The Chalet Girls Cookbook
Christina Erskine borrowed a copy of this hard-to-find and unusual cookery book to review it for the site.
She writes:
On holiday the summer after they leave the Chalet School, Jo Bettany, Simone Lecoutier, Frieda Mensch and Marie von Eschenau are quarantined for mumps after their landlady's son goes down with it. Kept indoors by poor weather, the girls decide to compile a cookbook from their favourite recipes.
The girls divide the book into conventional chapters: soups, fish, meat and so on, with plenty of room left for cakes and sweets at the end. Each contributes a dish in turn and there are around 100 recipes in the book in total.
Anyone expecting delicious little savouries of which Marie, Frieda, or whoever, knew the secret, will be surprised to find that local Tyrolean dishes are ignored in favour of more stereotypical fare: Simone the Frenchwoman provides the cooking theory and stock recipes, and Jo appears to know a remarkable number of traditional English dishes off by heart. This is ironic, as Jo's own cooking is famously hit-and-miss and there are a number of references to her culinary disasters throughout.
Published in 1953, the book is fascinating as a piece of culinary history. Dishes are generally heavier and more filling - who today would make a tomato soup by pouring pulped tomatoes over a white sauce base, or choose to serve lobster in cutlets, stuffed and rolled in breadcrumbs? And how many domestic cooks would push all those vegetables through sieves to achieve Maman's Cauliflower Soup?
The Chalet girls are thrifty, with many recipes specifying leftovers, and generally using common ingredients. However, Marie is keen to include Corney Flower's recipe for Chop Suey, which requires soy sauce, a condiment unfamiliar to Simone. Judging by Frieda's explanation, it was unfamiliar to EBD as well: soy sauce is hardly a version of béchamel made with soya bean flour.
Initially the cookbook is intended as a present for Marie, who is engaged to be married, although as Jo points out, she is unlikely to be doing much of her own cooking once she becomes the Countess von und zu Wertheimer. Jo believes they may be able to get the book published and so it is written in English.
And it seems that Jo did indeed manage to find a publisher: there are references to the cookbook written by the quartet in both A CHALET GIRL FROM KENYA and EXCITEMENTS FOR THE CHALET SCHOOL.
EBD-ism (well, there had to be at least one, didn't there?): the girls' landlady changes her name from Annich to Winkelstein between the vegetable course and the puddings.
contributed by Christina Erskine, England __ working from a hardback edition