Taking the Bull by the Horns, Part 5 and Last

I have reached the end of Bull Cook, and it has been every bit the adventure I thought it would be from the beginning.

When I first started this project my friend Eric – perhaps a bit bewildered by the sheer Gish Gallop of nonsense George Herter had produced for me to pass along, which is a not unreasonable position – suggested the possibility that this was all some kind of put on, a character that George was playing. There is, after all, a long tradition of such things in American culture. And to be fair, he doesn’t look like the sort of guy who would say a lot of the unhinged things he said and be serious about them. He looks almost reasonable, in fact, as you can see in this New York Times photograph.

Why he had a photo in the New York Times is an interesting question, but like most things George-related I’m just going to let it slide. There is no answer to that question that I would find comforting, so there is no point in asking.

But even at that early point in my project, I didn’t think that was the case.

Because while the United States does have a long tradition of people playing characters, it has an even longer tradition of cranks. Of people who are sincerely out there on their own little mental islands, shouting frantically at passersby while adamantly refusing any suggestion that they might be in need of assistance and who sound almost reasonable until you actually listen to them. 

We like cranks in this country. The inordinately self-assured, the know-it-alls at the corner of the bar, the quixotic and the damned – we as a culture have a soft spot for such people. This is after all the country that gave an appropriately royal sendoff to our one and only emperor, Norton I, who had his imperial throne in San Francisco from 1859 to 1880. The locals treated him well and accepted his currency and pronouncements, and when he died more than ten thousand of them came to the funeral to pay homage.

It gets us into trouble at times, particularly when the cranks get taken more seriously than they should be. Charles Pierce’s book Idiot America spends a lot of time on this downside of the American tolerance for cranks when they get into positions of cultural or political power. “America has always been a great place to be crazy,” he observes. “It just used to be harder to make a living that way.”

Yet George Herter not only made a living at being a crank, he thrived at it. He took over his father’s dry goods store in 1937 and turned it into the precursor of Cabela’s, selling hunting and fishing gear by mail and, eventually, in brick and mortar stores. It went bankrupt in 1981, but that’s a pretty good run. Bull Cook went through fifteen editions in its first decade and is still readily available more than sixty years after it was first published.

So hat’s off to George, a crank in the grand American tradition and the author of quite possibly the most insane cookbook ever published. I don’t know if I will ever try any of the recipes in there, but it was a ride worth taking.

For this final installment I read through the sections on Desserts; How to Dress Game; Wine, Beer and Liquor; and Helpful Hints. It has to be said that he calmed down considerably after the sheer unbridled weirdity of the Sandwiches and Vegetables sections, but even so I learned a few things that I probably would not have learned anywhere else. There is even a chance that some of them are true.

You never know.

So here you go, one last ride through the Technicolor mind of George Herter.

1. George was absolutely convinced that there was a conspiracy of flour manufacturers to prevent ordinary home cooks from making anything worthwhile. Throughout the section on Desserts he complains that flour companies will only sell “all purpose flour” rather than the bread flour, pastry flour, cake flour, or high gluten flour that you really need to do anything worthwhile. He actually has an entire entry entitled “Why It Is Impossible for Modern Women to Bake Well,” laying all this out in detail – that baking was something designated as women’s work seems not to have occurred to him as at all controversial – and he comes back to it in about half the recipes in the Dessert section. Once George latched onto an idea he was not the sort to let it go.

2. Donuts – or “doughnuts,” in the spelling that was popular at the time – are a purely North American item. “Europeans have never learned to make doughnuts,” he complains.

3. Not for George the desserts that involve pouring brandy onto something and lighting it on fire. “All this does is to waste good brandy,” he says.

4. One of the desserts he offers is Bananas Alexander the Great, which he builds up with a full page introduction on both the history of the banana and a biography of Alexander (“When he was only twelve years old he pushed his teacher Nectanebus into a pit and killed him. Maybe present day teenagers are not so bad after all”). Alexander, he assures us, was a connoisseur of all things banana-related. In the end, the big reveal is that this grand dessert is just bananas mashed together with milk and honey. Great.

5. You may think that Dom Perignon is most justly celebrated for his invention of champagne, but George is here to tell you that it is instead for his invention of an hors-d’oeuvre consisting of crackers with butter, cheese, and celery salt on top. This is to go with the champagne, of course.

6. Say what you will about his misguided admiration for the Confederacy, George minces no words on the evils of slavery. I’m not entirely sure how he managed to reconcile those things, but there you go.

7. “In New Orleans a drink is served today called Cafe Brulot. It is of fairly recent origin and is simply a drink dreamed up to look fancy and clip the tourists for a fancy price. It is strictly a tourist trap drink and contains among other things orange, lemon, cloves, and, of course, flaming brandy. I suppose there are poorer drinks, but they would be difficult to find.”

8. George is adamant that lemon does not belong in tea. I suspect my mother would have had a few choice words with him on this subject.

9. The section How to Clean Game has a total of three entries – how to clean a snapping turtle, how to clean game birds, and how to sharpen a knife. I am not sure how these three made the cut and other things did not, but then I learned through this process not to examine George’s decision making too closely. There is no win there.

10. The section on Wine, Beer and Liquor is second only to the Meats section in length, which tells you a bit of George’s priorities. And it has to be said that the part devoted to Wine is easily the most sober and least psychotic part of the book, ironically enough. There are very few manic rants about historical figures, most of the unsubstantiated opinions are actually relevant to the subject at hand, and overall it reads more like an actual cookbook than any other part of Bull Cook. It is thus easy to overlook the baseline weirdness that comes from George’s firm belief that you can make wine out of pretty much anything. Grapes. Flowers. Dandelions. Fruits and berries. Rhubarb. Bananas. Tea. Potatoes. Parsnips. Mangolds (which I had to look up – they’re related to beets). Carrots. Oats. Maple Syrup. On and on. It all goes into the fermentation tanks and out comes wine.

11. Vermouth, he confidently asserts, is just poor quality white grape wine flavored with cinnamon. I am not sure what brand of vermouth he is buying, but I’m assuming it is no longer sold.

12. My favorite wine recipe was “Calamity Jane Wine,” which contains two pounds of “old potatoes,” two and a half pounds of carrots, one pound of rhubarb, three and a half pounds of sugar, five quarts of water, brewer’s yeast, and no mention whatsoever of how exactly this gets back to the Old West entertainer Calamity Jane beyond the general sense of misfortune that you get from thinking about it.

13. Although his recipe for mead – entitled “Viking Virgin Wine” – comes close in a close second.

14. It’s when he shifts to Beer that George reverts back to form. He starts with a brief and vaguely plausible history of beer in human history, noting that it has been independently invented in pretty much every human culture including the Americas. “Columbus,” he says, “while exploring Central America in 1502, was given corn beer by the Indians. They should have given him poison.” Go ahead, George, tell us what you really think.

15. He is not a great fan of the mass-produced American beers that were available to him in 1960 when this was published, as he finds them too weak. “The only thing strong about American-made beer, ales or malt liquors is the strong taste of the cheap chicken feed most of it is made from.”

16. Yet he likes Budweiser. Go figure.

17. Throughout this section – and particularly the parts devoted to various hard liquors – George is at great pains to introduce each recipe with the stern warning that it is (or was at the time) illegal under federal law to make any of this in your own home, but that he just wanted to include the precise, highly detailed steps needed to do it anyway purely for historical purposes. I’ll bet he wrote the copy for the Wine Bricks they used to sell during Prohibition, too.

18. There are apparently two ways to produce whiskey. You can use a pot still, in which case you get a pretty fine drink out of it. Or you can do what most whiskey distillers do and use a patent still, which is “fine for making paint solvents but poor for making whiskey.” Your call.

19. London Dry Gin is a lie.

20. At the end of this section George helpfully includes not only a number of recipes for specific drinks, but also an entry entitled, “How to Avoid Alcoholism and Still Drink,” in which he advises you to a) water down your drinks, b) never drink on an empty stomach, and c) drink as slowly as you can. Honestly, I’m not sure that’s going to help.

21. The martini, George says, is the most popular drink in the United States, and in 1960 he may well have been right about that. He attributes this to the fact that “Americans want an escape from reality and use Martinis as an anesthetic not actually a drink.” There is a simple reason for this – at least there is for the anesthetic part (the escape from reality part he leaves as an exercise for the reader). The reason why American martinis are better at numbing than actually tasting is that “the way Martini drinks are made in America they are about the poorest excuse for an alcoholic drink that you could possibly find, actually no better than drinking Sterno canned heat strained through bread, the national drink of the bum jungles.”

22. George is a big fan of Pat O’Brien’s in New Orleans, home of the Hurricane – a drink that is perennially popular with college students as it is sickly sweet and provides a very good rate of Alcohol Per Dollar Spent. George recommend using Hawaiian Punch in yours. He also likes the atmosphere there. “In the group singing and drinking room, it is the only drinking room in the world where one minute everyone may be singing some ribald song so ribald that it would not even be tolerated in the whore houses of Hong Kong and the next minute Silent Night.” Sounds like New Orleans hasn’t changed much, really.

23. The final section, Helpful Hints, is a grab bag of things that didn’t really fit anywhere else even by George’s loose standards. The opening entry is "How to Make French Soap," and speaking as someone who ran a homemade soap business for seven years, all I can say after reading George’s recipe is No. Just, no.

24. Other entries include “Never Drink Coffee After Eating Peppered Fried Eggs or Soft Boiled Eggs,” “Red Pepper Good for Radiation and Upset Stomachs,” “Apples as a Tranquilizer,” “How to Prevent Toxic Action of Barbecued Foods” (a warning about the evils of charcoal), “How to Make Colorful Fireplace Flames” (this involves tossing in copper sulphate now and then, though keep it away from kids as it is poisonous), and the “Indian Method of Quitting Smoking.” Something for everyone, really.

25. The final entry, entitled “In Case of a Hydrogen Bomb Attack You Must Know the Ways of the Wilderness to Survive,” is your basic survivalist inventory of goods and skills that never once addresses the question of why, exactly, one might want to do that in a larger sense. I’ve taught a class on the atomic bomb since 1998 and if I have learned anything from that experience it is that the question of whether you would want to survive such an attack is not a simple one to answer. But George is nothing if not a straight-ahead damn-the-torpedoes full-frontal-assault kind of thinker, so good for him.

And now I take my leave of George Herter and Bull Cook and Authentic Historical Recipes and Practices, having faithfully reported many of the notions and assertions contained therein. I confess I’ve developed a certain fondness for the old crank, but I can’t say I’m sorry to be moving on to other things.