Uniform of the Day: Dinner Party.

Tonight we were invited to a dinner party for twelve at the home of an in-law-ish family: the parents of my neice's husband. It's a nice house in one of the "leafy" northwest DC neighborhoods. The dozen guests ranged in age from early-30s to early-60s and included a standard mix of DC types: writers, lawyers, government staffers, doctors, entrepreneurs, &c.

The weather is fine right now, the temperature today was in the 50's F. So the only real question was what would be appropriate dress? We've been to this home before, and seen other guests in jacket and tie, jeans and sweaters, and so on. Plus, it wasn't clear if this was a sit-down dinner or a drop in, running buffet.

So, I went with this:

Duck Head chinos, alligator belt with turned silver buckle, Bass Weejuns, cashmere roll-neck from Orvis, J.Press olive herringbone sport jacket, and the 1950 rose gold Omega bumper caliber 332. 

At the time it seemed a solid choice: casual but refined. When we arrived, the hosts and most of the other guests were wearing jeans and sweaters. Good: It's better to be a little overdressed than a little underdressed. 

The cashmere roll neck was a bit warm while we were all standing around the kitchen noshing. But by the time we got to the table for the dinner, it was fine. All in all, very comfortable kit for a lovely evening. 

Standing Rib Roast (Prime Rib)

Well, it is the holiday season. We and a few others enjoyed Christmas Eve dinner with a friend--who just happens to be a chef. That was a traditional turkey dinner with stuffing and potatoes, cranberries, brussels sprouts, and a choice of three desserts. On Christmas night we had pan roasted chicken at home with a really nice pinot noir. We just had Turbot en Matelote á la Normande. So tonight, a standing rib roast--prime rib of beef.

First thing, get enough people around you to make it worthwhile purchasing and cooking this piece of beef. It's pricey but with even a small roast, you have a cut big enough to feed at least four. Six or eight is no problem with a larger roast. You can plan to feed two-to-three people per pound for a bone-in rack, three-to-four people per pound for boneless. You want the bone-in. It's just better.

Here's what you need:

--The beef.
--Broccoli.
--Potatoes.
--Butter.
--Salt and pepper.
--Horseradish (as garnish).
--Wine.

You can add salad and bread, replace the broccoli with haricots vert or whatever, but the star is the standing roast. Also, spend a buck on a nice bottle of wine. A big red is what's called for. Tell your wine guy you're cooking a prime rib for eight and you need a nice bottle. Buy a case, stash a few bottles, but leave enough out to cover the meal.

To start. Take the roast out of the fridge two hours before you plan to cook it. Let it come to room-ish temp. Pre-heat the oven to 500 or 550 (some ovens only have a range up to 500). Place the roast on a roasting rack in a pan, fat side up.

You need time to cook this. Plan for about 18-20 minutes per pound (bone in) for medium rare. If you want to cook this more than medium rare or medium, you're disrespecting the meat and should go somewhere else for a recipe.

Still here? Good.

For reference, our roast weighs 4.39 pounds. Season with a little ground black pepper and (just before it goes in) kosher salt.

Immediately after you put the roast in, reduce the temperature in the oven to 350F. 

Now go away for whatever works out to be about 15 minutes per pound. For our roast, that means about an hour and five minutes (I'll round down to an hour.) At some point during this time, your guests will be arriving, so you'll have plenty to do. Open the wine.

You can also start on things like the potatoes. I'm using little white potatoes that I'll boil for a few minutes and then, before they're fully cooked, pull off the fire and drain. 

.....And the broccoli. 

OK, we're back to the roast. Here's what the roast looked like after an hour. The temperature in the center was about 110F, well below even rare. This gave me a pretty good idea of how much longer it would need to be in the oven. I added the potatoes, just dropped them around the bottom of the pan, and put it back in for about 20 minutes.  

Once you're reached 135F-140F throughout most of the roast, let it stand for about ten minutes or so. Then slice it and serve. Here's what ours looked like after about 1 hour and 20 minutes plus the ten minutes of standing. 

This 4.39 pound, bone in roast is easily enough meat for six people. I carved it into chunks rather than slicing it. This made it easier for those who really wanted their meat more well done to have it and those of us who prefer ours on the rarer side of medium rare to be happy, too. We served it with a California zinfandel.

Turbot à La Normande

Amid all the heavy holiday dishes--turkey and dressing, prime rib and roasted potatoes, multiple desserts, &c.-- I wanted to slip in some fish. I've been searching through some old cookbooks and found this in Elizabeth's David's French Provincial Cooking (1960).

Ms. David calls this dish Sole en Matelote à la Normande. A matelote is a hornpipe, but thankfully we're not using a literal translation. In this case, she means a fish served in a light sauce (often the same sauce in which the fish is poached) of wine with onions and herbs; the term comes from the word matelot, or sailor. So, after all of that, we're making fish in a light sauce of wine and herbs (with mussels). This is more or less a two step process: 1. prepare the sauce and the vegetables; 2. prepare the fish.

Here's what you need to feed four:

--About a pound of fish. This works best with sole, of course. But sole isn't easy to find. So flounder will do nicely. You're looking for small, thin filets of a flaky white fish. For tonight's dinner, I could find neither sole nor flounder, so I was stuck with turbot. It's the correct consistency, but a but larger a fish, so a bit larger filets. 
--About a pound of mussels.
--An onion
--White wine (A true à la Normande would use cider.)
--Some herbs.
--A couple teaspoons of butter.
--Parsley butter -- you'll need parsley, butter and a lemon.
--Salt and pepper.

Step one.

Preheat the oven to about 350F. Take your butter out of the fridge; divide it into two, one-teaspoon pats. One will be for the onions. The other is for the parsley butter; set it aside and let it come to room temp. Slice the onion quite thin and sauté in a teaspoon of butter until it is translucent. Scrub the mussels and place them in a sauce pan with a glass of wine and some fresh herbs--thyme seems to work well--salt and pepper (I added some minced garlic). Steam until they open and remove immediately from the broth; save the broth, remove the mussels and discard the shells.

Step two.

Place the onions in a baking dish. Lay the filets atop the bed of onions, add salt and pepper. Through a sieve or a muslin, strain the broth over the fish. Cover the dish and put it the oven for about 20 minutes (longer for thicker filets, less for thinner...). 

Now, turn to the parsley butter. Chop a small bit (a teaspoon or two) of parsley as fine as you can. Put your room temp butter into a bowl and stir it (use a fork) until it is soft. Stir in the chopped parsley. (alternatively, you could melt the butter and stir in the parsley...) Once it's well mixed in, add a squeeze of lemon juice. Put the mix into the fridge and let it chill.

At the 20 minute mark, pull the fish out, uncover, add the parsley butter on top and spread the mussels around the edges. Leave uncovered and put it back into the oven for five minutes of so to melt the butter and warm up the mussels.

Once it's done, serve from the dish along side haricots vert amandine, a dry white wine (we enjoyed a Sancerre), and fresh baguette.

et voila. 

Chapeau: Elizabeth David. Her book as pictured above in the first edition and signed costs about $3,500.00. Luckily for the rest of us, it is available on Amazon and in cooking stores for around $20.00. The Penguin Classics edition is very good.  

Essentials: Weejuns.

I think there are a few pieces which are essentials in a wardrobe: oxford cloth button down shirts, heavy tweed jackets, deck shoes, repp ties, chinos, go-to-hell pants, and the Maine Hunting Shoe among them. In time I'll write about most of them. I thought I would start from the ground up, so to speak, and look at the Bass Weejun.

A bootmaker named George Bass began marketing this shoe in the U.S. in 1925. Bass modeled his shoe after traditional Norwegian fisherman's slippers and called them 'weejuns' in homage to the Norse models. (Chapeau: Graham Marsh and J.P. Gaul, The Ivy Look.) The shoe has been a staple on campuses and among trad enthusiasts since.

But why? Well primarily, in my view, the shoe was initially successful because it was well built, comfortable, and inexpensive. Plus, a college man could slide into his Weejuns a moment faster than his brogues, so they became go-to shoes. Generations since have simply followed in the footsteps--pun intended--of our forefathers on campus and out into the wide world. 

A couple of notes about the shoes:

--Note in the image above, the ends of the strap across the top of the foot are flat stitched to the sides of the shoe. This is the standard model. Later versions would attach the strap to the top seam, creating what became known as a beef roll. (See below)

The strap is stitched directly onto top seam. Thus, the "beef roll" on this version, the Larson. 

--But what about the pennies? Ah, the Penny Loafer. Well, again according to Gaul, women began began putting pennies in the slot of the strap. The fad spread and Weejuns have been Penny Loafers since. My own pair sport well shined pennies from my birth year. 

--And color? Well the standard these days seems to be the burgundy shown above. But in years past a flat brown was the most popular, at least at my school(s). Those all-boy schools out in the Shenandoah Valley favored black, or so I was told back in the day. 

--Socks? Well, you probably wouldn't be shot for wearing them if your grandmother was taking you out to lunch or if you were going to a funeral. But otherwise you can skip 'em most of the year. 

Sometimes polished, but not very often or only when going home or into the city, the shoes needed to last at least a full year on campus and by year's end some would be duck taped to keep from flapping when you walked. No matter, you kept wearing them. Top drawer, indeed. 

Premont

We're just back from a trip to Belgium and northern France. We ate and drank well, of course. It was cold and wet, of course.

And, of course, we had a great time. But we also spent some time contemplating the Great War. We visited the battlefields of the Somme where between July 1 and November 18, 1916 more than 1.1 million soldiers were wounded or killed. The British had more than 57,000 casualties on the first day of the battle alone. The distances gained and lost between the French and British on one side and the Germans on the other are such that one could walk them at a leisurely pace between breakfast and lunch.

We also toured the area where my grandfather fought as an infantryman during the summer and fall of 1918 as part of the 119th Infantry, 30th U.S. Division. The regiment was assigned to II U.S. Corps, and further to the Fourth Army under British General Rawlins. They were, in effect, borrowed soldiers (the title of Mitch Yockleson's book about the U.S. troops.). My grandfather was a draftee from the mountains of western North Carolina. He had never been out of the state, except maybe just across the border into Tennessee or South Carolina, before the war.

I knew my grandfather only reasonably well. He never travelled to our house in Virginia Beach from his home in Hendersonville. And although we travelled to see him many summers, I don't remember spending long hours with him listening to stories. I wish I had.

I do remember hearing him tell about how he was wounded. He said he was on a small patrol ahead of the established U.S. lines and came under fire. I don't remember if he said all or most of the others on the patrol were killed. He said with a laugh that he ran three Germans to death--he was in front of them. He was wounded, shot in the heel, and said he was so cold and so scared that he didn't even really know he had been shot until he reached his own lines. That happened, according to a history of his unit, on October 10th, 1918; about a month before the Armistice and only a week after the regiment had crossed the St Quentin canal, a significant obstacle and part of the Hindenburg Line.

This map is part of the Somme Bellicourt Memorial to the U.S. 27th and 30th Divisions. You can see the position of the Riqueval Bridge (over the St Quentin Canal), centered in the 30th Division sector.

The Riqueval Bridge was captured by a unit of the 6th North Staffordshire Regiment, an English infantry regiment. But it appears to be in the center of the U.S. 30th Division sector. I suppose that shows how inter-twined the units were, and how chaotic things must have been amid the smoke, fog, and shelling: a British company commander told historians that he led his company across the bridge "having accidentally discovering it was intact after getting lost." 

This is the Riqueval Bridge on October 2, 1918, three days after it was captured. Brigadier John Campbell, VC is addressing his regiment. 

Here's the bridge today. Not much has changed. 

My grandfather's division was relieved by the Fifth Australian Division the following day and spent a few days in reserve, resting and refitting before returning to the line on October 5 and fighting through the evening of the 10th. The wound card I've seen for him said he was shot near the town of Premont, but the maps of action shows the regiment considerably further east-north-east on 10/10. Premont was likely the divisional headquarters or the rear area hospital where he was taken. 

Premont itself is a small town, with one main road and a single church. There is farmland and rolling hills all around. It is really quite a lovely place. The picture above is on a small dirt and gravel road just entering the town from the west. 

The Catholic church in Premont with a memorial to the fallen of the Great War.

The main road through town is named Rue du General Tyson, after the commander of the 59th Regiment -- the other regiment in my grandfather's brigade. 

Regardless, of precisely where he was when he was wounded, October 10th was the end of his fighting in the war. He left the front as a private first class and was awarded the Purple Heart Medal. At some point during his recovery or during demobilization, he was promoted corporal.

Once he got home in 1919, I don't think he left town again, at least not for long. And while I'm glad I had the chance to see the area he fought through, I wish I had been able to do so with him.

Gravestone, Berea Baptist Church Cemetery (aka Capps Cemetery), Flat Rock, N.C.