Taking the Bull by the Horns, Part 3

One of the things that really strikes you as you read through Bull Cook is that George Herter really had no particular plan in mind when he wrote it.

Oh, sure, he organized the book into sections – Meats, Fish, Eggs, Soups, Sandwiches, Civil Defense, and so on – and he’s not a bad writer in a structural sense so you can see how one idea kind of follows the next. But every time you read a recipe you get the very strong impression that he just kind of dove into it with a general topic and a devil-may-care attitude, confident that whenever he reached the end of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth he would have accomplished whatever it was he set out to do even if he had to define that goal retroactively.

Because some of these recipes are really a wild ride.

Consider, for example, the recipe for Fish Antony, which covers slightly more than a page of text.

George starts out with a four-paragraph biography of Antony Van Leeuwenhoek, who was born in the Dutch city of Delft in 1632, over three centuries before this book was published. After an introductory paragraph about Van Leeuwenhoek’s early life you get two paragraphs on what is generally considered by most historians to be his claim to fame – the invention of the microscope and the discovery of microscopic life forms in a drop of water, something that truly astonished Europeans of the day. And then George pivots to a fourth paragraph about how Van Leeuwenhoek was “a great fisherman and fish eater” and also “was one of the first to raise garden peas in Holland.”

This is followed by one rather long paragraph, almost as long as the four biographical ones combined, on the history of peas, from their origins in “Northwest India, Afghanistan, and the mountains and plateau of Ethiopia,” through the medieval and Renaissance period in Europe.

Returning to Van Leeuwenhoek, we get two paragraphs on his gardening skills and the invention of this recipe, which – after all that – turns out to be boiled fish with mushroom sauce and peas, spread on toast. George heartily recommends the use of Campbells Cream of Mushroom soup.

He then wraps things up with a paragraph that mostly discusses tuna and why it is just the foulest thing in the seas. George is nothing if not a man of Opinions, all of which he delivers with the confidence of an Old Testament prophet at a dance club.

Then he moves on to the next recipe.

The recipes in general are not all that complicated – really, most of them are at the “Cooking for College Students” level, the sort of thing a worried grandmother might offer to her wayward 18-year-old grandson in the hopes that he will neither starve nor burn down his dorm. Some are more involved, of course, but most of them are pretty straightforward.

And along the way you learn some things. I do not guarantee that those things are true. But they are certainly things, and generally interesting in the liberal arts sense of the term, the way three-headed frogs are, um, interesting.

So here are a few things that I learned in the Fish, Eggs, and Soups & Sauces sections, numbered for your convenience.

1. Caviar is not Russian but Mongolian, introduced to Europe by Genghis Khan himself, “the mightiest ruler the world has ever produced” and the man who also introduced buckwheat flour and pancakes to Europeans as well because when you’re slaughtering enough people to alter the global climate (which is true, by the way) you do work up a fearsome appetite.

2. Carp is toxic to mink, humans, and other fish.

3. St. James the Apostle invented a recipe for boiled clams and George is very happy to share that with you. Indeed, as I will cover in a later post, George does seem to have had an in with most of the important figures of the Old and New Testaments. It’s probably good that they had so many Fish recipes, and I’m sure I’ll get back to this point when we cover Loaves.

4. “The Scandinavian people both Norwegian and Swedish are great lovers of fish tongues, and consider them a great delicacy.” Let’s unpack that simple declarative sentence for a moment, shall we? First, we’ve limited Scandinavia to Norway and Sweden, which no doubt comes as a surprise to the Danes and Finns, let alone the Icelanders. Second, it does leave open the question of just how many fish tongues one needs to make a decent meal. The recipe that follows does not say – it just says to boil them or “French fry” them (do the Scandinavians fry things that way or is there a Swedish fry method?) and serve with catsup, mustard, and/or horseradish. How big are fish tongues anyway?

5. If you want pickled fish, however, you cannot just go to the store. “To get real pickled fish,” says George, “you must go to small towns along the coasts of such countries as Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Holland, and Belgium. Here you must be invited into the home where the woman of the house makes her own pickled fish.” So good luck with that, gentle reader! Fortunately, George has managed to cadge the recipe that apparently all of these women use and he presents it here. It’s actually one of the more complicated recipes, with a pile of spices, several rounds of vinegar and salt, and for some reason a packet of gelatin (he recommends Knox).

6. The restaurants in Seattle suck. “Most of them sell atmosphere, not food, and at very high prices.”

7. George has very firm Opinions about the oysters you can get in Seattle and the sorts of people who buy them. “The smallest ones are from Olympia and are called Olympia oysters,” he says with a certain amount of justification. “These tiny oysters are only about as large as a quarter. They bring $5.75 a pint wholesale [which would be a bit more than $30 in 2023]. Because of their small size some people think that it is smart to eat them. Actually they are the poorest quality of oyster grown anyplace in the world and have practically no taste at all. If you order them it just shows your stupidity about oysters.” So there.

8. He is also not a fan of Antoine’s in New Orleans – the recipe for Oysters a la Rockefeller is basically a negative Yelp review of the place punctuated by pictures and followed by the recipe that George felt they should have used had they known better – but he does like Galatoire’s.

9. San Diego has no noticeable traffic problems but Phoenix is a mess. How this fits into a recipe for abalone is not clear.

10. Even after reading a couple dozen recipes that George claims were inspired by food in New Orleans – either in honor of it or in reaction against it, either way – I’m still not sure if he liked the place. This is not helped at all by the photograph of The 500 Club on Bourbon Street, which is captioned, in its entirety, Bourbon Street, New Orleans, is a blend of fine old lace iron work and nude women. You could go either way with a caption like that, I suppose.

11. The section on Eggs is all of three pages long and contains pretty much nothing of note except for the first mention in the book of anything relating to nutrition, where he declares that Eggs King Louis IX – eggs mixed with lemon juice and onion powder and then fried to a custard consistency – can be substituted in place of mayonnaise in salads because it “has practically no calories.” This appears on page 131.

12. George is not a fan of French cooking in general, however much he likes specific examples of it. “A great many of the words used to describe recipes in French cooking mean nothing at all,” he complains. “Many of the words are strictly phony conjured up to simply give a very ordinary recipe a fancy name to falsely try to impress people.” These are literally the first two sentences of his section on Soups & Sauces, so you know you’re in for a ride given the prevalence of sauces in French cooking.

13. Consomme Royale – a recipe that calls for both canned and frozen mixtures of peas and carrots, as well as bouillon cubes, Bovril, cinnamon, and macaroni – is a seriously manly soup in George’s eyes. “Nothing sissy about this soup,” he says. This is why men lead shorter lives, you know.

14. Also in that same recipe, we discover that “cinnamon is imported pine bark.” Really, I got nothin’.

15. Speaking as someone with Italian heritage, his recipe for spaghetti sauce is pure blasphemy and I am deeply shocked that the entire Roman pantheon did not rise up from wherever it has been banished to for the last couple of millennia and strike him down in his kitchen for it. It starts poorly, with lard, an ingredient that has no place here. It rights itself a bit with tomato paste (a 6-ounce can and “no more,” which is rather restrictive), oregano, garlic, onion, and perhaps bay leaf. And then it goes off the rails completely with nutmeg, horseradish mustard, and celery salt. He also recommends Swiss cheese on your pasta. There is no coming back from this.

16. Despite this, George retains the unshakable confidence of an Instagram influencer (and you know he would have both hated and been exceedingly good at that) and this becomes truly obvious in his discussion of Bechamel Sauce, which he and he alone knows how to make. “Almost invariably persons who write or talk about Bechamel actually have no idea at all what they are talking about,” he complains. “They copy the recipe from a cook book, the author of which, likewise did not know the true recipe either and just made bad guesses. Even the so-called finest cook books do not have the true Bechamel sauce recipes.” If you’re interested, it consists of butter, flour, and cold milk. Salt and pepper to taste. Now you know.

17. In what is probably the most quoted section of this book other than the introduction where he lays out his plans, George discusses homemade mayonnaise. Or, more accurately, he discusses the one and only way that his recipe for homemade mayonnaise could possibly fail, which is tied intimately to the nature of the preparer and not something that George personally had to worry about. “If you are a woman,” he cautions, “do not attempt to make mayonnaise during menstruating time as the mayonnaise will simply not blend together at all well. This is not a superstition but a well established fact well known to all women cooks. … There are countless facts in everyday living that will always remain a complete mystery.”

You know, it’s hard to think of where even to begin when confronted by a statement like that. Has he tested this hypothesis? Without getting his ass kicked? How? There’s your complete mystery right there, really. And the thing is, by the time you get to this paragraph you’re 149 pages into the book. You’ve been reading along with all of the various and mounting oddities in this book thinking, despite the cumulative psychological toll, that “Yep, I’ve got the hang of this now, I am fully Weird Certified and an Experienced George Reader at this point and nothing he says will shock me” and then – BAM! – he hits you with this gem and you sit there in your chair staring into the middle distance with a dazed expression like you just went two rounds with Smokin’ Joe Frazier in his prime and wondering if it is too early in the day to commence serious drinking to get past this or whether “too early” is a meaningful concept in light of what you just read with your own actual eyes. I think I’ll stick with Duke’s.

18. Anti-pasto was invented by a drunk cat. After the mayonnaise bit, this almost seems normal.

19. Roquefort – which is George’s term for blue cheese in general, though he does differentiate varieties from time to time – was invented by a “sorceress” named Jehenne Muret roughly a decade before the birth of Christ. She lived in a cave.

20. The finest mustard in the world was made by Lucrezia Borgia and it’s just a shame about the poisoning thing is all.

Next up: Sandwiches, in which things well and truly go off the rails.