Alligator Pear Cocktail

It is 1:30am.  The dishwasher is running.  I am sitting in the living room across from the fire to which I added a log not just an hour ago… even though I could have let the coals die out and saved a log of my dwindling wood supply.  But… I kind of want to hold onto this evening, this very good night… and not go upstairs and shut my eyes on it quite yet.

Tonight was my supper club of March.  We have approached the 1920’s in our theme of decades this year.  I even applied gray eye shadow for the occasion…  but left my cloche hats in their boxes.  Still, it was… it was just one of those nights when life is simply, good.

Part of that, I’m not going to deny, is due to the compliments to my cooking.  Tonight was a total experiment.  By experiment, I mean to say I cooked four dishes outside of my norm.  Things that might even be considered weird by modern definitions… but appropriate for my dinner theme… and all from a cookbook that came from my grandmother’s… and I have no doubt… my great-grandmother’s kitchen.

As I type that… I’m not exactly sure which great-grandmother passed on these recipes.  I want to say Rose Alba, because one of the recipe books is stained so completely in the pie section – on the page of a prune pie recipe, that I have heard was one of her trademarks. I am certain she was the one opening up the book of Lorain Cooking to double check her measurements, even when she knew them after baking pies every Sunday.

There are no stains on the second cookbook, a guide to good housekeeping from Better Homes and Garden.  Indeed, I had a renegade splatter of tomato juice this afternoon and panicked that I was damaging this piece of history… even though the cardboard binding attached with my grandmother’s masking tape has already fallen away.  I wonder if that was given to my grandmother by her mother-in-law… or by her mother.

I never saw a photograph of Teresa Conroy until last October.  Well, let me say this again.  I didn’t realize I had seen a photograph of Teresa until I started sifting through pictures to make a database for my family.  There was a family portrait (that I have yet to scan and will not be including in this blog post at 1:30ish in the am) that hung in the dining room of Mt. Pleasant Ave.  I did not know that one of the young women in that early 1900s serious photo was my great-grandmother.  I knew that my grandmother lost her when she was 18 in 1939.  I don’t know if the fact that was the year Gone With the Wind was made into a movie makes that detail register in my brain… and that my grandmother was probably more concerned with the grief of her mother than Vivien Leigh that year… or the idea of being 18 and losing her mother is such a startling thought that I have never forgotten it.

I found an envelope of her pictures… just a handful of pictures.  Compared to the world of Facebook and iPhones, that seems like such a poor representation of a life… well lived, even if she died before either of her children reached the age of twenty.

My favorite is her dressed in Frank’s (the man who would become my great-grandfather) WWI uniform.  

But, there is another – actually a couple others – of her with a friend, when she is smiling, off the cuff, and so genuinely… happy.   

There is also a picture of her in a nurse’s uniform.   And, in the pile of pictures of her eventual husband, a picture of him in France, dark in shadow… handsome.  On the back is inscribed, “Dreaming of you.”

I piece these details together into a story… a story I will never know.   A story I probably would not have really known if I had asked my grandmother.  What do we know of our parents and their youth?  Their recklessness, their hopes and dreams before the burden of responsibility… before the larger problems of the world turn their hair gray and dull the shine in their eyes?  When they shift from hopeful dreamers into authoritarian stewards?

I never knew Teresa Conroy.  I don’t know if this cookbook I used tonight ever spread open on her kitchen counter as it did mine today.  Maybe it did.  Maybe she cooked spaghetti for two and a half hours in the oven as opposed to on the stove.  Maybe she made a white sauce for tuna or filled a cocktail glass with an alligator pear and catsup.  Maybe she cheated on Prohibition.  Maybe she thought it was a good idea.  Did she?  I wonder what she would have thought if she knew her daughter liked bourbon and ginger beer.

Maybe I’m more in tune to these speculations because I am writing a novel that takes place over several decades, but focuses on the 1910’s and 1920’s.  Maybe it is because tonight I had a supper club gathering that focused on the decade that decided alcohol was taboo.  Or maybe… I just find the recipes of these cookbooks an interesting challenge to our contemporary tastebuds and idea of easy cooking.  Whatever it is… whatever informed my fascination… tonight I had a good meal.

At some point I will share all four with you, dear readers.  But for the now, the most amusing is the cocktail dish.  And, yes, I mean dish instead of drink.  I don’t know if Teresa Conroy or Rosa Alba Rivers (Brennan) would have served a cocktail to her husband or group of friends in the 1920’s.  I don’t know if either woman would have snuck a shot of moonshine or vodka into this recipe… but one of them, I suspected, bought this collection of recipes.  And whether or not she contemplated filling a martini glass with an avocado and ketchup, I still like to think by serving it tonight, I knew her more.  Even as I laughed at the odd concept, I felt for a fleeting second that I could have had one of those women at my dining room table laughing and scooping up the surprisingly tasty concoction in delight.

A list of cocktails.  Alligator Pear is at the top.

Soda Bread or The Luck of the Irish

I’ve gotten a little sidetracked by life these past few weeks.  Weekends arrive and I find myself sleeping in to hours I haven’t indulged in quite some time.  Or I have an hour or two of productivity before a marathon of Agatha Christie shows seems like a good way to pass the time.  

I did attempt a recipe last weekend for Oatmeal Crisps.  Problem is I tried to multi-task whilst I attempted this seemingly simple oatmeal cookie recipe.  My history in the kitchen should have been smart enough to note that so much butter and shortening would make for very fragile and thin cookies… and oozing all over baking surfaces… which turned into oozing onto the bottom of the oven and an oh so delectable scent of burnt sugar.

So I’ll come back to Oatmeal Crisps when I’m less frazzled.

This weekend I baked.  I baked my own recipe.  Okay, a recipe I got off the internet ten years ago and take out of my overly stuffed folder of computer printouts once a year to bake my offering to the Brennan St. Patrick’s Day feast.

I’m eating some now, to go with my Bailey’s flavored coffee. 

If you want to try it, it really is quite simple… and (in my humble opinion) ten times better than any store bought variety.

Irish Soda Bread
Ingredients:
2 c. all-purpose flour
1 tsp. baking powder
3 Tbsp. butter
¼ c. raisins (optional)
1 egg white, slightly beaten
¾ c. buttermilk
¼ tsp. salt

- 1.Mix together dry ingredients.  Cut in butter until mixture resembles coarse crumbs.  (I do this with my hands.  It is pretty good stress relief.)  Stir in raisins if desired.  (I’ve often forgot to do this and end up adding them later… but it’s messier that way).  Make a well in center of mixture.

- 2.Combine egg white and buttermilk.  Add all at once to dry mixture.  Stir until moistened.

- 3.Knead dough until smooth.  Shape into 7 in round loaf.

- 4.Lightly grease baking sheet.  (I use my pizza stone).  Place dough on sheet.  With knife, make criss crossed slashes on top to form an ‘x’.  Brush with buttermilk

- 5.Bake about 30 minutes at 375° or until golden.  Serve warm if possible.

So while this isn’t one of Gram’s recipes, I can say it tastes fabulous with some of her jam.  Or alongside one of the many various interpretations of corned beef my uncles provide every year.  

I often joke how St. Patrick’s Day has become a second Christmas in my family.  While we don’t have all the Brennans in attendance, the house is certainly filled to the brim and requires multiple seating stations to eat a plate full of corned beef, green mold, and soda bread.  There is a lot of Irish whiskey.  A lot of silliness.  And a lot of green.

I’ve been cynical about St. Patrick’s Day.  How pretentious our sudden love of immigrant heritage is.  How ridiculous it is to honor the poverty and depressive alcoholic traditions of our Irish forbears.  How people who pooh pooh Mexicans try to pull out the 1/48^th Irish genetic component in their bloodstream to justify getting shitfaced and irresponsible on this one day a year.

This year… I didn’t care about that. Maybe it’s this blog.  Maybe it’s the fact I’ve really started to see my family differently after the birth of my nieces and the death of my grandmother.  Maybe it’s because I make a damn good soda bread and welcome the excuse to pull out this recipe once a year.  Whatever it is, whatever the ingredients and instructions, the fact is I saw the greatest recipe to come from the Brennan kitchen(s) isn’t the food on our tables but that innate ability to measure, blend, and serve happiness.  

My grandmother always used to reflect after these gatherings how lucky we are.  Maybe it’s the luck of the Irish.  Or maybe it’s because we are master chefs in that recipe of family.