The Stag Cook Book: Written for Men by Men — Key Ideas to Explore

d tails and give them to the cat.

Add the cooked onions and garlic,—butter and all—to the strained bouillion from the heads and tails and allow to simmer for half an hour more, after seasoning to taste with salt and white pepper. Add about a gill of dry white wine of any variety,—Chablis, Cotes du Rhone or what not,—the cheaper the wine the better. Now take two smallish lobsters, alive, and if you have the heart, cut them into segments and take off the claws and cut _them_ into segments. Cook the massacred lobster for about a quarter of an hour in the liquid or liquor or bouillon above described and add a saltspoonful of dried Spanish saffron, while the whole is cooking together. If you can get mussels, cook also with the entire mess, a dozen or so,—in their shells if the shells be well scrubbed in advance. Somewhere in this process add about a tablespoonful of chopped parsley. Last of all, add the fish cut into convenient slices rather small, and let cook until done, but not long enough so that the fish becomes disintegrated. Remember there ought to be no violent boiling.

Before serving strain off most of the liquor and serve it first as soup with a slice of toast in the bottom of the plate. If the toast has been fried in advance in good butter, so much the better, but this is not necessary. Then eat all the solid part except the shells and sop up all the remaining gravy with bread, using your fingers to do the job and not a fork. Don’t leave a bit of it.

There ought to be enough of this stew for four people, but I can usually manage the whole thing myself with only the slightest assistance from my wife. Wine ought to be drunk with the meal, a good Burgundy Beaune or Chambertin. Later one should eat an artichoke cold vinaigrette, then some fruit and cheese and two small cups of well made black coffee. After this it is necessary to smoke a Corona Corona not too mild, and drink a small glass of Cointreau Sec. The bread ought to be _Pain Riche_ in flutes. The fruit may be fresh apricots, a few green almonds and perhaps some green gages.

The coffee ought to be drunk and the cigar smoked in the garden which must be in the vicinity of Mount Boron on the Grande Corniche or it may be in the Parc Imperial. God ought to be thanked either during or after the meal, and when it becomes a little too cold in the garden a fire should be built in the small living room and one should read Somerville & Ross’ _Recollections of an Irish R. M._, or Neil Lyon’s _Simple Simon_, or Belloc’s _Path to Rome_, or Richard Ford’s _Gatherings from Spain_ until bedtime.

Repeat the whole process on the following Friday.

God! How hungry I am.

PELOTAS Á LA PORTUGUESE

“_This serves from six to eight people and is my favorite dish._”

One quart can of tomatoes. Put in kettle on top of stove, simmer or let boil slowly for one and a half hours. Add pepper, salt, two onions cut in fine slices, four allspice and four cloves. The cloves and allspice to be added after it starts to boil. After two and a half hours add:

Two pounds chopped beef; add one onion, chopped fine, two cups bread crumbs, a little parsley, salt and pepper. Make into meat balls about the size of a plum. Put into sauce and boil one and one-half hours slowly. This makes fully three hours’ slow boiling for the sauce.

Use a package or a pound of spaghetti; not macaroni. Have a large pot of boiling water with about one tablespoonful of salt. Slide the spaghetti into the water. Do not break it. Boil exactly twenty minutes. Must be tender, not tough nor doughy.

To sauce, add three bay leaves one hour before taking off the stove.

Serve spaghetti on large platter, pouring tomato sauce over it. Serve pelotas on smaller platter, allowing a small quantity of sauce to remain on them.

Serve grated Parmesan cheese on side. Use a piece of cheese to grate, not bottled cheese.

_“Get a fat hen—the fatter the better.”_

Because this recipe comes from a Southern cook, there are no accurate measurements.

Sam would always recommend a “fat hen”—“the fatter the better,” and “’nough rice and plenty of pepper.”