The Dinner Year-Book. Marion Harland
dish.
Cottage Pudding.
1 cup of powdered sugar.
1 cup of sweet milk.
1 tablespoonful of butter.
2 eggs, beaten light, yolks and whites separately.
Saltspoonful of salt.
About 3 cups of Hecker’s prepared flour, enough for cake-batter.
Rub the butter well into the sugar; add beaten yolks; the milk, salt, then whipped whites and yolks alternately. Bake in a buttered mould. When you can bring out the testing-straw clean from the middle of the loaf, turn it out upon a dish. Cut in slices while hot, as it is wanted.
One who has never tried it can hardly believe that the result of a receipt which may be tried fearlessly by a novice in cookery, could be the really elegant pudding just described.
It is also as economical as toothsome.
Sauce for Cottage Pudding.
2 cups of powdered sugar.
2 tablespoonfuls of butter.
1 cup of boiling water.
1 glass sherry wine.
Nutmeg or cinnamon to taste.
Rub the butter into the sugar; add hot water gradually; then spice and wine. Cover tightly to keep in the strength of the wine, and set for twenty minutes in a saucepan of boiling water. Stir up and send to table.
First Week. Thursday.
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Vermicelli Soup.
Scalloped Oysters. Mince of Mutton with Potato Frill.
Baked Tomatoes. Celery.
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Tipsy Trifle.
Apples and Nuts.
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Vermicelli Soup.
Take off all the fat from the broth in which your mutton was cooked yesterday, and boil it down slowly to two-thirds of the original quantity. Stew to pieces, in another vessel, a stalk of celery, one small onion, a carrot, and a bunch of sweet herbs—all cut up fine. A ham-bone, if you have it, or a couple of slices of lean ham, will be an improvement to the broth. Strain the soup; rub the vegetables through a fine colander with the water in which they were boiled; return to the fire with a double handful of vermicelli broken into short pieces; boil for ten minutes; add a tablespoonful of butter rolled in flour; boil up and serve.
Send around a saucer of grated cheese with vermicelli and macaroni soups. It is a great improvement to the flavor and consistency. Each person may take as much or as little as he likes.
Scalloped Oysters.
1 quart of fine oysters.
1 coffee-cupful of pounded cracker.
2 great spoonfuls of butter.
½ cupful of cream or rich milk.
Pepper and salt to taste.
Butter a baking-dish and cover the bottom pretty thickly with pounded cracker. Wet with oyster liquor and a few spoonfuls of cream. Next, lay oysters, one deep, closely over these. Pepper and salt, and stick a bit of butter upon each. Another layer of crumbs, wet as before; more oysters, and proceed in like order until your dish is full, making the top layer of crumbs with butter dotted over it. Set in the oven, invert a plate or tin pan over the dish, and bake until the juice bubbles up to the top. Uncover; set upon the upper grating of the oven to brown, and send to table in the bake-dish. Pass around sliced lemon with it.
Oysters, like fish, follow immediately after soup, and are a course by themselves.
Mince of Mutton with Potato Frill.
The remains of yesterday’s mutton, minced, but not very fine.
1 cupful of drawn butter.
2 tablespoonfuls of cream, or rich milk.
Pepper, salt, and mace to taste, also chopped parsley.
1 button onion.
2 eggs, well beaten.
Heat the sauce to a boil, add the seasoning and the onion, chopped very fine; then, the meat. Draw the saucepan to the side of the range, and let it stand, closely covered, in boiling water for ten minutes. Set again over the fire and bring to boiling point. Add the eggs and milk and set back at the side for five minutes, still covered. The mince should never really boil after the meat goes in.
Potato Frill.
Boil and mash some potatoes; working in a little milk and butter, but not so much as to make the paste very soft. Season with salt, and, while still hot, knead in a beaten egg. Shape this paste into a fence, on the inside round of a shallow dish; fluting it regularly with the round handle of a knife. Set for one minute in a hot oven, but not long enough to cause the fence to crack. Glaze quickly with butter, and pour the meat carefully within the wall. The mince should not be so thin as to wash away the “frill.” If well managed this is a pretty and a savory dish.
Baked Tomatoes.
1 can of tomatoes.
Stale bread, crumbed fine.
1 tablespoonful of butter.
Pepper, salt, a little chopped parsley, and white sugar.
Drain off two-thirds of the liquor from the tomatoes; salt it and set aside for another day’s soup. One has no excuse for waste whose “stock-pot” is always near at hand. Little comes amiss to it. Cover the bottom of a bake-dish with crumbs; lay the tomatoes evenly upon this bed; season with pepper, salt, sugar, and parsley, with bits of butter here and there. Strew bread-crumbs over all, a thicker layer than at the bottom; put tiny pieces of butter upon this, and bake, covered, about thirty-five minutes. Take off the cover and brown upon the upper shelf of the oven. Do not let it stay there long enough to get dry.
Celery—Raw.