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General Cooking (rec.food.cooking) For general food and cooking discussion. Foods of all kinds, food procurement, cooking methods and techniques, eating, etc. |
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![]() http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.c...inner-for-250/ December 14, 2009 The Way We Ate: Christmas Dinner for $2.50 By MICHELE HUMES "For more than a century and a half, The New York Times has been recording the pleasures and prejudices of the American palate. "The Way We Ate" is a weekly tasting menu of vintage food writing from The Times's archives. If O. Henry had tried his hand at food writing, he might have produced something like "A Joyous Christmas Dinner in Poverty Flat." Published in The New York Times in December, 1907, the article isn't just a game plan for a budget Christmas dinner. It's an exceptionally cheesy love story, with recipes. The piece is unsigned, so we don't know for a fact that he didn't write it. We do know that he was living in New York City when it ran, and that the story is reminiscent of one he'd published only a year earlier. That tale, "The Gift of the Magi," also centers on a pair of New York newlyweds facing a cash-strapped Christmas. With all the warm characterization and tender dialog you'd expect from O. Henry, "Poverty Flat" tells the story of a young bride's first Christmas dinner. Despite questionable cooking skills and limited means, she is determined to give her husband, Jack, a proper Christmas feast. After consulting "every available cookbook" and scouring Washington Market for bargains, our heroine decides on a menu: OUR $2.50 DINNER Olives. Celery. Radishes. Cream of Celery Soup. Roast Duck, Sage Stuffing. Creamed Potato. Mashed Sweet Potato. Boiled Onions, Butter Sauce. Crown of Japan on Toast. Apple Sauce. Endive Salad, French Dressing. Apple Pie. American Cheese. Christmas Plum Pudding, Hard Sauce. Nuts. Raisins. Figs. Coffee. Christmas morning arrives, and Jack is promptly banished from the apartment-his wife doesn't want him to see all those cookbooks. The reader, however, may stay and observe her preparations, which she describes so thoroughly that they form usable recipes: Celery soup is enriched with a quart of scalded milk and a quantity of butter "a trifle larger than a hen's egg"; three finely-chopped onions go into a bread stuffing for the centerpiece duck. Jack returns that afternoon with their friend, Mary, and the trio sit down to a modest but delicious dinner. Future Christmases will be richer, our time-traveling narrator reassures us, when Jack finds success as a writer, and Mary triumphs on the stage. But tonight, all that Jack and his wife could need is contained within the four walls of Poverty Flat. It's a departure, to be sure, from O. Henry's trademark twist ending. But the short story master, sentimental to a fault, would have approved..." </> |
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