Saturday, September 05, 2009

Rudolph Valentino's Chicken from Parma


"To generalize on women is dangerous.
To specialize on them is infinitely worse."

Back from the seaside after a week of intense recipe-wrangling. My mind is reeling with all kinds of nonsense - is a frying pan the same as a skillet? What English cheese would be roughly equivalent to Asederos - the Mexican cheese used in Lupe Velez's Enchiladas? And of course the continuing conundrum of how much fat salt pork would Gary Cooper have been able to buy for 15 cents in 1936?

Returned to my new home in Battersea with renewed vigour for recipe testing. Planning to test every one of the metric-ified recipes in the next few months. I will be very fat indeed by Christmas. It's definitely worth doing though, the very first test revealed that although there was flour in the recipe ingredients for Rudolph's dish, I hadn't specified when to add it. Rectified!

Sidney's verdict? "Very succulent. The sauce was to die for..." Better to die of a delicious chicken sauce than a perforated ulcer and blood poisoning at 31 like Rudolph I would say.

Sidney's local Somerfield supermarket is closing down in a couple of weeks, so the sherry for the sauce was HALF PRICE! So were many other things, so we had a bit of a spend up. The kitchen is full of booze, cleaning products and extra virgin olive oil...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dear Rudy was 31 when he died. I hear he was an excellent cook...such a shame Im a vegetarian!

Lya de Putti said...

Thanks for that correction Hala! Love your website - I'll link... Yes, I've also heard that Rudy was a great cook. I have a recipe for his spaghetti sauce that looks like it was published in an article by Hedda Hopper at some point. I'd love to get a proper source for that so if you ever come across it, please let me know! Alas, not a vegetarian recipe I'm afraid...