As
I am sure I don’t need to tell you, tomorrow is St. Patrick’s Day. On this day
in 1931, the United States Department of Agriculture Radio Service’s regular program
Housekeepers’Chat prepared its
listeners for the culinary challenges of the celebration with some menus and
recipes. Please enjoy the script for the program:
Subject:
“St. Patrick’s Day Menu.” Information from the Bureau of Home
Economics,
U.S.D.A.
Bulletin
available: “Lamb As You Like It.”
The top o' the morning
to you! All of us who have Irish blood in our veins - and all of us who wish we
had some - will be celebrating the great day of the cheerful patron saint of
Ireland tomorrow. How about carrying out the wearir' o' the green on your
dinner table tomorrow and serving a meal with a green color scheme? St.
Patrick's Day is a fine time for entertaining, especially for giving a luncheon
or a dinner. Emerald green is such an attractive, springlike color and is so
easily featured in food and also in decorations. And there are so many Irish symbols
to use for favors, place cards, tallies for bridge parties or other decorative
purposes. Suitable designs include shamrocks, harps, Irish terriers, pigs,
potatoes, a pipe for paddy and even woolly lambs or shepherd's creeks, since,
according to the old legend, St. Patrick was a shepherd.
Yes, Maureen, your
ancestors who lived way back in the fourth century probably knew little Patrick
when he was a boy shepherd tending the flocks of an Irish chieftain on the
green hills of county Antrim. The story goes that when he was about fifteen and
still engaged in this peaceful occupation, he was attacked by bandits who
carried him and his flock of sheep off to Connaught and kept him captive there
for some years. He finally escaped by boarding a ship headed for the coast of
Gaul. After landing there he was taken in by the kindly monks at the monastery,
of Lerins where he lived for some years and learned about Christianity. It was
there that he had his famous dream, the vision in which he heard the Irish
people calling him to come back to them. So he returned as a missionary to
teach his people. Back in Ireland ho often used the native shamrock with its
three leaves on one stem to illustrate the principle of the Trinity.
The absence of snakes
in Ireland is credited to St. Patrick who, as the old legend goes, "drove
the frogs into the bogs and banished all the vermin.”
During his long
ministry St. Patrick is said to have performed many other miracles. He also
founded many churches, among them the church and monastery of Armagh where he
died when he was an old man of seventy- two.
But get back to our
menus for this good saint's day. I have two menus that I'm sure you'll want to
take down. One is a dinner; the other is a luncheon. If you aren't entertaining
guests tomorrow, perhaps you will be giving a dinner or a bridge party a year
from now. If these meal plans are written down waiting ready in your files or
notebook, you won't have to worry about what to serve next time you ask friends
in on St. Patrick's Day. Let me suggest that you will find the leaflet,
"Lamb As You Like It," useful for both these menus.
Are you ready now for
the menu? Leg of Lamb; Broccoli; Green peas in a mashed potato nest; Hot cloverleaf
rolls; Mint gelatin salad; Vanilla ice cream garnished with green cherries or
bottled grapes; Green and white mints.
I'll repeat that menu. Leg
of Lamb; Broccoli; Green peas in a mashed potato nest; Hot cloverleaf rolls;
Mint gelatin salad; Vanilla ice cream garnished with green cherries or bottled
grapes; Green and white mints.
The broccoli may be
served either buttered or with hot Hollandaise sauce. There's a recipe for the
hollandaise sauce in your egg leaflet. Keep the natural green color in the
broccoli and the peas by cooking in an open kettle in boiling salted water
until just tender. Overcooking may cause the color to become brownish.
The recipe I'm about to
give you is for the mint gelatin salad - one of those salads that are both very
good and very beautiful - a jellied mixture of pineapple and cucumber flavored
with mint. If you want to see what it looks like there's a picture of it on the
back page of your lamb leaflet.
Eleven ingredients for
this good-looking salad:
2 tablespoons of gelatin
½ cup of diced cucumber
½ cup of cold water ½ cup of canned crashed pineapple
drained from its juice.
1½ cups of boiling
water
5 tablespoons of sugar 2 tablespoons of pineapple juice
½ teaspoon of salt 4 tablespoons of lemon juice
5 drops of oil of
peppermint Green coloring matter
I'll repeat that list.
(Repeat)
Soak the gelatin in the
cold water for five minutes, add to the boiling water with the sugar and the
salt, and stir until all are dissolved. Cool and add the cucumber, the
pineapple, the pineapple and lemon juice, the oil of peppermint and enough
flavoring matter to make the mixture pale green. Set the container in ice water
and stir until the gelatin mixture begins to stiffen. Then rinse a mold with
cold water, coat it lightly with some of the clear gelatin mixture and place
thin slices of cucumber on the bottom and sides (the jelly will help these
slices stick to the mold while the salad mixture is poured in.) Now fill the
mold with the gelatin mixture and let it stand in a cold place until firm.
Serve with a tart salad dressing on a bed of lettuce.
Now for the luncheon
menu which also features a most attractive salad, shamrock salad made from
green peppers and soft white cheese. But before I describe the salad let me
give you the menu.
Lamb chops; Creamed new
potatoes with chopped parsley; Peas, Green pepper rings filled with cottage or
cream cheese; Hot biscuits; Mint ice or sherbet or Peppermint ice cream; Wafers
or cookies cut in shamrock or other fancy shapes.
To make the salad, wash
green peppers, slice off the stem end and scrape out the seeds and extra
membrane inside. Stuff with the cheese pressing it down firmly into every
corner. Chill the stuffed peppers. Then cut them in slices about one-fourth
inch thick using a sharp knife. If the pepper is nicely shaped these slices
look like shamrock leaves, and will look even more so if you cut out stems for
each from left over pieces of the pepper. Lay the pepper and cheese shamrocks
on crisp lettuce and serve with mayonnaise or French dressing.
How would you like a
recipe for peppermint ice cream? Good. I have one right here to give you. Ingredients?
Just six. I'll read them.
1 ½ pints of single
cream ¼ teaspoon of
salt
½ pint of double cream Green coloring
⅔ cup of sugar 8
drops of essence of peppermint
That's a simple list,
but I think I'll repeat it just the same.
(Repeat). If you prefer
a less rich ice cream, you can use all single cream.
Heat ½ cup of the
single cream, add the salt and sugar, and stir until the sugar is dissolved. Mix
with the rest of the cream and add sufficient coloring to give a soft green.
Then add enough peppermint essence for a delicate flavoring. Use a freezing
mixture of one part salt and 4 to 6 parts of ice and turn the freezer slowly.
After freezing remove the dasher, pack the freezer with more ice and salt and
let it stand for an hour or more to ripen.
Tomorrow: Ironing is an
Art.
If
you are hungry for more historical food tidbits releavant to the day, here are
links to previous St Patrick’s Day and other Irish-themed posts:
Previous
posts featuring Irish Stew:
Only Apples [includes a
recipe for Irish stew with apples!].
A Tale of Timbuktu
[includes a recipe for Baked Irish stew]
All in a stew [3
versions of Irish stew].
On
Other Irish Foods:
And
not specifically Irish, but relevant in a fun kind of way:
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