The Sky Took Him - An Alafair Tucker Mystery

by Donis Casey

  1 egg

  Mix dry ingredients thoroughly. Beat one egg well and mix into milk before adding to dry ingredients. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until mixture thickens and boils with a dull “plop.” Remove from heat, add vanilla and mix well. Pour into 8-inch prepared pie shell. Alafair would have let the pie stand at room temperature but it can be refrigerated until set. Top with meringue or whipped cream. Leave out the egg for chocolate pudding.

  Meringue

  3 egg whites 3 Tbsp. sugar

  Beat sugar and egg whites together until stiff. The mixture will be white and be able to hold a peak. Spread the mixture over the top of the pie and put in a medium oven until the meringue sets and browns slightly.

  There is a colorful country name for meringue, but we are far too refined to repeat it here.

  FANCY CITY FOOD

  In 1915, many foods would be available to a cook in a well-to-do city the size of Enid that would be harder to come by on a farm or in a smaller Oklahoma town like Boynton. Alafair’s pantry would have been filled almost exclusively with meats, fruits, and vegetables that she and her family had raised and preserved themselves. However, her sister Ruth Ann Yeager would have had the resources and the opportunity to try foodstuffs imported from all over the United States and the rest of the world. Having a live-in cook to create elaborate meals from exotic ingredients is also very helpful.

  One note about cooking: times and temperatures given in the following recipes are approximate. Ovens vary, and even the dish you use will affect the cooking time. For instance, a glass baking pan will cook a dish faster than a metal one. So keep your eyes peeled.

  Beef Tenderloin

  In Alafair's time, a cook would have had the butcher specially cut the tenderloin from the side of beef for her. Tenderloin of beef is available these days, but it isn’t cheap, to say the least. This dish is gorgeous and delicious, as well as expensive. It might be the perfect entrée to serve next time you have the president of the United States over to dinner.

  1 beef tenderloin (about 3 lbs)

  2 Irish potatoes, cubed

  4 medium carrots, sliced into 1-inch chunks

  2 turnips, cubed

  4-6 large stalks of celery, with leaves

  1 or 2 large onions, quartered

  2 cups water

  1 tsp. allspice

  1 Tbsp. butter

  Put the meat in a roasting pan with 2 cups of water and the vegetables. Simmer in the oven for about one hour and 15 minutes at 400 degrees, or until done to your liking. When nearly done, add the allspice and butter to the meat juices. For serving, arrange the vegetables and meatballs (recipe follows) around the tenderloin on a large platter and pour the meat juices over everything.

  Meatballs

  You may certainly use ground beef to make the meatballs, but this is the fancy way. Boil a nice 1-pound hunk of lean beef until done through, then finely chop it and mix with ½ beaten egg, ¼ onion, minced, and salt and pepper. (Alafair likes 3 or 4 shakes of salt and 7 or 8 shakes of pepper.) Roll it into small balls, brush with beaten egg and roll it in fine bread crumbs or crushed cracker crumbs. Fry until brown in enough fat to cover the bottom of the skillet.

  You can save the broth that will be created from boiling the beef to make soup.

  Gumbo Soup

  This is not the same as Creole gumbo, which is spicier and more complex. This soup is quite simple, very nutritious and savory.

  1 medium onion, sliced

  2 cups thinly sliced fresh tender okra

  4 cups fresh or home-canned tomatoes

  1½ quarts of broth

  Luckily, you now have some very nice broth on hand from boiling the beef for meatballs. If you are using fresh tomatoes off the vine, scald (dip in boiling water for just a few seconds) and peel them and chop them up. Fry the onion in meat drippings until beginning to brown. Combine all the ingredients in a large pot and simmer slowly for three hours.

  Okra will thicken the soup and is very good for the digestion.

  Mashed Winter Squash

  Winter squashes are heavier and denser than summer squashes, and have a hard shell. Most varieties of winter squash can be used for this recipe, but good, sweet, firm butternut or acorn squashes are ideal. Squash can be boiled or baked. Boiling is fast, but baking intensifies the flavor and sweetness. Baked squash is much easier to deal with, too. To boil a squash, you should peel and seed it, cube it, and cook it in a small amount of water for 15 minutes or so. To bake, halve the squash, scoop out the seeds, and place the pieces cut side down on a baking sheet or shallow baking pan. For a nice, three-pound butternut, bake at 350 degrees for half an hour, then turn it over and bake for another 15 to 20 minutes, or until the squash is very soft. Remove from the oven and allow to cool enough to handle, then scoop the flesh out of the shell with a spoon into a pot and mash like potatoes. Over a medium low flame, add a scant quarter cup of milk or cream, a quarter cup of maple syrup, and 2 tablespoons of butter, and mix well. Stir constantly until hot, then turn out into a serving dish. Make a well in the top of the mound of squash and plop a big spoonful of butter into it.

  Succotash

  Anyone who has only eaten succotash out of a can has no idea what the real thing is like. One can make a quite passable succotash from frozen baby limas and frozen sweet corn kernels, but if you want the authentic succotash experience, this is the way to do it.

  2 cups fresh shelled baby lima beans

  about 12 ears of young sweet corn (makes 2 cups of kernels)

  1/3 cup butter

  ½ cup cream

  Place the beans in a pot and barely cover with cold water. Scrape the kernels from the ears of corn and put aside. Boil the beans with the scraped cobs for about 30 minutes. Then remove the cobs, put in the corn kernels, and boil for 15 minutes more. Add the butter and cream and salt and pepper to taste. Do use real cream. Milk just isn’t the same in this dish.

  Fried Parsnips

  Northerners tend to be more familiar with parsnips than Southerners, and this would be especially the case in 1915. Many recipes call for the parsnips to be boiled before frying, but if you choose young, tender parsnips and not big old woody ones, this is absolutely not necessary. Simply wash and scrape 3 or 4 medium-sized parsnips, cut into coins, like a carrot, and fry in enough fat to cover the bottom of the pan. When one side is brown, turn the parsnips with a spatula and brown the other side. Parsnips can be fried au naturel, but for a nice variation, dredge the coins in flour before frying. Salt and pepper to taste.

  Fried Tomatoes

  Frying is a great way to use green tomatoes, but red ones can be fried as well. Just cut firm, ripe tomatoes into thick slices, season with salt and pepper, dredge in cornmeal, and fry in meat drippings until they are brown on both sides.

  Mashed Potato Puffs

  This is a lovely side dish, and easy to make, especially if you have leftover mashed potatoes. Shape hot mashed potatoes into egg-sized balls and place them on a buttered cookie sheet. Brush with beaten egg and brown in a 400-degree oven for 10 or 15 minutes.

  Grace’s Little Almond Cookies

  ¾ cup butter ¼ cup sugar

  2 cups flour ½ tsp. almond extract

  Cream the butter and sugar together, then work in the flour. If the dough is crumbly, mix in another tablespoon or two of butter. Roll out the dough about ½-inch thick and cut with a cookie cutter, if you like pretty shapes. Or the floured mouth of a small drinking glass will do just as well. Place the cookies about ½ inch apart on an ungreased cookie sheet and bake in a moderate oven for 15 to 20 minutes, until they begin to brown around the edges. This will make about 2 dozen small cookies.

  Peach Pudding

  1½ cups stewed peaches 2 cups cream

  4 eggs ½ cup sugar

  pinch salt 1 Tbsp. flour

  ¼ tsp. nutmeg

  The first thing to do for this delectable dish is to peel and slice 5 or 6 peaches and stew them for about 40 minutes in a little water, ¼
tsp. cloves, and a cinnamon stick. Drain off the liquid and reserve for another use, then arrange the peaches over the bottom of a 2-quart baking dish.

  Beat the eggs and sugar together well, then add the flour and nutmeg. Slowly add in the cream, stirring constantly. Pour the custard over the peaches in the baking dish and bake for 45 minutes at 350 degrees.

  Serve with whipped cream. And in the name of all that’s holy, not that stuff you spritz out of a can. If you’ve never whipped your own cream, here’s your chance. The following is an easy way to do it: To 1½ cups of whipping cream, add ¼ cup of powdered sugar and 1 tsp. vanilla, and beat until soft peaks form.

  Alafair would have used a whisk to whip the cream, but if you have neither the patience nor the wrist strength to do it this way, use an egg beater. Or an electric beater, if you must.

  Historical Notes

  Absinthe was the LSD of its day. It is a potent type of spirits, distilled from herbs and wormwood, which in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was popular with the Bohemian set in the United States and Europe. Absinthe had the undeserved reputation of being highly addictive and hallucinogenic, and was banned for sale in this country in 1912. To this day, traditional absinthe cannot be imported into the U.S. for human consumption.

  The Garber Pool was located five miles south of the town of Garber, Oklahoma, in Garfield County, on a farm belonging to one George Beggs. The original oil lease on the land was owned by the Sinclair Company, but when Sinclair allowed the lease to lapse, Mr. Beggs sold the mineral rights to Enid banker and businessman Herbert Champlin. Champlin was hesitant to invest in the risky business of oil, but his far-seeing wife insisted that he take the step. It was a good thing for Champlin that she did. The field struck big in September 1916. Champlin rapidly changed his mind about the advisability of getting into the oil business, and immediately bought Victor Bolene’s small refinery in Enid, which was still under construction at the time. Champlin built a pipeline from his field in Garber to his greatly expanded refinery, and so was born the Champlin Refining Company.

  John Burns, hired in 1915, was the chief of police for the City of Enid, and Elsworth Hume, elected in 1910, was the sheriff of Garfield County at the time of this story. I borrowed their names, but since I have no idea what these gentlemen were actually like, the characters are pure invention. One interesting historical tidbit, though, is that Mr. Hume and two of his sons bought the Overland Automobile Company in Enid in 1919 and manufactured cars for a few years.

  Eugene V. Debs ran for president of the United States five times on the Socialist ticket. In 1912, he garnered more votes in Oklahoma than in any other state. He was the keynote speaker at the 1915 Founders’ Day Celebration in Enid. Debs was one of the founders of the International Labor Union and later of the International Workers of the World, and was a peace activist. Founding labor unions and being a peace activist was frowned upon by the government during World War I, and in 1918 Debs was arrested for un-American activities and sentenced to eleven years in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. In 1920, he made his final run for president from prison.

  Marquis James, whose mother rented a meat locker from Yeager in this novel, grew up in Enid and worked on several Enid newspapers in his youth. In 1915, he was in his midtwenties and working as a reporter for the New Orleans Item. He went on to become a well-known and respected newspaperman in New York and the author of several books, including biographies of Sam Houston (1930) and Andrew Jackson (1938), both of which received the Pulitzer Prize. He also wrote a wonderful book about growing up in Enid after the Cherokee Strip Land Run in 1893 and through the early 1910s entitled Cherokee Strip: Tales of an Oklahoma Boyhood, which was republished by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1993.

  The Cherokee Strip is a tract of land fifty-eight miles wide which starts where the panhandle joins the body of the state and stretches 226 miles across the top of Oklahoma at the Kansas border. The Cherokees never actually lived in the Strip. Their nation is in the northeastern corner of Oklahoma. The Cherokee Outlet, as the Strip was properly called, was given to the Cherokee Nation by treaty in 1836 as an outlet to western hunting grounds. Unfortunately, the Cherokees backed the losing side in the Civil War, and in 1866 Congress “persuaded” the Nation to sell parts of the Strip to several other tribes. After the war, Texas cattlemen drove their herds to Kansas railheads by way of several trails through the Strip, the most famous of which, the Chisholm Trail, runs right through Enid. Many ranchers decided that it was a lot more profitable and a lot less tiring to lease land from the Cherokees and raise cattle right on the lush grass in the Strip, and between 1865 and 1890, the land was covered with huge cattle ranches.

  The Cherokee Strip Land Run was the fourth and the biggest of the five great Oklahoma land runs. In 1890, one year after the original Oklahoma Land Run, the president and Congress decided to open the Strip for settlement. They made the ranchers remove their cattle, divided the land into seven counties, imaginatively named K, L, M, N, O, P, and Q, and opened four land offices at Enid, Perry, Alva, and Woodward. A prospective homesteader was allowed into the territory before the run to scope out the land, decide on a section he liked, and pay his filing fee. But in order to officially claim the land, he had to line up at the starting line and make a run for it when the gun was fired at noon on September 16, 1893. If he was the first to reach his chosen section and drive his stake into the ground (stake a claim), he then went to the land office to file the claim. A racer might reach his prospective claim to find that a sooner had jumped the gun and illegally planted a stake before the run was officially started. Filing the claim was an ordeal, as well, since the land offices did a land office business, and the lines of weary homesteaders waiting to file were unbelievably long. Over 100,000 people made the run, on horseback, in wagons, on foot, and even by bicycle. Several times, some wag shot a gun into the air ahead of time, causing overexcited racers to take off, only to be chased down by cavalry troopers and hauled back behind the line. One poor soul jumped the gun at 11:55 and was chased by soldiers for nearly a mile before they shot him dead, which turned out to be the only way they could get him to stop.

  The 1910 United States Census lists one person of Asian descent living in Enid, Oklahoma.

  Founders’ Day Jubilee was a very big deal all over the Cherokee Strip, but the multi-day Enid event topped them all for many years. Founders’ Day is now called the Cherokee Strip Celebration and is still celebrated in Enid and several other towns in northern Oklahoma.

  Puddin’head Wilson was written by Mark Twain in 1894. The novel is set in the little Missouri town of Dawson’s Landing in the year 1830. Puddin’head is a small-town lawyer whose hobby is collecting the fingerprints of any amenable person he can persuade to cooperate. Over many years, Puddin’head collects the prints of nearly every soul in town, and is eventually able to utilize his collection to solve a murder and establish the identities of two men who were switched in the cradle as babies.

  Oil Field Terminology

  Bindlestiff—A man who traveled from job to job with all his possessions in a bundle, or bindle, which was often tied to the end of a stout stick and slung over the shoulder.

  Boweevil—A general flunkie, who ran errands for the drillers and did whatever unskilled job needed to be done around the field. Nowadays, he would be called a “gofer.”

  Doodlebugger—The owner of a doodlebug machine, which resembled a wheelbarrow. This fabulous piece of equipment ostensibly was able to excite the molecules of the earth, rendering them transparent and enabling the operator to see through hundreds of feet of rock and soil right down to an oil deposit. During the oil boom years of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, these enterprising gentlemen traveled around the West, offering a “foolproof” way for eager landowners to determine exactly where to drill in order to strike oceans of oil and become wealthy beyond reckoning. For a handsome fee, the doodlebugger promised to run his machine over the property in question,
find the oil pool, and save the landowner the expense of sinking a duster, or dry oil well. Needless to say, a doodlebugger never stayed in one place for very long.

  Journal—This is a machinist’s term for any rotary shaft that turns in a bearing.

  Roustabout—A general oil field worker, more skilled than a boweevil.

  Shooter—An explosives specialist, who knew the proper techniques for blasting open an obstructed oil well with nitroglycerin or dynamite. This was an extraordinarily dangerous job, especially in the early days of oil drilling, and a shooter was paid a high premium for his services. He was often short-lived, however.

  Skimming plant—The old name for an oil refinery.

  Tankie—A man who works on the giant oil storage tanks at a refinery. Tankies were considered the roughest, most unsavory sons-of-a-gun in the entire oil business.

  Twister—Works the drill at an oil well. Twisters are the archetypical filthy, sweaty, shirtless guys who attach length after length of pipe with a giant wrench to the enormous rotary drill as it descends deeper and deeper into the ground.

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