemon juice and later, after a brief period of chilling, whipped egg whites. Thanks to that last ingredient there’s a slight risk of salmonella, but hey—we all survived that sodium-packed creamed beef, so why not this?

Sugar syrup mixed with the lemon juice—this looks a little thin to me

After a spell in the freezer I beat in the whipped egg whites. I suppose it looks more like the genuine article now, but I’m a bit concerned about how long this sherbet will take to harden. I should have made it yesterday so it could would have had time to freeze properly.

[Three hours later] Nope. Still almost liquid. In fact, the egg whites are floating on top of the syrup. This sherbet definitely isn’t ready for prime time...

Tea Cakes

The only recipe I could locate for tea cakes in A Thousand Ways To Please A Husband is listed as “Lighting Tea Cakes”. Close enough?

The recipe gives me the option of using either granulated or powdered sugar, but after making sherbet, salad dressing, and nut bread there really was no choice to be made—my sugar canister was virtually empty.

The batter looks decent. Now all I have to do is pour it in a greased muffin pan and pop it in the oven.

These “lightning” tea cakes are to be frosted with White Mountain AKA Boiled Sugar Syrup Frosting—so much for a simple and convenient dish!

Despite all the hassle the frosting looked OK…

…until I looked in the empty sugar syrup pot. Yup. The stuff had crystalized, and I realized with a sinking heart my frosting would be crunchy as rock sugar.

The Table

Since this is supposed to be a dainty luncheon I actually took time to scrounge some flowers from the yard. I’m sure my somewhat war torn nasturtiums can’t hold a candle to Bettina’s lavish blooms, but they did serve to brighten both the table and my mood (by the time the food was ready it was eight o’clock at night, and I was exhausted)

How It Looked

Part 2 (Celebrating the Fourth Continued)

How It Tasted

Lobster and Salmon Salad

Happily this salad survived the trip…when we opened the cooler it was still thoroughly chilled. The only flaw was the overcooked lobster meat—rather like chewing a mouthful of rubber bands. The taste was good though, but I longed for a handful of crackers to toss upon the salad.

Ham Sandwiches

With only 3 1/2 sandwiches to divide amongst the four of us I wondered beforehand who was going to get the short end of the stick. But this turned out not to be a problem as everyone (including me) only managed a single nibble. The bite of the green olives and chopped pickles combined set our collective hair on end! One taste was enough, more than enough in fact.

Nut Bread Sandwiches

Dry, oh so very very dry. Even the butter spread on the bread was no help, and in the end we fed the sandwiches to a flock of very happy ducks.

Pickles

These were fine, in fact great. As I said before I love pickles, and Vlassic Dills are my favorites.

Radishes

Much to my surprise these radish rosettes consented to open up by lunchtime, and there were reasonably well received by my hungry crew. The radishes lent some much-needed color to the meal, and their snap gave our taste buds a much-needed jolt after the bitter-tasting ham sandwiches and the dry-as-dust nut bread.

Devilled Eggs

Unlike the recipe I generally use these didn’t require onions—much to their detriment, I’m afraid. I never realized before that onions and the parsley I sometimes toss in add some visual interest to the filling—Bettina’s version looked like eggs freshly pulled from boiling water and then simply cut in half.

Potato Chips

Everyone really chowed down on these…by the end of lunch the party-sized bag I brought along was 2/3 empty.

Moist Chocolate Cake

Filip: What is this—gingerbread?

Well, gingerbread mixed with chocolate, I suppose. I myself enjoyed this—it certainly was different—but the boys merely toyed with their slices and my husband wasn’t impressed.

Bananas and Oranges

As expected everyone passed these by—such ordinary fruit couldn’t compete with fresh peaches, cherries, or nectarines.

Torpedo Candies

For some reason or other everyone  found the sight of the candies was amusing. When I filled the star-shaped ceramic bowl with these pink-and-white pellets the boys stared at them for a moment, then at me, and finally started giggling. It did seem like an odd choice for a picnic lunch, but in the end the dish was half-emptied.

Lemonade

I was the only one who drank any of this—the boys insisted on sodas and my husband had smuggled a can of his favorite beer into the picnic cooler.

But I have to admit that Bettina’s lemonade was far better than the bottled stuffed I generally buy. Tt tasted freshly-squeezed and really was refreshing on such a hot day. An extra spoonsful or two of sugar added would have made it better still, but to me this drink was a winner.

Would I Make This Again?

No, I probably would not—the ham sandwiches and nut bread were failures, and the fruit and the cake weren’t well-received. We all seemed to enjoy the lobster salad, I liked the lemonade, and the pickles and chips were eaten with gusto, but frankly this picnic lunch wasn’t worth even a quarter of the effort it took to make it.

Nor in the end was I too pleased with the overall effect of the red, white, and blue decorations. “Corny but festive” paper plates look sad and forlorn when they’re covered with food stains, and I was a bit disconcerted to see the American flag (even in sticker form) being buried under scoops of gooey salmon salad.