The Dinner Year-Book. Marion Harland
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.
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English Soup.
Mutton Chops, Broiled. Browned Potato.
Stewed Tomatoes. Sweet Pickles.
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Orange Fritters with Beehive Sauce.
Coffee.
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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.
Put the beef, cut into strips, the “carcasses” of the chickens broken to pieces, and three quarts of cold water, into a large soup-pot, and heat gradually. When it boils, skim well, and add the fried onion and other vegetables, cut fine, and three quarts more of cold water. Stew, with the pot-lid on, five hours, after it again boils, giving it no attention save to see that it never boils fast, and that the liquid has not diminished to less than three-quarters of the original quantity. Strain at the end of this time, first taking out the meat that has not boiled to shreds, and the bones. Rub the vegetables through the colander; afterwards strain the soup again through your wire strainer or sieve, into the kettle when you have washed it out. Season, and simmer ten minutes after the boil recommences, skimming often. Break the vermicelli into short lengths, put into the soup when you have taken out two quarts for Sunday’s “stock.” Cook gently twelve minutes after the vermicelli goes in.
At first glance, the quantity of meat prescribed for this soup may seem extravagant; but, apart from the fact that the coarser and cheaper quality is used, you must note that you have now the foundation of three days’ soups, and that you have saved time, no less than money, by making this as I have directed. It is by the long, intelligent look ahead that the mistress proves her right to the title.
Mutton Chops—Broiled.
Next to beef, good mutton, properly cooked, deserves the most prominent place among the meats upon your weekly bill of fare. It is digestible, nutritious, and, as a rule, popular. I therefore offer no apology for the regular and frequent appearance of these two standard articles of diet upon these pages. They may well be named the two staves of healthful existence—for civilized humanity, at least.
Trim your mutton chops, if your butcher has neglected to do it, leaving a naked end of bone as a “handle” upon each. Lay them for fifteen minutes in a little melted butter, turning them several times. Then hold each up for a moment, to let all the butter drip off that will, and broil over a clear fire, watching constantly and turning them often when the falling fat threatens a blaze from below. If your gridiron is beneath the grate, they can be cooked far more satisfactorily, and with one-tenth of the trouble. Pepper and salt when they are laid upon a hot dish, and put a bit of butter upon each.
Sweet