Breakfast, Luncheon and Tea. Marion Harland
1 quart of the finest, firmest oysters you can procure.
½ cup very dry bread-crumbs, or pounded crackers, sifted almost as fine as flour.
Pepper to taste.
½ cup melted butter.
Dry the oysters by laying them on a clean cloth and covering them with another. Dip each in the melted butter, which should be peppered, roll over and over in the cracker-crumbs, and broil upon one of the wire gridirons, made for this purpose, over a clear fire. These wire “broilers” hold the oysters firmly, and can be safely turned when one side is done. Five or six minutes should cook them. Butter and pepper a hot dish, lay in the oysters, and serve immediately.
Devilled Oysters.
1 quart fine oysters.
Cayenne pepper.
Lemon-juice.
Some melted butter.
1 egg, beaten light.
½ cup rolled cracker.
Wipe the oysters dry, and lay in a flat dish. Cover with a mixture of melted butter, cayenne pepper (or pepper-sauce), and lemon-juice. Let them lie in this for ten minutes, turning them frequently; roll in the crumbs, then in the beaten egg, again in the crumbs, and fry in mixed lard and butter, made very hot before the oysters are dropped in.
Oysters in Batter.
1 quart of oysters.
2 eggs, whipped light.
1 cup of milk.
Flour to make a good batter.
Pepper and salt.
Dry the oysters with a soft cloth, dip in the batter twice, turning each one dexterously, that it may be thickly coated, and fry in a mixture of butter and lard.
Stewed Oysters.
1 quart of oysters.
1 cup of milk.
Salt very slightly, and pepper to taste.
1 great spoonful butter.
Drain the liquor from the oysters into a saucepan and heat to a boil. At the same time, put on the milk to heat in another vessel set within a pot or pan of boiling water. When the liquor in the saucepan boils up, put in the oysters and stew until they begin to ruffle or crimp at the edges. Stir in the butter, and when this is quite dissolved, turn the stew into a tureen. Add the milk immediately (which should be boiling hot), cover closely, and send to table. Send around pickles, or olives, and crackers with them. There is no danger, when oysters are stewed in this way, of the milk curdling.
Oyster Patés.
1 quart of oysters, minced fine with a sharp knife, with a thin blade—not a “chopper.”
1 great spoonful butter “drawn” in a cupful of milk, or cream, if you can get it, and thicken with a teaspoonful of corn-starch or rice-flour, previously wet up with cold milk.
Salt and pepper to taste.
Drain the liquor from the oysters, and chop them as directed. When the milk has been boiled and thickened, and the butter well incorporated with it, stir in the minced oysters, and stew about five minutes, stirring all the while. Have ready some shapes of nice pastry, baked, and fill with the mixture. Set in the oven about two minutes to heat them well, and send to table.
Or,
You can heat the chopped oysters in a very little of their own liquor before adding to the thickened milk. Unless you are sure that the latter is quite fresh, this is a prudent precaution.
Cream Oyster Pie.
Line a pie-plate with good puff paste; fill it with slices of stale bread, laid evenly within it; butter that part of the crust lining the rim of the dish, and cover with a top crust. Bake quickly in a brisk oven, and while still hot, dexterously and carefully lift the upper crust. The buttered rim will cause it to separate easily from the lower. Have ready a mixture of minced oysters and thickened cream, prepared according to the foregoing receipt, and having taken out the stale bread (put there to keep the top crust in shape), fill the pie with the oyster cream. Replace the cover, set in the oven for two minutes, or until hot, and serve. This is a nice luncheon dish, and not amiss for supper.
BREAKFAST.
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He was a shrewd Cœlebs who restrained his loverly impatience to throw himself, in unconditional surrender, at the feet of his beloved, by the resolution to see her first at the breakfast-table. It is to be regretted that his admiring biographer has not recorded the result of the experiment. Let us hope, for the sake of preserving the “unities of the drama,” that Cecilia was “in good form” on the momentous occasion; not a thread ironed awry in bib or tucker; not a rebellious hair in her sleek locks. Cœlebs—Hannah More’s Cœlebs—and every other that I ever read or heard of, was a pragmatical prig; the complacent proprietor of a patent refrigerator, very commodious and in excellent repair, but which ought never, even by his conceited self, to have been mistaken for a heart.
Knowing you, my reader, as I do, I would not insult your good sense by intimating that the husband of your choice resembles him in any leading trait. Being a sensible (and avowedly a fallible) man, therefore, John does not expect you to appear at the breakfast-table in the flowing robes and elaborate laces that belong to the leisure hours of the day. If he does, he should don dress-coat and white cravat to keep you in countenance. He will not find fault with a neat peignoir (if it be neat), or a plainly-trimmed dress, or a white apron before the same. He ought to look for, and to see a clean collar put on straight and fastened snugly at the throat, or a white ruffle and cuffs, or wrist-ruffles, to correspond, and hair in irreproachable order. I have seen women who called themselves ladies, who could never find time to give their hair what they called “a good combing,” until afternoon. And time and patience would fail me, and I fear the equanimity of your diaphragm as well, were I to attempt even a partial recapitulation of the many and disgustful varieties of morning toilettes, of which I have been the unwilling spectator. You should hear my John—whose profession takes him into what the renowned Ann Gale styles the “buzzom of families,” at all sorts of unconventional hours—dilate upon this theme. Not invalid attire. When the work of wearing the robe of flesh becomes a matter of pain and difficulty, he must be indeed hypercritical who notes the ill-fitting wrapper, or roughened hair.
“But the queens of the breakfast-table!” he