The Hemingway Cookbook Read online

  Trout fishing in Sun Valley, Idaho, 1939.

  Hemingway trout fishing at Horton Creek, July, 1904.

  Camping Out

  In January 1920, Ernest traveled from Oak Park to Toronto to act as companion and tutor to the son of wealthy parents he met in Michigan while speaking on his wartime adventures. While there, he began writing for the Toronto Star, whose editor found Ernest’s straightforward prose and good humor perfect for the paper’s new direction. Young Hemingway had his own byline and received a penny a word for his articles. Hemingway would eventually work as a European correspondent for the Toronto Star during his time in Paris.

  In his article “Camping Out: When You Camp Out, Do It Right,” Hemingway shows that, even as a very young man, he had a knack for writing with an air of gentle, humorous authority. When he lectures on exactly how to prepare a delicious meal in the bush, it seems only wise to listen carefully.

  Fried Trout

  Ernest loved trout fishing and he loved eating trout. He enthusiastically shared his pleasure with his earlier readers, as he would later do after visiting the Spanish Pyrenees (see Trucha a la Navarra, page 84) and Switzerland (see Trout au Bleu, page 58). Interestingly, our first introduction to Hemingway’s trout is very similar to its Spanish counterpart. So we may take this campfire version as an introduction to trout, a dish that will reach great heights of gastronomic pleasure as the years pass. For now, let us follow young Ernest as he sets up camp and begins to prepare the day’s catch, and we will learn what to do and what not to do.

  4 SERVINGS

  1 cup Crisco or vegetable shortening

  4 whole trout, cleaned

  1 cup cornmeal

  8 slices bacon

  Hemingway fishing in Michigan at Walloon Lake, summer 1916.

  Hemingway instructs: “The proper way to cook is 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 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.”6

  Heat the Crisco in a skillet over medium heat (or over coals, not open flame, if cooking by campfire). While heating the shortening, coat each trout in cornmeal and set aside. When the shortening is hot, cook the bacon halfway. Just before it browns, remove from the pan. Place the trout in the pan (this may require two batches, depending on your luck on the river). After 5 minutes, turn the trout and place 2 strips of bacon over each fish. Cook for another 10-15 minutes, depending on the size of the fish.

  While the trout are cooking to perfection, Hemingway suggests you placate the hungry mob with coffee and pancakes.

  Pancakes

  When camping, Hemingway carried with him a sack of prepared pancake flour so that he could simply add water, mix until most of the lumps are out, and cook on a hot, greased skillet. To this day, nothing takes the hard edge off a campsite hunger like a hot stack of pancakes. Ernest’s favorite toppings were apple butter, syrup, or sugar and cinnamon.7 While today you may simply bring along any instant pancake mix, the purist would want to prepare the following pancake mix before leaving home. You can find the powdered milk and eggs at any well-stocked outdoor store.

  2 SERVINGS

  1 cup all-purpose flour

  ¼ teaspoon salt

  ½ tablespoon sugar

  ½ tablespoon baking powder

  2½ tablespoons powdered milk

  3 tablespoons powdered eggs

  ¼ cup shortening

  Before leaving home, mix all the dry ingredients together. Add the shortening and stir with a fork until thoroughly incorporated. Store the mix in an airtight container.

  To make the pancakes, add slightly less than 1 cup of water per cup of pancake mix. Mix well, but don’t worry about all of the lumps. Pour out mix to form round pancakes on a hot, greased griddle. When the edges are just browned and bubbles form, flip the pancakes and cook the other side until lightly browned. Any of Ernest’s recommended toppings go wonderfully with the pancakes.

  Stewed Apricots

  The stew kettle was an essential implement around the Hemingway campfire. In it he would soak, overnight, dried apricots in plenty of water. By the next morning, the fruit would have returned to its “predried plumpness,”8 and could be cooked until very tender and enjoyed as a sweet snack after the pancakes were gone. Ernest would also use the kettle to cook macaroni or to “…concoct a mulligan in….”9 Of course, the thoughtful camper will be boiling water in the stew kettle for washing dishes while it’s not in use for cooking.

  Hemingway hiking around Walloon Lake in Michigan, summer 1916.

  Campfire Apple Pie

  In this recipe, Ernest takes a page from his father’s book of cooking tricks, suggesting that the reader roll out the piecrust using a bottle. It also shows an attention to detail and presentation, most likely attributed to Ed’s deliberate teachings. Hemingway recommends using a reflective campfire baker. These days, such devices are hard to come by. If you have one, by all means dust it off and start baking. Otherwise I would recommend using a Dutch oven or a baking device such as the Outback Oven Ultralight, which converts your own cooking pot into a fine campfire baker.

  For the filling

  1½ cups dried apple slices

  ½ cup sugar

  For the piecrust

  2½ cups plus 2 tablespoons sifted all-purpose flour

  1 teaspoon salt

  ¾ cup shortening, preferably chilled, plus a little more

  4-5 tablespoons cold water, or more if needed

  Soak the apples in 3 cups cold water overnight.

  Mix 2½ cups flour with salt. Blend in the % cup lard with a fork until it reaches the consistency of coarse meal. Add just enough water to work into a “… good workmanlike dough …”10

  Flour any clean, flat surface available. Divide the dough into two pieces, with one piece slightly larger than the other, and use a bottle to roll out the dough in circles large enough to fill a pie tin, preferably the kind with holes. Spread a little more lard on the dough, sprinkle with flour, then roll one piece around the bottle and unroll it into the bottom of the pie tin.

  Drain the soaked apples, mix in the sugar and 2 tablespoons flour, and place in the pie tin. Drape the top dough over the pie, crimping the edges with your fingers. Then, “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.”11

  These recipes, direct from Ed’s storytelling, are as intricate as any Hemingway would ever provide for his readers. While he wrote many spectacular descriptions of exquisite dishes and extravagant meals, Hemingway was not a particularly skilled cook. In fact, when Ernest was prevailed upon to instruct on the preparation of “The Hamburger” in Venice in 1954, he took haste in delegating that responsibility to friend and biographer A. E. Hotchner.12 The food that Nick Adams prepared in “Big Two-Hearted River” is a much better representation of the foods Ernest himself would prepare when out in the wild on his own.

  Hemingway trout fishing in 1913.

  “Big Two-Hearted River”

  In the late summer of 1919, Ernest and two friends took the train to Seney, on Michigan’s upper Peninsula, to fish and camp by the Fox River. Seney was a ghost town, just as the fictional Nick Adams found it when Ernest brought him there. Hemingway wrote “Big Two-Hearted River” in Paris in 1924, telling the story of a young man on a fishing trip. He included in this story his acute focus on the most minute details, implanting “it in geography and, insofar as possible, … [kn
owing] what time it was on every page.”13 This newly developed characteristic in his emerging style is seen clearly when Nick settles by his campfire to eat:

  Nick put the frying pan on the grill over the flames. He was hungrier. The beans and spaghetti warmed. Nick stirred them and mixed them together. They began to bubble, making little bubbles that rose with difficulty to the surface. There was a good smell. Nick got out a bottle of tomato catchup and cut four slices of bread. The little bubbles were coming faster now. Nick sat down beside the fire and lifted the frying pan off. He poured about half the contents out into the tin plate. It spread slowly on the plate. Nick knew it was too hot. He poured on some tomato catchup.14

  Pork and Beans and Spaghetti

  Never before have pork and beans been afforded such heroic status as when Nick Adams settled in to eat by the shores of Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River.” While this dish may seem simple and common, when eaten alone in the bush by a favorite trout stream after a long journey you may understand its ascension into the pantheon of haute cuisine litéraire.

  2 SERVINGS

  1 can prepared pork and beans

  1 can prepared spaghetti

  Ketchup

  4 slices bread

  Pour the can of pork and beans and the can of spaghetti into a saucepan. Warm over a medium fire until the bubbles come fast to the surface. Pour half out onto a plate (preferably tin). Add ketchup to taste. Allow to cool sufficiently before eating. Serve with bread for wiping up the sauce.

  Canned Apricots

  Nick Adams also brings apricots along on his camping adventure. Contrary to Hemingway’s suggestion in “Camping Out,” Nick enjoys canned apricots rather than stewed. One need only imagine the sweetness of the syrup from the can to understand his preference for this canned version. Either way, apricots provide a succulent dessert, simply prepared and profoundly enjoyed by the fire.

  Coffee According to Hopkins

  Hemingway closes Nick’s meal and Part One of “Big Two-Hearted River” with a pot of coffee. Not just any coffee, but coffee according to the specific method of Nick’s friend Hopkins, a “very serious coffee drinker.”15 Most likely Hopkins is loosely based on Charlie Hopkins, Hemingway’s friend and editor at the Kansas City Star. Hemingway made the fictional Hopkins an oil millionaire who had a particular penchant for coffee making. Nick argued with him at every point but eventually saw the light. The following recipe is “straight Hopkins all the way.”16

  2 SERVINGS

  2 cups cold water

  3 heaping spoonfuls ground coffee

  Sugar

  Pour the water into a coffeepot. Use ice-cold stream water, if available. Add the coffee. Bring the water to a boil, allowing it to overflow and run down the side of the pot just to assure yourself that it is, in fact, boiling. Remove the pot from the fire and sprinkle in a little cold water to settle the grounds. Pour coffee into apricot cans or coffee cups as per your preference. Do not let the coffee steep in the pot. Add sugar to taste.

  These were the foods of Ernest Hemingway’s youth, expressions of the characters of his mother and father, and symbols of the freedom and adventure of the Michigan woods. He would return again to Michigan, and its summer people would be on his mind for years to come as he lived and wrote. He would rarely return to Oak Park and would never write explicitly about his hometown. He lost his father to suicide in 1928, and grew continually more distant from his mother, who died in 1951.

  Growing up in Oak Park and Michigan, his father had instilled in him a voracious appetite for new experiences. He had tasted adventure, and he longed for more and greater ones. He could never have imagined what awaited him in northern Italy and later in Paris and beyond. And yet in many ways he was always well prepared for what lay ahead.

  2

  ITALY

  Remembrance and War

  “‘I like a retreat better than an advance,’ Bonello said. ‘On a retreat we drink barbera.’

  ‘We drink it now. Tomorrow maybe we drink rainwater,’ Aymo said.

  ‘Tomorrow we’ll be in Udine. We’ll drink Champagne.’”

  —A Farewell to Arms

  Ernest in uniform.

  Ernest graduated from Oak Park High School in 1917 and faced the prospect of work, college, or war in Europe. Through his uncle Tyler (Hemingway), who was in the lumber business in Kansas City, Ernest learned of a position with the Kansas City Star that would be available in the fall. After yet another joyous summer in Michigan, Ernest left for Kansas City. His work at the Star was as close to a formal education in the fundamentals of writing as he would ever have. “Use short sentences,” the Star’s stylebook said. “Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English, not forgetting to strive for smoothness.”1 He acquired his first tools. The raw material from which he “whittled a style for his time”2 lay in wait close by, though never close enough until it was upon him in a blanket of fire, earth, and metal.

  In the spring of 1918, the war in Europe beckoned. Ernest could not imagine missing out on “the most exciting drama ever produced.”3 Although his poor eyesight kept him out of the armed services, he quickly volunteered when the American Red Cross began recruiting ambulance drivers.

  On the morning of May 22,1918, Hemingway left New York on the French liner Chicago, bound for Bordeaux. After chasing incoming German shells around Paris and taking a spectacular train ride through the Alps, he was assigned to ARC Section Four in Schio, 24 kilometers northwest of Milan.

  After three weeks with Section Four, Ernest was impatient to get out and find the war. His opportunity came when the Austrians increased their assault on the Piave River Valley above Venice and volunteers were needed for emergency canteens. About two weeks later, as Ernest was delivering cigarettes and chocolate to soldiers in a riverside trench, the war found him. Everyone heard the dull, rhythmic flutter of the 420-caliber projectile. When it struck the ground, “… there was a flash, as when a blast-furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white and went red….”4 Ernest was badly wounded in both legs by the trench mortar and by machine-gun fire that struck him hard as he attempted to carry a wounded Italian soldier to safety.

  After the first of several operations to remove the shrapnel, a brief stay in a field hospital, and a grueling train ride to Milan, Ernest eventually found comfort in the American Red Cross hospital, where he found his first love. She was Agnes von Kurowsky, an American nurse seven years older than Ernest.

  The true details of their love affair remain obscured beneath Ernest’s youthful bragging and his eventual fiction. This woman, and this chapter of his life, became the basis of one of the great novels to emerge from the trenches of World War I—A Farewell to Arms. This novel, along with Across the River and into the Trees, whose main character could very well be Frederic Henry 30 years later, reflects Hemingway’s lifelong, bittersweet love of northern Italy. Both of these books offer a rich and wonderful selection of Italian cuisine, providing for us, amidst the sorrow of lost battles, an indulgent sustenance.

  Recovering in the Red Cross Hospital, Milan, July 1918.

  A Farewell to Arms

  It was almost 10 years after Ernest limped home from Europe before he had obtained the emotional distance and the skill to use his wartime experience for his fiction. He was bitter and hurt when Agnes, who remained in Europe, wrote that she had fallen in love with another. When the fiction finally came, he created Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley and gave them evenings together and tense hours apart, much as he may have either experienced or hoped to experience with Agnes.

  As Frederic was about to return to the front, he and Catherine took a room in a hotel across from the Milan train station and spent an evening together before they had to part. In this scene of passion, heightened by their imminent separation, Hemingway provides for Frederic and Catherine a meal befitting their love:

  “Monsieur and Madame wish dinner in their rooms?”

  “Yes. Will you have the menu brought up?” I s
aid.

  “You wish something special for dinner. Some game or a soufflé?”

  The elevator passed three floors with a click each time, then clicked and stopped.

  “What have you as game?”

  “I could get a pheasant, or a woodcock.”

  “A woodcock,” I said. We walked down the corridor. The carpet was worn. There were many doors. The manager stopped and unlocked a door and opened it…

  Hemingway with his first love Agnes von Kurowsky, in Milan, Italy, 1918.

  Catherine wore my tunic over her shoulders while we ate. We were very hungry and the meal was good and we drank a bottle of Capri and a bottle of St. Estephe. I drank most of it but Catherine drank some and it made her feel splendid. For dinner we had a woodcock with soufflé potatoes and purée de marron, a salad, and zabalione for dessert.5

  THE MENU

  Woodcock Flambé in Armagnac

  Soufflé Potatoes

  Purée de Marron

  Salad

  Zabaglione

  Wines

  Capri

  St. Estephe

  Woodcock Flambé in Armagnac

  Hemingway shared his knowledge of wild fowl with Frederic Henry, who orders woodcock without hesitation. Frederic knows that woodcock is superior in delicacy to pheasant and is in season during the autumn frost. One can safely assume that Ernest also shared with Frederic his knowledge of hunting woodcock and the best way to prepare it as well:

  While the woodcock is an easy bird to hit, with a soft flight like an owl, and if you do miss him he will probably pitch down and give you another shot. But what a bird to eat flambé with Armagnac cooked in his own juice and butter, a little mustard added to make a sauce, with two strips of bacon and pommes soufflé….6