Thanksgiving – Biblioklept

Forty Literary Recipes for Thanksgiving (Or Any Other Time)

November 27, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

Eudora Welty’s Jellied Apples

November 26, 2025November 25, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

Pare and core one dozen apples of a variety which will jell successfully. Winesap and Jonathan are both good.

To each dozen apples moisten well two and one-half cups of sugar. Allow this to boil for about five minutes. Then immerse apples in this syrup, allowing plenty of room about each apple. Add the juice of one-half lemon, cover closely, and allow to cook slowly until apples appear somewhat clear. Close watching and frequent turning is necessary to prevent them from falling apart.

Remove from stove and fill centers with a mixture of chopped raisins, pecans, and crystallized ginger, the latter adding very much to the flavor of the finished dish. Sprinkle each apple with granulated sugar and baste several times with the thickening syrup, then place in a 350-degree oven to glaze without cover on vessel. Baste several times during this last process.

Eudora Welty’s recipe for jellied apples is from a pamphlet written for and distributed by the Mississippi Advertising Commission in 1936. Her recipes from that pamphlet are widely available online.

George Orwell’s Nice Cup of Tea

November 26, 2025November 25, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

A Nice Cup of Tea
If you look up ‘tea’ in the first cookery book that comes to hand you will probably find that it is unmentioned; or at most you will find a few lines of sketchy instructions which give no ruling on several of the most important points.
This is curious, not only because tea is one of the main stays of civilisation in this country, as well as in Eire, Australia and New Zealand, but because the best manner of making it is the subject of violent disputes.
When I look through my own recipe for the perfect cup of tea, I find no fewer than eleven outstanding points. On perhaps two of them there would be pretty general agreement, but at least four others are acutely controversial. Here are my own eleven rules, every one of which I regard as golden:
First of all, one should use Indian or Ceylonese tea. China tea has virtues which are not to be despised nowadays — it is economical, and one can drink it without milk — but there is not much stimulation in it. One does not feel wiser, braver or more optimistic after drinking it. Anyone who has used that comforting phrase ‘a nice cup of tea’ invariably means Indian tea. Secondly, tea should be made in small quantities — that is, in a teapot. Tea out of an urn is always tasteless, while army tea, made in a cauldron, tastes of grease and whitewash. The teapot should be made of china or earthenware. Silver or Britanniaware teapots produce inferior tea and enamel pots are worse; though curiously enough a pewter teapot (a rarity nowadays) is not so bad.
Thirdly, the pot should be warmed beforehand. This is better done by placing it on the hob than by the usual method of swilling it out with hot water.
Fourthly, the tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right. In a time of rationing, this is not an idea that can be realised on every day of the week, but I maintain that one strong cup of tea is better than twenty weak ones. All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes — a fact which is recognised in the extra ration issued to old-age pensioners.
Fifthly, the tea should be put straight into the pot. No strainers, muslin bags or other devices to imprison the tea. In some countries teapots are fitted with little dangling baskets under the spout to catch the stray leaves, which are supposed to be harmful. Actually one can swallow tea-leaves in considerable quantities without ill effect, and if the tea is not loose in the pot it never infuses properly.
Sixthly, one should take the teapot to the kettle and not the other way about. The water should be actually boiling at the moment of impact, which means that one should keep it on the flame while one pours. Some people add that one should only use water that has been freshly brought to the boil, but I have never noticed that it makes any difference.
Seventhly, after making the tea, one should stir it, or better, give the pot a good shake, afterwards allowing the leaves to settle.
Eighthly, one should drink out of a good breakfast cup — that is, the cylindrical type of cup, not the flat, shallow type. The breakfast cup holds more, and with the other kind one’s tea is always half cold before one has well started on it.
Ninthly, one should pour the cream off the milk before using it for tea. Milk that is too creamy always gives tea a sickly taste.
Tenthly, one should pour tea into the cup first. This is one of the most controversial points of all; indeed in every family in Britain there are probably two schools of thought on the subject. The milk-first school can bring forward some fairly strong arguments, but I maintain that my own argument is unanswerable. This is that, by putting the tea in first and stirring as one pours, one can exactly regulate the amount of milk whereas one is liable to put in too much milk if one does it the other way round.
Lastly, tea — unless one is drinking it in the Russian style — should be drunk without sugar. I know very well that I am in a minority here. But still, how can you call yourself a true tea-lover if you destroy the flavour of your tea by putting sugar in it? It would be equally reasonable to put in pepper or salt. Tea is meant to be bitter, just as beer is meant to be bitter. If you sweeten it, you are no longer tasting the tea, you are merely tasting the sugar; you could make a very similar drink by dissolving sugar in plain hot water.
Some people would answer that they don’t like tea in itself, that they only drink it in order to be warmed and stimulated, and they need sugar to take the taste away. To those misguided people I would say: Try drinking tea without sugar for, say, a fortnight and it is very unlikely that you will ever want to ruin your tea by sweetening it again.
These are not the only controversial points to arise in connexion with tea drinking, but they are sufficient to show how subtilised the whole business has become. There is also the mysterious social etiquette surrounding the teapot (why is it considered vulgar to drink out of your saucer, for instance?) and much might be written about the subsidiary uses of tea leaves, such as telling fortunes, predicting the arrival of visitors, feeding rabbits, healing burns and sweeping the carpet. It is worth paying attention to such details as warming the pot and using water that is really boiling, so as to make quite sure of wringing out of one’s ration the twenty good, strong cups that two ounces, properly handled, ought to represent.

George Orwell’s recipe/method for a nice cup of tea was first published in the 12 Jan. 1946 issue of the Evening Standard. Image via the Orwell Society.

Walter M. Miller Jr.’s Gopher Tortoise Stew

November 25, 2025November 25, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

Gopher Stew

A book of science fiction recipes should contain a few formulae for things to be cooked in a tin can in the forest after World War III. In the southeast, one such recipe might read simply: Catch, kill, and dress one 10-12 inch gopher, and boil meat until tender, adding any available herbs such as wild garlic and sabal palmetto hearts. The “gopher” of the recipe is not a rodent but a burrowing land tortoise, Gopherus polyphemus, common in this region and long a part of that swampland cuisine lately called “soul food.” In the summer and early fall, gophers are seen migrating across roads and through sandy clearings; when you approach, the animal’s only defense is to pull himself inside his shell and batten down the hatches. Because of the shell, a slow metabolism, and a subterranean abode, the gopher should have a better resistance to radiation than most hard-to-catch game. In the winter, you will find them underground, but dig with caution; the gopher sometimes shares his bole with a south-
eastern diamondback.

Calculate the position of the retracted head and kill either by putting a bullet through the shell just behind this point, or by breaking through the shell with hammer, hatchet, or pointed stone, and inserting a sharp knife to sever the neck. Chop all around the edges of the bottom shell plate, completely severing it from the top shell, insert a machete or long stiff butcher knife between the plate and the belly and slice the plate free. Dump the entrails, not bothering to look into the matter of reptilian giblets unless you’re really starving. By now you are feeling somewhat guilty because the headless beast keeps thrashing and waving its paws as it tries to crawl away: it’s not a mammal, so forget it. Reptilian meat is very persistent. Grasp the paws with a pair of pliers and stretch them out (against their will) while you cut around behind them and free the meat from the shell. A large gopher should yield about a quart of meat, including bone. Scrub the feet thoroughly, but do not attempt to skin or declaw, part of the backwoods charm of this dish is the sight of scaly reptilian feet floating with the onions and carrots in the tomatoey goop. Treat the meat with an ordinary papayin-based tenderizer, liquid or powder, and freeze it until you find another tortoise if one is not enough. (One does not ordinarily hunt the creatures, but encounters then while fishing, hunting, or walking in the woods.) Other types of turtle nay be substituted for gopher.

1 quart tortoise meat chunks
3-4 slices bacon
1. 1b. small peeled onions
4-5 carrots, sliced
4-5 small potatoes, if desired
8-9 pods of okra, sliced
3 large, red, ripe bell peppers (or large jar pimentos)
6 hot red peppers (meat only, discard seeds)
3 cloves garlic
1 small can tomato sauce
half glass of sherry, two bay leaves, several sprigs (or a teaspoon of dry) thyme, oregano, rosemary, salt and pepper

Fry out the bacon, then brown the gopher meat, trying not to let it jump out of the pan if recently killed (it’s less active if frozen). Mince the hot pepper meat, the garlic, one of the onions, and a small carrot, and add to the browning meat, along with the herbs. Add the tomato sauce and a little water, cover lightly, und Sumer until the meat is nearly tender. Add the sherry, herbs, and vegetables; cook until done. Okra is mucilaginous and has some thickening effect, but if there is too much liquid, thicken with a little brown roux or preferably, with powdered sassafras leaves (or gumbo fillet).

Note: the fire in hot peppers is mostly in the seeds; if you use seeds and all, use only one pepper, not six.

Walter M. Miller’s recipe for “Gopher Stew” is collected in collected in Cooking Out of This World (ed. Anne McCaffrey, 1973).

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Valley Succotash

November 25, 2025November 25, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

Líriv Metadí or Valley Succotash

Wash about two cups of small red beans (the Valley metadí is very like the Mexican frijole), and cook till done (a couple of hours) with half an onion, three or four garlic cloves, and a bay leaf.

Simmer about a cup and a half of parched corn until thoroughly cooked, and drain (or in season use fresh corn cut off the cob, uncooked).

Simmer a handful of dried black mushrooms for half an hour or so, and keep them in their cooking broth.

When all these ingredients are done combine them, along with:

the juice and pulp of a lemon, or some preserved tamarind pulp an onion chopped and fried in oil with some finely chopped garlic and a spoonful of cumin seeds

a large, mild green chile of the chile verde type, or a small, hot green chile (but not bell pepper), seeded and chopped fine

three or four tomatoes peeled and chopped coarsely

add, as seasoning, oregano, winter savory, and more lemon to taste

add dried red chile if you want it hot

To thicken the sauce, one dried tomato-paste ball was added; our equivalent would be two or three tablespoons of thick tomato paste. (If fresh tomatoes are not in season, double or triple the quantity of tomato paste.)

All this simmers for about an hour.

Serve with chopped raw onion to garnish, and a sour sauce or chutney made of green tomatoes or tomatillos, flavored with fresh or dry coriander leaf.

This dish, “too heavy for rice,” was accompanied by cornbreads, either of the hoe cake or the tortilla type.

From Ursula Le Guin’s 1985 novel Always Coming Home.

Samuel Beckett’s Assassination Custard

November 25, 2025November 24, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

When Samuel Beckett went to Paris in 1930 he discovered his true home, a place of liberation in both the personal and professional sense. He became a member of James Joyce’s inner circle, and was one of the many accoucheurs at the prolonged delivery of Finnegans Wake.

In the early hours of 7 January 1939, Beckett was returning home with friends from a café when he was accosted by a pimp called Prudent. When Beckett repelled the pimp’s advances he stuck a flick knife straight into Beckett’s chest, missing the heart by a mere whisker. His companions roared for help and were assisted by a passing piano student, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, and Beckett was rushed to hospital. Joyce insisted on paying for a private room for him, and lent him his favourite reading lamp. Nora made one of her special custard puddings to nourish the invalid. The cool and efficient piano student eventually became Mrs Beckett.

5 egg yolks loz (30g) castor sugar
1 pt (600ml) single cream
2 tbsp brandy
Preheat oven to 160°C (325°F, Gas mark 3).

Grease a shallow ovenproof dish (about 900ml or 1½ pt capacity). Beat the egg yolks and castor sugar together. Heat the cream gently, do not boil, and stir in the brandy. Very gradually add the warmed cream to the egg mixture, beating constantly. Pour into the dish. Place the dish in a baking tin and pour sufficient hot water into the tin to come half-way up the dish. Bake for 45 minutes or until set.
Serves four.

From A Trifle, a Coddle, a Fry: An Irish Literary Cookbook by Veronica Jane O’Mara and Fionnuala O’Reilly.

John Barth’s Chesapeake Bay Recipes

November 25, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

FIVE CHESAPEAKE BAY RECIPES

Oysters Chesapeake
1. Tong oysters.
2. Shuck.
3. Eat.

Softshell Clams Chesapeake
1. Dig softshell clams.
2. Steam.
3. Eat.

Cherrystone Clams Chesapeake
See recipe for Softshell Clams Chesapeake

Blue Crabs Chesapeake
1. Net blue crabs.
2. Steam.
3. Eat.

Champagne Chesapeake
1. Pop champagne.
2. Toast.
3. Drink.

John Barth’s “Five Chesapeake Bay Recipes.”

From The Great American Writers’ Cookbook (ed. Dean Faulkner Wells, 1981).

Ernest Hemingway’s Wild West Hamburger

November 25, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

Ernest Hemingway’s favorite burger:

FROM EXPERIMENTING,

PAPA’S FAVORITE HAMBURGER. There is no reason why a fried hamburger has to turn out gray, greasy, paper-thin and tasteless. You can add all sorts of goodies and flavors to the ground beef — minced mushrooms, cocktail sauce, minced garlic and onion, chopped almonds, a big dollop of piccadilli, or whatever your eye lights on. Papa prefers this combination.

Ingredients —

1 lb. ground lean beef

2 cloves, minced garlic

2 little green onions, finely chopped

1 heaping teaspoon, India relish

2 tablespoons, capers

1 heaping teaspoon, Spice Islands sage

Spice Islands Beau Monde Seasoning — ½ teaspoon

Spice Islands Mei Yen Powder — ½ teaspoon **

1 egg, beaten in a cup with a fork

About one third cup dry red or white wine.

1 tablespoon cooking oil

What to do —

Break up the meat with a fork and scatter the garlic, onion and dry seasonings over it, then mix them into the meat with a fork or your fingers. Let the bowl of meat sit out of the icebox for ten or fifteen minutes while you set the table and make the salad. Add the relish, capers, everything else including wine and let the meat sit, quietly marinating, for another ten minutes if possible. Now make four fat, juicy patties with your hands. The patties should be an inch thick, and soft in texture but not runny. Have the oil in your frying-pan hot but not smoking when you drop in the patties and then turn the heat down and fry the burgers about four minutes. Take the pan off the burner and turn the heat high again. Flip the burgers over, put the pan back on the hot fire, then after one minute, turn the heat down again and cook another three minutes. Both sides of the burgers should be crispy brown and the middle pink and juicy.

More at The Paris Review; image via.

Nineteen Literary Recipes for Thanksgiving (Or Any Other Time)

November 28, 2024November 28, 2024 BibliokleptLeave a comment

Breakfast

Zelda Fitzgerald’s Special Breakfast

Vladimir Nabokov’s Eggs à la Nabocoque

Lunch

Thomas Pynchon’s European Pizza

Hunter S. Thompson’s Open-Face Cigarette-Special Hot-and-Cold Sandwich with Artichoke Appetizer

Soup

Ishmael Reed’s Texas Gumbo

Denise Levertov’s Black Bean Soup

Donald Barthelme’s Fine Homemade Soups

Sides

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Crab Nebula

John Cage’s Homemade Bread

Biblioklept’s Oven Rice

Mains

John Brunner’s Squid with Pine Nuts

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ Recipes for Coot Surprise, Jugged Rabbit, and Jellied Tongue

Ernest Hemingway’s Campfire Trout

William Faulkner’s Cured Ham

Libations

Thomas Pynchon’s Crocodile (A Traditional Anarchist Favorite)

Walker Percy’s Mint Julep

Poul Anderson’s All My Own Invention

Dessert

Anita Loos’ Kitten’s Tongue

Elizabeth Bishop’s Brownies

Elizabeth Bishop’s Brownies

November 28, 2024November 28, 2024 BibliokleptLeave a comment

Elizabeth Bishop’s brownie recipe:

4 squares bitter chocolate (or about a cup of cocoa)
4 eggs
1/2 cup butter
2 1/2 cups white sugar
1 cup flour
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 cups chopped nuts

Melt the chocolate and butter together – or, if you use cocoa, melt along with half the sugar and a little water. Cool slightly and beat in eggs and rest of sugar.

Sift in flour, add vanilla and nuts and beat. The batter is fairly stiff – doesn’t run much. Spread about <——————> this thick in square pan.

Bake in a slow oven – about 45 minutes to an hr., depending on pan, thickness, etc. They should be dry on top, just pulling away from edges, but still rather damp in the middle. Cut in squares in pan and remove with spatula.

This makes chewy brownies – for a harder kind, use brown sugar and an extra egg – or half brown sugar – Can be made thicker and used hot with whipped cream on top for a desert [sic] –

Via the excellent blog Paper and Salt, whose author Nicole acquired it via Bishop’s at Vassar College.

Thomas Pynchon’s Recipe for the Crocodile, a Traditional Anarchist Cocktail

November 28, 2024 Biblioklept1 Comment

“I’ll be in the bar,” said Reef. Yzles-Bains was in fact one of the few places on the continent of Europe where a sober Anarchist could find a decent Crocodile—equal amounts of rum, absinthe, and the grape spirits known as trois-six—a traditional Anarchist favorite, which Loïc the bartender, a veteran of the Paris Commune, claimed to have been present at the invention of.

A cocktail recipe from Thomas Pynchon’s novel Against the Day. (More on trois-six here; good luck finding real absinthe).

Bonus recipe: Kit Traverse’s drink invention:

“‘Love in the Shadows of Pera,’ ” Kit said. “It’s just Creme de Menthe and beer.”

Anita Loos’ Recipe for Kitten’s Tongue

November 27, 2024November 27, 2024 Biblioklept1 Comment

Anita Loos’ recipe for kitten’s tongue:

Take 2 eggs and not quite a cup of sugar. Whip them just a little, then add not quite a cupful of melted butter and a cup of flour. Stir the mixture, spread it on a tin in small quantities, bake them. Roll in nuts and sugar.

From Famous Recipes of Famous Women (ed. Florence Stratton, 1925).

Poul Anderson’s Cocktail All My Own Invention

November 27, 2024November 28, 2024 BibliokleptLeave a comment

Poul Anderson’s cocktail “All My Own Invention” is collected in collected in Cooking Out of This World (ed. Anne McCaffrey, 1973).

All My Own Invention

2 oz. dark rum, 2 oz. dry vermouth, 1 oz. fresh lemon juice, stirred over ice. Sneaky.

Walker Percy’s Cud’n Walker’s Uncle Will’s Favorite Mint Julep Receipt

November 27, 2024 BibliokleptLeave a comment

As a postscript to his 1957 essay “Bourbon,” Walker Percy offers his favorite recipe for the drink:

Reader, just in case you don’t want to knock it back straight and would rather monkey around with perfectly good Bourbon, here’s my favorite recipe, “Cud’n Walker’s Uncle Will’s Favorite Mint Julep Receipt.”

You need excellent Bourbon whiskey; rye or Scotch will not do. Put half an inch of sugar in the bottom of the glass and merely dampen it with water. Next, very quickly—and here is the trick in the procedure—crush your ice, actually powder it, preferably in a towel with a wooden mallet, so quickly that it remains dry, and, slipping two sprigs of fresh mint against the inside of the glass, cram the ice in right to the brim, packing it with your hand. Finally, fill the glass, which apparently has no room left for anything else, with Bourbon, the older the better, and grate a bit of nutmeg on the top. The glass will frost immediately. Then settle back in your chair for half an hour of cumulative bliss.

Uncle Will shows up a few times in Signposts in a Strange Land, a collection of essays that includes “Bourbon” along with 1965’s “Uncle Will,” which offers this nugget:

Early each afternoon he made himself a pitcher of vodka martinis—no one had ever heard of such a drink in Mississippi in the 1930s—and set up shop in the pantry, listened and talked to any and all comers.

Also from “Bourbon”:

Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.

1926: As a child watching my father in Birmingham, in the exurbs, living next to number-6 fairway of the New Country Club, him disdaining both the bathtub gin and white lightning of the time, aging his own Bourbon in a charcoal keg, on his hands and knees in the basement sucking on a siphon, a matter of gravity requiring cheek pressed against cement floor, the siphon getting going, the decanter ready, the first hot spurt into his mouth not spat out.

1933: My uncle’s sun parlor in the Mississippi Delta and toddies on a Sunday afternoon, the prolonged and meditative tinkle of silver spoon against crystal to dissolve the sugar; talk, tinkle, talk; the talk mostly political: “Roosevelt is doing a good job; no, the son of a bitch is betraying his class.”

1934: Drinking at a Delta dance, the boys in bi-swing jackets and tab collars, tough-talking and profane and also scared of the girls and therefore safe in the men’s room. Somebody passes around bootleg Bourbon in a Coke bottle. It’s awful. Tears start from eyes, faces turn red. “Hot damn, that’s good!”

1935: Drinking at a football game in college. UNC versus Duke. One has a blind date. One is lucky. She is beautiful. Her clothes are the color of the fall leaves and her face turns up like a flower. But what to say to her, let alone what to do, and whether she is “nice” or “hot”—a distinction made in those days. But what to say? Take a drink, by now from a proper concave hip flask (a long way from the Delta Coke bottle) with a hinged top. Will she have a drink? No. But it’s all right. The taste of the Bourbon(Cream of Kentucky) and the smell of her fuse with the brilliant Carolina fall and the sounds of the crowd and the hit of the linemen in a single synesthesia.

1941: Drinking mint juleps, famed Southern Bourbon drink, though in the Deep South not really drunk much. In fact, they are drunk so seldom that when, say, on Derby Day somebody gives a julep party, people drink them like cocktails, forgetting that a good julep holds at least five ounces of Bourbon. Men fall facedown unconscious, women wander in the woods disconsolate and amnesiac, full of thoughts of Kahlil Gibran and the limber lost.

Would you believe the first mint julep I had I was sitting not on a columned porch but in the Boo Snooker bar of the New Yorker Hotel with a Bellevue nurse in 1941? The nurse, a nice upstate girl, head floor nurse, brisk, swift, good-looking; Bellevue nurses, the best in the world and this one the best of Bellevue, at least the best-looking. The julep, an atrocity, a heavy syrupy Bourbon and water in a small glass clotted with ice. But good!

Biblioklept’s Oven Rice

November 27, 2024 BibliokleptLeave a comment

I’ve been sharing literary recipes on Biblioklept, mostly around Thanksgiving and Christmas, since I first started the blog back in 2009. The first entry was Zora Neale Hurston’s mulatto rice.

I’ve enjoyed taking note of recipes (or approximations of recipes) in the books I’ve read and sharing them here, as well as recipes authored by authors (printed originally in cookbooks or elsewhere). I’ve rehashed the recipes each Thanksgiving (here’s last year’s entry), but this Thanksgiving I thought I’d search for new stuff—hence the flurry of recipes on the blog the past few days. In the same spirit, I figured I’d share a simple staple in our household: a recipe for oven rice.

Really, this isn’t so much a recipe as it is a technique. My aunt taught me how to cook rice in the oven over twenty years ago and I haven’t looked back. I’ve employed this technique to cook all kinds of rice: long grain and short grain; jasmine, brown, wild, basmati, sushi and so on. It even works for middlins (but not grits). I’ve cooked this rice in smaller and larger batches, used different stocks, added vegetables, used a variety of oils and fats; I’ve cooked the rice in at least five different ovens. It always turns out perfect.

Here is what you need:

An enameled cast iron Dutch oven.

An oven and a cook top.

A cup of rice.

Two cups of stock or water. I almost always use stock that I make on Sundays.

Oil or fat; I usually use olive oil or schmalz if I have it.

Salt.

Here is how you make the rice:

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

Preheat your stock or water if it is cold. The liquid need not be aboil or anything, but it can’t hit the pan cold.

Coat the bottom of the Dutch oven with oil, turn the cook top eye to high, throw in your rice and add salt (more salt than you think you need).

Stir the rice until it’s coated with oil and salt and cook it until it’s nearly translucent—but you’re not making a pilaf here, please.

Add your liquid (really, the liquid should be a stock, which is easy to make from any bones or scraps you have about).

Bring the rice to not quite boiling and make sure it doesn’t stick to the bottom of your pan. But don’t overagitate it. If need be, remove the pan from the eye in the event you’ve misjudged how long it takes your oven to heat to 350°F. You’re not cooking the rice on the stove top; you simply want the liquid to be close to the same temperature as the oven.

Cover the rice and put it in the oven, setting a thirty minute timer or simply attending to the time yourself.

Now is the perfect time to read a short story and drink a glass of white wine, as you’ve already prepped a suitable match for this lovely oven rice, yes? Butter beans and chorizo with the onions you caramelized on Monday? Roasted garlic and peppers? Field peas cooked with a leftover smoked chicken thigh? Even a quick spinach wilt with a few tomato slices or an egg on top will do.

But you’ve taken care of that; read your story, drink your wine.

Remove the rice from the oven after thirty minutes. It will stay nice and hot in the enameled cast iron dish for an hour or more. If you’ve neglected to prepare butter beans or field peas or spinach—or even a can of sardines and hot sauce from your pantry—you can eat this rice with butter and salt and lots of pepper. And maybe you’ll have enough peace to read another story while you eat.

Hunter S. Thompson’s Open Face Cigarette Special Hot and Cold Sandwich with Artichoke Appetizer

November 27, 2024November 27, 2024 BibliokleptLeave a comment

I’m pretty sure there should be some hyphens in the title of Hunter S. Thompson’s recipe for “open face cigarette special hot and cold sandwich with artichoke appetizer.” From The Great American Writers’ Cookbook (ed. Dean Faulkner Wells, 1981).

OPEN FACE CIGARETTE SPECIAL HOT AND COLD SANDWICH WITH ARTICHOKE APPETIZER

Ingredients

1 Artichoke

1 stalk of celery

1 onion

1 tomato

one quarter lb. butter

1 container cottage cheese

1 can Ortega whole green chilis

1 lemon

mayonnaise

vinegar

4 strips of bacon

1 slice dill rye bread

La Victoria green taco sauce

Directions

Fill a large pot three quarters full with water and add celery and half of the onion. Bring to a boil.

Add artichoke, cover and boil for 45 minutes. While you are waiting for the artichoke to cook you can prepare the sauce for it and the sandwich.

Sauce:

Mix 3 heaping tablespoons of mayonnaise with one table spoon of Dijon mustard. Add a splash of vinegar and a squeeze of lemon.

Cigarette Special

Cook bacon and put aside.

Butter the slice of rye bread generously and toast until the bread is light brown and the butter is sizzling.

Spread cottage cheese exactly one quarter inch thick on the toast.

Cut Ortega whole green chilis into 4 one quarter inch strips and place lengthwise on top of cottage cheese.

Add bacon to sandwich.

Cut 3 or 4 thin slices of tomato and place on top of bacon.

Cut 2 or 3 very thin slices of onion and put those on top of the tomatoes.

Then spread another one quarter inch thick layer of cottage cheese.

Salt and pepper and garnish with La Victoria green taco sauce.

Then cover the open face sandwich with Reynolds Wrap, leaving the bottom of the toast uncovered. Timing is crucial at this point. The artichoke should be well-boiled and ready to eat and all sandwich ingredients prepared for the final mix before the bread is toasted for the first time.

The sandwich must be lashed together and toasted (twice) in less than 5 minutes, or the toast will get limp and soggy.

When you have finished eating your artichoke appetizer and are ready to eat the Cigarette Special, place the sandwich back into the toaster oven and toast for about one minute. Remove Reynolds Wrap and you will now have a hot buttered toast cold cottage cheese cigarette special.

The procedure by steps:

Drink good whiskey while boiling artichoke and frying bacon.

Prepare sandwich ingredients.

Eat artichoke leaves

Mix sandwich and toast.

Eat artichoke heart, with good beer.

Eat sandwich.

Drink coffee and good whiskey, with sharp chocolate.

Zelda Fitzgerald’s Bacon n’ Eggs

November 27, 2024November 26, 2024 BibliokleptLeave a comment

Zelda Fitzgerald’s “recipe” for breakfast:

See if there is any bacon, and if there is ask the cook which pan to fry it in. Then ask if there are any eggs, and if so try and persuade the cook to poach two of them. It is better not to attempt toast, as it burns very easily. Also in the case of bacon do not turn the fire too high, or you will have to get out of the house for a week. Serve preferably on china plates, though gold or wood will do if handy.

From Famous Recipes of Famous Women (ed. Florence Stratton, 1925)

Breakfast

Soup

Sides

Mains

Libations

Dessert

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Breakfast

Lunch

Soup

Sides

Mains

Libations

Dessert

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