Betty Talmadge usually kept her parties small. Then Liz Carpenter and Lady Bird Johnson got involved. "Before I knew what was happening, I was giving a party for Lucille Ball and three hundred guests," she wrote.1
Ball was in Atlanta to open Mame. Betty hosted a hunt breakfast at Lovejoy, with Lady Bird as a fellow guest of honor and proceeds benefiting the LBJ Memorial Grove.1
Lucy arrived in an open Rolls-Royce, escorted by horsemen in red-and-black hunting clothes. The dogwoods and peach trees were blooming. It was also forty degrees. Lucy was shivering, and so were the young women welcoming guests on the porch in their Southern-belle costumes.1
"The place looked like a Hollywood setting for sure," Betty wrote.1 Inside, guests carried mint juleps past country ham, sausage, baked cheese grits, Sally Lunn bread, biscuits, strawberries, and lace cookies. Plenty took their plates outside anyway, where a Dixieland band played tunes from Mame.2
The hunt-breakfast menu in Betty's cookbook included strawberries laced with bourbon. Her instructions were simple: leave the stems on, pile the berries high, and set out bourbon and powdered sugar for dipping.3
Lucille Ball, Lady Bird Johnson, three hundred guests, and bourbon with the strawberries. Betty called it breakfast.
FROM BETTY’S KITCHEN
Make something from the breakfast.
Three recipes from Betty Talmadge’s How to Cook a Pig & Other Back-to-the-Farm Recipes (1977), with Jean Robitscher and Carolyn Carter. The recipes below retain the cookbook’s original wording.
PAGE 29
Fresh Strawberries Laced with Bourbon
Leave stems on strawberries and wash them thoroughly. Pile the strawberries high in a large glass bowl or on a serving platter. Have handy a little bowl of bourbon next to a bowl of powdered sugar—the combination makes a delicious dip for the strawberries.
PAGE 29
Lace Cookies
These delicate cookies have a Southern touch.
- 2¼ cups regular oatmeal
- 2¼ cups light-brown sugar
- 3 tablespoons flour
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 cup butter, melted
- 1 egg
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
Lightly mix the oatmeal, sugar, flour, and salt in a bowl; do not use an electric mixer. Add the melted butter and stir. Add slightly beaten egg and vanilla; mix well.
Grease a sheet of heavy aluminum foil or a cookie sheet. From the end of a teaspoon, drop small quarter-size circles onto the foil or baking sheet. Bake 8 to 10 minutes in a 350° F. preheated oven.
PAGE 24
The Perfect Mint Julep
- mint sprigs
- 1 teaspoon fine granulated sugar
- soda water
- 3 ounces bourbon
For each julep, crack enough ice, very fine, to fill a collins glass almost to the top. Set the glass aside. Strip leaves from two sprigs of mint and muddle with sugar in another glass; then add a splash of soda water and the bourbon. Strain over the ice in the prepared glass and work a long-handled spoon up and down in the mixture until the outside begins to frost. Top with a splash of rum and a sprig of mint.
Source: Betty Talmadge, with Jean Robitscher and Carolyn Carter, How to Cook a Pig & Other Back-to-the-Farm Recipes (1977), pp. 24 and 29.
Sources & photograph credits
Text: Betty Talmadge, with Jean Robitscher and Carolyn Carter, How to Cook a Pig & Other Back-to-the-Farm Recipes (1977), pp. 21–24 and 29. This story draws on Betty’s retrospective account.
- How to Cook a Pig & Other Back-to-the-Farm Recipes, p. 21 and accompanying photograph page. The narrative says an open touring car; the photograph caption identifies an open Rolls-Royce. ↩1 ↩2 ↩3 ↩4
- How to Cook a Pig & Other Back-to-the-Farm Recipes, pp. 21 and 24. The narrative lists sausage balls and beaten biscuits; the accompanying menu lists sausage patties and hot biscuits. ↩1
- How to Cook a Pig & Other Back-to-the-Farm Recipes, menu on p. 24 and "Fresh Strawberries Laced with Bourbon" on p. 29. ↩1
Photographs: Steve Deal, Atlanta Newspapers, reproduced in Betty Talmadge’s How to Cook a Pig & Other Back-to-the-Farm Recipes (1977).