Most for your money cookbook

Scrape the small black seeds from a two-inch section of vanilla bean and mix pod and all into cream and sugar, dissolving the sugar in the cream over gentle heat and removing the piece of vanilla bean pod before cooling the mixture and freezing. This seedless vanilla bean pod can be used several times for flavoring other dishes, and should always be saved until it gets as worn out as an old piece of leather. The black specks of vanilla seeds were formerly thought to be pepper, put in for the sake of the stomach, to heat up the cold dish and counteract any ill effect on the digestion. At least one modern ice cream maker still uses this unbeatable recipe and advertises "Look for the specks!" to prove it's genuine. Old-timers used to dust their pre-sundaes with the pepper shaker, too. It's terrible! Mexican vanilla beans are much better than even the best pepper. Usually they're sold singly in glass tubes about 8 inches long, costing about a quarter, and to our mind they are better value than liquid vanilla extracts, which of course have only a trace of the true flavor of the bean. CHOCOLATE 2 QUARTS CREAM 2>^ OUNCES CHOCOLATE, MELTED 1 POUND SUGAR VANILLA EXTRACT, OR BEAN Heat cream and sugar until sugar is dissolved, add to melted chocolate, flavor with vanilla, strain through muslin, cool and freeze. PEANUT ICE CREAM 2 CUPS SUGAR 3 EGGS 2 QUARTS MILK VANILLA BEAN 2 CUPS CREAM 2 CUPS PEANUTS Brown i cup sugar and stir into milk, then put in the second cup of sugar plain. Whip eggs, add cream and flavor with a 2-inch piece of vanilla bean and add to sugar and milk mixture. Crush roasted peanuts fine and stir them in last. Freeze. Since peanuts are rich in fat and, indeed, a cream as well as oil is extracted from them, this recipe calls for much more milk than cream, yet it will be quite as rich as old-fashioned ice creams which call for cream only. XXVIII. Rich Man iS^, Poor Man ^ It's enlightening, even refreshing, to contrast lavish recipes for indigestible dishes, made to tickle the palate of the rich and often labelled a la Financiered with others that have been known for centuries as Poor Man's Sauce, Poor Man's Pudding, Poor Boy Sandwiches, Poor this and Poor that till you're blue in the face. Some are lousy, others swell; and when it comes to a steady diet the poor-boy recipes have the splurgy ones beat a mile, but what gets us down is the silly self-consciousness of the poor themselves who invented these sound recipes out of sheer need, yet refuse to admit their own poverty by evasively naming their cheap but sound sauces and sweets after some mythical "Poor Man" who couldn't possibly be they themselves. So here's an ancient sample of about as flossy a billionaire sauce as can be thrown together: Take red wine, gravy, sweet herbs, and spice, in which toss up lamb stones, cockscombs boiled, blanched and sliced, with sliced sweetbreads, oysters, mushrooms, truffles, and morels; thicken these with brown butter, and use it occasionally when wanted to enrich a ragout of any sort. 2IO And in contrast, here are some classic Proletarian Puddings; the first, calling for only one egg, is a dandy, if you can squeeze a little rum out of the bottle for the sauce: POOR MAN'S PUDDING (i) 1 EGG, LIGHTLY BEATEN 2 TABLESPOONS SUGAR