Gossip Friday: Summer Entertaining with Clark and Carole

From August 1941:

Informality’s the role on the Gable farm. Clark and Carole love to have company drift in around dinner time and stay for a feed-providing they help prepare it themselves. And if it’s a July night, hot and breathless, you’ll find the Gables out beneath the stars.

Supper is served picnic style on the porch. The makings are spread out colorfully, lavsihly. From then on each guest is his own chef with no food combinations barred. Count on Clark to set the mood with a superman three-decker: alternate layers of sliced tomatoes mixed with thin crisp bacon, sliced breast of chicken and slices of roast beef–mounted on toasted whole wheat!

Whole cookbooks could be written about the Gable appetite. Carole can tell you that it’s solid, masculine and impatient. After a day’s toil on the farm wrestling with soil and tractor, he’s liable to be too hungry to get his overalls off for dinner. And sometimes Carole has to send him back for “retakes” with the soap and water!

If his fingernails pass inspection, she turns her boy-man loose in his favorite dish–broiled trout and Boston baked beans. Or is the trout isn’t biting, he can eat his way through salmon salad by the bowlful.

When Clark is working on a picture, the size of his meals varies with the amount of action in the plot. During his latest, MGM’s thrilling melodrama “They Met in Bombay”, with Roz Russell–all about jewel thieves and phony detectives racing madly around exotic East Indian sets–Carole had a real struggle to keep her husband well-fed. She fears the farm will soon run out of greens from the vegetable garden and livestock from the corral if Clark keeps on in this type of role.

Why don’t you take a tip from the Gables and do your summer entertaining informally? You can trim your table gayly with bowls filled with substantial salads and trays laden with colorful sandwiches and chilled desserts. Serve one hot dish and a good old-fashioned raisin cake to balance the lighter dishes. Canned pineapple juice makes a fine foundation for cooling beverages. Spiced tea with pineapple juice ice cubes always proves popular. You can serve hot tea, too, and you’ll find it will win friends–even in the warmest evenings. Try thin silces of lime stick with one or two cloves as a variation for lemon. Coffee is a winner served either hot or iced when accompanied with chilled whipped cream.

If you think picnic-style meals a little too rough-and-tumble, arrange your buffet more formally but keep it cool and casual with novel ceramics, lacy paper doilues that you can get inexpensively at your local five and dime store anda fresh flower or tropic fruit centerpiece.

Summer Salmon Salad

To serve four:

1 small head lettuce

1 can salmon

1 onion, minced fine

2 tomatoes, quartered

2 green peppers

2 eggs, hardboiled

1 tablespoon vinegar

2 tablespoons vegetable or mineral oil

1 teaspoon lemon juice

Salt, pepper, paprika, garlic salt and celery salt

Trim off chilled head lettuce, tear off crisp leaves and arrange in large bowl.
Open can of salmon and empty into a soup plate. Remove bones and pieces of skin. Add minced onions and heart of lettuce chopped fine.
Arrange salmon and onion on lettuce, garnish with quartered tomatoes, sliced hardboiled eggs and green peppers sliced in thin rings.
To fish-oil remaining in soup plate add vegetable oil, lemon juice, vinegar and seasoning—mix well and pour over salad. Keep salad in cool place until serving. (To enlarge for unexpected company add cold sliced boiled potatoes and diced radishes).

Easy Raisin Cake

To make 12 slices:

1/3 cup soft butter

1 1/3 cups brown sugar

2 eggs

1 1/3 cup milk

1 ¾ cups flour

3 teaspoons all-phosphate baking powder

1/3 teaspoon nutmeg

1/3 teaspoon mace

1/3 teaspoon cinnamon

1 tablespoon grated orange and lemon peel

1/3 teaspoon vanilla

1 cup seedless raisins

Cream butter and sugar, add beaten eggs and milk. Then sift flour, baking powder and spices together and add to cake batter, beating in thoroughly.
Wash raisins in hot water, allowing to soak one or two minutes, drain and dry on a fresh towel. Add grated fruit peel, raisins and vanilla to batter and stir.
Pour cake batter into greased paper-lined loaf pan (about 9 1/2 x 4 1/2 x 3). Bake in a moderate oven (350 degrees F) for 50 to 55 minutes. Do not serve until cool. If you wish to make the cake richer, pour 1 pony rum over it and wrap in a dry cloth until ready to serve.

Refreshing Pineapple Juice Punch

Sparkling Pineapple Punch: 6 or 7 servings—double or triple recipe according to amount desired.

2 cups canned unsweetened Hawaiian pineapple juice

1 cup Pepsi Cola or ginger ale

½ cup grapefruit juice

¼ cup raspberry syrup

Sliced oranges and maraschino cherries

Crushed ice or ice cubes

Mix fruit juices and raspberry syrup and chill in refrigerator. (If fresh raspberry juice is used, add 3 tablespoons sugar).
When ready to serve, add Pepsi Cola or ginger ale, sliced fruit and ice.

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New this week:

Film page for After Office Hours

The page for Honky Tonk has new production notes

A MGM “Lion’s Roar” sneak peek added to the Comrade X page

Lots of new pictures, including screenshots for Never Let Me Go, It Happened One Night and After Office Hours.

Oh, and did I mention quite a few new Clark and Carole candids?! Everyone’s favorite, I know–mine too. Finding a new one is like Christmas…