From
Beating Austerity in the Kitchen
(More or Less)
by Joel L. Fletcher

When I was on liberty in London as an N. R. O. T. C. midshipman more than half a century ago, I bought an English cookbook because I was charmed by its title: Beating Austerity in the Kitchen. It sounded so stiff-upper-lip, that much-admired quality of the English. The Second World War had been over for almost a decade, but life in Britain still seemed grim. London was pocked with bombed-out ruins, drabness was pervasive, and the food I encountered in the restaurants and hotels was hardly edible.  I stayed in a small hotel near Russell Square where breakfast was included in the modest cost of the room. Each morning at seven, the proprietor set out racks of cold, scorched toast and poured lukewarm milk over bowls of cornflakes which by a quarter past seven were unrecognizable as such.

Buying a cookbook in post-war England was perverse, bordering on the masochistic. Beating Austerity in the Kitchen was a thin volume that might have been mistaken for a slender first book of poems by a chronically depressed poet had it not been for its  bright yellow dust jacket festooned with red and blue rosettes. It contained a lot of information about preserving, storing, and stretching food that was still being rationed, and was written for the British housewife accustomed to preparing and eating the kinds of dishes Cyril Connolly had in mind when he wrote: “Oh, the superb wretchedness of English food, how many foreigners has it daunted, and what a subtle glow of nationality one feels in ordering a dish that one knows will be bad and being able to eat it!”

Apart from its gaudy dust jacket, the showiest thing about this modest book was the name of its author: Lady Peacock. Since by now the good Lady more than likely “has gone to get the prize for domestic virtue” (the translation of an inscription I once saw on an ancient tomb in Florence), she probably will not object if I borrow her title for this collection of recipes my partner, John Copenhaver, and I have enjoyed through the years, and would like to share with our friends in this new Age of Austerity when we may not be eating out quite as often.  Some of the dishes are a little extravagant to fit comfortably in a book with a title that suggests restraint and frugality, but if you prepare them in your own kitchen, consider what you will save on tips alone.

Fanny’s Gin Soup

My mother was educated at the now defunct Mississippi Synodical College for Young Ladies in Holly Springs, Mississippi, where she learned to be a lady, but not to be a cook. Indeed, she was quietly proud of being helpless in the kitchen. It showed that she had never had to do that sort of thing. As a college president’s wife, she did a great deal of entertaining, but rarely found herself behind the stove. That was not her place. In the course of a long, gracious, and, on the whole, very happy life, she did master a few, very few, recipes for those occasions when a cook was not available.

Late in life, she devised this recipe for Gin Soup as a first course. The amount of gin she used depended on her estimate of how palatable she thought her second course was likely to be. If it appeared that it was turning into an unavoidable fiasco, she poured with a heavy hand.

Ingredients:
1 can of Campbell’s Consommé, diluted with one can of water
1 pint of half-and-half
A pinch of dried tarragon
A dash of Tabasco
As much gin as deemed necessary.
Mix ingredients in a saucepan and bring to a simmer over medium heat. Serve.

Serves 2 or 3

Fanny McLees Fletcher, circa 1918,
shortly after her graduation
from the Mississippi Synodical College
for Young Ladies in Holly Springs, Mississippi.

Peter Patout’s Red Beans & Rice

All Patouts seem to have been born with a cooking gene. Peter, the New Orleans antique dealer is no exception. He is famous for lavish dinner parties cooked up in his miniscule kitchen on Bourbon Street, where he has held forth, with one significant interruption, for many years.

The interruption occurred in the late 1990s when Peter, together with more than twenty other New Orleans antique dealers and collectors, unwisely bought from a skilful con man and his associates some objects that had been stolen from several New Orleans cemeteries: benches, urns, and statuary of the kind that are found, not only in southern cemeteries, but also in southern gardens.

When the thieves, who were stealing for drug money, were apprehended they faced life sentences because of previous convictions.  Then the head of the gang had a stroke of genius. It occurred to him that if he could implicate in the crime the people who had bought from him, he and his accomplices might be able to get off with lighter sentences. So he persuaded the investigating police that the collectors and dealers to whom they had sold the stolen goods had actually commissioned them to steal and had told them what they wanted and where to steal it. It was a preposterous lie, but it made a much better news story than a gang of drug addicts being caught and sent to jail. The thieves’ allegations soon caught fire in the local press and spread quickly to the national and international news as well. Many citizens of New Orleans, where cemeteries loom large as the sacred resting places of their ancestors, were horrified and incensed.

Peter, who recently had been featured in a number of upscale lifestyle magazines, suddenly found himself the subject of a growing scandal in the media where every lurid rumor about the case was reported as fact.  To protest his innocence, he gave a press conference in front of the New Orleans tomb where several of his ancestors are buried.  Among other things, he pointed out that a statue the police had confiscated from his house was made of plaster of Paris, and thus could never have come from a cemetery where it would have soon melted away.  Perhaps because he made the police look dumb, they soon made him the principal focus of their investigation.  The NOPD, who themselves had a long history of being portrayed in the press as corrupt, relished the chance to be seen as “good guys” getting to the bottom of a heinous crime.

Of the many dealers and collectors who had bought from the gang, only three were indicted, and of the three, only Peter was convicted. That the scion of a prominent plantation family was involved in the crime was too juicy a story for the press to ignore, and the press convicted Peter long before the jury did. In the end, he was the sacrificial lamb demanded by public outrage and spent 18 months in Dixon Correctional Institute in Jackson, Louisiana, before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously voted to overturn his conviction and vacate his sentence. When he was released, he had spent much more time in prison for the crime than any of the actual thieves.

Peter has said that one thing that helped him get through the difficulties of prison life was the thought of the hardships his ancestors must have faced when, in the 19th century, they left a comfortable bourgeois life in France to carve their sugar plantations out of the fertile but harsh bayou land of southern Louisiana. “I have the same blood as they had,” he told himself, “and if they could survive that, I can survive this.”

Peter has the gift of always being able to find the silver lining of any grim situation. When, immediately after sentencing, he was thrown into the brutal New Orleans City Jail, he was comforted to learn that the sheriff in charge took pride in his recipe for cheese grits that prisoners were served. It was a small thing for Peter to look forward to at breakfast each day. And his first cell mate, a Cuban named Adonis, shared Peter’s love for good food, and with imagination and culinary know-how, they were able to transform leftovers and condiments smuggled from the dining hall back to their cell into quasi-gourmet treats.

Peter was eventually transferred to the prison farm at Jackson where he was assigned to the gardening detail. He enjoyed the work outside in the orchard and in the flower gardens of a nearby historic home.  Now, when he refers to his time in prison, he often begins by saying, “When I was away at horticultural school…..”

Shortly after his release from prison, Peter was visiting with one of his customers from a wealthy and prominent family in northern Louisiana. “Now, tell me, Peter.” she enquired, “which Louisiana prison were you in?”  “I was in Jackson,” he told her. “What a pity!” she replied, “…if you had been in Angola, you could have met my cousin.”

His many friends are happy that Peter, his joie-de-vivre unquenched and himself not much the worse for wear, is once again inviting them to memorable dinner parties in the French Quarter where the food is prepared with innate skill and verve, and served on his elegant white-and-gold Vieux Paris china.

Peter, pre-prison, at the Croissant d’Or in New Orleans

Each Mardi Gras day, Peter holds an open house for all his friends (and their friends) in the courtyard of his Bourbon Street home. It is always a crowded, but relaxed and festive occasion, providing some respite from the madness of the Quarter streets on the most frenzied day of the carnival season.  He always serves that ultimate New Orleans comfort food: red beans and rice.

One year Peter invited two elderly nuns who had taught him at the Convent of Mercy Elementary School in Jeanerette on the Bayou Teche, where Peter grew up. Not wanting to cramp anyone’s style and put a damper on the party, they came without their nun’s garb and requested that Peter not tell anyone that they were nuns. “We’ve seen it all, anyway,” one of them told Peter. “Nothing can shock us anymore.” Peter respected their wishes, but, not surprisingly, several other of their former pupils were there and blew their cover. “So much for Sister Incognito,” Peter told them.

Here is Peter’s recipe:

John Copenhaver and Joel Fletcher beating austerity on
the terrace of Maison Bertaux on a recent visit to London.

Joel Fletcher and John Copenhaver are partners in Fletcher/Copenhaver Fine Art. They deal in 19th and early 20th century American and European Fine Art, and are located in Fredericksburg, Virginia. They exhibit in a number of major charity antiques shows every year. For more information, visit their webs site:  www.fc-fineart.com