The Dinner Year-Book. Marion Harland
tablespoonful of butter.
3 tablespoonfuls of rich milk.
Pepper and salt.
Boil the cabbage in two waters. When it is cold, chop fine, and mix with it the beaten eggs, butter, milk, pepper and salt to your liking. Beat up well and bake in a buttered pudding-dish until brown. Serve in the dish in which it was cooked, and eat hot.
Baked Potatoes.
Select large, fair potatoes of equal size, wash, wipe and put into the oven to bake until soft all through. Send to table wrapped in a napkin.
Stewed Salsify.
Scrape and drop into cold water as fast as you clean them. Cut into inch lengths; cover with hot water and stew tender. Turn off the water; put in a cupful of cold milk. Stew in this ten minutes after the boil begins; add a lump of butter rolled thickly in flour; pepper and salt as you fancy. Boil up once and pour into a deep dish.
Soft Gingerbread.
1 cup of butter.
1 cup of molasses.
1 cup of sugar.
1 cup of sour or butter milk.
½ lb. of raisins, seeded and cut in half.
1 teaspoonful of soda, dissolved in boiling water.
1 teaspoonful of cinnamon.
2 eggs.
Nearly 5 cups of sifted flour, enough for tolerably thick batter.
Cream butter, sugar, molasses, and spice; set the mixture on the range until lukewarm. Add the milk, then the beaten eggs, the soda, and at last the flour. Beat hard five minutes; put in the fruit dredged with flour; beat three minutes, and bake in small round tins.
Eat warm all that is needed for dessert. The rest will keep well. This gingerbread is uncommonly fine.
Café au Lait.
2 cups strong made coffee—fresh and hot.
2 cups of boiling milk.
Strain the coffee from the boiler into the table coffee-pot, through thin muslin. Add the boiling milk and set in a vessel of hot water, a “cozey,” or a thick cloth wrapped about it, for five minutes. Then it is ready for use. Pass with the gingerbread.
First Week. Thursday.
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Dundee Broth.
Baked Calf’s Head. French Beans and Fried Brains.
Stewed Tomatoes. Potatoes in cases.
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Snowballs.
Sweet Cream.
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Dundee Broth.
3 lbs. of mutton cut into strips.
2 lbs. of bones cracked.
1 carrot.
2 turnips.
2 onions.
Bunch of herbs.
Handful of chopped cabbage.
Pepper and salt.
¼ lb. of barley.
4 quarts of cold water.
Put on the meat, bones, and sweet herbs, to stew in four quarts of water. Do not disturb for four hours. Meanwhile, pare and cut the vegetables into dice, and boil until tender in just enough water to cover them. Drain this off and throw it away. Cover the vegetables with cold water, a little salt, and let them stand until you have strained the soup. This should be allowed to cool to throw up the fat. Skim it with care; put back over the fire. Salt and pepper, boil up, and skim again before putting in the vegetables, without the water in which they have been standing. The barley should, all this time, be soaking in warm water, just deep enough to cover it. Turn it now, with the water in which it has lain, into the soup. Let all simmer together one hour, and serve the vegetables in the soup.
Baked Calf’s Head.
Take out the brains and set aside. Wash the head carefully. It should, of course, be cleaned with the skin on. Soak it in cold, salted water, one hour, then in hot water ten minutes. Boil in three quarts of cold water for about an hour after the water begins to bubble. Take it out, saving the liquor when you have salted it, as stock for to-morrow’s soup. Plunge the head into cold water for five minutes. Wipe carefully, put into your dripping-pan, brush it over with beaten egg, sprinkle with bread-crumbs, and bake until nicely browned, basting three times with butter. Make a gravy of a cupful of the liquor, seasoned and thickened. Fry strips of ham, about an inch wide by four inches long, almost crisp in their own fat, and having laid the head upon a flat dish, dispose these about it. Serve a piece with each plate of the head.
French Beans and Fried Brains.
Open a can of string-beans one hour at least before they are to be cooked. Cut into short pieces, cover with hot water, and stew thirty minutes, but not until they break. Drain well; stir into them two tablespoonfuls of melted butter, in which have been mixed salt, pepper, and a tablespoonful of lemon-juice. Heap within a deep dish, and garnish with the brains.
Wash the brains and lay in cold salt and water for an hour, then boil ten minutes. Leave in very cold water until firm—say a quarter of an hour. Wipe, and chop fine, add a little parsley, pepper and salt; make into small cakes by flouring your hands; dip in beaten egg, then in cracker-crumbs, and fry in hot dripping. Drain thoroughly.
Stewed Tomatoes.
Season a can of tomatoes with salt, pepper, sugar, and a little chopped onion. Stew for twenty-five minutes and stir in a large tablespoonful of butter. Simmer ten minutes, and serve.
Potatoes in Cases.
Roast