Louise Brooks — aka Lulu — was a country bumpkin from Kansas when she hit the NYC scene at age 15 as a Denishawn Dancer and later Ziegfeld Follies dancer — then in 1926 at age 20 was signed to a Hollywood contract with Paramount, where she became one of the first Silent Film stars.
She was very pretty and stylish — and is considered to be THE icon of the Flapper style of the 1920’s, with her “bob” hairstyle.
She had an amazing and turbulent life — with many highs and many lows — moving to Germany in 1929 (because she hated Hollywood) and becoming an even bigger Silent Film star there, then seeing her career end abruptly as she hit her 30’s, and being forced to take odd jobs, before resorting to becoming a high-class hooker later on.
She had a renaissance in the 1950’s as film buffs rediscovered her, and she wrote a number of articles on her life in Hollywood, which were rolled into an amazing book published in 1982 when she was 76 years old — Lulu In Hollywood. She passed away 3 years later at age 79.
Lulu Learned Etiquette for Cafe Society
In the book — which is a recommended read — she details how she had to learn proper big-city restaurant etiquette early on, and how the waiters at The Colony restaurant in NYC taught her how to eat various items on the menu. The Colony was a fashionable haunt of Cafe Society in NYC in the 1920’s — located on 61st Street off Madison Avenue.
A snippet of the book that describes her predicament in detail — and how the waiters helped her out of it — is provided below. Lulu says her 17-year-old friend Barbara Bennett (daughter of famous actor Richard Bennett) introduced her “to the Wall Street brokers who would take me to dine at The Colony. And there I, who in Kansas had never seen a lobster, was terrorized by a bright-red lobster, which I sent away uneaten.”
Lulu then says she went to the 42nd Street Public Library to learn proper etiquette.
She also details how “a few nights later, when I was sawing away at a squab at The Colony, it scooted off my plate. One of the captains, Ernest, whisked it away and returned with a fresh squab, which I watched him carve on the service table. From then on, indifferent to the reactions of my dinner partners, I took instructions from the waiters on how to eat everything on the menu. There was how to bone-a-brook-trout night, how-to-fork-snails night, how to dismember-artichokes night, and so on, until we came to the bottom of the menu, which included a dessert of the understanding and proper pronunciation of French words.”
It’s funny stuff — the whole snippet is below. The book is available for rent for free from The Internet Archive, or you can buy it to have it in your home as a perfect Coffee Table book.
Lulu’s Favorite Dish — “Shit on a Shingle”
The amazing thing to come out of this snippet — and reason for this article — is her disclosure to Ernest the captain of the waiter staff , on the dinner following her graduation, that she was “at last going to order a dish I truly liked — creamed chipped beef. He sent a busboy to a Madison Avenue delicatessen for a jar of chipped beef, which was transformed into the most delicious chipped-beef-in-cream-on-toast I would ever eat.”
If you look up Chipped-Beef-in-Cream-on-Toast sandwich — you immediately discover its erstwhile knickname — “Shit on a Shingle” (S.O.S.).
It consists of a creamy white gravy on dried, salted beef served over slices of toasted bread.
It originated as an inexpensive and hearty meal in the US military; in fact the recipe for S.O.S. first appeared in the 1910 Manual for Army Cooks under the name “Stewed chipped beef, with cream sauce, served on toast”. Soldiers in World War I came up with the “Shit on a Shingle” knickname — calling it like they saw it — the creamed beef mixture (“shit”) served on toast (“a shingle”).
The dish became a staple in military mess halls during both World War I and World War II, providing a filling and shelf-stable fuel for soldiers using readily available ingredients.
Where to Order and Eat It
You cannot walk into a restaurant or diner and ask for “Shit on a Shingle” and expect anyone to know what you are talking about. They won’t.
If you ask for a chipped-beef-in-cream-on-toast sandwich — they might. Most probably they will not know what chipped beef is. There are various conversations on Reddit about it — and some restaurants are called out — such as Sun’z Up Cafe on New Jersey Ave in Wildwood, New Jersey, or Jellyfish Cafe also in Wildwood. Next time we’re in Wildwood we’ll see.
How to Make It
Most conversations on Reddit say that it is hard to find a restaurant who knows what it is let alone serve it — so the best way to get it is the way Lulu did — by making it yourself — or in her case, sending a busboy to a Madison Avenue delicatessen for a jar of chipped beef to make it.
Here’s a recipe:
- Buy a 2.25-ounce jar of dried beef at your local grocer, or you can get a 3-pack of dried beef from Amazon.
- Soak the beef in fresh, cold water before cooking. You might change out the water once or twice.
- Chop the beef into bite-sized pieces.
- Grab a large, heavy-bottomed skillet and put it on medium-high heat.
- Add your butter to the skillet.
- Add your chipped beef and brown it a little bit in the butter.
- Add flour and give everything a good mix.
- Make sure to coat all of the beef in flour. Optionally add some black pepper.
- Add milk. (You can use condensed milk mixed with beef stock if you prefer.)
- Keep stirring. Reduce the heat to medium-low and let everything simmer until it thickens up.
- Toast plain white American sandwich bread.
- Put the beef shit on the toast — you have made Shit on a Shingle.
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