Bull Cook Homemade Caviar

If you can possibly find a copy, grab "Bull Cook and Authentic Historical Recipes and Practices" (Herter, 1960*) off the shelves and dig right the hell in. It's a brilliant collection of old-fashioned everything, including photographs, restaurant reviews, and local information about Seattle, New Orleans, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, and god help us, Disneyland.

To give some indication how totally cool this book is, just to let you know just what kinds of antiquated, obscure, and dubious information are to be gained within its eroding covers, behold the very first subheading of the very first chapter of the book: MEATS. How to Make Real Corned Venison, Antelope, Moose, Bear, and Beef. Yuh-huh. Bear. The book also contains instructions for Jefferson Davis' Southern Chicken ("a man who liked food well prepared and saw to it himself that his cooks knew how to cook"), a brilliant method of pressure-cooking raw chicken, then lightly breading and pan-frying it in butter. The Herters instruct, "Save money any way you can, but do not try to save it by using margarine or cooking oils or fats to pan fry chicken. Chicken can only be fried in butter." (italics mine)

"Doves Wyatt Earp," a recipe developed by the real man, is listed after a comparatively lengthy and unquestionably sympathetic history of Earp's gunslinger days. According to Herter, Earp was an "outstanding cook," and "his Wyatt Earp breakfast consisting of a half inch thick slice of beef or buffalo, eye of a rib steak with thinly sliced onions on top put between two slices of buttered bread with the butter well sprinkled with salt and served with two fried eggs on both sides was very popular and justly so." The brief biography ends with Herter's assertion that "(W)e need men today like Wyatt to put law and order in today's Hollywood and New York's television area more than we ever needed him in Dodge City or Tombstone." One shudders to think of that much belligerent firepower loose among such misunderstood heathens.

Within this invaluable and endlessly fascinating tome are also offered descriptions of Catherine de Medici's fabulous legs and her subsequent invention of ladies' panties (so she could ride and show off her gams) as well as recipes for "Birds Saint Thomas Aquinas," "Prairie Dog Bat Masterson," and "Swedish Muskrat." A subchapter is entitled "How to Make Liverwurst of Duck, Goose, Deer, Rabbit, Squirrel, Pheasant, Moose, or Calf's or Pork Liver by Johannes Kepler."

In the Herter's instructions for making caviar, carp is listed as having the finest-tasting caviar, though its flesh constitutes some "very poor eating" and is, indeed, poisonous, according to them. I'd never seen instructions for making caviar before this book and thought the method worth reproducing, though I am unconvinced of its end results:

"Here is the original and best caviar recipe:
"Take one gallon of water. Add 2-1/2 cups of salt. See if an egg will float in the solution. If it will not, add more salt until the egg will float. Add 1/6 of an ounce of sodium nitrate. Add 1/32 of an ounce of sodium nitrite. (Get both from your druggist, it costs practically nothing)

"Add one level teaspoon of powdered ginger. Add one level teaspoon of dry mustard. Wet mustard will do if you do not have dry. Stir well. Then take the carp egg sack and cut it open and squeeze out the eggs into the solution. Leave stand at room temperature for five days. Then strain out the carp eggs and place them in glass jars and keep them under refrigeration or frozen until used. If you have no refrigeration put the eggs in mason jars and put on mason caps. Sterilize them as described elsewhere in this book and store in a dark place until used."

I'll be posting more from Bull Cook, as well as myriad other antiquated cookbooks, at later dates. This information, colloquial or otherwise, is too good, too woefully obscure, to exist solely between these fading covers. It should be shared and loved, if not outright canonized.

And if anyone tries out the caviar recipe? For the love of Food, lemme know how it comes out and whether or not anyone dies of it.

*"Bull Cook and Authentic Historical Recipes and Practices," written by George Leonard Herter and Berthe L. Herter. Published by Herter's, Inc., Waseca, MN, 1960.