½ lb. of prepared flour.
¼ lb. of butter.
5 eggs.
½ lb. of sugar.
¼ lb. of raisins seeded and cut into three pieces each.
¼ lb. of currants, washed and dried.
½ cup of milk.
½ lemon, grated peel and juice.
Cream the butter and sugar; add the beaten yolks; the milk and the flour alternately with the whites. Lastly, stir in the fruit, well dredged with flour; beat up thoroughly, pour into a buttered mould; put into a pot of boiling water and do not let it relax its boil for two hours and a half. Dip the mould into cold water for one moment before turning it out.
Cabinet Pudding Sauce.
Yolks of 2 eggs, whipped very light.
1 lemon, juice and half the grated peel.
1 glass of wine.
1 teaspoonful of cinnamon.
1 cup of sugar.
1 tablespoonful of butter.
Rub the butter into the sugar; add the yolks, lemon, and spice. Beat five minutes and put in the wine, stirring hard. Set within a saucepan of boiling water, and stir until it is scalding hot. Do not let it boil. Pour over the pudding.
FEBRUARY.
First Week. Sunday.
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Clear Vermicelli Soup.
Stewed Ducks. Fried Apples and Bacon.
Mashed Carrots. Potatoes à la Reine.
Potato Pie.
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Oranges and Bananas.
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Clear Vermicelli Soup.
6 lbs. of veal—the knuckle is best.
1 lb. of lean ham, cut fine.
1 bunch of sweet herbs.
¼ lb. of vermicelli.
5 quarts of water.
Pepper and salt with half a teaspoonful ground mace.
Cut the meat from the bones in thin shreds, and crack the bones to splinters. Mince the ham and herbs. Put into a soup-kettle, add the water, cover very tightly with a weight upon the lid, and stand where it will slowly boil, for five hours. Then turn into a jar, salt and pepper, and shut up while hot. Leave the jar all Saturday night upon the side of the range, where it will keep warm until morning. Pour into a bowl before breakfast and let it get cold. Take off the cake of fat two hours before dinner, turn the soup-jelly, bones and all, into the soup-pot, and when it is melted strain through your wire sieve. Put in the mace, boil for an hour and a half, and skim. Put the vermicelli, already broken into short bits and boiled tender, into the tureen (but not the water in which it was boiled) and strain the soup over it through double tarlatan. Let it stand ten minutes before serving. This is a showy soup, and easily made, really requiring little attention.
Stewed Ducks.
On Saturday, draw, wash, and stuff your ducks, adding a touch of onion and sage to the dressing. On Saturday, also, make a gravy of the giblets, cut small, an onion, sliced, with a pint of water. Stew, closely covered, for two hours; take off, season, and set away with the giblets in it still. Next day—on Sunday—lay the ducks in the dripping-pan, put in the gravy, adding water if there is not enough to half cover the fowls, at least. Invert another pan of the same size over them, and let them stew, at a moderate heat, for two hours. Or, you can put them into a large saucepan, pour in the gravy, fit on the lid, and cook upon the range for the same time. In either case they will take care of themselves, as will the soup, if Bridget be reasonably obedient to orders, while you go to church. When the ducks are done, lay them upon a hot dish, thicken the gravy with browned flour, add a glass of brown sherry and the juice of a lemon. Lay three-cornered bits of fried bread around the inside of the dish, and pour the gravy over all.
Fried Apples and Bacon.
Pare, core, and slice round, some well-flavored pippins, or greenings. Cut into thin slices some streaked middling of excellent bacon, and fry in their own fat almost to crispness. Take out the meat and arrange it upon a hot chafing-dish, while you fry the apples in the fat left in the pan from the bacon. Drain and lay upon the slices of meat.
This is a Southern dish, and not so homely as it would seem from the mere reading.
Potatoes à la Reine.
Mash as usual, beating up light with butter and milk, but not so soft as not to take any shape you like to give them. Make a rounded hillock, or a four-sided pyramid of them upon a flat dish. Brush this all over with beaten yolk of egg, set in the oven a few minutes to harden the coating, and send to table.
Mashed Carrots.
Scrape, wash, lay in cold water half an hour; then cook tender in boiling water. Drain well, mash with a wooden spoon, or beetle, work in a good piece of butter, and season with pepper and salt. Heap up in a vegetable dish, and serve very hot.
Potato Pie.
1 lb. mashed potato, rubbed through a colander.
¼ lb. of butter, creamed with the sugar.
6 eggs, whites and yolks beaten separately.
1 lemon, squeezed into the potato while hot.
1 teaspoonful of nutmeg and the same of mace.
2 cups of white sugar.
Cream the butter and sugar; add the yolks, the spice, and beat in the potato gradually until it is very light. At last, whip in the whites. Bake in open shells of paste. Eat cold.
When making these pies on Saturday—forecasting Monday’s needs and superabundance of cares—prepare more pastry than you need