Part 37

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

SUGGESTION FOR A SUNFLOWER LUNCHEON]

The cheese had been melted upon buttered toast, cut by a tin “shape” into scalloped ovals; it was golden brown in color, crisp to the teeth, savory to the palate. The tea was scalding and fresh and fragrant; for meat we had three Hamburg steaks, garnished with celery-tops. They were accompanied by an apple-and-celery salad, treated on the table to a French dressing; wafery slices of brown bread and butter went with it. Afterwards we had Albert biscuits and a second cup of tea—and nothing else. Beyond the laughing remark prefacing the frugal meal, the hostess offered no apology. She lived in this style every day, affecting nothing and hiding nothing. A gentlewoman in grain, if she had sat down to three meals a day alone, she would have breakfasted, lunched and dined—not merely “fed.” Luxury was beyond her reach—elegance never.

Simplicity need not be homely. Neatness is not a synonym for bareness. A certain degree of beauty and grace is almost a Christian duty.

The best cooks can not afford to despise the recommendation of the eye to the palate. The difference between plain and dainty housekeeping depends so much upon it that the professional caterer plays cunningly upon the desire of the eye, often bringing a good thing into disrepute. Because his garnishes and fanciful devices conceal cheap materials and indifferent manufactures is no reason why the housekeeper should not make the substantial “home fare” provided by her honest hands goodly to sight, as well as to taste.

Cooking schools and classes, chafing-dish lectures and the cuisine corner of the woman’s page have been active for more than a third of a century to bring our average American housewife to what old-time revivalists called “a realizing sense” of the deficiencies of the national kitchen, and by the rugged road of conviction to conversion from the old way to the new, which is the better. There is no dearth of missionaries, no lack of machinery.

Much of the work done by these is surface culture—scratching and smoothing over the soil, cleansing, to a polish, cup and platter. Curled parsley, beets, carrots and turnips, carved into leaves, stars and flowers, and fantastic confections of tissue paper and meringue—do not cheat veterans in gastronomics into relish of the ill-prepared dishes they adorn. Experiences of this sort have something to do with the contempt felt by many competent cooks for culinary esthetics. They class everything that looks in this direction under the head of “French cookery,” a synonym with them for flash and frippery.

I grant that to the hale appetite of the lover of “plain roast and boiled” of joints, haunches and rounds—the man who can digest mountains of fried “griddles,” and, in the bottom of his stomachic conscience, prefers corned beef and cabbage to broiled sweetbreads and mushrooms—his steak, or rare roast, or sugar-cured ham, or choice cut of cod, tastes no better for the garnish of cress, nasturtium or lemon. I once saw a millionaire “high-liver” toss aside the green sprays with the declaration that he “liked to have victuals and weeds sent in upon separate dishes.” After clearing the trou—trencher!—he proceeded to feed.

In the feeder’s very teeth I maintain that food daintily served tastes better than the same when set before us with no regard to seemliness. If slender appetites are to be coaxed into action, the study of pleasing effects becomes an obligation.

DINNER SWEETS OF ALL SORTS

PIES

Pastry

Have all ingredients very cold. Into a pound of flour chop three-quarters of a cup of firm, cold butter. When the flour is like a coarse powder stir into it a small cupful of iced water. With a spoon mix together, then turn upon a floured pastry-board, roll out quickly and lightly, fold and roll out again. Set the pastry on the ice until chilled through, roll out and line a pie-dish with it. Before filling the pastry shell with fruit, or other material of which the pie is to be made, wash over the lower crust with the unbeaten white of an egg, and, when the filling is put in, set the pie immediately in an oven that is as hot at the bottom as at the top. The oven must be hot and steady.

A good puff paste

Into a half-pound of flour chop six ounces of firm, cold butter, and, when like a coarse powder, wet with a small cupful of iced water. Stir to a paste and turn upon a chilled board. Roll out quickly and lightly, handling as little as possible. Fold and roll out three times, then set on the ice for several hours before making into pies. Always bake pastry in a very hot oven.

Family pie crust

Sift a quart of flour three times with one teaspoonful of baking-powder. Chop into it two tablespoonfuls of cottolene or other fat until it is like granulated dust. Wet with iced water into a stiff dough, handling as little as you can, using a wooden spoon until it is too stiff to manage. Turn upon a floured board and roll out thin. Have ready two tablespoonfuls of firm butter, and with this dot the paste in rows one inch apart, using one tablespoonful of butter. Roll up the sheet of paste, inclosing the butter; beat flat with the rolling-pin, and roll out as before. Use the other tablespoonful of butter in dotting this sheet, sprinkle lightly with flour, and roll up tightly. Give a blow or two of the pin to hold it in fold, and set on the ice until you are ready to use it—all night if you like. It is better for three or four hours’ chilling.

Butter the pie-plates, lay the crust lightly within them; pinch the edges to hinder it from “crawling” while baking, fill with fruit, or whatever else is to go into them. If this is to be what a witty editor designates as “the kivered pie which stands high in the royal family of Pie,” lay the paste neatly over the filling, trim off ragged edges, and press or print down the edges.

A North Carolina man thus separates the “royal family” aforesaid: “There are three varieties: kivered, unkivered and barred.”

The New York editor, just quoted, says of the “kivered” variety:

“Its triumphant composition requires of the artist higher qualities of head and heart, a more delicate touch, a higher strain of genius, a sublimer imagination, than the composition of the unkivered, or the barred. There must be magic in the upper crust of it. Ah! that delicious, finely-flaking upper crust, designed by a deep-revolving brain and fashioned by a sensitive hand, a pâté Queen Mab would be glad to nibble!”

On the other hand, a New Orleans knight of the pen boldly defines the kivered pie as “distinctively a product of New England civilization, that has no place in simpler and more democratic states. Descendants of the men who made the charge up King’s Mountain, the Majuba Hill of this continent, take their pie unkivered. They will not touch the kivered abomination!”

Mince pie

Returning to our New York editorial, the amused reader finds this eulogium upon mince pie:

“There goes much skill to the making of a mince pie. Within the fortunate inwards of the president of pies are strange dainties and spices, and Dr. Johnson’s drink of heroes. The elements are so mixed in it that nature may stand up and say to all the world: ‘This is a _pie_! A great mince pie is a masterpiece!’”

An anonymous writer upon the same subject says for the comfort of semi-dyspeptics:

“Mince-meat ought to be extremely wholesome for the same reasons that make it good to eat—its flavors of sweet and sour, of meat, apple and spice, which relieve each other, and its finely divided particles which allow the choicer blending of flavors and save the stomach much of the grinding work which reduces food to the pulp in which it enters the blood. What gives mince pie its ill repute as the very spawn of nightmare, are its overdressing with suet and butter, only fit for polar consumption, and its drugging with spices. Spice is the very food of the nerves, rightly used, growing more essential as circulation and sense dull with age. But it should be delicately, discerningly used not to lose its potency. The overdressing with fat is a relic of the old English barbarism which stewed its food in tallow, and, as the old play has it, ‘took two fat wethers to baste one capon.’”

Mince-meat

(A family recipe 150 years old.)

Boil two pounds of lean beef, and when cold, chop fine. Mince a pound of beef suet to a powder. Peel and chop five pounds of apples. Seed and halve two pounds of raisins. Wash, and pick over carefully two pounds of cleaned currants and one pound of sultana raisins. Cut into tiny bits three-quarters of a pound of citron. Mix these ingredients, adding, as you do so, two tablespoonfuls, each, of cinnamon and mace, a tablespoonful, each, of cloves and allspice, a teaspoonful of ground nutmeg, a tablespoonful of salt and two and a half pounds of brown sugar. When all is well mixed, stir in a quart of sherry and a pint of the best brandy. Mix thoroughly and pack down in a stone crock.

Mince-meat should be prepared several weeks before it is needed, that it may “ripen” and become mellow. Those whose temperance principles forbid the moistening of the mince-meat with brandy or sherry, may use cider in their place. In making mince pies have the best puff-paste. Line pie-plates with this, fill the crust shells with the mince-meat, and lay strips of pastry, lattice-wise, across the tops of the pies. Bake in a good oven, which should be as hot at the bottom as at the top. The pies may be kept for weeks, but must be reheated before serving.

Our New Orleans essayist upon the national pie, is cavalierly disdainful in throwing aside the third variety:

“The barred pie may be dismissed without discussion, being a mere compromise, a pabulum for colorless individuals who are the mugwumps of the dining-room.”

In defiance of the slur, I commend my “barred” mince pie, with its latticed cover, as the pearl of the royal race. For a century and a half, the Old Virginia housewives, from whom I proudly claim descent, laid the dainty trellis across the heaving brown breast of the masterpiece, and six generations of epicures have set thereon the seal of their approval.

Pumpkin pie (No. 1)

Belongs to the noble order of the “unkivered” pie.