[Sca-cooks] [Sca-cooks]OT-The One True Tigger

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Ted Eisenstein wrote:

> By the way, to haul this whole thread back into shouting distance of the
> list. . . In the Bertie-and-Jeeves stories, Bertie's aunt's husband has an
> excellent French chef. Some of his creations are mentioned in the stories.
> Has anyone ever actually tried to come up with those creations?

Nom d'un nom d'un nom! M'sieur Anatole!

In the two or three stories in which he appears in any detail, a few
dishes are mentioned, and in "The Code of the Woosters", a specific menu
is outlined (This is the dinner Bertie plans to have Anatole prepare for
him to celebrate his release from the Totleigh-in-The-Wold jailhouse
after being framed and wrongfully imprisoned for stealing the leering
silver cow-creamer we've already discussed on this list a while back).

Unfortunately, a lot of that menu verges on nonsense, the kind of thing
that might be (and presumably was) written by a man who appreciated good
cooking, but knew nothing of its details. Without actually hunting up
the book, I STR it began with:

Le Cantaloup
Le Fried Smelts
And then it kind of crashed and burned with a mixture of actual French
culinary terms and what appear to be nonsense words. Something about
nonettes de poulet a la something or other, and then there was something
about creme de sylphides and a bunch of other stuff that I, an avid
reader of Escoffier, didn't recognize. And then we'd be back to Le fried
potatoes.

I do remember that the teleplay based on "Brinkley Manor", a.k.a. "Right
Ho, Jeeves", had a big scene over the timbale de ris de veau, and that
the book had the plot hinge heavily on various people roaming the halls
of the mansion at 1 AM, looking for a cold steak-and-kidney pie. There's
a similar scene in the much earlier novel "Something Fresh" (actually
one of Wodehouse's first written for adults) having to do with Rupert
Baxter staying awake all night in Blandings Castle, trying to catch a
jewel thief, roaming the halls carrying a tray containing bread,
pickles, and a cold tongue, and at one point somebody trips over the
tray in the dark, lands on the tongue, mistakes it for a corpse, and
naturally, has to begin shrieking about bloody murder.

Awright, it made perfect sense in the context of the story... ;  )

Adamantius
--
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com

"It was so blatant that Roger threw at him.  Clemens gets away with
things that get other people thrown out of games.  As long as they
let him get away with it, it's going  to continue." -- Joe Torre, 9/98