FoodNet

A bachelors cupboard

1906

Page 35 · 1 recipe record on this page

Presented as published in 1906. Historical recipes may not meet modern food-safety standards. Cook from the modern interpretation, not the original instructions.
up three or four pigeons in four pieces each and mari- nating them in a half cup of olive oil for ten minutes. Drain the oil into the blazer and while " Jeems " is laying the plates — I take it you're not an impecunious bachelor — you are chopping an onion, a clove of garlic, a green pepper and some parsley. Fry in the oil until transparent, then add the pieces of pigeon and sear them all over. This is preliminary. Next get out the nice brown French casserole and put all of this in it together with a can of tomatoes, salt, paprika and cayenne to taste, a tablespoonful of finely minced salt pork, half a cupful of sliced olives, and a can of bouil- lon or a pint of good stock. Cover tightly and sim- mer an hour; it takes time, but it's worth the waiting. Five minutes before serving, moisten a tablespoon of browned flour with a little of the gravy, stir in and when it thickens it's ready. Pass with this, grated Parmesan cheesePigeon Casserole, or, if you're sure they all care for it, sprinkle over the casserole while it's on the fire. It's as red as Shaw's w^hiskers and as fine as " Candida," while it will disappear almost as quickly as did " Mrs. Warren's Profession." CHAPTER X " New disbes beget new appetites." San Francisco was a city of restau- rants— the most wonderful restau- rants in all America. With the passing of the old city one shudders to think of the fate of Zinkand's, the Techau Tavern with its sweet-voiced Haw^aiian singers and sadly beautiful native music, Tait's mammoth un- derground palace, the Palace of Art with its wonderful collection of paintings, including a Rosa Bonheur, the new and the old " Poodle Dog " — the latter one of the show places of the Coast. Then there was the newly opened Oyster Grotto, where nothing but shellfish, including the delectable California crabs, was served. There was the Italian cafe of one Coppa on Montgomery Street that had been decorated by the fa- 85 A BACHELOR'S CUPBOARD Mexican and Creole Cooking mous San Franciscan artists and where writers, mu- sicians, and painters met to drink Chianti and eat spaghetti, ravioli, and frittura, and through their smoke wreaths admire the w^onderfully suggestive frescoes re- calling Gelett Burgess and his " goops," Jack London, and other celebrities whose names were lettered upon the border together with those of " Maisie," " Isabel," " Murger," " Verlaine," and other good Bohemians who know how to live — and to die. The restaurants of Chinatown passed by, there was that of one Matias in the Telegraph Hill region which was unique of all eating places in the West. For it was a Mexican res- taurant over which Matias, an Austrian, presided proudly, and served his few^ patrons in the two clean, shabby little rooms that smelled of garlic and were decorated with colored prints all the way from Spain, showing glorious bull fights in every stage from a hand- some, lone matador, calmly awaiting the onslaught of Taurus, to the gory finish with rivers of blood; and from without, coming through the open windows, all the clattering tongues of Italian and Greek, Mexican and Portuguese, denizens of the " Barbary Coast."