together in a saucepan a tablespoonful of butter and two of flour.
Add the spinach with pepper and salt to taste; cook for five minutes.
Butter the insides of muffin-tins or pâté-pans, and press the spinach
hard into these. Set in the oven to keep hot while you make a white
sauce. Carefully turn out the forms of spinach on a hot platter, lay
a slice of hard-boiled egg on the top of each form and pour the white
sauce around it.
SQUASH
The summer squash differs from the winter variety in having a tender
shell and in being very juicy. Both may be cooked in a variety of ways,
and form many appetizing dishes. In opening the winter squash it is
often necessary to exert great strength to break through the outer
rind—some housekeepers using a small saw for the purpose. The summer
vegetable may be easily peeled or sliced with an ordinary case-knife.
Boiled squash
Wash two summer squashes, pare them, and cut into pieces about an
inch square. Put them over the fire in a saucepan of boiling water
and boil steadily for twenty-five minutes. Drain in a colander,
pressing hard to extract the water, turn into a wooden bowl and mash
with a potato-beater until free from lumps. Now beat in a heaping
tablespoonful of butter; salt and pepper to taste. Return to the fire
just long enough to get very hot, stirring all the time. Serve in a
deep vegetable dish.
Baked squash
Peel, boil and mash two small squashes. When cold, beat in two
tablespoonfuls of melted butter, two whipped eggs, a gill of cream and
salt and pepper to taste. Turn into a greased bakedish, sprinkle with
bread-crumbs and bake for a half-hour. A good way to use squash left
over from yesterday.
Creamed squash
Peel two summer squashes and cut into dice of uniform size. Boil for
fifteen minutes in salted water, or until tender, but not broken.
Drain carefully in a colander and keep hot while you cook together two
heaping teaspoonfuls of butter and the same quantity of flour until
they bubble; then pour upon them a cupful and a half of sweet milk.
Stir until smooth; turn in the squash dice, season liberally with salt
and white pepper, and serve.
Scalloped squash
Peel, wash and boil three summer squashes according to directions given
in the recipe for boiled squash. Beat two eggs light, and whip into
them a small cupful of rich sweet milk, and a tablespoonful of melted
butter. Beat this mixture into the mashed squash, season with salt
and pepper and turn all into a greased pudding-dish. Sprinkle with
bread-crumbs and bits of butter, and bake.
Squash pancakes
Boil and mash two squashes, and when cold beat into them two
tablespoonfuls of melted butter, a quarter of a teaspoonful of salt, a
pint of milk, two eggs and a cupful of flour in which has been sifted
a teaspoonful of baking-powder. Beat hard for five minutes. Have a
soapstone griddle heated, and drop the mixture by the spoonful on this.
If the cakes are too stiff, add a little more milk. Serve hot with
butter. These are good with broiled steaks or chops.
Squash fritters
Peel and slice the squash, and boil in salted water for a little over
five minutes. Carefully remove the slices and drop into iced water.
When cold, drain in a colander and pat dry between the folds of a
dish-towel. Dip each slice in beaten egg, then in cracker crumbs, and
when all are thoroughly coated set in a cold place for an hour. Have
ready a kettle of boiling dripping; drop the squash slices carefully
into this and fry to a golden brown. Drain in a heated colander,
sprinkle with pepper and salt, and serve.
TOMATOES
The nineteenth century was a third gone before the world on this side
of the sea began to appreciate the beneficent qualities of what our
foremothers used to call “love apples.” There is no other vegetable
that is of more value as a liver regulator and blood-cooler than the
tomato. The small quantity of calomel it contains acts as a corrective
of biliousness, and stimulates all the secretions of the body to
activity. Eaten raw, it is cooling and delicious, and it may be cooked
in so many and varied forms that one does not soon weary of it.
In the average home it appears as a salad, in soup, stewed, and perhaps
baked or scalloped. When it has been thus served many housekeepers
consider that they have exhausted its capabilities. On the contrary,
they have hardly touched upon its possibilities.
The increasing familiarity with sauces as the cook’s potent aids in
converting old dishes into new, has made tomato sauce popular as an
accompaniment of certain compounds of macaroni, but even those who use
the sauce in this manner do not all know how admirable it is served
with boiled or baked fish, or with roast mutton, or as a vehicle for
shrimps, or as a zest for eggs. Apart from this, the tomato, not made
into a sauce, but employed either fresh or canned, may come to the
table in a variety of easily-prepared and savory combinations that will
appeal to the family caterer as being the new and inexpensive dishes
she is always seeking.
Raw tomatoes
Never scald them. Pare and strip off the skins. Set on ice until you
are ready to serve. Cut up quickly, lay within a chilled bowl and
season, as you serve, with French dressing.
Raw tomatoes and cucumbers
Cut off the tops of large, firm tomatoes and carefully remove most of
the pulp. Keep pulp and tomatoes in the refrigerator while you peel and
cut into small dice ice-cold cucumbers. Mix the cucumber dice with the
tomato pulp, fill the tomato shells, set them on crisp lettuce leaves
and pour a great spoonful of mayonnaise dressing over each.
Creamed tomatoes
Cut firm tomatoes into thick slices and fry them until tender in a
couple of spoonfuls of butter. Have ready a white sauce made by cooking
together a tablespoonful, each, of butter and flour to the bubbling
point, and then pouring upon them a half-pint of milk—or, better still,
a half-pint of mingled milk and cream. Cook, stirring constantly, until
the sauce thickens, dish the tomatoes and turn the sauce upon them,
after seasoning them suitably with pepper and salt.
Stewed tomatoes
Peel, slice and put a quart of tomatoes over the fire in a
nickel-steel-plated or agate saucepan—never in tin. Stew fast twenty
minutes. Season with a lump of butter rolled in flour, a teaspoonful of
sugar, salt and pepper to taste, and two teaspoonfuls of onion juice.
Stew five minutes longer, and serve.
Some cooks substitute fine dry crumbs for the flour. Unless some
thickening is used, the tomatoes will be watery and thin.
Raw tomatoes and whipped cream
Pare large, smooth tomatoes carefully, and set on ice until chilled to
the heart. Cut each in half when ready to serve, sprinkle lightly with
salt and paprika, and heap with whipped cream.
A welcome entrée in summer. Send around heated and buttered crackers
and cream cheese with them, or thin slices of buttered graham bread.
Tomato croquettes
These can be made either of fresh or canned tomatoes. Rub through
a colander half the contents of a can of tomatoes into a saucepan
with a thin slice of onion, salt, pepper, two or three cloves, and
one tablespoonful of sugar. Cook for fifteen minutes, thicken with
corn-starch—four teaspoonfuls of it rubbed to a cream with a generous
lump of butter. Let it boil up and add one egg. Pour the mixture out to
cool. When cool, form into croquettes, and dip them, first, in beaten
egg, then in fine crumbs; set on ice for two hours before frying in
deep, boiling cottolene or other fat.
Stuffed tomatoes (No. 1)
Cut the tops from large, firm tomatoes, and with a small spoon scoop
out the insides. To half of this pulp, chopped, add as much minced
boiled ham and two tablespoonfuls of bread-crumbs. Season to taste and
fill the tomatoes with this mixture. Set in a baking-pan and bake for
twenty minutes, covered; then brown.
Stuffed tomatoes (No. 2)
Cut the tops from large tomatoes and scrape out the pulp. Mix with this
one part of bread-crumbs to two parts of minced boiled ham. Fill the
tomato shells with this mixture, put a bit of butter upon the top of
each, and set, side by side, in a bake-pan. Pour a cupful of soup stock
over and around the tomatoes, and bake until tender.
Scalloped tomatoes
Grease a pudding-dish and put in the bottom of it a layer of peeled
and sliced tomatoes. Cover with a layer of salted and peppered crumbs,
sprinkle with bits of butter and a little sugar. Now put in another
stratum of tomatoes and more crumbs. When the dish is full pour over
all a cupful of well-seasoned soup stock, sprinkle the top with crumbs,
and bake, covered, for fifteen minutes. Uncover and brown.
Tomatoes and corn
Put a cupful, each, of stewed tomatoes and boiled corn over the fire
together, bring to a boil, add half a teaspoonful of white sugar and,
if you like, a dash of onion juice; cook one minute longer and serve.
A good way of using yesterday’s left-overs of these vegetables.
Tomato fritters
Make a batter of a cupful of flour, a cupful of water, a tablespoonful
of butter, a saltspoonful of salt and the white of an egg. The water
should be just warm enough to melt the butter, but not hot. Stir the
two into the sifted and salted flour, mixing carefully, and, lastly,
beat in the whipped white of an egg. Into the batter thus made dip
rather thick slices of peeled tomatoes, and fry in deep hot fat to a
light, delicate brown. The tomatoes may be sprinkled with salt and
pepper before dipping them in batter, or the fritters may be seasoned
after they are cooked.
Tomatoes stuffed with meat
Select large, firm tomatoes, cut off the tops and scoop out the inside
pulp. Do not peel. Chop fine a cupful of cold meat—it may be fowl,
tongue or ham, or even lamb, mutton or beef, if the latter are well
seasoned. With the meat put a half cupful of fine bread-crumbs, a
tablespoonful of butter, and salt, pepper, parsley and onion juice.
The quantity of these to be used must be determined by the amount of
seasoning there is already in the meat. After sprinkling the inside of
the tomato shells with a very little salt and pepper fill them with the
mixture of meat, crumbs, etc. If this seems too dry it may be moistened
with a small quantity of gravy or soup stock, or even with milk or
cream. Arrange the tomatoes in a pudding-dish, replace the tops, lay a
cover over them and bake half an hour. Serve in the dish in which they
were cooked.
Tomatoes stuffed with corn
Prepare the tomatoes as in the preceding recipe, place them in the
bake-dish and fill them with a mixture of a cupful of grated green
corn, half a cupful of bread-crumbs, a tablespoonful, each, of milk and
butter, a teaspoonful of white sugar, and salt and pepper to taste.
Tomatoes stuffed with rice
Fill tomato shells prepared as above directed with cold boiled rice,
to which have been added two tablespoonfuls of melted butter, half
a teaspoonful of onion juice, salt and paprika. When the shells are
filled strew the contents of each thickly with grated cheese before
laying on the tops. Bake, covered, half an hour.
Tomatoes stuffed with macaroni
Prepare as in last recipe, substituting cold, boiled macaroni, chopped,
for the rice, and mixing cheese with the filling, besides strewing it
on the top.
Tomatoes à la créme
Cut unpeeled tomatoes into thick slices. Put into a frying-pan three
tablespoonfuls of butter, and fry the tomatoes for three minutes in
this, or until they are tender. Remove carefully and keep hot on
a platter set in an open oven. Into the butter in the pan stir a
tablespoonful of flour and cook until thoroughly blended; then pour in
gradually a half-pint of rich milk in which a pinch of soda has been
dissolved. Stir all to a smooth sauce, season and pour over the fried
tomatoes.
Tomatoes and poached eggs
Cook tomatoes by either of the preceding recipes, or stew them until
tender. If you do the latter, strain off the thin, watery liquor
that comes from them in cooking, and set it aside for sauces or for
seasoning. Make of the thick portion of the tomato a layer in the
bottom of a platter, seasoning to taste with pepper and salt, and, if
desired, with a few drops of onion juice; make all very hot and lay
on the bed thus prepared carefully poached eggs. If fried eggs are
preferred, they may be substituted. Dust them with a little salt and
pepper and serve at once.
Tomato omelet
Peel and chop four tomatoes. Soak a cupful of bread-crumbs in a cup of
milk and stir them into five beaten eggs. Add the chopped tomatoes,
season to taste and turn into a frying-pan in which two tablespoonfuls
of butter have been melted. Cook until set, turn upon a hot platter,
pour tomato sauce about the omelet, and send at once to the table.
Curried tomatoes
Put into a frying-pan a heaping tablespoonful of butter and half a
small onion, grated. Cook until the latter begins to brown—about two
minutes—and stir in a scant teaspoonful of curry powder. In this fry
thick slices of tomato until tender, sprinkle with salt and serve.
Another method of preparing curried tomatoes is to cook them by the
recipe given for creamed tomatoes, adding a teaspoonful of curry powder
to the cream sauce and pouring this over the fried tomatoes.
Curried green tomatoes
Cut large green tomatoes into very thick slices. Melt in a frying-pan
three tablespoonfuls of butter and fry in this a small onion, sliced.
At the end of two or three minutes stir into the melted butter a
teaspoonful of curry powder. Lay the tomatoes in this mixture and fry
them on both sides. When done, drain, sprinkle with salt and pepper,
and serve.
TURNIPS
Mashed turnips
Peel, lay in cold water for an hour; boil tender in hot, salted water;
throw this off and fill up the pot with boiling water, slightly salted.
Cook five minutes in this, drain well and rub through a colander or
vegetable-press. Beat in a lump of butter rolled in a little flour,
salt and pepper to taste; return to the saucepan and cook one minute,
stirring all the time.
Turnips boiled, plain
Pare and quarter. Cook tender in two waters; drain, dish; pour a little
melted butter, seasoned with pepper and salt, over them, and serve
_hot_.
Young turnips stewed with cream
Pare, lay in cold water one hour; cook tender in two waters; drain and
cover with hot cream (heated with a pinch of soda) or hot milk, if you
have no cream. Simmer gently for five minutes; stir in a white roux
made by cooking together a tablespoonful of butter and one of flour,
salt and pepper, and serve very hot.
Young turnips with white sauce
Peel, lay in cold water for an hour; boil for ten minutes in fresh
water, cover with boiling, slightly salted water, and cook tender.
Drain, dish, season and pour over them a good white sauce of drawn
butter.
Fried turnips
Peel and slice young turnips, dropping them into cold water as you do
so. Turn into a pot of boiling water, and cook for twenty minutes.
Drain carefully, so as not to break the slices. When cold, dip each
slice in beaten egg, then in salted cracker dust, and spread all upon
a platter. Let them stand for an hour and fry in deep, boiling fat to a
golden brown.
Turnips and carrots sautés
Peel and cut into dice of uniform size enough cold boiled turnips
and carrots to make a cupful of each. Mix and sprinkle with salt and
pepper. Melt two tablespoonfuls of butter in a frying-pan and turn the
vegetable dice into this. Toss and turn in the hissing butter for five
or ten minutes; drain in a hot colander and dish.
Kohlrabi turnips
Separate the turnip of the vegetable from the leaves that surround it
and wash thoroughly. Cut into quarters and boil for twenty minutes in
salted water. Drain; sprinkle with salt and pepper, and serve hot with
melted butter.
Kohlrabi with leaves
Remove the outer leaves from the swelled stalk, or turnip; wash
thoroughly and throw into cold water. Drain both and put them on to
boil in separate vessels of salted water. When the turnips have cooked
for ten minutes, drain and pour over them fresh boiling water, to
which a tablespoonful of vinegar has been added. Boil for ten minutes
longer; drain, scrape and slice. Dip the slices, one by one, in melted
butter and lay about the edge of a hot platter. Drain the leaves which
have been cooked tender, turn into a chopping-bowl and chop very fine.
Return to the fire with two tablespoonfuls of butter, pepper and salt
to taste. Beat to a smoking mass, and heap in the center of the heated
platter, about the edge of which you have laid the sliced vegetable.
A WORD ABOUT NUTS
Nuts of all kinds are gaining in favor as articles of diet, and are
at their best in the autumn and winter. They may be bought, shelled
and packed in boxes, so that they are ready for immediate use. The
housekeeper of moderate means, with an abundance of time at her
disposal, will find that it is cheaper to buy the nuts in their shells
and crack them herself. If she is so fortunate as to be able to despise
the petty economies she will rejoice in the prepared nuts. They will
save her much tedious labor.
If Spanish chestnuts are not to be procured when wanted, large domestic
chestnuts may be boiled and used in their stead.
Chestnut croquettes
Boil a quart of Spanish chestnuts in salted water. While still hot,
remove the shells and skins and rub the nuts through a colander.
With a wooden spoon work to a smooth paste, adding, as you do so, a
tablespoonful of butter, a saltspoonful of salt, a dash of paprika,
a quarter of a teaspoonful of onion juice, a handful of fine
bread-crumbs, and the unbeaten yolk of an egg. Put the paste in a
double boiler over the fire and heat through. With floured hands form
into croquettes, dip in beaten egg, then in cracker dust, and lay on
a platter in the refrigerator for two hours. Fry in deep, boiling
cottolene or other fat; drain in a colander, and serve very hot.
English walnut croquettes
Crack, extract the kernels, blanch by pouring boiling water over them,
stripping off the loosened skins and dropping into cold water. Leave
there for ten minutes; take out, dry between two soft towels and, when
crisp and perfectly dry, proceed as with chestnuts in last recipe.
Peanut stuffing for roast duck
Prepare the ducks for roasting and make a stuffing of bread-crumbs
seasoned with butter, pepper and salt. Chop a cupful of roasted and
shelled peanuts to a powder and rub them into the bread-crumbs. Stuff
the ducks with this mixture and roast, basting frequently.
Savory chestnuts
Boil and shell and skin large Spanish chestnuts; break each in half and
cover with a thin giblet gravy. Or you may make a gravy of the legs
and necks of a pair of fowls, and thicken it with browned flour rolled
in butter. The gravy must be brown. Cook the chestnuts in it for ten
minutes. This is a pleasing accompaniment to roast poultry of any kind,
particularly roast turkey.
EVEN-THREADED LIVING
“Come what may, appearances must be kept up!” wrote a venerable
gentlewoman to her daughter, with whom life had grown suddenly hard by
reason of her husband’s pecuniary losses. “Show a brave front to the
world although there may be an empty purse and an empty larder behind
it. _Noblesse oblige!_”
The motto is grand—sometimes sublime.
There is an heroic side to the question, of which I shall treat
presently.
The ignoble side, and that which forms the basis of most treatises on
this subject, crops up when appearances are all in all, and make the
life a continual lie, like an embroidered silk stocking drawn over an
unwashed foot.
One of my childish recollections is of a rich woman, whose “pair of
parlors,” as she called them, were richly carpeted, curtained and
furnished, as was also a spacious dining-room on the same floor. When
there was no company the family sat in a back room adjoining the
kitchen. The worthy woman, visiting a sister-housewife, was scandalized
at learning that she, her husband and six children actually used
the parlors “every day and Sunday, too,” and ate habitually in a
dining-room “where there was an elegant Brussels carpet on the floor.”
“My dear Mrs. Blank!” cried the wealthy economist, “do you expect to
have all this and heaven, too?”
“I expect to enjoy heaven the more for having made the best of the
Father’s gifts to me here,” answered the matron of advanced ideas.
Ideas, which I record with devout gratification, are fast relegating
to a dusty and dishonored past, the “best room” of farmhouse and
town mansion never opened except for visitors. With it is going the
basement sitting-room, “low” in every sense of the word, which used to
be thought good enough for the family. Expensive furniture, kept with
real china and solid silver for “occasions”—that is, when appearances
must be kept up before comparative strangers and acquaintances for
whom, taken as individuals, the appearance-worshipers care less
than nothing; fine clothes, worn above mean undergarments; sounding
phrases aired, like the reserve of linen sheets, for company use—have
more influence upon character than we are willing to believe. It is
well to put the best foot foremost. It is better to have both feet
decently shod and alike serviceable. Each of us knows plenty of
people who have company tones, company smiles, company phraseology,
company opinions—_un_wisely kept for show. One and all, singly and
collectively, they mean to imply something which the wearers thereof
are not. Their “appearances” are social electroplating, moral
veneering. Slipshod at home and every day; well-groomed abroad and
in the sight of those to whom it makes not an atom of difference
how the hypocrites look or act,—“home devils and street angels,” as
plain-spoken critics style them,—such is the great host of those
who keep up appearances because they have not souls above shams,
whose dusters and mops never visit the insides of burnished cups and
platters. Verily they have their reward, but the prizes are as ignoble
as the recipients and their motives.
We see, or may see, if we use our senses aright, the heroic side of the
question. My heart aches with the thought of scores of examples which
pass under my eyes in the lives of unknown martyrs of whom this world
is not worthy, by whom the world to come will be made the worthier
abiding-place of those for whom the Father has prepared it.
An old woman, who knew the Bronté sisters as children and women, told
me that their body linen was darned by a thread until the original
fabric hardly showed between the mending.
“But it was always whole and clean, and they made it as carefully as if
it were to be trimmed with real lace. Nobody ever saw a rip in their
gloves, and they cleaned them themselves. They looked like the ladies
they were. Not a bit fashionable, but downright ladylike, you know.
They always kept themselves up.”
I heard another “downright ladylike” girl, who is almost as poor as the
Yorkshire sisters were, insist, the other day, upon dressing for the
family dinner when the relative with whom she lived begged her not to
change her walking costume.
“You are so tired, my dear, after teaching all day!”
“We working women can not take such liberties with ourselves,” said
the spirited heroine. “If we let the forms of elegant propriety and
conventionality go, we are in danger of forgetting what they represent.”
Of a like strain was the regard for appearances that led young
Ellsworth, who was killed early in the Civil War, decline an invitation
to dine with a business acquaintance at a restaurant when Ellsworth was
so hungry that the smell of the food made him almost frantic. He was
then a poor student working his way through a New York law school. In
referring to the incident in more prosperous days, Colonel Ellsworth
explained that he could not have accepted a courtesy he would not be
able to repay in kind.
“A gentleman may starve without loss of caste,” he added. “He forfeits
his right to the name in becoming a pauper, or a beggar.”
The outward appearance was the sign of the inward grace, inbred and
invincible.
True refinement—the kind that does not shrink or go to pieces under
the roughest processes of the mangle we know as daily living—is
“even-threaded” and consistent throughout.
I called the other day upon a woman who has never been rich, but always
refined. She is now poor. She can never be common. Her lunch hour was
earlier than I had supposed, and my call infringed upon it. She and her
daughter were at table.
“You shall not go,” she insisted; “I can give you a cup of hot tea and
little else besides ‘bread and cheese and kisses.’ The welcome must
make up the rest.” [Illustration: A BRIDESMAIDS’ TABLE WITH PINK
ROSES]
TABLE FOR AN ENGAGEMENT DINNER