The Dinner Year-Book. Marion Harland
the sago should have been washed and soaked in lukewarm water, for an hour. Stir it into the broth and let them simmer, stirring often, half an hour. Heat the milk scalding hot in another vessel, beat the yolks of the eggs light, reserving the whites for your pudding; pour gradually over these a cupful of the hot milk, and stir carefully into the soup with all the milk. Taste, to see if it needs more seasoning; add a little chopped parsley, if you like; let it almost boil and pour into the tureen. It should be about as thick as boiled custard. Should the sago thicken it too much, add boiling water.
A relishful and wholesome soup.
Jugged Rabbit.
1 full-grown but tender rabbit or hare.
½ lb. corned ham.
1 cup of good gravy, saved from yesterday’s roast.
Dripping for frying.
1 onion, sliced.
Juice of 1 lemon.
1 tablespoonful currant jelly.
Parsley, pepper and salt, and browned flour.
Joint the rabbit, and lay for an hour in salted water. Wipe dry and fry in the dripping, with the onion, until brown. Put in the bottom of a tin pail, or farina-kettle, a layer of salt pork cut into strips; upon this one of rabbit. Sprinkle with pepper and a little salt. Scatter fried onion over the rabbit and proceed in this order until your meat is used up. Pour in the gravy; cover the vessel, and set it in another of cold water. Bring gradually to a boil and stew steadily one hour, or until tender. Arrange the meat upon a dish; strain the gravy, thicken with browned flour wet up with cold water; boil up once; stir in the jelly and lemon-juice, heat to boiling, and pour over the rabbit. If you have no gravy, use a little butter and water instead.
Scalloped Potatoes.
3 cups mashed potato.
3 tablespoonfuls of milk.
3 hard-boiled eggs.
2 tablespoonfuls of butter.
1 handful very dry bread-crumbs.
Salt.
Work butter, milk, and salt into the hot mashed potatoes. Put a layer in the bottom of a pudding-dish well greased; cover this with thin slices of egg; salt and pepper; another stratum of potato, and so on, until the dish is full. Strew bread-crumbs thickly over the uppermost layer of potatoes. Stick bits of butter over this and bake, covered, until hot throughout; then brown quickly. Send up in the pudding-dish.
A simple and nice side-dish.
Sweet Potatoes—Fried.
Boil, peel, and when cold, slice the potatoes neatly. Fry in good dripping until they are of a light brown. Drain from the fat and eat hot.
Minced Celery with Egg Dressing.
Scrape and wash the celery and cut into half-inch lengths, having first crisped it in cold water. Rub the yolks of two hard-boiled eggs to a paste with a tablespoonful of oil; add salt, pepper, a little powdered sugar, vinegar to make the mixture liquid, and pour over the celery. Serve in a salad-bowl and eat at once, lest the celery should toughen in the vinegar.
Macaroni and Almond Pudding.
½ lb. macaroni.
3 pints of milk.
1 cup of white sugar.
2 tablespoonfuls of butter.
5 eggs.
½ lb. sweet almonds, blanched and chopped.
Rose-water and bitter almond flavoring.
A little salt and nutmeg.
Simmer the macaroni half an hour in a pint of the milk. When tender, but not broken, put in butter and salt. Take the saucepan from the fire and turn out the contents to cool while you make a custard of the rest of the milk, the eggs and sugar. Add the latter to the scalding milk, but do not boil the custard. Chop the almonds when you have blanched them, i.e., taken off the skins with boiling water. As you chop, put in a few drops of rose-water from time to time, to prevent oiling. When the macaroni is almost cold, mix it with the custard, breaking it as little as may be. Season, and last of all, stir in the chopped almonds. Bake in a well-buttered pudding-dish. Spread with the méringue made from the whites of the eggs reserved from the soup. Eat warm with powdered sugar and cinnamon.
Second Week. Friday.
——
Fish Chowder.
Fricasseed Chicken, White. Potatoes à l’Italienne.
Tomatoes Stewed with Onion. Cheese Fondu.
——
Sponge Gingerbread.
Chocolate.
——
Fish Chowder.
3 lbs. of cod, cut into strips an inch thick and four inches long, and freed from bone so far as is possible without breaking the fish.
1 pint of oysters.
2 large onions cut into thin slices.
About ½ lb. Boston crackers, split, and buttered thickly.
Pepper and salt.
1 cup of milk.
Parsley.
Cover the bottom of your soup-kettle with the fish; pepper and salt; strew with sliced onion, and this with the split crackers, buttered sides down. Follow this order until your ingredients are all in the pot, and cover them with cold water. Stew gently for an hour, keeping the water at the original level by replenishing from the tea-kettle. By this time the fish should be thoroughly done, if it has cooked steadily. Take it up with a perforated skimmer, and cover in the tureen to keep hot, while you strain the chowder to get out the bones, returning the crackers with the liquor to the soup-kettle, when you have rinsed it out. Thicken with two teaspoonfuls of corn-starch wet up in a cup of milk, and when this has boiled, add the oysters, cut small, two great spoonfuls of butter, and a little chopped parsley. Stew for three minutes, pour slowly over the fish in the tureen. Send sliced lemon around with it.
This is a most palatable chowder when properly prepared. You can use fewer crackers, if you dislike a thick soup.
Fricasseed Chicken—White.