Brave Meals

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 47, 19 November 1936, Page 6

Brave Meals

Zest and Courage Can Turn Cooks Into Artists

“Round the World With mi Appetite, by Molly Castle (London: Hodder and Stoughton, Ltd.).

TIERE at last is a book of recipes - n - that read like entertaining essays. Molly Castle has ignored the tradition of tabulated instructions—“add flour, pour in butter, season to taste and serve hot”—that make of cooking such a dull, tedious business in print. She treats cooking as it ought to be treated, as a Held for enterprise and wild adventure. for daring and sometimes unhappy experiment rather than neverfailing stodginess. She admits quite frankly in her prologue, “I am not an expert cook. I am lucky rather than skilful that the things I make almost always turn out well Often I do not make them again, in case next time they might not; also there is always something else I am wanting to try. So that this is not really a cookery book, but a series of suggestions for the amateur cook of adventurous disposition.” Nevertheless, one has yet to read a more exciting recipe than this, for monies marinieres: “You have to shave mussels; they grow beards. Then you have to wash them well. It’s all very intimate. After that you put them in a pan and cook them for a few minutes over a brisk fire. Throw away any that have not opened up. Secretive mussels are no good. Save the water that comes out of them and boil it down a bit. Melt some butter and brown a little flour in it. Add cream and pepper, but watch out for the salt. Add the mussel-water and 1 drop of tincture of iodine (so far you’d never know if this was a hospital, a kitchen, or an American police station). Put in some finelychopped tarragon, onion, chervil, parsley and shallot. Cook gently; the sauce should thicken. Take off the smaller of the shells from each mussel and lay the rest out on a big dish. Cover them with the sauce, and, if you like that sort of nonsense, finely-chopped parsley.”

The suggestions, however, are not simply an amusing record of dishes. They have a background, for they were gleaned by Miss Castle in the course of trips through Europe, America and the Mediterranean. Each is preceded by a travel sketch describing the circumstances under which Miss Castle ate them in what might be termed their native haunts. As travel talks, the sketches leave something to be desired, but they have the same virtue as the recipes. They are written with a zest and individuality which to a certain extent redeems their triviality. They are, in effect, diary extracts which reveal little depth of thought, but a whole-hearted enjoyment of humorous incident and odd characters. If sometimes we are bored by Miss Castle’s accounts of varied drinking parties and unimportant love affairs, we are partly compensated by the liveliness with which she describes towns and countries. Her observations are superficial, but they are at leastvivid and often create that sense of “atmosphere” for which all travel writers .strive.

Certainty, the book is stimulating and novel, for all its flippancy and irritating vagueness about highways and byways. Miss Castle lias wit, a good sense of humour and understands eating—although her tastes are expensive. —O.M.A.