The Compleat And Actual Adventures of Marcella White Campbell

I like to talk about food. I also like to talk about Mad Men. So, barring life getting in the way, every remaining week that Mad Men is on the air, I’ll try to prepare a 60s snack menu based on what the ladies and gentlemen of Sterling Cooper ate last week — because they always at least drink something — and say a few words about what they ate this week.

Last Week:

In last week’s episode, Grandpa Gene salted his chocolate ice cream, smelled orange blossoms, and died offscreen; Pete Campbell — or should I say Ho-Ho — watched Don Draper try to shoot his golden egg-laying goose over a Caesar salad prepared tableside; and Betty Draper ate her daughter Sally’s peach. Oh, and Peggy bought her new roommate a sandwich.

So I designed a lavish menu involving a fresh Caesar salad, James Beard’s vidalia onion sandwiches, and flambeed peaches. Then I remembered that 1) there were only two of us this week and 2) we had already eaten dinner and 3) we had already had two kitchen fires and an eggplant explosion since Thursday before last. So I scaled back our plans.

I own a fantabulous Betty Crocker cookbook from 1967, in which the secret of Riviera Peaches is revealed:

The secret is that Riviera Peaches are gross. A half peach, covered in melted raspberry jelly, topped with a scoop of pistachio, combines many concepts that scare me, such as dessert and pistachios. We dutifully followed the recipe. We couldn’t find pistachio, but we made sure to substitute another old timey ice cream flavor, butter pecan, from back when people were just excited that the ice cream didn’t taste like salt pork or cabbage. (I also would have accepted black walnut, rocky road,  or rum raisin.)

Our approximation was, admittedly, much less swingin’ 60s.

Still not good though. These people of the sixties, when they were not marching for freedom or burning bras, must have liked their sugar. There is no need to melt a lavish quantity of raspberry jelly over a ripe peach and then add ice cream.

In the Nice Save department, however, we paid homage to Grandpa Gene’s chocolate ice cream salting with a bar of Rococo’s Sea Salt Milk Chocolate.

Grandpa Gene had the right idea. Salt and chocolate should go together, when salt isn’t busy with caramel, and, ideally, when you are not a diabetic hypertensive consumed by thoughts of death.

This Week:

Sally Draper had the first of what will likely be a pattern of catfights. Betty Draper had a baby and met Medgar Evers during a Twilight Sleep hallucination. Peggy and Pete were forced to have something like a conversation. Duck returned in a dumb turtleneck. Pete asked a black person to explain the buying habits of all other black people, possibly convening the world’s first, smallest, and saddest focus group in the process.

But forget all that. Don Draper made corned beef hash.

This is the second time this season that Don has been cooking in the middle of the night. In the first episode of the season, he warmed some milk for Betty, leading to a flashback about his own origins. Tonight, after the birth of his third child, he has a conversation with Sally, his oldest, about her origins.

And addling eggs.

The egg symbolism is quite clear. A baby was just born, a new creature onto which Don is already beginning to project the idea that he deserves a clean slate — an idea underlined by the fact that Don is resistant to giving the new baby a name.

Meanwhile, Sally’s teacher has just warned Don that Sally needs more attention. (No one will realize Bobby needs attention, too, until he has climbed a clock tower and is picking off Manhattan urbanites.) Sally quotes that same teacher, saying that you can addle fresh, fertilized eggs, and then eat them.

Now I am no farmer but all the information I can find about addling says that it’s used as a form of population control, usually for wild birds like geese and ducks. The egg is often shaken, or coated with oil to suffocate the chick, and then placed back under the mother so she thinks it’s still alive and doesn’t lay more eggs.

But back to the hash! Corned beef hash is, frankly, peasant food, the food of farmers and urban tenements. It’s often made for breakfast to use up leftovers from corned beef and cabbage, a quintessential peasant food. I would wager the Chlorox account that Betty Draper never, ever cooks corned beef hash. Don is showing his working-class roots, here,  in the late night kitchen, just as he did when he imagined his birth at the beginning of the season.

This time, though, perhaps thinking about Sally’s teacher’s warning, he shares a bite of his past with his daughter. Sally doesn’t quite grasp the intimacy of the moment, but she basks in the attention from her distant father.

A few final words: Betty mentions that the only food she’d had before going into labor was cottage cheese, pineapple, and toast. Classic diet food. She probably washed it down with a G&T.