The Baltimore Harley's Sandwich Shop Burger

      I won't go through the history of the Harley's Sandwich Shop chain as I have it all laid out in the tuna salad article, just suffice it to say that Harley's was THE fast food chain in Baltimore long before Gino's and McDonald's.  Harley's restaurants were open all night and so were a favorite of the night shift crowd and police officers.  These burgers were always simmering in Harley's secret sauce ready to be served to hungry customers.

Adult Tartar Sauce

   
     I made this recipe while playing around one day trying to come up with something better than regular old tartar sauce.  I consulted a couple of my old recipe books for ideas and revisited some of the better ingredients in my remoulade  recipe I wrote oh so long ago.  I like remoulade, it's just a pain to make and involves tarragon which goes brown quicker than an avocado in a heat wave.  Dried tarragon has no flavor because it doesn't dry well so it was off to come up with something that has the flavor of remoulade but not the headache.

Green Goddess Dressing Recipe

Green Goddess dressing can be traced back to 1923 when it was adapted from an original recipe dating back to the 1600's.  It was created and named in honor of a play by the same name featuring the actor George Arliss and enjoyed a revival in popularity in the 1970's when the dressing maker 7 Seas re-introduced it to the American market.  As with most things culinary it has been on a roller coaster ride of popularity tempered with indifference ever since.

Lettuce Salad With Piquant Dressing

Salads as we know them today were not common back in the vintage era.  Most of the time you had to use what was on hand and for a large part of the year the only lettuce to be had was iceberg.  I rather like iceberg lettuce even though it has earned an undeserved maligned reputation in recent years when compared to the much vaunted Romaine Lettuce.  What is important to remember is that the water content of iceberg lettuce is much higher and when that is taken into account the nutritional comparison actually evens out between the 2 contenders. 

Holladaise Sauce and Her Daughters

I wrote about Mother Bechamel and her Daughters some time ago and promised to pass along a recipe for Hollandaise Sauce in due time as it is a mother sauce in and of itself.  I finally had the opportunity to make Hollandaise the other day when I made a rather rich dinner of Eggplant Creole topped with a poached egg and Hollandaise sauce.  To tell you the truth I don't really recommend the combination as the relatively light flavor of the sauce was drowned out by the heavier flavor of the eggplant creole.  However if you get back to basics and use the Hollandaise for such things as dressing aspargus or steamed cauliflower or the legendary eggs benedict then you will see the flavor of the sauce shine through into the whole dish not dominating or being dominated in turn.

Cooked Salad Dressing & Old Fashioned Potato Salad

     I love it when a vintage recipe just clicks together with a minimum of effort on my part.  This recipe is one of those chosen few that need no real tweaks on my part to work well.  With this dressing you can make either old fashioned potato salad or coleslaw but I think to my taste it works best in potato salad.  The original recipe says it can be served either hot or cold but I did mine cold for use with Easter dinner.  Give the sauce time to cool down before adding to your potatoes.

Mother Bechamel And Her Daughters

Back in the vintage era the home cook always knew how to make a sauce that would be the perfect accent to any meal.  This has becomes something of a lost art in the modern world as we have been indoctrinated over the years by the wood be health gurus that sauces are bad for us because of their richness and fat content.  Poppycock!  A well chosen sauce is perfect for making a dull uninteresting piece of meat sing with renewed vigor.  You may think that making sauces at home is time consuming but I assure you it will become second nature with practice.  Indeed, sauce making from scratch is rather easy once one knows the tricks of the trade and after a few times of doing it yourself you will wonder why you ever used a shortcut sauce like the disgusting concoction above.  To learn the whole array of sauces available to chefs would be a lifetime of work and take up volumes on the bookshelf but the vast majority of sauces available are really only attainable by professional chefs.  So for the purposes of this article we will be dealing with 1 mother sauce and it's daughter sauces.  With these you will be able to put the topping on any meat desired.

Mushroom Gravy

It may seem silly to post something as trivial as a mushroom gravy on here given all the more complicated recipes that I have talked about over the years, but you would be surprised how many cooks cannot make a simple sauce without resorting to something in a jar or worse, an envelope.  It's really not that hard and this makes the perfect accompaniment to the Bacon Meat Roll With Olive Stuffing I wrote about the other day.