The Hemingway Cookbook (9 page)

Apple Tart

1 10-
INCH TART

For the Dough

½ cup butter

1½ cups all-purpose flour

2 tablespoons sugar

¼ cup ice water

For the Filling

4 baking apples, such as Granny Smith or Stayman, peeled and cored

1½ tablespoons lemon juice

4 tablespoons sugar

2 tablespoons melted butter

To make the dough with a food processor, fit the processor with the metal blade. Cut the butter into small pieces and place in the bowl of the food processor. Add the flour and sugar. Blend together until dough just begins to adhere to the sides of the bowl. Add the ice water and continue blending until the dough starts to stick together. Turn the dough out onto a floured surface. Form the dough into a ball, wrap in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least 2 hours.

To make the dough by hand, cut the butter into small pieces. In a large mixing bowl, combine the flour and sugar. Cut the butter into the dry mix with a pastry blender or two knives until it has the texture of coarse crumbs. Add the ice water slowly and mix with a wooden spoon until completely incorporated. Turn the dough out onto a floured surface and knead gently, pushing part of the dough away from you with the heel of your hand, and folding it over onto itself. Repeat a few times. Form the dough into a ball, wrap in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least 2 hours.

When the dough has chilled, turn it out onto a floured surface. Roll the dough, lifting and turning a quarter-turn after each roll, to a circle of ¼-inch thickness. Transfer the dough to a buttered 10-inch tart pan by rolling the dough around the rolling pin and unrolling it onto the pan. Work the dough into the pan, gently lifting to cover the bottom and sides evenly. Fold over any excess and crimp decoratively. Refrigerate the tart shell for at least 30 minutes, or until ready for filling.

When the shell has chilled, preheat the oven to 350° F. Prick the bottom of the shell several times with a fork. Line the surface of the shell with aluminum foil and fill with dry beans to prevent shrinking or heaving. Bake the tart shell for 20 minutes.

To make the filling, cut the apples into thin slices and toss in a bowl with the lemon juice. Arrange the slices in the tart shell in two layers of overlapping, concentric circles, sprinkling half the sugar on each layer. Drizzle the finished tart with melted butter. Bake at 350° F for about 30 minutes, or until the crust is golden brown. Serve warm.

It was not until March 1922, that Ernest found the courage to call on Gertrude Stein at her studio at 27 Rue de Fleurus. He had no doubt borrowed her books from Shakespeare and Company and was eager to affirm Anderson’s assessment of the importance of her experimental writings, but as a 22-year-old aspiring writer with roots in journalism and a taste for Kipling, he just didn’t get it. When he and Hadley finally visited Gertrude and her partner, Alice Toklas, Ernest could not possibly understand the profound impact that this squat woman with the mobile face would have on his life and his ability to write:

Alice Toklas (left) and Gertrude Stein in the salon of their pavilion located in the courtyard of 27 rue de Fleurus.

My wife and I had called on Miss Stein, and she and the friend who lived with her had been very cordial and friendly and we had loved the big studio with the great paintings. It was like one of the best rooms in the finest museum except there was a big fireplace and it was warm and comfortable and they gave you good things to eat and tea and natural distilled liqueurs made from purple plums, yellow plums or wild raspberries.
⁶

Hemingway spent many afternoons sitting before Miss Stein in the studio, listening attentively to her instructions on the rhythm of words, the power of repetition, and sex and writers and life. She found him an extremely handsome young man, eager to learn. Their friendship grew into the relationship between master and disciple, and each benefited. Ernest, while working for Ford Madox Ford on the
Transatlantic Review
, insisted that Ford publish Stein’s immense
The Making of Americans
serially in the magazine. As with most friends of those days, where Ernest was once the willing student, eventually the success of the disciple overshadowed that of the master. Ernest was often less than gracious, seeing clearly the faults and shortcomings of those whom he had once so deeply admired. Stein was no exception. He saw in her the cardinal vice of writers, one that he could never forgive: laziness. He saw her through new, seemingly clearer eyes, her genius turned to arrogance, and their friendship dissolved in venomous public critiques. In the early days, though, when there was much to learn and a childlike eagerness to listen, Ernest drank in the warmth of Miss Stein’s studio and partook of her philosophy as well as of her food and drink. The following recipes are adapted from
The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook
.

Visitandines

These small cakes were first prepared for Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas by Léonie, an early
femme de ménage
in their home. She claimed that the name was derived from the religious order of the Visitation, the nuns of which first prepared them
. Visitandines
were invented to help the nuns use up their surplus egg whites
.

ABOUT
36
CAKES

¼ cup butter

8 egg whites

cup sifted all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

½ cup apricot jam

Preheat the oven to 400° F
.

In a saucepan, heat the butter slowly until slightly browned. Remove from heat and allow to cool. Combine 6 of the egg whites in a bowl and stir very slowly with a wooden spoon until completely mixed. This step may take up to 15 minutes. Fold in the flour and mix until perfectly smooth. Add the vanilla and heated butter. Beat the 2 remaining egg whites to stiff peaks, then add to the batter.

Lightly butter small muffin tins. Fill halfway with batter and bake for 15 to 20 minutes, or until
visitandines
are pale gold in color. Remove from tins to a cooling rack. In a small saucepan, heat the apricot jam just to boiling. Strain through a fine sieve. Paint the cakes with apricot glaze.

Note:
You may wish to frost the
visitandines
with kirsch icing, which is simply butter cream with a few tablespoons of kirsch added.

Black Currant Liqueur

ABOUT
2¾
QUARTS

½ pound raspberries

3 pounds black currants

1 cup black currant leaves

1 quart vodka

3 pounds sugar

3 cups water

Wash and drain the raspberries and black currants. Place the berries in a large ceramic or glass bowl and mash thoroughly. Cover the bowl with cheese-cloth and set aside in a cool place for 24 hours.

After this time, add the black currant leaves and vodka to the bowl. Cover the bowl with a plate and set aside again for another 24 hours.

After the second day, pour the mash through a fine sieve into another bowl, forcing through all of the liquid with a pestle. In a large saucepan, combine the sugar and water and bring to a boil over low heat, stirring constantly. Boil for 5 minutes, stirring frequently. Remove the syrup from heat and allow to cool completely. Add the syrup to the berries, cover with a cloth, and allow to stand for several hours. Filter the liqueur through cheesecloth into bottles. It may be served immediately.

Hemingway lived in Paris, off and on, for eight years. He was educated at the feet of Stein and Pound and Fitzgerald, and he worked very hard to turn his writing into his art. He worked hardest in a small rented studio on the Rue Descartes, hunched over the Corona typewriter Hadley bought for him, sipping kirsch to keep warm by the fire and eating mandarins and chestnuts. He also discovered such Parisian cafés as the Café du Dôme, the Closerie des Lilas, and a “warm and clean and friendly”
⁷
café on the Place St. Michel. He would order a café au lait, a rum St. James, and a dozen of the very cheap oysters known as
portugaises
and wrote stories like “The Three Day Blow.”

When there was no money, when he was unable to sell his stories and had given up journalism altogether and dared not gamble on the horses to support his wife and newborn son, he discovered strategies to hide his hunger or use it in his work:

By any standards we were still very poor and I still made such small economies as saying that I had been asked out for lunch and then spending two hours walking in the Luxembourg gardens and coming back to describe the marvelous lunch to my wife. When you are twenty-five and are a natural heavy-weight, missing a meal makes you very hungry. But it also sharpens all of your perceptions, and I found that many of the people I wrote about had very strong appetites and a great taste and desire for food, and most of them were looking forward to having a drink.
⁸

He often used the Luxembourg gardens to relieve his hunger, as “you saw and smelled nothing to eat all the way from the Place de I’Observatoire to the rue de Vaurigard.”
⁹
In the Luxembourg museum, the paintings by Cézanne appeared sharper and clearer and more beautiful because he was “belly-empty, hollow-hungry.”
¹⁰
One early afternoon late in 1924, Ernest decided to walk to Shakespeare and Company, carefully avoiding streets filled with aromatic restaurants and cafés. That day, Sylvia Beach had good news: a letter had arrived from
Der Querschnitt
, a German magazine, which had accepted two of his stories and paid him 600 francs. “Hunger is healthy and the pictures do look better when you are hungry,” but “eating is wonderful too and do you know where you are going to eat right now? Lipp’s is where you are going to eat and drink too.”
¹¹

There were few people in the brasserie and when I sat down on the bench against the wall with the mirror in back and a table in front and the waiter asked if I wanted beer I asked for a
distingué
, the big glass mug that held a liter, and for potato salad. The beer was very cold and wonderful to drink. The
pommes à l’huile
were firm and marinated and the olive oil delicious. I ground black pepper over the potatoes and moistened the bread in the olive oil. After the first heavy draft of beer I drank and ate very slowly. When the
pommes à l’huile
were gone I
ordered another serving and a
cervelas
. This was a sausage like a heavy, wide frankfurter split in two and covered with a special mustard sauce. I mopped up all the oil and all of the sauce with bread and drank the beer slowly until it began to lose its coldness and then I finished it and ordered a
demi
and watched it drawn.
¹²

THE MENU

Lunch at the
Brasserie Lipp

Pommes de Terre à l’Huile
Cervelas with Mustard Sauce
Beer

Pommes de Terre à l’Huile (Potatoes in Oil)

2
SERVINGS

1 pound potatoes

6 tablespoons very fine olive oil