Last dinner on the Titanic.

[wakemeupwhenitsover]

The Titanic hit the iceberg on April 14th & many, many, many years later I was born on April 14th. Well, I have a sort of yucky birthday coming up & not to equate 1500 deaths & my yucky birthday, but I thought I would recreate the dinner for friends.

Here's the problem. I've got the menu & recipes, but I'm not sure how to serve a couple of the courses.

Here's the list.

First Course-Hors D'Oeuvre:

Canapes a l'Amiral
Oysters a la Russe

White bordeaux, White Burgundy or Chablis

Second Course-Soups:

Consomme Olga
Cream of Barley Soup

Madeira or Sherry

Third Course-Fish:

Poached Salmon with Mousseline Sauce

Dry Rhine or Moselle

Fourth Course-Entrees: (Major screw up here. This should have been the fifth course)

Filets Mignons Lili
Chicken Lyonnaise
Vegetable Marrow Farci

ReD Bordeaux

Fifth Course-Removes:

Lamb with Mint Sauce
Calvados-Glazed Roast Duckling with Applesauce
Roast Sirloin of Beef forestiere

Chateau Potatoes
Minted Green Pea Timbales
Creamed Carrots
Boiled Rice
Parmentier & Boiled New Potatoes

Red Burgundy or Beaujolais

Sixth Course:-Punch or Sorbet

Punch Romaine

Seventh Course - Roast:

Roasted Squab on Wilted Cress

Red Burgundy

Eighth course - salad

Asparagus Salad with Champagne-Saffron Vinaigrette

slog through with water

Ninth Course - cold dish:

Pate de foie Gras
Celery

Sauterne or Sweet Rhine Wine

Tenth Course -sweets

Waldorf Pudding
Peaches in Chartreuse Jelly
Chocolate Painted Eclairs with French Vanilla Cream
French Vanilla Ice Cream

Sweet Dessert Wines (Muscatel, Tokay, Sauterne)

Eleventh Course - dessert:

Assorted fresh fruits & cheese

Sweet Dessert wines, Champagne, or Sparkling Wine

After Dinner

Coffee, cigars

Port or Cordials

Since I don't have an industrial kitchen with a sous chef I'm just picking one dish from each course. So:

Oysters-2 per person?
Consomme Olga- 3/4 cup per person?
Poached Salmon - 2 ounces per person?
Chicken Lyonnaise - this uses chicken breasts. Should I cut the breasts in half before cooking? Or should I cut them afterwords? One chicken breast per person would be waaay too much.
Roast Sirloin of Beef - 3 ounces per person?
Punch Romaine - 1/2 cup per person?
Roasted Squab 1 per person & there will be horrible waste here, too.
Asparagus Salad 4 spears per person?
Pate de Foie Gras - clueless on how much to serve.
Chocolate Eclairs 2 very small ones per person?
Assorted fruits & cheeses - maybe 2 fruits & 2 cheeses per person? Or would 3 be better? This is easy because any leftovers we'll eat. Any good ideas on which fruits & cheeses?
Coffee, cigars & tums (Okay, I made the tums up)

Do these amounts look right? I know there will be waste, but I'm trying to hold it down to a minimum. I also don't want to look stingy & have one little blob on each plate. I also don't want to send any of my guests into cardiac arrest.

[Tab]

1. The big question, of course, is...

what to wash it down with?

(sorry, couldn't resist)

[wakemeupwhenitsover]

2. The wines are listed at the end of each course.

ha ha ha!

[politicat]

3. I think your amounts are reasonable, even large.

With the roasted squab, you could probably go down to a half per person, and just cut them down the breastbone before roasting. As much as we eat now, we just aren't in training to compete with the Edwardian haute ton stomachs. (I wonder how those women fit into their corsets... surely they weren't all bulimic?)

According to my very old (1928), very battered Fannie Farmer, pate should be served on cress or lettuce with quartered, small tomatoes and about a half-ounce per person. Fois gras is very rich and fatty, and not to everyone's taste. You might prefer to do a mock fois gras (I think it tastes better, and is almost as smooth if whipped with an electric hand mixer.) When served at table, it is not served with crackers or a bread base. It is shaped into fancy shapes (though balls make with a small disher or melon baller would work, or slices cut very neatly from a terrine) and arranged on greens with flavorful tomatoes (or grapes) quartered beside it.

I hate to say it, but instead of the chicken Lyonnaise, you might want to look at doing the vegetable marrow farci instead. You have a LOT of meat on this menu between the sirloin, salmon, the squab and the pate. (As far as I can tell, vegetable marrow farci is stuffed squash, though considering the season, it might be stuffed squash blossoms, too.)

My question is do you have enough dishes? And do you have the recipes the chef used?

[wakemeupwhenitsover]

5. I think the half squab per person is an excellent idea.

I'll cut them before or after cooking.

As far as the pate; in Edwardian times it was served with celery. It was probably changed later - sort of like the hot hors'doervre that was served after the fish which later changed into celery & olives & nuts after the fish. A half ounce sounds good though.

I didn't opt for the vegetable marrow farci because marrow won't be available, though I could use zucchni. I think that's a good choice. And you're right there's a lot of meat.

And as to how they ate that all; I don't have a clue. Though I did watch The Manor House on PBS. Lady Whatever was an ER doc in real life so she couldn't have been just sitting around on her tush. She said she was sure she would gain tons during the show & actually lost weight. She thought it must have been the corset. Hard to eat much when your tummy is sucked in half.

The dishes are going to be tight. I have a set for 12 with soup bowls & salad plates & tons of serving dishes. I have glass plates that will work for the oysters & the lined things for the punch. I'll have to dig up some more. My set is impossible to fill. In all the years I've had it I saw 3 soups bowls for sale one time. That's it. That's all she wrote. Nothing else ever.

The recipes I'm using are just standard Edwardian ones for all the dishes. This is a cookbook titled Last Dinner on the Titanic. The authors just got them from Escoffier, etc.

Good ideas & thanks!

[Warpy]

6. I'll bet that squash was stuffed with MEAT

because that's where those first class folks were at, meat, tons of it, several varieties at each meal, or they felt deprived. I've come across dinner party menus from my grandmother's family, and they were the same. Meat, meat, meat, meat, meat. Then fruit & cheese.

Squab are much smaller than the other UFO, the Cornish game hen. There really isn't that much meat on 'em, so one per person is probably OK. It certainly takes enough time to wrestle with them for a little bit of meat.

Your suggestion about the melon baller for the pate was in line with mine about the size of the servings. GMTA on that one.

[wakemeupwhenitsover]

7. Actually, no it wasn't stuffed with meat.

And now I remember why I can't use it. It's stuffed with rice & DH can't eat rice.

Chicken Lyonnaise it is.

[politicat]

8. Ah. Okay...

Ack. No rice? Poor guy!

You are more ambitious than I, m'dear. There's no way I'd be doing what you're doing without recruiting some kitchen help into playing server (fortunately, I know enough people who are kinky that way... :wink: ). Have fun and if you can get someone to take pictures, please post them! (And I bow before you...)

Thinking about the cress/lettuce/celery with fois gras, the difference might be barbarian Americans versus French. Celery is a pain in the behind to grow. Especially "white celery" where the stalks are wrapped in burlap or buried in compost as they grow to keep the ribs from turning green. I know my older cookbooks absolutely deplore green celery and demand that it be discarded. But lettuce will take over a garden if not thinned enough and cress is a virtual weed in wetter parts of the world.

Perhaps instead of cheese, you should serve Lipitor with the fruit? *giggle*

As for dishes, I know that feeling. There's a reason we ditched the last set and went with plain, wide rimmed, white china... replacements are easier to find when I butterfingers something. I do know that glass cake sized plates can be rented from one of the party rental places for not too much. Linens, too.

[wakemeupwhenitsover]

14. It took forever to figure out what was causing his cramps. When

he found out it was rice he just about went into a funk.

As far as the celery: it used to be considered very haute cuisine for the very thing you mentioned: it was a bitch to grow & was very woody & needed a lot of trimming to make it edible. So, of course it was desired.

Weird about my dishes. I just remembered that they were made sometime between 1894 & 1914 (which is why they're impossible to find) so they'll be perfect. True Victorian/Edwardian.

I will definitely need to rent additional plates & glassware.

Now, we need to figure out a way for me to do all this, eat, drink & not slide under the table by the 4th course.

Thanks for all your great suggestions.

best.

[Warpy]

4. Very ambitious

But you need to know the Edwardians were prodigious eaters, due no doubt to their extremely high activity level. There were few labor saving devices yet, and even the "modern" kitchen stoves required a lot of hauling and stoking, not to mention careful attention to the hot water tanks attached to them that neeeded pumping to fill. The cars still had cranks. The serving sizes you suggest would have been mere samples to the first class passengers on the Titanic. It probably sank quicker because they were all full to bursting.

In any case, for a contemporary crowd I'd probably go with half a chicken breast Lyonnaise (split before cooking), 2 oz. roast beef, one squab, 2 oz. salmon, 3 oysters, and I'd serve the pate either in very tiny molded portions (think Godiva chocolate sized), 2 per person or serve a medium sized mold for every 4 people or so, let 'em fill their own celery. I'd go easy on the consomme, too, since hot liquids like that can be incredibly filling and you've got multiple courses after it. 2 tiny eclairs might be OK, but you can bet the Edwardians downed enormous ones with a side of French ice cream. I might go easy on the creamed carrots, but the minted peas and boiled new potatoes will work. The Edwardians would probably have consumed two times these amounts.

Fruits after a spread like this one should be on the lighter side, like pears and grapes, cheeses can be any soft cheese like brie with shavings of harder cheeses like Romano. Cheddar would work, too, shaved. Small shavings. People will be STUFFED, and it's poor form these days to provide a vomitorium. OK, that was tacky. It would be good to have a little extra of each item just in case there is a guest who wolfs his portion and then looks around for more, but I doubt this will be the case.

As for not looking stingy, do what upscale restaurants do: buy a bunch of plastic ketchup bottles for your sauces, and carefully and artfully fill the plates with sauce drizzles and dots. Beds of greens can also fill a plate quite nicely, which is why the squab is supposed to sit on a bed of wilted watercress. Edible flower petals like rose and squash can also compensate for empty expanses of china. This isn't prole food, and the food isn't supposed to be crowded on the plate. This is ART.

These are just suggestions, of course. I haven't had to do anything this ambitious for many years, thank gawd, my last one convincing me of the beauty of paper plates for more than 6 guests at a time, since my bathtub quickly filled with dishes it took me hours to do after the last guest departed.


Good luck! It sounds wonderful.

[Sanity Claws]

9. I think your guests will look like The Titanic when the meal ends

Sounds absolutely delicious. Let me know if you need help on the leftovers.

[Stinky The Clown]

10. What a great idea for a theme dinner ..... what about the dress code?

We love getting all dressed up in formal wear and going out for an evening.

I don't suggest this for just *any* birthday, but if this is a big one for you, how about having your guests get all dressed up in black (or better yet, white) tie and gowns, rent the needed dinner plates and silver, and a set an excrutiatingly formal table with the rows and rows of silver and line-ups of wine glasses.

Many years ago, we did a dinner party that was all done on the grill ..... and nothing fancy at all .... barkers and burgers, spud salads, corn onna cob, that kinda menu .... but set a very formal table in the dining room.

Everyone had great fun.

Sometimes ya just gotta go for it! :)

[Warpy]

11. I'm just hoping that

the evening ends better than the original did...

[babylonsister]

12. Never mind dishes, how many ovens and stoves to

you have, and YOU are doing all this work on your birthday?
It sounds extravagant and wonderful, and I'm sure your friends
will appreciate all your effort! I hope you might be able to find
a bit of time to take some pics for us salivating over here!
Happy early Birthday! :party:

[wakemeupwhenitsover]

13. I've got a double oven, 4 burner grill,

nuke (I know, I'm cheating there) & a big gas barbeque to set on low & keep foods warm.

I also enjoy cooking & 2 or 3 times a year I go aaalll out. I've never done anything this ambitious, but several of the courses are actually easy when you look at them. I'm pretty talented at breaking things down & getting lots done before hand, too.

Thanks for you your kind words!

best