MFK Fisher's Gazpacho Salad

If it's still in the 90s in the daytime and 70s at night, it's still Summer and it's hot, I don't care how many Autumn pictures I see on Pinterest.

It's still aspic weather in the South and will be in my house as long as the hot weather lasts, although I've been known to serve tomato aspic on Christmas Eve.

I did one post on it at my other blog back in June but MFK Fisher helped me take my recipe to a whole new level when I made her Gazpacho Salad this week. 

It turns out that hers was just a fancier name for it and I guess that gazpacho salad does sound more gourmet than tomato aspic.

The recipe for the basic tomato aspic is back on my blog post here but I updated it with Fisher's recipe in Joan Reardon's delightful book on her called M. F. K. Fisher among the Pots and Pans.

I added 1 cup of beef consommé, 1 red sweet bell pepper diced, 1 sweet red onion, chopped, and 1 cucumber peeled and diced. And I added a couple of chopped jalapeños from my garden. All of these chopped vegetables were so good in the salad!

And I added a cup of chili sauce, something I saw somewhere, can't remember where, and thought would be good and was it ever! Extra spiciness!

I didn't make her dressing of 1 clove garlic mashed into 1/2 cup olive oil with salt and pepper because we love my own dressing of mayo with a little olive oil, lemon juice and snipped basil so much.

I know from emails on my other post that very few of you like aspics. But I stand with Julia Reed (I love her column in Garden & Gun) when she wrote in her cookbook Ham Biscuits, Hostess Gowns, and Other Southern Specialties that we congeal everything in the South. 

Her mother once "had a four-day house party during which she served an almost exclusively gelatin-based menu...crabmeat mousse, a strawberry mousse, two kinds of tomato aspic, and a charlotte russe."

I would have been a happy member of that house party! 

Now I can just bet that no one is going to try the Gazpacho Salad recipe and I'll put money on not one of you trying the entree of our meal. But you might just like my dessert recipe, so stay with me, please.

Are you asking what in tarnation is that ugly entree? I never said I was a food stylist but believe it or not this was good.

On a slice of pumpernickel for each of us I spread avocado mashed with a little lemon juice, next I put on some good wild caught canned sardines, next went thin slices of cucumber with black pepper and a squirt of lemon juice and then I topped it off with jalapeño slices. 

And there was our dinner. I know that Poppy loves sardines, although hers are fresh caught ones from Crete. Anyone else out there like these protein packed little fish that have the same omega 3 that salmon does?

Enough of that, let's have dessert! What about pecan pie? 

That purple is just a sprig of Joe Pye Weed hanging over the pie from a vase on the table. 

Have you ever tried an Authentic Pecan Pie? One without nasty corn syrup in it? 

I've had this recipe for years and the clipping said it was by a Carolina cook. "And don't ever use corn syrup! That ruins the consistency. Authentic pecan pie is jelly-like, translucent with sparkle. Just start with a pound of brown sugar, then add three eggs, about two eggshells of milk, a big splash of vanilla, some salt, and a lot of pecans."

I baked it at 350 degrees for about 40 minutes.

Easiest pecan pie ever and you wouldn't believe the good flavor. I have several recipes for pecan pie but RH says this is his favorite. I only had a small piece of the pie and left the rest for RH, and he took a slice to Zack.

Besides, my favorite dessert is another serving of aspic. And I'll take fish and seafood any day for my protein rather than poultry or beef or pork. 

Maybe, just maybe, I've been influenced by MFK Fisher's thoughts in Serve It Forth.

For many old people, eating is the only pleasure left...And between gobbling down an indistinguishable mess of heavy meat and bread, or savouring a delicate broiled trout or an aspic full of subtle vegetable flavours, how few of us would choose the distressful insomnia that follows the first for the light easy rest of the second?

Okay, I really don't think of myself as old yet but I'm already finding that I sleep better after a supper of vegetable stuffed aspic and fish or seafood than red meat. Wild caught Alaskan salmon is usually my choice but I think that Rainbow or brook trout is my very favorite fish and I have an excellent recipe from Judith Jones for that. 

I wonder if RH would agree to trout and pecan pie for Thanksgiving Dinner? 

Oh, and thank you so much for ideas for using the copper gutter in the garden! I think that RH is now thinking about making it into a water fountain if he can find a pretty basin for the water to fall into.

Happy Birthday, M. F. K. Fisher and review of The Gastronomical Me

Remember when you have discovered a new to you author and her writing takes your breath away and you cannot stop until you devour every book she's written? 

I felt that way about M. F. K. Fisher decades ago when I discovered her. Last year I ordered her The Gastronomical Me published in 1943, feeling fortunate to find a wartime copy instead of a reprint. 

Since today is her birthday, I though I would share this book with you in case it is new to you. With this autobiographical book you get travel, food and love.

As an armchair traveler I love books that let me see a country not as a tourist, and through Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher's pen you do, whether it is Switzerland, France, Mexico or California that she writes of.

"I heard Juanito singing almost as soon as I came to earth in Mexico.

I did not know it at first. I was like a sea-plant, with a thousand ears out on little stalks, but only to hear what I was listening for."

Food, naturally, is all through the book, and Fisher continues to be frustrated with America's meat and potatoes mentality at that time, and with the many heavy course meals of affluent America. Instead, she always chose a simple meal of something like salad, a casserole of cauliflower, bread, fruit, and wine.

"I was beginning to believe, timidly I admit, that no matter how much I respected my friends' gastronomic prejudices, I had at least

an equal right to indulge my own in my own kitchen.

My meals shake them from their routines,

not only of meat-potatoes-gravy, but of thought, of behavior...

perhaps next time they come I will blast their safe tidy

little lives with a big tureen of hot borscht and some garlic toast and salad,

instead of the 'fruit cocktail,' fish, meat, vegetable,

salad, dessert and coffee they tuck daintily away

seven times a week and expect me to provide for them."

America had vast areas of the country with mediocre taste when Fisher was writing. But how many of us today dare invite company to dinner and serve them borscht, toast and salad?

And where does love come into The Gastronomical Me? To borrow today's catchphrase: It's complicated. Fisher writes about her marriages but the following sums up her philosophy:

"It seems to me that our three basic needs,

for food and security and love,

are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot 

straightly think of one without the others.

So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing 

about love and the hunger for it,

and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it...

and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied...

and it is all one."

Those needs sometimes haunt all of us, don't they? 

I remember another thing that Fisher wrote in another book, something to the effect of her encouraging her reader to study their own hungers. Good advice, don't you think?

What are my hungers? Beyond fried potatoes and onions, that Is?

That's an ongoing thought process for me, but it is beginning to become clear to me that the answer lies somewhere in the realm of simplicity.

When Mary Frances moved into her Last House, she purposely chose simple food and a simpler life. In later years travel became rare. Instead of going abroad to see the world, the world came to her.

Where she usually had a bowl of soup for them, hot crusty bread, and a glass of wine, with a fruit dessert.

That sounds about right to me, how about you? Especially if the cook was...

Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher