the bottom of a buttered pudding-dish, season well, and pour a few
spoonfuls of cold gravy over them, letting it soak into the meat while
you prepare a batter according to the above directions, taking care not
to get it too stiff. Pour over the meat and bake in a quick oven. Eat
hot.
SCORED POTATOES.
Mash in the usual way, mixing rather soft; heap and round upon a
greased pie-plate; score deeply in triangles with the back of a carving
or butcher’s knife; brown in the oven, and slip carefully to another
dish.
CANNED PEAS.
Open a can of peas an hour before cooking them, that there may be no
musty, airless taste about them, and turn into a bowl. When ready for
them put on in a farina-kettle—or one saucepan within another—of hot
water. If dry, add cold water to cover them, and stew about twenty-five
minutes. Drain, stir in a generous lump of butter; pepper and salt.
APPLE MÉRINGUE.
Butter a neat pudding-dish, and nearly fill it with apple sauce. Cover
and leave in the oven until it is smoking hot. Draw to the oven door
and spread with a méringue made of the whites of three eggs, whipped
stiff with a little powdered sugar. (Your pudding will be much nicer,
by the way, if you have beaten the yolks into the stewed apple before
putting it into the dish.) Shut the oven door long enough to brown the
_méringue_ very lightly. Eat nearly or quite cold, with sugar and cream.
Send around crackers and cheese as an accompaniment.
Third Week. Tuesday.
——
Celery Soup.
Veal Cutlets with Ham. Cauliflower with Cream Sauce.
Stewed Potatoes. Mixed Pickles.
——
Jam Pudding.
Tea, and Albert Biscuits.
——
CELERY SOUP.
3 lbs. of veal, and some bones of the same.
2 onions.
2 bunches of celery, using the white parts only.
3 quarts of cold water.
1 pint of fresh milk.
2 dessertspoonfuls of corn-starch.
Pepper and salt.
2 tablespoonfuls of butter.
Some fried bread.
Cut the veal up small, crack the bones, and put on in cold water. Boil
slowly four hours, replenishing with boiling water should the broth
sink to less than two-thirds of the original quantity. Strain, pressing
all the strength out of the meat. Cut the celery into bits, and stew
in the broth, with the minced onions, until so soft that you can rub
through a colander. Strain a second time, and return the soup, with the
pulped celery, to the fire. Season, and thicken with the corn-starch
wet up in the pint of milk. Stir until it boils, and lastly, put in,
carefully, the butter, after which take from the range. Have ready a
double handful of fried bread in the tureen, and pour the soup upon it.
VEAL CUTLETS AND HAM.
2 lbs. of veal cutlets, neatly trimmed, and the same of sliced ham.
Yolks of 2 eggs.
Bread- or cracker-crumbs.
Dripping for frying.
Divide each cutlet into pieces about two inches wide by three inches
long, and cut the ham into slices of corresponding size. Dip in the
egg, then roll in the bread-crumbs, and fry—the ham first, afterwards
the veal, until nicely browned on both sides. Sprinkle salt upon the
veal cutlets. Arrange upon the dish in alternate slices of veal and
ham, overlapping one another. Anoint the ham with butter mixed with a
little mustard; the veal with butter melted up with a spoonful of tart
jelly.
CAULIFLOWER WITH CREAM SAUCE.
Boil your cauliflower, when you have washed and trimmed it, and tied
it up in coarse net or tarletan. Cook in boiling water slightly
salted, keeping the stalk end uppermost. Prepare, in another saucepan,
the dressing, by adding to a cup of scalding milk a tablespoonful of
corn-starch wet up with cold water, two tablespoonfuls of butter,
pepper and salt at discretion. Drain the cauliflower, remove the net,
put into a deep dish, the flower up, and drench with the boiling sauce.
STEWED POTATOES.
Cut into slices, cook until tender, but not to breaking, in hot water.
Turn half of this off and replace by as much milk, in which some slices
of onion have been boiled and strained out. Add pepper and salt, a good
lump of butter rolled in flour, and some chopped parsley. Simmer three
minutes, and turn into a vegetable dish.
MIXED PICKLES,
Home-made or bought, should be passed with the cutlets.
JAM PUDDING.
3 cups of milk.
4 eggs.
¾ of a cup of sugar.
Bread and butter.
Sweet jam—berry, peach, or quince.
Spread slices of stale bread with butter, then with jam. Fit them
closely into a buttered pudding-dish until it is two-thirds full. Make
a custard by adding the beaten eggs and sugar to the scalding milk,
but do not let them boil. Lay a heavy saucer upon the bread and butter
to prevent floating, and moisten gradually with the hot custard. Let
all soak for fifteen minutes before the dish goes into the oven. When
it is hot throughout, take off the saucer, that the pudding may brown
equally. Eat cold.
TEA, AND ALBERT BISCUITS
May follow the pudding.
Third Week. Wednesday.
——
Sheep’s-head Soup.
Roast Hare, with Currant Jelly. Macaroni, with Ham.
Stuffed Potatoes. Turnips.
——
Fig Pudding.
——
SHEEP’S-HEAD SOUP.
Get your butcher to clean a sheep’s head with the skin on, as he would
a calf’s head for soup. Let him also split it in half that you may get
at the brains. Take them out, with the tongue, and set aside. Break the
bone of the head, wash it well in several waters, and soak for half an
hour in salted water. Cover it with fresh water, and heat gradually to
a boil. Drain off the water, and thus remove any peculiar odor from
the wool or other causes, and add four quarts of cold water, with two
turnips, two roots of salsify, two carrots, two stalks of celery, and a
bunch of sweet herbs, all chopped fine. Boil slowly four hours. Strain
the soup into a bowl, pressing all the nourishment out of the meat,
and let it stand in a cool place until the fat rises thickly to the
surface to be taken off. The vegetables should be soft enough to pass
freely through a fine colander, or coarse strainer, when rubbed. While
the soup cools, prepare the force-meat balls. The tongue and brains
should have been cooked and chopped up, then rubbed to a paste together
and mixed with an equal quantity of bread-crumbs, salt, pepper, and
parsley, bound with a raw egg, and rolled into small balls, dipped in
flour. Set them, not so near as to touch one another, in a tin plate or
dripping-pan, and put in a quick oven until a crust is formed upon the
top, when they must be allowed to cool. Return the skimmed broth to the
fire; season; boil up once; take off the scum, and add a cup of milk in
which you have stirred a tablespoonful of corn-starch. Simmer, stirring
all the while, for two minutes after it boils. Put the force-meat balls
into the tureen and pour the soup gently over them so as not to break
them.
This is a good and cheap soup, and deserves to be better known.
ROAST HARE.
Have the hare skinned and well cleaned. Cooks are often careless
about the latter duty. Stuff, as you would a fowl, with a force-meat
of bread-crumbs, chopped fat pork, a little sweet marjoram, onion,
pepper, and salt, just moistened with hot water. Sew up the hare with
fine cotton; tie the legs close to the body in a kneeling position.
The English cook it with the head on, but we take it off as more
seemly in our eyes. Lay in the dripping-pan, back uppermost; pour
two cups of boiling water over it; cover with another pan and bake,
closely covered, except when you baste it with butter and water, for
three-quarters of an hour. Uncover, baste freely with the gravy until
nicely browned; dredge with flour and anoint with butter until a fine
froth appears on the surface. Take up the hare, put on a hot dish, and
keep covered while you make the gravy. Strain, and skim that left in
the pan; season, thicken with browned flour, stir in a good spoonful of
currant-jelly, and some chopped parsley; boil up; pour a few spoonfuls
of it over the hare; serve the rest in a gravy-boat. Clip, instead of
tearing hard at the cotton threads. Send currant-jelly around with it.
MACARONI AND HAM.
Break the macaroni into inch lengths, and stew ten minutes in boiling
water. Meanwhile, cut two slices of corned (not smoked) ham into
dice, wash well and put on to boil in a cup of cold water. Drain the
macaroni, and when the ham has cooked for ten minutes after coming to a
boil, pour it, with the liquor, over the macaroni. Season with pepper,
simmer in a closed farina-kettle for fifteen minutes; add a little
chopped parsley, cover, and let it stand a minute more, and serve in
a deep dish. The fatter the ham the better for this dish. Always pass
grated cheese with stewed macaroni.
STUFFED POTATOES.
Wash and wipe large, fair potatoes, and bake soft. Cut a round piece
from the top of each, and carefully preserve it. Scrape out the inside
with a spoon without breaking the skin, and set aside the empty cases
with the covers. Mash the potato which you have taken out, smoothly,
working into it butter, a raw egg, a little cream, pepper, and salt.
When soft, heat in a saucepan set over the fire in boiling water. Stir
until smoking hot, fill the skins with the mixture, put on the caps,
set in the oven for three minutes, and send to table wrapped in a
heated napkin.
TURNIPS.
Boil, sliced or quartered, until soft all through; drain well and mash
in a colander with a wooden spoon or beetle, very quickly, lest they
should cool. Cold turnips are detestable. Work in a little salt and a
good lump of butter; serve in a hot dish, smoothly rounded on top, with
a pat of pepper here and there.
FIG PUDDING.
½ lb. good dried figs, washed, wiped, and minced.
2 cups fine, dry bread-crumbs.
3 eggs.
½ cup beef suet, powdered.
2 scant cups of milk.
½ cup of white sugar.
A little salt.
A pinch of soda, dissolved in hot water and stirred into the milk.
Soak the crumbs in the milk. Add the eggs, beaten light, with the
sugar, salt, suet, and figs. Beat three minutes, put in a buttered
mould with a tight top; set in boiling water with a weight on the
cover, to prevent the mould from upsetting, and boil three hours.
Eat hot, with hard sauce, or butter and powdered sugar, mixed with
nutmeg. It is very good.
Third Week. Thursday.
——
Veal and Rice Broth.
Stewed Mutton à la Jardinière. Potato Puff.
Pork and Beans. Grape Jelly.
——
Minced Pudding.
Apples, Nuts, and Raisins.
——
VEAL AND RICE BROTH.
4 lbs. knuckle of veal, well broken up.
1 onion.
2 stalks of celery.
½ cup of rice, washed and picked over.
Chopped parsley, pepper, and salt.
1 cup of milk.
4 qts. of cold water.
1 tablespoonful corn-starch.
Put on the veal and bones, with the onion and celery minced, in four
quarts of cold water. Boil gently after it begins to bubble, four
hours, keeping the pot-lid on. Soak the rice in lukewarm water, enough
to cover it well—adding warmer as it swells—for one hour. Cook in the
same water, never touching with a spoon, but _shaking_ up from the
bottom, now and then. Strain and press the soup into a bowl; cool to
throw up the fat for the skimmer, and return to the pot. Salt and
pepper; boil up and skim, and stir in the corn-starch wet up in the
milk. Simmer three minutes; put in the rice with the water in which it
was boiled, and the parsley. Simmer very gently five minutes, and pour
out.
MUTTON À LA JARDINIÈRE.
5 lbs. of mutton, breast or neck, all in one piece.
2 onions, peeled.
1 carrot, peeled.
2 turnips, peeled.
1 pint canned tomatoes.
A few sprigs of cauliflower.
2 stalks of blanched celery.
Pepper and salt.
2 tablespoonfuls of butter.
1 tablespoonful of corn-starch.
Dripping for frying.
Fry the mutton (whole) in a large frying-pan, until it is lightly
browned on both sides. Put into a deep, broad saucepan with all the
vegetables (also whole) except the tomatoes; cover with cold water,
and stew, closely covered, for an hour after they begin to boil. Take
out the vegetables, and set aside; add boiling water to the meat, if
it is not covered, and simmer steadily, never fast, two hours longer.
The meat should be tender throughout, even the fibres. Turn off all the
gravy, except about half a cupful, fit the pot-lid on very tightly,
and leave the meat where it will keep just below the cooking-point.
Strain the gravy you have poured off; leave it to cool until the fat
rises. Skim, and return to the pot with the tomatoes. Season, and boil
_fast_, skimming two or three times, until it is reduced to one-half
the original quantity, or just enough to half cover the meat. Thicken
with corn-starch, and put in the meat, with its juices from the bottom
of the pot. Simmer, closely covered, half an hour. Cut the now cooled
vegetables into neat dice; put the butter into a saucepan, and when it
is hot, the vegetables. Shake all together until smoking hot, season,
add a little gravy from the meat, and leave them to keep hot in it
while you dish the mutton. Put it in the middle of a flat dish, and put
the vegetables around it in separate mounds, with sprigs of parsley or
celery between. Pour gravy over the mutton.
Try this dish. It is not difficult of preparation, diffuse as I have
made the directions. It is, if well managed and discreetly seasoned, a
family dinner of itself, and a very cheap one.
POTATO PUFF.
Mash the potatoes as usual; beat in more milk than is your custom, and
a couple of eggs, whipping all to a cream, and seasoning well. Pour
into a buttered pudding-dish, and bake quickly to a good brown.
PORK AND BEANS.
Soak a quart of dried beans overnight in soft water. Change this for
more and warmer in the morning, and, two hours later, put them on to
boil in cold. When they are soft, drain well, put into a deep dish;
and sink in the middle a pound of salt pork (the “middling” is best),
leaving only the top visible. The pork should have been previously
parboiled. Bake to a fine brown. It is well to score the pork in long
furrows to mark the slices, before baking.
MINCED PUDDING.
4 large juicy pippins, pared, cored, and chopped.
¼ lb. of raisins, seeded and chopped.
2 tablespoonfuls beef suet, freed from strings and rubbed to powder.
12 almonds, blanched and minced.
½ cup of sugar for pudding, and three tablespoonfuls for custard.
1 pint of milk.
Stale bread.
Butter to spread it.
2 eggs.
Nutmeg.
Cut the crust from the bread and slice evenly. Butter a shallow
pudding-dish, and line it with the slices, fitted neatly together, and
well buttered. Spread thickly with a mixture of the ingredients just
enumerated, to wit: apples, raisins, suet, and almonds, sweetened with
sugar, and spiced with nutmeg. They should form a paste and adhere to
the bread. Make a custard by scalding and sweetening the milk, then
pouring gradually over the eggs. Soak the bread, etc., with this by
pouring it on, a few spoonfuls at a time, until the dish is full. Bake
in a moderate oven, for a time covered, lest it should dry out. Eat
cold, with powdered sugar sifted over the top.
APPLES, NUTS, AND RAISINS
Should be served on clean plates after the pudding.
Third Week. Friday.
——
Purée of Peas.
Fried Bass. Roast Chicken.
Mashed Potatoes. Stewed Celery.
Fried Salsify. Crab-apple Jelly.
——
Margherita Lemon Custard.
——
PURÉE OF PEAS.
1 pint of split peas, soaked overnight in soft water.
3 onions—small.
3 stalks of celery.
2 carrots—small.
1 bunch of sweet herbs.
1 pint of tomatoes.
Season to taste.
3 tablespoonfuls of butter rolled in flour.
3 quarts of water.
Put all on to cook together, except the tomatoes and butter. The
vegetables must be chopped fine. Stew steadily and gently three hours.
Rub to a purée through a sieve, and put in the tomatoes, freed of
bits of skin and cores, and cut into bits. Season, and return to the
fire to stew for twenty minutes longer, closely covered. Stir in the
butter—divided into teaspoonfuls, each rolled in flour. Boil up and
serve. Dice of fried bread should be put into the tureen.
FRIED BASS.
Clean, wipe dry, inside and out, dredge with flour, and season with
salt. Fry in hot butter, beef-dripping, or sweet lard. Half butter,
half lard is a good mixture for frying fish. The moment the fish
are done to a good brown, take them from the fat and drain in a hot
colander. Garnish with parsley.
MASHED POTATOES
Must accompany the fish.
ROAST CHICKEN.
Wash well in three waters, adding a little soda to the second. Stuff
with a mixture of bread-crumbs, butter, pepper, and salt. Fill the
crops and bodies of the fowls; sew them up with strong, not coarse
thread, and tie up the necks. Pour a cupful of boiling water over the
pair, and roast an hour—or more, if they are large. Baste three times
with butter and water, four or five times with their own gravy.
Stew the giblets, necks, and feet in water, enough to cover them well.
When you take up the fowls, add this liquor to the gravy left in the
dripping-pan, boil up once, thicken with browned flour; add the giblets
chopped fine; boil again, and send up in a gravy-boat.
Should there be more gravy than you need, set it away carefully. Each
day brings forth a need for such.
CRAB-APPLE JELLY
Is a pleasing sauce for roast fowls.
STEWED CELERY.
Select the best blanched stalks, and lay aside in cold water. Stew
three or four stalks of the coarser parts, minced, with a small onion,
a few sprigs of parsley, also chopped, and a bone of ham, or other
meat. Stew for an hour in enough water to cover them; strain, pressing
hard. Cut the choicer celery into pieces two inches long; pour over
them the “stock” from the strainer, season with pepper, and, if needed,
salt. Stew until very tender. Stir in a good tablespoonful of butter,
and a little corn-starch, wet up in cold water. Simmer gently three
minutes, and dish.
FRIED SALSIFY.
Scrape and lay in cold water ten minutes. Boil tender, drain, and when
cold, mash with a wooden spoon, picking out the fibrous parts. Wet to
a paste with milk, work in a little butter, and an egg and a half for
each cupful of salsify. Beat the eggs very light. Season to taste,
make into round, flat cakes, dredge with flour, and fry to a light
brown. Drain off the fat, and serve hot.
MARGHERITA LEMON CUSTARD.
5 eggs.
1 quart of milk.
Half the grated peel of a lemon.
5 tablespoonfuls of white sugar.
Beat the whites of two eggs and the yolks of five very light; add the
sugar and pour over these the milk, scalding hot. Lastly, put in the
grated peel, pour into a buttered pudding-dish, and set in a pan of hot
water. Put both into the oven, and bake the custard until it is well
“set.” Then spread with a _méringue_ made of the reserved whites beaten
stiff with a little powdered sugar. Shut the oven door, and cook the
_méringue_ until slightly tinged with yellow-brown. Eat cold.
Third Week. Saturday.
——
English Soup.
Mutton Chops, Broiled. Browned Potato.
Stewed Tomatoes. Sweet Pickles.
——
Orange Fritters with Beehive Sauce.
Coffee.
——
ENGLISH SOUP.
6 lbs. brisket of beef, cut into thin strips.
2 onions, sliced and fried in dripping.
The bones of yesterday’s chickens.
2 carrots.
3 turnips.
4 stalks of celery.
1 bunch of sweet herbs.
¼ lb. of vermicelli.
Pepper and salt at discretion.
6 quarts of cold water.
Put the beef, cut into strips, the “carcasses” of the chickens broken
to pieces, and three quarts of cold water, into a large soup-pot, and
heat gradually. When it boils, skim well, and add the fried onion and
other vegetables, cut fine, and three quarts more of _cold_ water.
Stew, with the pot-lid on, five hours, after it again boils, giving
it no attention save to see that it never boils fast, and that the
liquid has not diminished to less than three-quarters of the original
quantity. Strain at the end of this time, first taking out the meat
that has not boiled to shreds, and the bones. Rub the vegetables
through the colander; afterwards strain the soup again through your
wire strainer or sieve, into the kettle when you have washed it out.
Season, and simmer ten minutes after the boil recommences, skimming
often. Break the vermicelli into short lengths, put into the soup when
you have taken out two quarts for Sunday’s “stock.” Cook gently twelve
minutes after the vermicelli goes in.
At first glance, the quantity of meat prescribed for this soup may seem
extravagant; but, apart from the fact that the coarser and cheaper
quality is used, you must note that you have now the foundation of
three days’ soups, and that you have saved time, no less than money,
by making this as I have directed. It is by the long, intelligent look
ahead that the mistress proves her right to the title.
MUTTON CHOPS—BROILED.
Next to beef, good mutton, properly cooked, deserves the most prominent
place among the meats upon your weekly bill of fare. It is digestible,
nutritious, and, as a rule, popular. I therefore offer no apology for
the regular and frequent appearance of these two standard articles
of diet upon these pages. They may well be named the two staves of
healthful existence—for civilized humanity, at least.
Trim your mutton chops, if your butcher has neglected to do it, leaving
a naked end of bone as a “handle” upon each. Lay them for fifteen
minutes in a little melted butter, turning them several times. Then
hold each up for a moment, to let all the butter drip off that will,
and broil over a clear fire, watching constantly and turning them often
when the falling fat threatens a blaze from below. If your gridiron is
beneath the grate, they can be cooked far more satisfactorily, and with
one-tenth of the trouble. Pepper and salt when they are laid upon a hot
dish, and put a bit of butter upon each.
SWEET PICKLES
“Go” well with broiled chops. For receipts for these and other pickles,
with preserves and fruit jellies, the reader is respectfully referred
to “COMMON SENSE IN THE HOUSEHOLD, NO. 1, GENERAL RECEIPTS.”
BROWNED POTATO.
Mash your potatoes with milk, butter, and salt; heap as irregularly as
possible in a vegetable dish, and hold a red-hot shovel close to them.
They will brown more quickly if you glaze them with butter so soon as
a crust is formed by the hot shovel, then heat it again and repeat the
browning.
STEWED TOMATOES.
To one can of tomatoes allow a saltspoonful of salt, half as much
pepper, a teaspoonful of sugar, and a great tablespoonful of butter.
Drain off half the liquor, season thus, and stew _fast_ for twenty
minutes, in a vessel set within another filled with water on the hard
boil. This receipt was given to me by a notable housewife. It is worth
trying for her sake—and variety’s.
ORANGE FRITTERS.
3 cups of milk.
2 cups of prepared flour.
4 eggs.
A little salt.
Lard for frying.
6 or 8 sweet oranges.
A little powdered sugar.
Take the peel and thick white skin from the oranges. Slice, and take
out the seeds. Make a batter of the ingredients given above, taking
care not to get it too thin. Dip each slice in this dexterously and fry
in boiling lard. Drain in a hot colander, and eat with the sauce given
below.
BEEHIVE SAUCE.
½ cup of butter.
2 cups of sugar.
Juice and peel of a lemon.
½ teaspoonful of nutmeg.
¼ cup of currant jelly, or cranberry syrup.
Make hard sauce in the usual way by creaming the butter and sugar.
Before beating in the lemon-juice and nutmeg, set aside three
tablespoonfuls to be colored. Having added lemon and spice to the
larger quantity, color the less by whipping in currant jelly or
cranberry syrup, until it is of a rich pink. Shape the white sauce into
a conical mound. Roll a sheet of note paper into a long, narrow funnel,
tie a string about it to keep it in shape, and fill with colored sauce.
Squeeze it gently through the aperture at the small end, beginning at
the base, and winding round the cone to the top, guiding it so that the
white will show prettily between the pink ridges.
The effect is pleasing and costs little trouble to produce.
COFFEE
Is believed by some to aid digestion, and, since fritters are not
generally classed among very wholesome dainties, it may be as well to
give John and John’s wife—_not_ the children—a cup of the fragrant
elixir as a possible preventive against an attack of dyspepsia. It
always lends grace even to a homely dinner.
Fourth Week. Sunday.
——
German Sago Soup.
Boiled Turkey with Oyster Sauce. Savory Rice Pudding.
Potatoes au Maître d’hôtel. Celery.
Grape Jelly.
——
Mince Pie.
Bananas and Oranges.
——
GERMAN SAGO SOUP.
Soak half a cup of German sago in enough water to cover it entirely
for two hours. Heat yesterday’s soup to boiling, with a little of the
reserved “stock,” should the supply be too small; stir in the sago with
a little salt, until dissolved, and serve.
BOILED TURKEY AND OYSTER SAUCE.
15 oysters.
A little milk, bread-crumbs, butter and seasoning.
Wheat flour.