Gentle Reader, I’d like to tell you about a friend of mine from my junior high years in San Diego.
Her name was Debbie Zinn.
In my eyes, she was fearless and glamorous. She was always brilliant without trying, and frequently trying to impress both teachers and her parents because she was brilliant.
In Spanish class, we each had to create an imaginary restaurant, then produce a real menu for it, and every word had to be in Spanish.
I called mine “El Camino Del Rey” (The King’s Road); she called hers “La Mosca Verde” (The Green Fly). She was a cute, blond subversive and I thought she was cooler than Pinkie Tuscadero.
She introduced to me the gothic romance genre.
These days gothic romances are more, “I married a werewolf and now live in a werewolf subdivision.”
But back in the land of the lost a gothic romance, and especially our faves, the ones authored by Victoria Holt were pretty formulaic and followed the example set by the Brontës and Du Maurier: helpless orphan goes to live in mysterious castle-type place and falls in love with enigmatic master of the house.
They were read at a very impressionable time and have stayed with me as literary comfort food.
And in the vein of comfort food and because this is, in the end, a food column, I give you the Victorian, utterly sophisticated meal known as “The Cold Supper.” In those books Debbie and I read, traded and reread, there were always “servants.” Depending on the household it could be more than 20, and in smaller, poorer homes there was maybe a cook, and a maid-of-all-work, or a we-don’t-have-enough-cash-for-more-than-one-maid-maid.
If one wanted something to eat after the fires had been banked and the kitchen closed, it was usually a cold supper. Unreheated leftovers that could be eaten cold: breads, cheeses, meats, cold veggie dishes.
To me, they are the hallmark of sophisticated British living. One has a cold dinner if the train carrying you and your mysterious new husband runs into a delay and your new mother-in-law frostily states that she’s sent the servants to bed. Or maybe you’ve returned extremely late to your extremely fashionable townhouse in Belgravia and the servants have left a cold supper along with bottles and bottles of chilled champagne as sustenance for you and your crowd of extremely amusing crowd of friends..
In a far less glamorous and noteworthy dinner, I brought home a plate from Whole Foods with two slices of their London Broil, garlic kale and sherry beets — all cold.
I decided to plate my meal and it turned out looking like a plate from a fancy steak house.
So, I made sauces, took pictures and had a milk chocolate Easter Bunny head for dessert.
Thanks for your time.
Contact The Curious Cook at dm@bullcity.mom.
Steak House Sauces
The secret to these sauces is to go heavy with the sharp. Think of these sauces as the sauce that would be used in a historic Steak House during the Mad Man era, three-martini lunch; the dueling ground for mid-century city dwellers, pushing themselves for admiration and dominance within their pack of co-workers/rivals.
So hit those flavors until you think you went over the line just a bit too much. Then season a little heavier than you think you should. Let it rest in the fridge for at least thirty minutes, and taste it again. You may need to season a little more, but you’ll find that the flavors have melded and while still pretty sharp, it’s no longer too sharp.
Dijonnaise
1/4 cup mayonnaise (Hellmann’s, homemade, or whatever other kind of mayo you may be mistaken about being the best)
Really sharp Dijon mustard (the kind that makes your eyes water when you take a big sniff)
Salt and pepper
Stir in mustard until smooth. Taste, and keep stirring in more mustard and tasting until you’re afraid you ruined it.
Season until it’s tap dancing on the knife edge between well-seasoned and, “OMG, it’s so salty! My mouth is drier than a Wednesday Adams stand-up routine!”
Screw your courage to the sticking place, Gentle Reader, it’s OK, cover, refrigerate, and walk away … just walk away.
Horseradish Za’atar Cream
1/4 cup sour cream
1/8 teaspoon za’atar herb blend (every grocery carries this these days)
Horseradish (fresh or prepared is up to you, but never having used fresh, I have no idea about how it compares to prepared)
Salt and pepper
Stir together sour cream and za’atar, then add horseradish, just like you did with the mustard, a bit at a time until pretty darn spicy, and then a bit more, heavily season afterward, and rest in fridge.