Playboy at the Chafing Dish

playboy's food & drink editor

The word "chafing" comes from the old French chaufer meaning to make warm, to excite or inflame.

From the earliest Roman times amateur and professional gourmets have understood this principle when performing at the chafing dish. Seneca, the Roman Stoic who lived in the first century A.D., talked about the "chafing dish that pleases the pampered palate." Centuries later Marie Antoinette ordered an elaborate chafing dish made in England to tickle the taste buds of the royal player-arounders.

In the late 19th century the chafing dish was the elegant tool of Philadelphia matrons and millionaire yachtsmen. One from that period was so cleverly designed that when taken on an ocean voyage, it would remain upright, spirit lamp burning brightly, no matter at what precarious angle the ship's deck stood and no matter how ossified the skipper might become.

But the chafing dish was destined for more lively company and at the turn of the century it was taken from the drawing room damsels into the attics of artists and writers and into the dens of playboys and playdaddies where it has remained ever since.

The latter soon discovered a bit of wisdom Playboy gladly passes along at this point: namely, it is possible to have a woman eating out of your hand without ever laying that hand on her, in fact, without even looking at her, by simply catching her eye with the romantic blue flame of a chafing dish.

After you've caught her eye, you proceed to catch her nostrils. The lady herself knows the value of this sense when she spills eau de cologne over her shoulders or dabs the back of her ears with a drop or two of Passionate Night. You now set up a counter olfactory current. Your sorcery includes such ingredients as butter, cheese, wine, seafood and cream.

The chafing dish is actually only a small portable stove which can be placed on a table. It's a simple apparatus with a tripod base holding a bottom pan (which holds water) and a top pan in which the food is cooked. The top pan is called the blazer. Beneath the pans is a small burner containing alcohol, Sterno, or a similar fuel. When both bottom and top pan are used, the chafing dish functions in the same way as a double broiler. It is used to cook food by indirect heat or to keep food hot before serving. When the bottom pan is removed and the blazer is placed directly on top of the flame, the chafing dish becomes an ordinary saucepan or frying pan.

From whence, then, comes the chafing dish's incredible magnetism? Why, since it is only a double broiler or a frying pan, has it become the emblem of larkish living and high-fed wooing?

Tell a girl, for instance, that you're going into the kitchen to make some Clams Southside, and she'll probably say, in a rather bored voice, "Oh, 1 didn't know you could cook."

But light the flame under a chafing dish and see what happens. A show is on. You must be sure, first of all, that the chafing dish rests on the whitest Irish linen tablecloth you can buy.

You must be sure the chinaware is gleaming and the silver is burnished bright. The fragrance of perking coffee has been stealing around for a few minutes now. You place the blazer directly over the flame. You may melt a few tablespoons of sweet butter in the blazer and add about two dozen cooked shrimps. When the shrimps are glossy with butter, you shower them with dry sherry and paprika.

Until now the young lady has remained silent with a kind of fixed stare. You look up from your proceedings just long enough to notice that emotionally she is now on stilts. The combined aroma of the butter, the sherry, and the shrimps creates an effect something like that achieved by Dr. Mesmer. Your subject is under complete control.

The art of the chafing dish isn't quite as easy as it may sound. The bobbish young man who doesn't know his chafing dish cookery can cause quite an uproar with the small, gleaming apparatus. If he doesn't put water in the bottom pan, he can burn or discolor the metal. If he doesn't use the proper wick in the alcohol lamp or enough alcohol, he can wait around until Christmas for the fire to begin cooking the food. Finally he must learn the careful art of avoiding the last minute rush. Some of his foods must be previously prepared, some only half prepared, but all in a stage of preparation that allows him to execute his steps of legerdemain with the shortest space of time and with the greatest of ease.

A chafing dish usually reflects the (continued on page 36)Chafing Dish(continued from page 29) personality of its user. Some would seem to believe in cooking by fumigation rather than fire. This type waits until he and his guests are slightly starved and then, noticing that he has forgotten to fill the apparatus with fluid, he brings a gallon can of alcohol to the table. This guy also requires a pair of pliers to open the can, which is rusty. After considerable maneuvering, he manages to wrench loose the top of the can and successfully spills most of its contents on his lap, soaking his trousers down through his shorts, and filling the air with fumes that remind his fascinated audience of a very sterile hospital ward.

The Fumigator then proceeds to pour the alcohol into the chafing dish burner. The alcohol, of course, flows like the Mississippi at full spring tide, inundating glasses, linen and silverware, with only a trickle reaching the spirit lamp. By this time every well-mannered guest is reaching for his gas mask. All this colossus at the chafing dish now needs for his second act high spot are a few well placed live cigarettes ashes to set his entire apartment into a glorious blaze.

If you are using liquid alcohol, fumigation and possible conflagration can be avoided by opening the can in the kitchen and filling the burner over the sink, using a small funnel. Better still, use a semi-liquid fuel such as Sterno which requires no pouring or wicks.

Besides the Fumigators there are the pretentious amateur gourmets, the cognoscenti of the culinary arts, who will cluster about your chafing dish like gnats at a sweet picklebarrel. These are the fellows who can't imagine cooking without an immense tray of assorted spices and herbs containing anything from coriander to fenugreek. They are the "Good gracious! No saffron here" sort, the "Fergoodnessakes! He keeps his truffles in the refrigerator" type. Their idea of a fascinating bit of reading is to beguile you with a seventeenth century recipe for Filet de Mouton a la Moneglas aux Foie Gras.

This is the fellow who only cries the praises of unusual foods that few people know and that fewer people care about. In short, they use the chafing dish to trot out their odd knowledge and esoteric tastes. They know how, in the brief space of eighteen hours, to make enough salmon forcemeat for four persons. But they run to seed when someone asks them to make a few soft scrambled eggs. They are to be avoided like botulism or ptomaine poison.

The size of the chafing dish you buy should depend upon the number of people you normally entertain. For the average small group of two to six people, a chafing dish with a two quart capacity is ample. Choose a chafing dish of heavy metal for uniform, steady heating. Blazers made of thin metal tend to scorch food readily. The most expensive chafing dishes are those of heavy silver, and many of them are rather pretentious. Copper pans with tin or silver linings are warm and hospitable looking and have excellent cooking qualities. New and inexpensive are the aluminum chafing dishes with iron bases.

When cooking at the chafing dish, it's a good idea to have a wooden spoon for stirring rather than a metal one, to avoid scratching the dish.

If you know nothing whatever about cooking, you can still have a fine time with a chafing dish. Remember that it is, first of all, a food warmer and that these days it is possible to buy prepared dishes -- frozen, canned, or packed in jars -- varying from onion soup to crepes suzette. Most such foods merely require heating to serve: a few rules of thumb are helpful in the serving. Many of these prepared main dishes are sauce foods such as veal scallopine, lobster newburgh and chicken a la king and they can be improved rather simply.

If, for instance, you are heating a food with a white sauce like creamed mushrooms or chicken a la king, you can always enhance it by adding a small amount of sweet cream. A dash of white wine or sherry is likewise an improvement in white sauce dishes. A half-teaspoon or teaspoon of grated onion is salutary.

If the food is in brown sauce, you can generally step up the flavor by adding a dash of red wine, or dissolving a bouillon cube or two in the sauce, or by adding one of the flavor improvers such as Accent, Maggi seasoning, etc.

Some chafing dish cookery is merely a matter of combining pre-prepared foods. For instance, if you want to make shrimps creole, you can buy fresh shrimps, already cooked or cooked and shelled, from a fish dealer. You then buy a can of Creole sauce, combine the shrimps and sauce, heat them to bubbling and you have a delightful shrimp Creole.

Many chafing dish foods require cooking from scratch, of course, and the easiest and most popular of these is scrambled eggs, the queen of the late supper and early morning dishes. In the early hours before dawn, after the spark of love has been spent, a kind of ghoulish hunger is abroad. It's too late to go prowling the streets hunting for eating places that are still open. One is too tired to fuss with sauces or seafood. In the refrigerator are butter and eggs. On the pantry shelf there's a tin of flat salted anchovy filets. It takes only a moment to light the chafing dish. Then, like all good cooks, you start working from outward perimeter inward. You begin at the terminal end with the coffee, the napkins, the rolls or toast, the butter -- everything but the scrambled eggs. Then when you and she are ready to eat, you open the eggs into a dish and beat them until the whites are no longer visible.

You put the blazer of the chafing dish over a direct flame. For each two eggs, you place a tablespoon of butter in the blazer. When the butter just begins to splutter and brown, you add the eggs. Douse them generously with salt, lightly with white pepper. Then stir and don't stop stirring until the eggs are ready to be turned into the serving dishes. Cook them dry if you like, but the true devotee of scrambled eggs will want them soft. If you want to add a tablespoon of sweet cream to the eggs while cooking them or a dash of grated cheese, you may do so, but either of these filips will alter the wonderful comforting flavor of country fresh eggs.

Over the eggs on the serving dishes, you may place three or four salted anchovies or several strips of smoked salmon. A kippered herring or a Yarmouth bloater warmed in butter may be placed on the scrambled eggs, but these items are for literal breakfast eaters rather than for hungry owls.

When the eggs have been placed on the serving dishes, you may wait for a few seconds until the steam subsides, but you shouldn't let the eggs get cold or flat. The hot coffee should be served in oversize cups.

There are, of course, nights when any playboy gets fed up with plain womaninity. He gets tired of their rickety chatter, their high geared demands for attention, the fact that they are proud one minute and the next minute dying on the vine. He becomes conked out with quarreling and then he wants the fellows around. He wants to jaw and tell a few blue gags. When the bull session reaches midnight, all the fellows will feel hunger pangs and that's the signal for a Welsh Rabbit, perennial favorite of night hawks.

Frequently the dish is spelled "Welsh Rarebit," an affectation. There are a lot of explanations for the name, Welsh Rabbit. One school holds that poor Welshmen who had no meat and who were forbidden to poach on the large estates, for rabbit or any other game, turned instead to their simple cheddar cheese as the (continued on page 50) Chafing Dish (continued from page 36) main meal of the day and named it after the dish they would have preferred. Such comic misnomers are not unusual: A specially prepared dried fish is called Bombay Duck in India and Colonial Goose is the name given to stuffed mutton by the Australians.

In making Welsh Rabbitt it is important to cook the cheese over hot water, using the bottom pan of the chafing dish. A direct flame will cause the protein in the cheese to harden and form tough strings. Old American cheese, the rat trap variety, crumbly and pungent with age, is the best. Process sharp American cheese may be used if natural cheese is unavailable.

Welsh Rabbit is simply cheese heated until it is liquid and has the consistency of a thick sauce, flavored mainly with ale, mustard and worcestershire sauce. It should taste like a river of gold out of Hades and should always be served on dry toast.

Welsh rabbit for four males

Open two eggs, seperating the yolks from the whites. Ask the landlady to show you how to do this, if necessary. Give her the whites as a present. Keep the yolks.

Cut l-1/2 pounds of old cheddar cheese into cubes about 1/2 inch thick. Melt two tablespoons of butter in the top part of the chafing dish. Add 1 teaspoon paprika, 1 teaspoon dry mustard, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon pepper, 2 teaspoons worcestershire sauce, and 2 teaspoons prepared mustard. Stir well to blend all the seasonings thoroughly. Add 1/4 cup ale. Add the cheese and cook, stirring frequently, until the cubes of cheese melt completely. While the cheese is melting, start making toast, allowing about 2 slices per person.

When the Rabbit is very hot, beat the egg yolks slightly and add them to the cheese. Cook two minutes longer, stirring constantly. Pour the Rabbit over the toast on serving dishes. The Rabbit should be followed with an inexhausible supply of cold ale or beer.

Sherried Crabmeat for four bons vivants

Canned, frozen or freshly cooked crabmeat available in fish stores may be used for making Sherried Crabmeat.

Melt 3 tablespoons butter in dialing dish over simmering water. Examine a 13 ounce can of crabmeat, removing any cartilage or shell. Break the crabmeat into large lumps.

Place the crabmeat in the chafing dish. Add 1/4 cup dry sherry wine, a 10 ounce can of condensed cream of mushroom soup, and 1/4 cup of light cream or milk. Mix well.

Simmer until mixture is very hot. Add 1/4 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce. Add 1/4 cup finelly chopped scallions using both white and green part. Add salt and pepper to taste. When the crabmeat is served, there should be a basket of crisp French bread on the table. Pass a salad of crisp, curly chicory and tomato wedges with tangy French dressing. Serve a bottle or two of cold Liebfraumilch with the crabmeat.