Part 5

Wash the sweetbreads; lay in salted water fifteen minutes, and stew with the onion, in a pint of cold water, a little salt, until done, as may be seen by cutting into the thickest part. Wash the macaroni when you have broken it into small bits, and cook gently until tender, but not to breaking, in the hot broth from which you have taken the sweetbreads and strained the onion. Stew in a farina-kettle or tin saucepan set in hot water. Chop the sweetbreads; stir the butter into the macaroni, which should have absorbed all the broth; then the minced sweetbreads. Season with parsley, pepper, and salt; cover closely and leave in the hot water, but not over the fire, five minutes before turning into a deep dish.

POTATOES AU NATUREL

Are, with all their high-sounding name, only the homely vegetables boiled in their skins. Put on in cold water, bring to a slow boil, and increase the heat until a fork will pierce the largest. Throw in salt; turn off every drop of the water; set back on the range, without the cover, for two minutes to dry, peel, and send to table in a napkin.

FRENCH BEANS, SAUTÉ.

Open a can of French or “string” beans; cut into inch lengths and boil in the can liquor, adding a little cold water, if needed, for twenty minutes. Drain, return to the saucepan with two tablespoonfuls of butter and a little salt and pepper. Toss constantly with a fork until they are hissing hot, but not until they scorch. Serve in a hot vegetable dish.

APPLE SAUCE.

Pare, core, and slice tart apples, and stew in water enough to cover them until they break to pieces. Beat to a pulp with a good lump of butter and plenty of sugar. Eat cold. Make enough for several meals, as it will keep a week at this season.

MADE MUSTARD.

4 tablespoonfuls English mustard. 2 teaspoonfuls of salt. The same quantity of salad oil and white sugar. 1 teaspoonful of pepper. Vinegar to make a smooth paste—that from celery, or onion pickle, if you have it.

Rub mustard, oil, sugar, pepper, and salt together; wet, by degrees, with vinegar, beating very hard at the last, when the proper consistency has been gained.

This is far superior to mustard as usually mixed for the table.

NARCISSUS BLANC-MANGE.

1 quart of milk. 1 package of Cooper’s gelatine, soaked in two cups of cold water. Yolks of 4 eggs, beaten light. 2 cups of white sugar. Vanilla and rose-water for flavoring. Less than 2 cups of rich cream.

Heat the milk to scalding; stir in gelatine and sugar. When these are dissolved, take out a cupful and pour, by degrees, over the beaten yolks. Return to the saucepan and stir together over the fire for two minutes after the boiling point is reached. Take from the range, flavor with rose-water, and pour into a mould with a cylinder in the centre, previously wet with cold water. Next day, turn out upon a dish with a broad bottom, and fill the hollow in the middle with the cream, whipped light with a little powdered sugar and flavored with vanilla. Pile more whipped cream about the base.

Send your coffee around after the blanc-mange has been eaten. A spoonful of whipped cream, without the vanilla, will give a touch of elegance to the beverage. Let this happy thought come to you while you are preparing the cream, and before the flavoring goes in.

Third Week. Monday. —— Variety Soup. Beef Pudding. Scored Potatoes. Canned Peas. Mixed Pickles. —— Apple Méringue. Crackers and Cheese. ——

VARIETY SOUP.

Chop a quarter of a small cabbage, a turnip, and some sweet herbs; cover with cold water, and heat to boiling. Throw off the first water, and add a quart more of cold. Put in the roast-beef bones, after you have cut off the meat, with a slice or two, or bone, of ham. Stew all two hours at the back of the range. Half an hour before dinner, warm up what was left from Sunday’s soup. Strain the hot liquor in which your cabbage, etc., have boiled, into this. Pick out bits of bones and meat from the colander, mashing the vegetables as little as possible; put these into the soup, with any macaroni or beans you may have left over; season to your liking; simmer for ten minutes; thicken with a tablespoonful of corn-starch, and pour out.

This will not be a “show-soup,” but it will be savory and nutritious.

BEEF PUDDING.

1 pint of milk. 3 eggs. A cupful of prepared flour. A little salt. 1 tablespoonful of melted butter.

Cut the meat from yesterday’s roast into neat pieces; lay them in 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.