Hi
Can anyone answer theese simple questions to one who have not yet seen the film:
Do we as audience ever know what they are going to eat? If yes, what?
Im asking because im cooking a "dinner at eight" and it would be great to cook the same.
All the Best
Mikkel
Denmark
Well, we know the aspic ("...it's so dressy") was destroyed because May Robson "had to drop it", as Gustav was being stabbed. So they sent out for some lobster to be cooked a la "Newburg".
"I told you a million times not to talk to me when I'm doing my lashes"!
karmala2: ..they sent out for some lobster to be cooked a la "Newburg".
Lobster?? Heavens, it was crab!
Millicent Jordan: "...I'm half out of my mind! Do you know what's happened to me? I've had the most ghastly day anybody ever had! No aspic for dinner! And Ricky in jail and Gustav dying for all I know, and a new butler tonight and that Vance woman coming in. And having to send for crab meat. Crab meat!"
A dinner in honor of this wonderful film should have a dropped lion aspic as the centerpiece (with small US and UK flags being moved constantly from before it to behind it and back again), live music in the outer room, a butler serving drinks, servants knife-fighting in the kitchen, and if she's game have the cook complain occasionally throughout the service about her toothache. Dinner should be followed by a lovely evening at "the thee-ah-tah," preferably something that one of the guests has already seen.
Yes, yes. I stand corrected.
"I told you a million times not to talk to me when I'm doing my lashes"!
A dinner in honor of this wonderful film should have a dropped lion aspic as the centerpiece (with small US and UK flags being moved constantly from before it to behind it and back again), live music in the outer room, a butler serving drinks, servants knife-fighting in the kitchen, and if she's game have the cook complain occasionally throughout the service about her toothache. Dinner should be followed by a lovely evening at "the thee-ah-tah," preferably something that one of the guests has already seen.
It was crabmeat, not lobster! I am watching it now and just saw that scene. I believe that was to be the first course, due to the loss of the aspic!
Well we know one thing: no Australian mutton.
shareDid anyone else find that ridiculous aspic that giggled like a jello lion, with the flags in his paws outrageously funny?
Who in their right mind would serve something that idiotic to important guests? (I know...Millicent Jordan!)
It MIGHT have been a snipe at MGM....(g)
shareThat...thing...was a showy centerpiece and very appropriate for the era. I wonder where the cook got the mold for it, and if she had to make the gelatin from scratch? boiling down bones. I should know this kind of thing...like when Jello was invented...but the aspic lion would have been the crowning touch for that dinner party.
shareWell, aspic is after all glorified jello. Sort of a meat jello if you will.
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Please put some dashes above your sig line so I won't think it's part of your dumb post.
It is wonderful to see things that we think of, today, as "nothing" presented as something really quite remarkable at the time:
the aspic (the amount of work it would take to make that from scratch to boil down the bones, we today have no idea, using simple box mix today)
orange juice (like in The Philadelphia Story, or countless other '30s movies where rich people are just casually having it), which was a large effort to make from scratch, until frozen concentrate was invented in 1945
The supermarket scene in Double Indemnity, we see that today as something quaint, "look at how tiny that little grocery store is", but when it was filmed, during WWII rationing, it was an amazing show of food not available to the audience.
Has anyone ever tasted aspic?
shareCommercial gelatin had been on the market since the turn of the century.
Here's a great page on its history http://whatscookingamerica.net/History/Jell-0-history.htm
Given up on by its inventor, sold door-to-door in the 1890s, taken to fairs in horse-drawn carriages! Gotta love the internet.
I suspect in the early 1930s, this kind of "cheap convenience" was looked down on by the monied. Anything reserved to the rich, then accessible to the lower classes usually goes through that transition period. A "housewife" would rely on a trick in a box. The upper class had a staff to deal with time-consuming things.
It's a guess, based on how other lifestyle shortcuts have been adopted over time. But I can definitely see boxed gelatin looked down on as a dead giveaway of lesser class - that one didn't have a cook on hand, to start with bones and end up with a trembling, beflagged version of the MGM lion.
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Nothing to see here, move along.