The Dinner Year-Book. Marion Harland
Sheep’s-head Soup.
Roast Hare, with Currant Jelly. Macaroni, with Ham.
Stuffed Potatoes. Turnips.
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Fig Pudding.
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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.
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Veal and Rice Broth.
Stewed Mutton à la Jardinière. Potato Puff.
Pork and Beans. Grape Jelly.
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Minced Pudding.
Apples, Nuts, and Raisins.
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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