Stretch Cooking: The "Joy" of it

Of course the champion stretch-cooking cookbook of all time is the good old "Joy of Cooking," whose first copyright was recorded in 1931, just as the Great Depression was beginning to seriously ravage the land. Yes, you can find many high-tone recipes in "Joy," such as Beef Wellington, but you will also find this caveat preceding the recipe:

"If time is no object and your aim is to out-Jones the Joneses, you can serve this twice-roasted but rare beef tenderloin encased in puff paste – but don't quote us as devotees."

I am actually an unabashed fan of Beef Wellington, since I was introduced to it in, of all places, Abilene, Texas, in the early 1970s. I was a sports writer at The Abilene Reporter-News, and my then-wife Lynn, the mother of our children, worked in the nutrition department at Hendrick Memorial Hospital, headed at that time by Milla Perry, who today is the sister of the sitting Texas governor.

On evenings when the Hendrick board met, Lynn would bring home with her whopping slices of Beef Wellington left over from the board dinner. Were such extravagant habits already embedded in the health care culture, contributing to today's crisis? I couldn't say, but the Beef Wellington sure was good. It was a whole beef tenderloin, quickly roasted in a hot oven, smeared with pate de foie gras, rolled up into puff pastry, then baked to a golden brown. The beef was still rare in the middle. I wouldn't mind a slice right now.

Where was I? Oh, yes. I was saying that "Joy of Cooking" reminds us that stretch cooking embodies practices that today may be considered haute cuisine, but whose origins were absolutely basic. Take stock, for example. It has not been all that long, really, since all recipes began with harvesting or killing something you had cultivated, found, herded, or hunted. Cooking, shelter, and finding water were the original hard work, and those cooks learned to use everything, and make it go a long way. I have absolutely no attribution for this – it just popped into my head – but the first "gourmet" cuisine probably evolved as the human class system evolved, and the privileged class developed privileged tastes because they had the lower class doing all the work out there in the kitchen, the fields, and the pasture. Part of liking Beef Wellington so much was that they didn't have to make it themselves.

The same holds true today. I would like to know if any members in the history of the Hendrick Memorial Hospital Board ever made Beef Wellington for themselves. Daily, I am sure, their recipes are the original lower class, modified by our present, astonishing, ease of procurement. A frightening number of Americans can't even cut up a chicken for themselves, even though whole chickens can be bought for a fraction of the price of cut-up ones, and the gizzards, hearts, necks and backs, used for – that's right – stock.

To make a piece of meat go a long way, buy a big piece of meat with the bones in, learn what to do with it, and use all of it. It's all right there in "Joy of Cooking." On the very same page as the Beef Wellington recipe is text and illustrations showing how to cut up a whole sirloin into tenderloins, T-bones, ribeyes and porterhouses. If there are bones, there are five pages on preparing stocks, which can be frozen and show up in hundreds of stretch recipes, in soups, in gravies, in braising.

Outside of the slaughtering, the head, and the hide (you don’t want to go too retro here), with "Joy" you could essentially raise your own steer, butcher it, and use all of it, for some minuscule fraction of the cost of buying all those parts through a middle-man. There are some recipes in the book that I wouldn't eat, ("Beef Tongue with Raisin Sauce" is one), but "Joy" is the essential stretch cookbook. It doesn't throw anything away.