Cookery books

Chafing with Frank

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It has been a while since I sat down to write something which wasn’t an application for money.

Before you think that Deepest Sussex and its reluctant housewife have been plunged into penury, roasting badgers and growing lentils, I would like to say that this is money for a work project.

And that is something I have not been able to say for some years.

So along with all the usual stuff of life I, maybe, just maybe, be about to embark on a lovely, sparkly new work project- but there is many a slip between cup and research funding so will be biding my time and just hoping.

Meanwhile, the Oxfam bookshop carries on and I cook, and the two sometimes come together.

The aga is back on – though the weather has hardly justified it up until the last few days, I don’t care.

And when stuck on how to construct just the right paragraph for the money proposal, I will always go and rustle up a soup, or a supper, and sometimes will rustle among the dead geraniums and prop up a dahlia or two.

I have a lot of cook books and they fall into categories:

Ones I use a lot

Ones I use one recipe from 

Ones I used to use a lot

Ones I would like to cook from but am intimidated by ( see also Yotam Ottalenghi’s Guardian recipes for which buying the ingredients in Petersfield is a hopeless task. Think Odysseus or The Lord of the Rings in terms of difficulty and length of mission.)

Impulse buys from Oxfam – which tend to sit there for a bit then get taken back to the shop and re-sold.

And a grey folder with all those recipes I have ripped out of magazines, sent to be by my mother, scrawled on a envelope by a friend, wrestled from a chef in a restaurant…..

But I am a sucker for a cookery book and a great book title.

This is written by a man, Frank Schloesser, and brought to the public by the delightfully named publishers Gay and Bird in 1905.

( Apparently they published 113 books which included Frank’s other book, The Greedy Book, but also such interesting titles as Japanese Girls and Women, The Arab, The Horse Of The Future, Penelope’s Irish Experience and then her Experiences in Scotland – the mind boggles.

My favourite title is a book by one John Cutler: On Passing Off. The Illegal Substitution Of The Goods Of One Trader For The Goods Of Another Trader. Splendid! )

Back to Frank and his plans to convert the world to cooking with chafing dishes.

( From Wikipedia:

A chafing dish (from the French chauffer, “to make warm”) is a kind of portable grate raised on a tripod, originally heated with charcoal in a brazier, and used for foods that require gentle cooking, away from the “fierce” heat of direct flames. The chafing dish could be used at table or provided with a cover for keeping food warm on a buffet. Double dishes that provide a protective water jacket are known as bains-marie and help keep delicate foods, such as fish, warm while preventing overcooking.)

He explains that a chafing dish means that you have more in the way of tasty morsels than huge helpings of food, and quotes a Chinese proverb which says that ‘most men dig their graves with their teeth, meaning thereby that we all eat too much. This is awfully true and sad and undeniable, and avoidable.’

I have to say it is both undeniable in our house and we haven’t got round to the avoidable bit yet.

He doesn’t take his light suppers lightly and quotes Ruskin ( who knew Ruskin knew anything about domestic cookery.)

There is a chapter on Preliminaries which includes not only the recipe for Jellied Ham but an idea of what you should eat before and after different kinds of theatre experiences:

I am at a loss to know whether and East Room menu might be Indian food? And as for an A.B.C shop, I need a friendly food historian to tell me.

And Frank is a friendly food historian. His recipes are peppered with interesting historical references.

But he is also stern:

‘ By the way, in cooking soups, as indeed in all Chafing-Dish cookery, I cannot too earnestly insist upon the use of wooden spoons for all stirring manipulations. Metal spoons, even silver, are abhorrent to the good cook.’ 

And insists on ‘ the most scrupulous cleanliness…..

‘The Chafist who neglects his apparatuses unworthy of the high mission with which he is charged, and deserves the appellation of the younger son of Archidamus III, King of Sparta.Cleanliness is next to all manner of things in this dusty world of ours, and absolutely nothing conduces more to the enjoyment of a meal that one has cooked oneself than the knowledge that everything is spick and span, and that one has contributed oneself thereto by a little extra care and forethought.’

( And, no I have no idea what Achidamus’s son’s appellation was.)

I have looked through Frank’s recipes and although I am tempted by some including The Alderman’s Walk ‘a very old English delicacy, the most exquisite portions of the most exquisite joint in Cookerydom, and so called because, at City dinners of our grandfather’s times, it is alleged to have been reserved for the Aldermen. ( It is a saddle of Southdown mutton done in a sauce with bread.)

I am less entranced by the idea of eels with nettles though Frank assures me that ‘they give a peculiar zest to the dish which is quite pleasant.’

As for Frank himself, I can find nothing about him. 

I know he went on to the write The Greedy Book and they are both still around in second hand book sites, but of Frank there is nothing in Wikipedia or easily found.

I am sure there are food historians who know all about his Gallimaufrey and Ham in Hades, and love his short essay on the merits and otherwise of sauces, and could tell me everything from his boyhood onwards and if so, could they let me know.

Frank and I are cookery friends though I am not about to invest in a chafing dish however a useful present it would be.


Sappho and Christmas 2017

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So, if you don’t get your Oxfam retail act together for Christmas sales, you are in trouble.

We, or less modestly I should say, I have been hoarding books for Christmas since late August – and not just any old books but those which are in such mint condition no one would know they are second hand.

Upstairs in the shop there have been teetering piles of plastic crates with imperious labels on them saying ‘please leave for table display’ or ‘please leave for Lucy to deal with’ or ‘gets your mitts off, I have these put aside for special use’ – no, not the last one.

Now here is a weird thing.

In the autumn sometime I had found an art book called Pastoral Landscapes which had lovely woodcut images which had links to pastoral poets. Never seen one before – and it was worth a bit.

A fellow volunteer, let’s call him Jim, was recently in the shop and, as ever, more than diligently sorting books, when I reached into one of those crates to show him this nice book.

We chatted about it and I went back to put it back for later use – and then he called to me.

I went into the other room, where he was, and the next book he had pulled out of the bag he was sorting was, yes dear reader, another copy of the very same book….

They have both sold.

Indeed by now almost all of the excellent Christmas gift books have sold so I am down to sorting out the ‘dregs’ and working out what table display to make of them.

When I work it out – actually that will be Thursday – it will be I think a green and red display and then next week we will go for the nativity look – though you have to race in immediately after Christmas to get rid of it as there is nothing worse than a nativity after the event.

We open Sundays in the run up to Christmas and so I had the key to the shop and, against the rules, went in early to create a Christmas table I had been planning – a blue table.

It was all blue china set out like a table setting with blue books on it and loathe though I am to take any credit, so many people said how lovely it looked.

IMG_1094

Now here is the thing, the table stuff sold slowly – but that is not just what it is there for (though that is nice too.)

It is there to get people into the shop and to appreciate what an effort we have made, how nice it looks, how we work to make the window and table look good every week of the year and especially at Christmas – and then go on to buy other books.

And they did.

That week, we made £2,499.87 – I think any volunteer in the shop would have put in that extra 13p to round it up if we had known.

By the way, you see that books called Snowflake and Schnapps? Well, it was a lovely cookery book – and dear reader, I was tempted.

But, lacking milk for essential tea-making one day, I went to Waitrose to get some and bumped into a regular customer who I knew to be a cook/proper chef type and I told him about it.

Once I had the milk, I went to the bank or something, and by the time I got back to the shop, there he was with it in his hand.

I had to take a photo of one recipe I had my eye on and he said we would share the books’s recipes, but no way was he letting it go.

So, one or two other little stories:

I have a habit of setting the people on the till a challenge to sell a particular book that shift.

So, we had a volunteer, let’s call her Margaret, who had a book to sell and when I came down from sorting things out upstairs (aka behind-the-scenes), it was still there on the desk.

I was berating her, in an oh-so-jocular fashion about the fact it was still there, and a couple heard us talking and said they hadn’t noticed it before but how lovely it was.

The man said his daughter was an artist – and it was an art book – so Margaret and I went into overdrive extolling its attributes.

But, he said, his daughter was a children’s book illustrator and this book wouldn’t be for her.

Oh, said I brightly, I can’t stop now, I have to get home, but I am sure I have a book on children’s illustrators somewhere upstairs. Give you number to Margaret and I will call you when I find where I have put it.

He did. I did. He bought it. Margaret sold the other book to the next customer.

The small books are often the interesting ones and I found one which was Sappho’s poetry with art nouveau illustrations of the period, about 4 inches tall, handcut pages and rare-ish.

I was showing it to a volunteer, let’s call her Judith, and we were admiring the illustrations.

She is a lovely woman who gardens, paints and decorates not only her own house but her son’s, she and I talk auctions, antiques, cooking, she also is an excellent needlewoman I understand, and she treks in by bus to volunteer with us.

She is a woman of a certain age and, given that we were talking about Sappho, the subject got onto sexuality, gender, homosexuality, gender fluidity, transgender issues, what a waste a good looking gay man is to us heterosexual women – however older we may be.

And, how all these issues should be on a live and let live and let’s get past it basis – all the normal chat of an Oxfam volunteering conversation – but apparently not one her granddaughter had expected to find so easy when she had broached the subject.

(Don’t, granddaughters, assume stuff about your lovely grandmas.)

The book was worth a bit, so we agreed what we needed was a relatively well off lesbian shopping in Oxfam Petersfield for that just so unusual Christmas present.

The book is still in our cabinet should you be that person.