The recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) published a surprising number of recipes during his life—and not only drink recipes (though there are a goodly number of those). Hemingway was a sportsman and connoisseur of fine foods who often prepared his own meals while on camping trips or safaris. He even once published a recipe for “fillet of lion” with a classic first line: “First obtain your lion.”1 He seemed attuned to the language of cooking. The title of his story “A Clean, Well Lighted Place,” for example, could have been borrowed from a bread recipe.
Bloody Mary
To make a pitcher of Bloody Marys (any smaller amount is worthless) take a good sized pitcher and put in it as big a lump of ice as it will hold. (This to prevent too rapid melting and watering of our product.) Mix a pint of good Russian vodka and an equal amount of chilled tomato juice. Add a table spoon full of Worcester Sauce. Lea and Perrins is usual but can use A1 or any good beefsteak sauce. Stirr (with two rs). Then add a jigger of fresh squeezed lime juice. Stirr. Then add small amounts of celery salt, cayenne pepper, black pepper. Keep on stirring and taste it to see how it is doing. If you get it too powerful weaken with more tomato juice. If it lacks authority add more vodka. Some people like more lime than others. For combating a really terrific hangover increase the amount of Worcester sauce—but don’t lose the lovely color.—Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961, ed. Carlos Baker (New York: Scribner, 1981), 618–19.
Chop Suey
The lunch which Ernest praised so gaily, one of his favorites, was one of my versions of chop suey eaten with chopsticks, which helps the flavor. That one I made with chicken stock and chicken, pearl-tinted shrimp fresh from the ocean that morning, fresh bean sprouts, bamboo shoots and ginger from Havana’s Chinatown, onions, mushrooms and such, of course, and something which the Chinese call, in Spanish, ears. Maybe they are membranes of monkey or pig ears, or maybe they are a vegetable. What we like about them is their slippery smooth texture and delicate flavor, resembling tea. We had finished with a flowery lime ice into which I’d stirred a little gin and a little crème de menthe and then refrozen it.—Mary Hemingway, “Life with Papa,” Flair 1 (January 1951), 116.
Daiquiri
The hard-drinking Hemingway claimed he invented the drink he named “Death in the Afternoon” “after having spent seven hours overboard trying to get Capt. Bra Saunders’ fishing boat off a bank where she had gone with us in a N.W. gale.” He submitted the directions for making it to a collection of celebrity cocktail recipes.2 His acolyte A. E. Hotchner remembered the components in his favorite daiquiri:
A Papa Doble was compounded of two and a half jiggers of Bacardi White Label rum, the juice of two limes and half a grapefruit, and six drops of maraschino, all placed in an electric mixer over shaved ice, whirled vigorously and served foaming in large goblets.—Hotchner, Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir (New York: Random House, 1966), 5.
Fried Trout
Hemingway’s early journalism and fiction, including “Big Two-Hearted River” (1924) and The Sun Also Rises (1926), were punctuated by stories of trout fishing. Stephen L. Tanner even contends that “trout fishing was important for Hemingway and his characters because it offered a way to avoid the nada or emptiness of life.”3
A pan of fried trout can’t be bettered and they don’t cost any more than ever. But there is a good and bad way of frying them.
The beginner puts his trout and his bacon in and over a brightly burning fire; the bacon curls up and dries into a dry tasteless cinder and the trout is burned outside while it is still raw inside. He eats them and it is all right if he is only out for the day and going home to a good meal at night. But if he is going to face more trout and bacon the next morning and other equally well-cooked dishes for the remainder of two weeks, he is on the pathway to nervous dyspepsia.
The proper way is to cook over coals. Have several cans of Crisco or Cotosuet or one of the vegetable shortenings along that are as good as lard and excellent for all kinds of shortening. Put the bacon in and when it is about half cooked lay the trout in the hot grease, dipping them in cornmeal first. Then put the bacon on top of the trout and it will baste them as it slowly cooks.
The coffee can be boiling at the same time and in a smaller skillet pancakes being made that are satisfying the other campers while they are waiting for the trout.
With the prepared pancake flours you take a cupful of pancake flour and add a cup of water. Mix the water and flour and as soon as the lumps are out it is ready for cooking. Have the skillet hot and keep it well greased. Drop the batter in and as soon as it is done on one side loosen it in the skillet and flip it over. Apple butter, syrup or cinnamon and sugar go well with the cakes.
While the crowd have taken the edge from their appetites with flapjacks, the trout have been cooked and they and the bacon are ready to serve. The trout are crisp outside and firm and pink inside and the bacon is well done—but not too done. If there is anything better than that combination the writer has yet to taste it in a lifetime devoted largely and studiously to eating.
The stew kettle will cook your dried apricots; when they have resumed their predried plumpness after a night of soaking, it will serve to concoct a mulligan in, and it will cook macaroni. When you are not using it, it should be boiling water for the dishes.
In the baker, mere man comes into his own, for he can make a pie that to his bush appetite will have it all over the product that mother used to make, like a tent. Men have always believed that there was something mysterious and difficult about making a pie. Here is a great secret. There is nothing to it. We’ve been kidded for years. Any man of average office intelligence can make at least as good a pie as his wife.
All there is to a pie is a cup and a half of flour, one-half teaspoonful of salt, one-half cup of lard and cold water. That will make piecrust that will bring tears of joy into your camping partner’s eyes.
Mix the salt with the flour, work the lard into the flour, make it up into a good workmanlike dough with cold water. Spread some flour on the back of a box or something flat, and pat the dough around a while. Then roll it out with whatever kind of round bottle you prefer. Put a little more lard on the surface of the sheet of dough and then slosh a little flour on and roll it up and then roll it out again with the bottle.
Cut out a piece of the rolled-out dough big enough to line a pie tin. I like the kind with holes in the bottom. Then put in your dried apples that have soaked all night and been sweetened, or your apricots, or your blueberries, and then take another sheet of the dough and drape it gracefully over the top, soldering it down at the edges with your fingers. Cut a couple of slits in the top dough sheet and prick it a few times with a fork in an artistic manner.
Put it in the baker with a good slow fire for forty-five minutes and then take it out, and if your pals are Frenchmen they will kiss you. The penalty for knowing how to cook is that the others will make you do all the cooking.—Hemingway, “Camping Out,” Toronto Daily Star, June 26, 1920; rpt. in Hemingway, Dateline, Toronto: The Complete Toronto Star Dispatches, 1920–1924, ed. William White (New York:Scribner, 1985), 45–47.
Picadillo
Its base is ordinary ground beef or the usual hamburger mixture of beef and pork. Any practicing cook ought to know more or less the proportion of things, so I make them only relative:
Slice fine and fry in plenty of butter a medium-sized onion, or more if your family is big and you are using more than a pound of beef, also shredded garlic according to your taste. Stir in the meat with salt, pepper, a big dash of marjoram and a big dash of oregano, and before the meat starts burning or sticking to the pan, add about one-half cup of dry white wine. (Here the Cubans use, instead, tomato paste and water, but I prefer this dish without tomatoes.) Let this simmer for awhile during which you make a platter of fluffy white rice. About five minutes before serving, add to the frying pan mixture a half cup of previously soaked raisins, a cup of fairly finely chopped mango or fresh peach, half a cup of sliced celery, a handful of sliced stuffed olives and, if you wish to be fancy, a handful of blanched, chopped almonds. Pour the frying pan mixture on top of the rice. Very small rivulets of the juice of the meat mixture should appear around the edges of the platter, or you haven’t used enough butter, wine or fruit. Garnish it with something dark green and very crisp.—Mary Hemingway, “Life with Papa,” Flair 1 (January 1951), 117.
By Gary Scharnhorst in "Literary Eats", McFarland and Company, Jefferson, North Carolina, USA, 2014. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.