The Hemingway Cookbook (10 page)

2 cloves garlic, crushed

Salt

Pepper

2 tablespoons dry white wine

2 tablespoon red wine vinegar

1 tablespoon beef broth

Wash and peel the potatoes. Place in a saucepan with enough cold salted water to cover. Bring to a boil and cook until tender, about 20 minutes. Drain the potatoes and cut into slices as soon as they’re cool enough to handle. Put the sliced potatoes into a medium bowl and toss gently with the olive oil, garlic, and salt and pepper to taste. In a small saucepan, heat the wine, vinegar, and broth until hot. Pour over the potatoes and toss gently. Be sure to include plenty of bread for mopping up the sauce.

Cervelas
with Mustard Sauce

Cervelas
are fat, short sausages made with pork and pork fat and seasoned with garlic or pepper. The name refers to brains, or
cervelles,
with which these sausages were formerly made. If
cervelas
are unavailable, you may substitute any fine pork sausage with garlic
.

1
HUNGRY YOUNG WRITER OR
2
SERVINGS

2
cervelas
, or other pork and garlic sausage

2 tablespoons butter

Bring a medium saucepan of water to a boil. Add the
cervelas
. Reduce heat and simmer for 5 minutes. Remove
cervelas
and rinse with cold water. Melt the butter in a skillet over medium heat. Cook the
cervelas
in the butter until lightly browned. Remove
cervelas
, cut in half lengthwise, and place on warm plate. Serve covered with mustard sauce.

Mustard Sauce

2 tablespoons butter

½ onion, finely chopped

½ cup dry white wine

1 tablespoon Dijon-style mustard

1 teaspoon vinegar

Juice of ½ lemon

Melt 1 tablespoon of the butter in a small pan over medium heat. Add the chopped onion and cook until translucent. Add the wine and cook until reduced by half. Stir in the mustard and vinegar. Add the lemon juice and the last tablespoon of butter. When the butter is melted, pour the sauce over the
cervelas
and serve immediately.

As Hemingway used the Luxembourg gardens to relieve his hunger, he used the Seine for thinking things through. He browsed the bookstalls along the quais, or sat to edit manuscripts for Ford Madox Ford’s
transatlantic review
, for which he worked as an unpaid assistant in the mid-1920s. He found that the thinking came easier along the river, “seeing people doing something that they understood,”
¹³
as the fishermen with the long, jointed cane poles understood their serious endeavors along the Seine:

They always caught some fish, and often they made excellent catches of the dace-like fish that were called
goujon
. They were delicious fried whole and I could eat a plateful. They were plump and sweet-fleshed with a finer flavor than fresh sardines even, and were not at all oily, and we ate them bones and all. One of the best places to eat them was at an openair restaurant built out over the river at Bas Meudon where we would go when we had money for a trip away from our quarter. It was called La Pêche Miraculeuse and had a splendid white wine that was a sort of Muscadet.
¹⁴

Friture de Goujon
(Fried Gudgeon)

2
TO
3
SERVINGS

Olive oil for frying

18 small gudgeon, or smelts

1 bottle beer

1 cup cornmeal

Salt

Lemon wedges

Heat the oil, deep enough for deep-frying, in a saucepan until just hot. Because these fish are too small to gut easily, simply wipe the fish with a cloth, then squeeze the underbelly to force the intestines and swim bladder out through the abdomen. Pour the beer into a small bowl. Dip each fish in beer, then dredge in cornmeal to coat. Shake off any excess.

Fry the fish in the barely hot oil until light yellow. Remove the fish and drain on brown paper or paper towels. Heat the oil until very hot (about 350° F). Return the fish to the very hot oil and fry until golden brown. Drain the fish again, sprinkle with salt to taste, and serve with lemon wedges.

Six Days at the Races

Spring was a magical season in Paris. “With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning.”
¹⁵
The only truly sad time in Paris was the false spring, when cold rains would beat back the season “so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life.”
¹⁶
And not just any season, but one that revived Ernest’s appetites for the sports of the city. Hemingway enjoyed taking in the six-day bicycle races at the Velodrome d’Hiver, near the Eiffel Tower. In the early 1920s, Hemingway took friend, writer, and fellow adventurer John Dos Passos to the races. Dos Passos recalled Ernest’s knowledge of the race and its riders but preferred to sit idly by eating and drinking:

I did enjoy the six day bicycle races with him. The Six Jours at the Vélo d’Hiver was fun. French sporting events had for me a special comical air that I enjoyed. We would collect, at the stalls and barrows of one of the narrow market streets we both loved, a quantity of wine and cheeses and crunch rolls, a pot of paté and perhaps a cold chicken, and sit up in the gallery. Hem knew all the statistics and the names and lives of the riders. His enthusiasm was catching but he tended to make business of it while I just liked to eat and drink and enjoy the show.
¹⁷

Lunch with John Dos Passos

Dos Passos was not alone in remembering those early days through gastronomic eyes. Hemingway simply would not allow his appetite for food and drink to impinge on his appetite for the intricacies of the sport. As we have seen (and will continue to see), Hemingway frequently enjoyed his food and drink as a postscript to sport and, of course, to writing. While Ernest wrote his biting satire of Sherwood Anderson,
The Torrents of Spring
, he remembered the food and drink he shared with Dos Passos while taking a break from work:

I wrote the foregoing chapter in two hours directly on the typewriter, and then went out to lunch with John Dos Passos, whom I consider a very forceful writer, and an exceedingly pleasant fellow besides. This is what is known in the provinces as log-rolling. We lunched on
rollmops, sole meunière, civet de lièvre à la cocotte, marmelade de pommes
, and washed it all down, as he used to say (eh, reader?) with a bottle of Montrachet 1919 with the sole, and a bottle of Hospice de Beaune 1919 apiece with the jugged hare. Mr. Dos Passos, I believe, shared a bottle of Chambertin with me over the
marmelade de pommes.
¹⁸

Hemingway standing between Gerald Murphy and John Dos Passos in Schruns, 1926.

Rollmops

6
TO
8
SERVINGS

6 fresh herrings, or 12 fresh fillets

2 cups vinegar

6-8 small pickled gherkins

1 onion, coarsely chopped

1 bay leaf

1 sprig dill

6 juniper berries

6 white peppercorns

Salt

Marinate the fish in a mixture of 1 cup vinegar and 1 cup water for 24 hours.

Remove the fish and, if whole, fillet. Lay the fillets skinside down. Place a piece of gherkin and a few pieces of chopped onion on each piece offish. Wrap the herring around the vegetables and secure with a toothpick. Bring the remaining cup of vinegar to a boil and allow to cool completely. Place the rolls in a large glass jar. Add the herbs and berries. Dilute the vinegar with 2 cups of water. Add a generous pinch of salt. Pour the vinegar-and-water solution over the fish to cover completely. Cover the jar with a lid or cellophane. Let stand in a cool place for 3 to 4 days. The exact combination of herbs is “the secret of the cook.” Some experimentation is necessary to find the combination to suit each individual taste.

Sole Meunière
(Fillet of Sole Miller’s Wife Style)

2
SERVINGS

½ cup all-purpose flour

2 large or 4 small sole fillets

Pepper

½ cup butter

Juice of ½ lemon

2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley

Salt

Lightly flour all of the fillets on both sides. Season with pepper to taste. Heat ¼ cup of the butter over medium heat until very hot and foamy. Add the fillets, being careful not to overcrowd the pan (it may take two batches). Brown the fish on both sides, 5 to 6 minutes to a side. Remove the fillets to a heated serving plate. Garnish with lemon juice, parsley, and salt and pepper to taste. Pour out the frying liquid and wipe the frying pan clean. Melt the remaining ¼ cup of butter until very lightly browned. Pour the melted butter over the fish. Serve immediately.

Civet de Lièvre à la Cocotte
(Jugged Hare)

3
TO
4
SERVINGS

1 hare, cleaned, gutted, and cut into pieces

4 cups red wine

8 onions, halved

1 carrot, coarsely chopped

1 sprig thyme

2 tablespoons butter

¼ pound salt pork, diced

2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

2 cups water

Bouquet garni (a few sprigs of parsley, thyme, rosemary, and bay leaf bundled and tied together)

4 cloves

1 bay leaf

½ pound mushrooms, halved

Salt

Freshly ground pepper

Marinate the hare overnight in 2 cups wine with 2 of the onions, the carrot, and the thyme. The following day, melt the butter in a casserole over medium heat. Add the salt pork and render until the pork is brown. Remove the pork and set aside. Remove the hare pieces from the marinade and pat dry. Brown the meat in the butter and pork fat. Stir in the flour, then add the 2 cups wine, water, bouquet garni, the remaining 6 onions, cloves, and bay leaf. Lower the heat and simmer, covered, for about 2 hours. Add the mushrooms and simmer for another 30 minutes. When the hare is cooked, place the pieces on a serving platter and keep warm. If you have the liver and blood of the hare, add the chopped liver to the blood and add to the cooking liquid. Bring the sauce to a boil, then strain through a fine sieve. Return the onions, mushrooms, and pieces of salt pork to the sauce. Season with salt and pepper to taste and pour over the hare.

Marmelade de Pommes
(Apple Conserve)

4
SERVINGS

6 apples, peeled, cored, and cut into quarters

1 cup sugar

2 tablespoons water

Place the apples, sugar, and water in a small saucepan. Cook over medium heat until the apples are soft. Purée the apples in a food processor or food mill. Return the purée to the saucepan and cook until bubbling. Allow to cool slightly and serve.

Beside the marathon bike races, there were boxing at the Cirque de Paris, tennis matches, and horse races. Ernest and Hadley occasionally took the cheap train to the steeplechase at Enghien or Auteuil, sat in the infield, ate a picnic lunch of sandwiches that Hadley made, and drank cheap wine from the cooperative in the Rue Mouffetard. As was the case with his writing, when there was a windfall of funds from a lucky day at the track, attitudes changed, fond memories returned, and thoughts turned to the haute cuisine of Paris. After one particularly fortunate outing, Ernest and Hadley stopped at Pruniers. Sitting at the bar, they dined on oysters and
Crabe Mexicaine
, enjoying their momentary affluence that lingered through the night until morning, when the all-too-familiar hunger returned and the writing resumed. Many years later, Papa would return to dine at Prunier with his fourth wife, Mary, and Marlene Dietrich. For now, though, Paris belongs to the young Hemingways, and hunger is elsewhere.