1%. )l f4 Class__ TXll^ Goipght W. COPOilGlfr DEPOSIT. A PEIMER OF COOKING A PRIMER OF COOKING BY DOROTHY M. HAMILTON »? ^^w«« NEW YORK THE CENTURY CO. 1921 \i^'^ .W^^'^ Copyright, 1921, by The Century Co. OCT 25 1921 Printed in U. S. A. g)Cl.A627371 cr I INTRODUCTION We hear much of drudgery, but any sort of work that is slighted becomes drudgery. — William Dean Howells. It is hard for the beginner at cooking to dig out for herself answers to all the questions which are constantly puzzling her. And ex- perienced cooks, either from impatience at the absurdity of the questions or from inability to be scientifically accurate, often fail of being helpful. The result is that the beginner must learn by experience alone, laboriously and extravagantly wasting material. This cook- book aims to meet the beginner as it were in a laboratory: to start her in various minor ex- periments; to suggest more complicated ones without insisting upon them. In no case does it try to hurry past the elementary steps. In attempting to be specific the author faced the impossibility of making the book all- embracing. But to cover all kinds of living and market conditions would be to prevent the book from being a primer and turn it into a treatise. vi INTEODUCTION It will be easy for the reader to make individual adjustments. For example, the point of view presupposes a city community, and all refer- ences to stoves imply gas stoves; but the same results may be had with a coal stove or an alcohol stove with an attachable oven. Only simple recipes are included, because the nature of the book demands this. And there is another reason: the stress of the times de- mands it. In small families where there is no servant and where efforts are being made toward economy, there is no logical demand for elaborate meals. There is instead the tendency to stress the possibilities of simple ones. CONTENTS PAGE Introduction v IN AND OUT OF THE KITCHEN 3 I The Meal Scheme 6 II Easy Ways Around the Kitchen ... 8 III Kitchen Utensils and Accessories ... 11 IV Serving Refreshments 14 BREAKFAST 19 I Beverages 22 II Eggs 24 III Breakfast Meats 28 IV Hot Cakes 31 V Hot Breads 34 VI Marmalade 39 VII Cereals . 41 LUNCH 45 I HoRS d'OEuvres 47 II The Main Lunch Dish 49 vii CONTENTS PAGE III Desserts for Lunch 59 IV Cake 62 DINNER 75 I Soup 78 II Meats , . . . . 86 III Sauces 103 IV Fish . Ill V Poultry 121 VI Potatoes, Rice, and Macaroni 133 VII Green Vegetables 142 VIII Salads 150 IX Desserts 161 Index 175 VIU IN AND OUT OF THE KITCHEN A PRIMER OF COOKING IN AND OUT OF THE KITCHEN You must set your own housekeeping stand- ard. It will depend upon the amount of your income, the quality of your leisure, and your tastes. It may demand all of your time or very little; you may insist that your house be in a state of perfection, from the point of view of cleanliness, or you may be contented to have it merely comfortable and habitable. But this is important: Having once deter- mined your individual standard, never depart from it! If it is to your satisfaction to dust the living- room only once in two days ; if you like to use that room as a reading-room, with a few books laid here and there on the reading-table and a cushion stuffed against the back of the easiest chair for comfort, be sure not to change it fur- 3 A PEIMER OF COOKING tively for a chance caller. You are living not according to the caller's standard, but accord- ing to your own. i This is particularly applicable to your table service and the planning of meals. Presumably you have, every day, the most nourishing and daintily served meals which you are capable of preparing. It is taken for granted that you try to have every dinner well balanced and appetizing, though not elaborate. You know how much you can afford to spend for food, and you manipulate the amount so that you can buy the best food materials, — good meats, first-class canned goods, fresh fruit, and guaranteed dairy products. If meat is expensive you round out dinner with more cheese than usual, or with a milk-and-egg dessert. You have, at any rate, a definite course of action which you follow habitually. Could anything be more unreasonable than the sudden switching from this course, at the appearance of company for dinner — the im- pulse to have a more elaborate and expensive dinner? A dinner more elaborate and expen- sive than the kind you are accustomed to have is a discourtesy to your guest, because it is an 4 IN AND OUT OF THE KITCHEN insincerity ; it is a pretense that your standard of living is higher than it really is. And in- variably the guest feels it. If your breakfasts, lunches, and dinners are entirely suitable to you and your family, they will be just the thing to serve to your guests. 5 I THE MEAL SCHEME You will find it hard to improve upon the French theory of meals which recognizes as a serious consideration only one meal of the three. The French have coffee or chocolate and rolls for breakfast, combinations of appetizing trifles for lunch, and at night, when they are hungry and unhurried, they have a very sub- stantial dinner. This plan is good for the digestion, because it gives the body rest before each big meal. It is economical, because it concentrates expense upon dinner alone, — presupposing that lunch may be built on dinner left-overs. And, if thoughtfully worked out, it is the most time- saving plan possible for the housekeeper. The meat for dinner, and the potatoes with it, may be cooked in the morning. If the meat is to be baked, a baked dessert may be mixed up and put in the oven at the same time. If a sauce is 6 THE MEAL SCHEME to be served with the dessert, it may be made then, and set away to be served cold at dinner- time. Soup, if it is the canned kind, may be heated up at night, when the second vegetable is warmed in its sauce, and a salad mixed. If the soup is home-made it will have been got ready the day before. The preparation of lunch and breakfast should not take more than fifteen minutes each. So there would be, under this arrangement, a whole afternoon and at least half of a morn- ing, every day, free from cooking. n EASY WAYS AROUND THE KITCHEN You will find out through experience that the only way to hurry in the kitchen is to be neat. Not excessively neat; just neat enough to pick up after yourself ; to keep things ship-shape. For instance, after beating an egg hold the egg-beater under cold water immediately, then under hot water, — it will take only a second, — dry it, and put it in its drawer. When you take a little corn-starch from the box or a pinch of spice from the spice-sifter, put the box and the sifter back in their places automatically Set the butter back in the ice-box as soon as you have taken out enough for your purpose. When you have finished mixing up a cake put the mix- ing-bowl, the spoon, and the measuring-cup un- der cold water, then wash them under the hot water faucet and dry them or set them in the dish-drainer to dry. When you empty a sauce- pan or a frying-pan put it in the sink and fill it 8 EASY WAYS ABOUND THE KITCHEN with cold water. You will find it much easier to wash, later on, than if you had left it dry. Washing your pots and pans thoroughly is practical. For if you put them away only slop- pily washed you will have to rinse them out before you can use them again. Pie pans care- lessly dried will rust. A bread-board put away with bits of flour sticking to it will be too uneven to roll pie dough on, the next time you need it. If you look ahead, in managing kitchen af- fairs, you will find yourself inventing all sorts of schemes to save time without sacrificing neatness. You will spread a piece of newspaper down on your kitchen table when you are going to crack nuts or cut cabbage or pare potatoes or cut steak or mix up a cake. Then this paper may be gathered up with the scraps in a heap, and thrown into the garbage can, — a shorter op- eration than clearing off the table and wiping it with a cloth. You will save dish-washing by beating eggs in the same bowl in which they are to be baked, if it is a souffle you are making, or a salmon loaf. But you must grease the bowl before you put the eggs in it. 9 A PEIMER OF COOKING You will put food away, as often as possible, in a receptacle that can go either on top of the stove or in the oven, so that you will not have to soil another dish to reheat it. This is not laziness, but scientific planning. Nor is it laziness to drain your dishes instead of drying them. If each dish is washed with soapy water, rinsed, then set in a draining- rack, with boiling water finally poured over the whole rack, the moisture will dry by evapora- tion in a few minutes, leaving the dish really cleaner and shinier than if it had been mopped over with a half-damp tea towel. Glassware and knives and forks and spoons must be dried. If they are left to drain, the glasses will look cloudy and the silverware will tarnish. Have a place for every cooking-utensil. Putting an article in its place will not take a minute. And finding it there when you want it in a hurry is a great satisfaction. 10 m KITCHEN UTENSILS AND ACCESSORIES Your capacity for ease and quickness in cook- ing will depend in large measure upon your kitchen utensils. Saucepans that are too big or that are made of scratchy ware, or cheap saucepans whose handles come off; a dull par- ing-knife ; a mixing-bowl that is too small for cake batter, — all these will hinder you more than you realize. It is very easy to buy too many pans and to buy them of the wrong material. Enameled ware is pretty to look at. But it is hard to take care of, because every time you scratch it with a spoon or a knife the mark stays. And if it gets burned on the bottom the enamel wiU peel off, and make the pan useless. For general ware, — for your coffee-pot, tea- kettle, double boiler, soup kettle, and most of your saucepans, — aluminum is more satisfac- tory. It is heavy enough to protect the food in it from burning easily, and solid enough to 11 A PEIMER OF COOKING hold the heat. It is easily kept clean with steel wool which can be bought at the five-and-ten- cent store. You will need at least one heavy iron frying- pan. The auxiliary ones may be of thin steel or aluminum. The heavy one is to be used for steaks and chops, — to keep the surface of the meat from browning or burning before the meat is heated through. You will find that an oval dish-pan is more convenient than a round one. It will accommo- date platters, the largest frying-pan, and even the meat-roaster. Pay enough for your kitchen knives and forks and spoons to insure their being sharp and durable. Get knives whose blades run to the very end of the handles. Wash the wooden- bladed cutlery separately from the other ware. Never put the handles in water. The following is a virtually complete list of necessary utensils and accessories. You can add to it any number of luxuries, — a pastry- tube, a vegetable scoop, a machine for slicing potatoes in corrugated shape, etc., — ^but there is no item on this list which you can afford to do without. 12 UTENSILS AND ACCESSORIES FOR GENEKAI. COOKING Soapstone griddle Iron frying-pan Two thinner frying-pans Meat-roaster with lid Two small aluminum sauce- pans Soup kettle with lid Double boiler or steam cooker Tea-kettle Coffee-pot Tea-pot "Wire strainer Aluminum colander One small saucepan holding a cupful One covered casserole Six individual casseroles One shallow baking-pan One casserole with rounded bottom One earthenware pitcher Meat-grinder Dover egg-beater Lemon-squeezer Can-opener Apple-corer Potato-masher Lettuce bag Bread-box Cake-box Coffee-strainer Sieve spoon Spatula Sharp paring-knife Two or three broad-bladed knives Bread-knife Narrow-bladed, long meat- knife Three tablespoonfuls Two wooden-handled forks Wooden spoon Wooden fork Two soft napkins for drying lettuce Pair of scissors Ice-pick FOB BAKING Bread-board Rolling-pin One large mixing-bowl One small mixing-bowl Half -pint flour-sifter Glass half -pint measuring cup Biscuit-cutter Cookie-cutters Muffin pan Two pie pans One large loaf pan One small loaf pan Two patent cake pans Tube cake pan FOR DISH-WASHING Dish -pan Dish draining-rack Dish-mop Six tea towels Soap-shaker Soap-rack Sink garbage can Small brush and dust-pan for sink 13 IV SERVING REFRESHMENTS The spirit of refreshment-serving is excel- lent. There is an atmosphere of pleasant ease, of conviviality, and of confidence supplied by the act of eating in company. Refreshments are important enough to be considered thoughtfully by the housekeeper as a combination of privilege-duty. She can serve them so intelligently that they will be no real trouble to her, — rather a pleasure. Consider, in serving refreshments, that the comfort of the guests is the important thing. In the middle of the afternoon or late after- noon, they will not want anything to take their appetite from dinner. Toward the end of the evening they will not want a heavy food, to add to an already sufficient dinner and perhaps to spoil their night's rest. So it will be best to avoid very sweet refreshments, such as layer- cake with thick icing, ice-cream, substantial 14 SERVING REFRESHMENTS fruit salad, and candy; or insistently heavy ones, such as Welsh rabbit or creamed oysters in patty shells. Always make your refreshments unobtrusive. In the afternoon serve tea, hot or iced, ac- cording to the season, with lemon, sugar, cream, and some kind of sweetened cookies, or with thin slices of bread and butter, or with cinna- mon toast, — made by covering hot toast with butter, then sprinkling it with granulated sugar mixed with cinnamon. Or, on a cold winter's day you might serve a cup of hot bouillon, for variety, with salted crackers and an olive on each saucer. Coffee is rather heavy for afternoon. So is cocoa. But if you use small cups and serve saltines or some other unsweetened crackers with it, it will be very much more to the liking of some guests than tea. In the evening coffee and sandwiches are the only sensible form of refreshment. The coffee should be served in large cups, with whipped cream if possible, and the sandwiches should be dainty ones, of several different kinds. Use tea napkins and let the guests sit at a table if you can arrange it, so that they can eat 15 A PRIMER OF COOKING and drink comfortably. If tlie table is imprac- ticable, be sure to have a tea plate under each person *s cup instead of a small saucer. Then there will be room on the plate for a sandwich. 16 BBEAKFAST BREAKFAST It has to be cooked fast, in most homes, and eaten fast, too. And if the housekeeper has other things than cooking to spend time on, she will want to clear the table and wash the dishes fast. So why not use individual trays to serve it on? These had better be wooden or lacquer rather than glass, so that a coffee-pot may be set on one of them. Have as many trays as there are members of the family. Before starting break- fast lay the trays out in a row on the kitchen table, cover each one with a paper napkin, and put on it the necessary dishes and silver- ware. When breakfast is ready ladle out each person's share, leaving the hot drink to be poured when everybody is ready to eat, and cover each hot dish with a deep saucer. Then the trays may be carried into any room in the house which is adaptable for a breakfast-room. 19 A PRIMER OF COOKING A low card-table set in front of a fire in the living-room may be pleasant. Then, when breakfast is over, the trays may be carried back to the kitchen in a few trips, and cleared methodically. There will be no table to crumb, nor table-cloth nor mats to remove. Breakfast is not a lukewarm meal. Its func- tion is to stir the appetite, and to satisfy a hun- ger that perhaps does not consciously exist. There are two secrets to a good breakfast; they are, — hot and cold. Have the hot drink, the cooked cereal (if one is used), the bacon and eggs, the buckwheat cakes, very hot. And have the fruit and the cream very cold. Keep the hot things hot with dish-covers, and get the cold things cold by leaving them in the ice-box over- night. Although the coffee or chocolate and rolls breakfast is an ideal working basis — comply- ing with the theory that breakfast should be as light as possible — it will not do, literally, for the men of the family, nor for the women who go out to work. In contrast to it, however, is the heavy breakfast of oatmeal, chops and fried potatoes, hot bread and coffee. This sort of breakfast is not only an unfair burden on 20 BREAKFAST the housekeeper, making her get a full meal the first thing in the morning, but it is too much for the digestion of the person who eats it. It makes him stupid all day. As a compromise, breakfast might include a fruit course ; either a substantial cereal course or a light hot course of eggs, ham, wheat-cakes, fish or bacon ; and coffee, with rolls or toast. 21 I BEVERAGES COFFEE Have the coffee ground of medium fineness, and as soon as it comes from the store empty it from the paper or cardboard container into air- tight glass jars. To make coffee, put in the pot a heaping tablespoonful for each person to be served. Follow this with as many cups of cold water — using a standard half-pint measuring-cup or glass — and an egg-shell crushed up, for the pur- pose of clearing the liquid. Put this on over a brisk fire. When it has come to a boil, turn the flame down low and simmer the coffee for at least five minutes. The whole operation for five or six portions of coffee will take about twenty minutes. TEA Tea-ball tea is simple. Heat the water to 22 BEVERAGES the boiling-point, and pour it over a tea-ball, half -filled with tea, in each cup separately. To steep tea, put in a tea-pot — ^which has been rinsed out with boiling water — ^half a teaspoon- ful of tea for each person. Pour about a cup- ful of boiling water over this, cover, and let stand for two minutes. Then add as many more cups of boiling water as are needed. OOOOA For each person to be served measure into a saucepan a level teaspoonful each of cocoa and sugar. Blend these with a little milk. Then add a cup of milk for each portion. Bring just to a boil, over a rather slow fire, and serve im- mediately. 23 n EGGS In cooking eggs keep in mind that to be pal- atable they must be delicate. They must never be cooked until they are leathery. And they must not be cooked without seasoning, nor served without some sort of garnishing, such as toast, or a leaf cf parsley, or a shred of let- tuce. It is safe — ^when deciding how many eggs to use for an omelet or for scrambled eggs — to include one egg for each person to be served, and two eggs in addition to that number. Of course the number of poached or fried eggs to be cooked depends upon the individual appe- tites of those who are to eat them. FRIED EGGS Fried eggs, cooked soft, are the most uni- versally popular. Have butter or bacon or other meat drippings slowly melting in a f rying- 24 EGGS pan, while you break the eggs into a wide, shal- low bowl, taking care not to break the yolks. Then gently slide all the eggs into the pan, and turn the fire up under it. Salt and pepper each egg. With a spatula begin separating the eggs. As soon as the whites are fairly set, turn each eggy cook it only for a half -minute on the other side, and put it on a hot plate to serve. OMELET There is nothing to be afraid of in omelet- making, except having too hot a fire under the skillet. Put a tablespoonful of cooking-fat into the pan, and let it melt. Meanwhile beat the yolks and the whites of the eggs in separate bowls, adding to the yolks a tablespoonful of water for each yolk. Season yolks and whites. Lastly, add the whites to the yolks, stirring gently until they are blended. Pour the mix- ture into the frying-pan. Let it cook for a few minutes, occasionally testing it by lifting up an edge with a spatula, to see if the under side is beginning to brown. When it is light brown, add to the omelet any extra feature that you may like. Lima-beans, grated cheese, rice, or a few tablespoonfuls of tomato sauce are often 25 A PRIMER OF COOKING used. Take the frying-pan off the fire and set it in a moderately hot oven, with the oven-lid open, until the top is set. Then take the pan out of the oven, turn one-half of the omelet over the other half, and serve. SCRAMBLED EGGS Scrambled eggs are not to be scrambled, lit- erally. Scrambling makes them dry and watery. Break into a bowl the eggs to be cooked, and beat them; add salt and pepper and a table- spoonful of milk for each egg. Melt half a tablespoonful of butter or bacon fat in a frying- pan. With a slow fire under the pan, pour the eggs into it, and let them alone for the first minute of cooking. Then with a spoon gently work at them from time to time, lifting them from the bottom of the pan, keeping them in one mass. When there is no liquid part left at the edge of the pan, the eggs are done. They will be soft, well-moistened with milk, and deli- cate. POACHED EGGS The advantage of poaching eggs rather than frying them, lies in the opportunity poaching 26 EGGS offers for putting an added flavor into the egg. By simmering the egg in liquid, you can make it absorb part of that liquid. Eggs may be given a meat flavor by poaching them in gravy or bouillon. They may be made rich by poach- ing them in a little tomato sauce with spice in it, or in a cheese cream sauce. To poach eggs, heat the liquid to be used to the boiling point, then lay the eggs in it, care- fully — ^in a poaching ring — and take the pan off the fire, leaving it, however, on the stove, covered. In four or five minutes the eggs will be done, with a white film over each one. STEAMED EGGS A quick way to cook eggs for individual serv- ing — as for a tray breakfast — is in small cas- seroles. Drop one or two eggs into each cas- serole, which has been buttered. Season with salt and pepper, and put a little butter on top of each egg. Set the casseroles in a shallow tin baking-dish half full of hot water. Put a lid over the casseroles. Cook over a brisk fire un- til the whites are set. 27 in BREAKFAST MEATS BACON It is almost impossible to cook bacon crisp unless it is cut thin. Bacon bought loose by the pound from meat markets is apt to be cut too thick. So, although it costs a fraction more, the boxed or jarred bacon is a better purchase. Every slice will be thin and edible. Have the frying-pan hot when you lay the strips of bacon in it. With a fork turn eacli slice as soon as the under side is seared. Then lower the flame under the pan and keep turn- ing the bacon until each piece is a light brown. Drain off the grease from the pan into a glass jar or other container, ready to be used as cooking-fat. Let the bacon lie for a minute in the dry pan, to drain. Then serve it. Cook two or three slices for each person. 28 BREAKFAST MEATS HAM Before cooking a slice of ham, cut off the brown rind along the side opposite the fatty- side. Leave all the fat on. Then with a sharp knife make short incisions along the lean side. This is to keep the ham from curling up while it cooks. Have a hot frying-pan ready. Put the ham in, leave it until one side is white, then turn it. Turn two or three times, with the fire high, until both sides are beginning to brown. Then turn down the fire, cover the frying-pan, and let the ham cook slowly for at least fifteen min- utes. At the end of this time turn the fire up long enough to complete the browning. A small slice of ham will be about the right quan- tity for three people. SAUSAGE Fresh country sausage is to be made into small flat cakes about an inch and a half in diameter, pressed into compactness, and fried in a hot frying-pan, without any other grease than its own. Turn the cakes often, and let them cook not more than fifteen minutes in all. 29 A PEIMER OF COOKING Squeeze a few drops of lemon-juice over each cake before serving. Smoked sausage or frankfurters should be slit down one side and fried over a slow fire until the skin is crisp and brown. 30 IV HOT CAKES There are several points to be remembered about making hot cakes: Have a steady heat under the griddle. Get the griddle to the point where grease dropped on it will sizzle, then turn the fire down low enough simply to keep it at this temperature. Put the cake batter, when mixed, into a pitcher and pour it on the griddle from this. This will make the cakes uniform in size and shape and will do away with the mussiness of dropping batter from a spoon. If obtainable, use a bacon rind for a griddle greaser. Next best to a piece of bacon rind is the manufactured greaser that may be bought at a hardware store for twenty-five cents. This must be dipped into cooking-fat once or twice during the cake-baking. Grease the griddle be- fore each new batch of cakes. If the cake batter doesn't sizzle when 31 A PEIMEE OF COOKING dropped on the griddle, tlie griddle is not hot enough. Turn the cakes when two or more bubbles show on the upper side. Any cake batter may be mixed the night be- fore and kept in a cool place overnight. FLANNEL CAKES Beat up one egg, well salted, in a mixing- bowl. In a half -pint measuring-cup put half a teaspoonful of soda. Fill up the cup with sour milk and stir until the milk is smooth. Add this to the egg, then stir into the mixture a half-pint sifterful of flour in which half a teaspoonful of baking-powder has been mixed. Stir until smooth. This quantity will serve two people amply. BUCKWHEAT CAKES These must be made the night before. Put three cupfuls of buckwheat in a mixing-bowl, one tablespoonful of wheat flour, a pinch of salt, a tablespoonful of molasses (this is to make the cakes brown), half a yeast-cake crumbled up, and enough warm water to make the whole thing into a rather thin batter. Beat the mixture 32 HOT CAKES thoroughly imtil all the ingredients are blended. Cover it with a piece of cloth and leave it in a cool place to rise overnight. If it is too thick in the morning to pour easily from the pitcher, thin it with milk. There will be enough batter to serve two peo- ple for several successive mornings. It will keep, if it is put in a cool place. Some sort of syrup should always be served with hot cakes. Maple syrup is the most de- sirable, and may be bought in liquid form or as a lump of maple sugar, ready to be melted with a little cold water. There are good brands of manufactured syrups on the market, which are combinations of maple and granulated sugar. Lacking any of these, one can make a good syrup by boiling half a cupful of brown sugar with half a cupful of cold water for a few min- utes. Add a drop of vanilla extract, and let cool before serving. 33 V HOT BREADS MUFFINS Before starting to mix them, light the oven with a very low flame. Put two tablespoonfuls of butter in one of the compartments of a muffin pan, and set this over a low flame to melt. While it is melting, break an egg into a bowl, add a table spoonful of sugar, stir together, add a cup of milk, — ■ or half milk and half water, — add two half -pint flour-sifterfuls of flour with which are mixed three teaspoonfuls of baking-powder and a tea- spoonful of salt. Lastly, add the melted but- ter, beat for a minute or two, and pour out by spoonfuls into the muffin pan. Have each compartment not more than two thirds full. Bake in the slow oven which has been heating, until the muffins rise. This will take about ten minutes. Then turn the fire up and let the 34 HOT BEEADS muffins get a delicate brown. Twenty minutes in all should be long enough to cook them. This quantity of batter will make eight muf- fins. BISCUIT The oven fire can hardly be too hot for bis- cuit. Light the oven before starting the mix- ing, and turn it up high. Into a mixing-bowl sift three small sifters of flour with which are mixed four teaspoonfuls of baking-powder and one teaspoonful of salt. In the center of this put three teaspoonfuls of butter, lard, or any good vegetable fat. (See page 84.) Work the flour and fat with your fingers until the fat is distributed through the flour. Make a hole in the center of the flour and pour three fourths of a cup of cold water into it. Work this with the flour until you have made the whole thing into a soft ball. Get this out on a thickly-floured board, roll into a sheet about an inch thick, and cut it, with a biscuit- cutter or the top of a small baking-powder can, into rounds. Lay these close together on greased pie pans. Bake in a hot oven until brown. There will be about eight biscuit. 35 A PEIMER OF COOKING POPOVBRS You will need a quick oven for popovers. Grease six compartments of the muffin pan, and into each compartment put a little dab of but- ter, — ^using about two teaspoonfuls of butter altogether. In a mixing-bowl beat one egg^ and add to it, while continuing to beat, one cupful of milk, and one cup of flour with which is sifted a pinch of salt. Pour the batter into the pan, on top of each dab of butter. Cook with the fire up high until the popovers pop, or rise. Then turn the fire down rather low, and let them get cooked through. The whole baking will take from twenty to thirty-five minutes. CORN BREAD In a mixing-bowl stir together one cup of com meal, a half-cup of flour, one third of a cup of sugar, half a teaspoonful of salt, and two teaspoonfuls of baking-powder. Beat up one egg, in a separate bowl, and with it a cup of milk. Add the eggs and milk to the dry in- gredients, beat hard for a few minutes, then pour into a loaf-cake pan and bake in a slow even until the top is brown and firm. 36 HOT BEEADS This quantity will make enough for four peo- ple. TOAST Have the oven turned on full for at least five minutes before you begin to make toast. Arrange the grill as close under the flame as it can be to accommodate the toasting-pan. A long, shallow pan is the best thing for a toaster. Have a fork ready at hand, and a hot-pan-holder to open the grill door with. Cut the bread in uniform-sized slices. Put these in the shallow pan. Slip the pan under the flame of the grill, and leave it there, with the grill door closed, for about a minute. Watch the toast carefully. As soon as one slice is brown, turn it. If the oven is very hot to begin with, the toasting process should not take more than two or three minutes. Butter the toast while it is hot. Crisp, hard toast is made by cutting the bread very thin and toasting it with a slower fire. Toast made on the funnel-shaped toasters that sit over the flame is not satisfactory. It 37 A PRIMER OF COOKING gets browned and sometimes burnt on the out- side before it is thoroughly heated through. With hot bread it is a good idea to serve a little jar or bowl of some kind of marmalade. Here are two suggestions : 38 VI MARMALADE CANNED FRUIT MARMAI.ADB Peaches, pineapple, pears, berries, or cher- ries may be used for this. If cherries are used, first stone them. Drain a cupful of fruit and cut it into small pieces. Add to it the juice of one lemon and a cup of sugar. Cook over a medium fire for about twenty minutes. Let it cool before serv- ing at breakfast. OKANGE MABMAI.ADE Wash one orange and one lemon. With a sharp knife cut each piece of fruit — rind, white skin, and all — into shreds. Measure the result and put it into a saucepan with three full meas- ures of water to each one of shredded fruit. Set this away to soak until the same hour the next day. Then measure the mixture and to every 39 A PRIMER OF COOKING cupful allow the same amount of sugar, adding one extra cupful of sugar at the last. Put the saucepan over a moderate fire and cook the mix- ture until it seems thick, and will drop from the spoon in two places at the same time, which is the jellying test. Then pour it into hot jelly glasses that are standing in a pan of hot water. This quantity of marmalade should fill seven glasses. 40 vn CEREALS For the preparation of cooked cereal at least two hours are required. Even the brands ad- vertised as quick cereals must be cooked for a long time to make them digestible. For cereal-cooking a steam double boiler, or steam cooker, is necessary. The ordinary- double boiler needs too much attention and dries the cereal up. One of these steam cookers is a good investment. You will find that whole meals can be cooked in it at one time. All cooked cereals should be made with cold water. It is easier to make them this way, and the resulting product is thicker and richer for it. Use the general proportions of one cup of cereal to three cups of cold water and one half- teaspoonful of salt. Turn the flame up high until the water in the bottom pan is boiling, then turn it as low as possible, and let the cereal 41 A PRIMER OF COOKING cook for two or three hours. Morning is the best time to cook cereal. Then it should be al- lowed to cook until nearly noon. Stir it once or twice during the cooking. When it is done, take the top pan out and set it in a cool place until time to warm it up for breakfast. You can vary the serving of cooked cereal by frying it sometimes, after it has become cold and firm enough to handle as one mass. Put it carefully in a frying-pan with several table- spoonfuls of butter ; sift brown sugar over the top ; turn the cereal with a spatula, and sugar the other side. Brown with a hot fire. Serve with one of the syrups referred to on Page 33. Always be sure the dry cereal you serve is crisp. If the box it came in is set in a dry, cool place, it should keep crisp in winter as long as a package lasts. But it can be crisped quickly by spreading out on a pie pan the amount needed for breakfast, and setting this in a hot oven for less than a minute. 42 LUNCH LUNCH Lunch may be the one unpremeditated meaL Its elements are simple, — an hors d'oeuvre, or appetizer ; a hot dish ; a dessert. Lunch is the meal for tidbits. You can plan lunch very easily if you think of it in terms of the individual. For example, instead of making up a big dish of hors d'oeuvres, a casserole of salmon, and slicing peaches into one large glass dish, fix a separate hors d'ceuvre for each person; cook each per- son's creamed salmon in a ramekin, and slice only as many peaches into individual sherbet glasses as will be eaten. With food thought of in this way, one cooked potato will grow in importance; a chop, half a cup of string-beans, or one slice of cake may be applied to lunch, fairly, without recourse to the practice of dividing up the left-overs among the family, giving one person the chop, another the string-beans, and a third the cake. Sliced thin, the potato may be used as a basis for an 45 A PRIMEE OF COOKING appetizer. Mix it with mayonnaise and put several slices on each plate, with shredded let- tuce under them and a sliced pickle on top. Cut the chop up, mix with it the string-beans, seasoned ; then beat two eggs (yolks and whites separately), add the yolks to the meat and beans ; then the whites, stirred in lightly. Add half a cup of milk at the last, and turn the whole thing into a buttered casserole to cook in a hot oven for about ten minutes or until the top is brown. This will make a hot dish to be di- vided into individual portions as soon as it is done. Divide the piece of cake into as many parts as there are people to eat it. Spread a layer of jelly on each piece, and lay it beside a half-orange, or a saucer of canned fruit, or a few stuffed dates, that form the individual des- sert course. Lunch, like breakfast, is a good meal to serve on trays. The use of individual portions makes this desirable. If it is served on trays, cover the hot dishes with saucers, to keep them warm while the hors d'ceuvre is being eaten. 46 HORS D'CEUYRES Since it is to be the appetizer of the meal, the hors d'ceuvre must have piquancy of taste, such as acidity, or saltiness, or sweetness, — although sweet hors d'oeuvres usually belong to dinner, in the form of fruit cup or half a cantaloupe. But the real appetizer is made of such food as olives, sweet pickles, boiled ham, tuna fish, salmon, lettuce, pimiento, beets, salted nuts, celery, radishes, salads with French dressing, a thin slice of cold meat, timbales (which are de- scribed on Page 50), stuffed green peppers, or tart apples. Any one item of this list may be used alone, or in combination with almost any other. But the arrangement counts for a good deal. And judgment is necessary to avoid serving too much of a very heavy food. Here are some possible combinations : A tablespoonful of tuna fish surrounded by two stuffed olives, sliced. 47 A PEIMER OF COOKING A lettuce leaf, with beets cut into small bits on top of it, and a sprig of celery laid beside it. A quarter of a slice of boiled bam, cut witb scissors into shreds; beside it a sweet pickle cut lengthwise, and two or three salted nuts. A sliced peach mixed with lemon- juice and olive-oil, laid on a lettuce leaf, with powdered sugar sprinkled over the top. You can see how quickly any of these can be made, with materials for them kept on hand. But here are a few to be made from left-over food: A teaspoonful of boiled rice made into a ball and rolled in vinegar, salted, then rolled in oil. Serve it on lettuce with a dab of mayonnaise on top. (See Page 153.) Scoop out the center of a boiled onion and put into it cold peas, or lima-beans or string- beans, which have first been mixed in a bowl with catsup or Worcestershire sauce. With the scissors cut into bits left-over bacon. With a cold boiled potato mix salt, a little 48 HOES D'CEUVRES chopped onion, and mayonnaise, and sprinkle the bacon on top. Half a cooked sausage cake, minced, seasoned, and served with a drop of catsup on top. Sur- round it with any cold vegetables on hand. THE MAIN LUNCH DISH In planning this main lunch dish — to be made, preferably, of left-overs — ^you will need to keep in mind only two basic rules about left-overs : first, they must be taken apart ; secondly, they must be put together again. In other words, they must be chopped, sep- arated from skin, bone, and gristle; shredded with the scissors, run through the meat-grinder, cut with a sharp knife, or sliced, according to their different natures. And then they must be made into compact shape again in a new form. There are three important combining agen- cies that play their part in cooking left-overs. They are, in order of importance, eggs, gravy, and cream sauce. With the help of eggs you can make souffles, timbales, and fritters. 49 A PEIMER OF COOKING SOUFFLE The idea of souffle-making is to swell the amomit of your food material, by combining it with beaten egg, then baking it in a moderate oven, like a cake, until it rises and browns on top. It will bake in about twenty minutes. A souffle is usually made in an earthenware cas- serole, but an enameled baking-pan or even a tin one will do. Grease the pan first. As many eggs as you like may be used, to increase the bulk of the dish. But to one cup of chopped meat, or cooked vegetables, or flaked salmon, two eggs will be about the suitable proportion. To make the souffle, beat the yolks of the eggs until they are foamy^ having dropped a pinch of salt in before starting to beat. Add the left-over material. Beat the mixture until it is stiff, and add — stirring them in gently — ^the white of eggs. Half a cup of milk should be added if a dry absorbent ma- terial such as rice or potatoes is used. This souffle will serve three persons. TIMBAIiES A timbale is an elaboration of a souffle, and 3,n adaptation of it to individual serving. It 50 THE MAIN LUNCH DISH combines left-over food materials of all kinds with eggy not to increase the bulk, but simply to hold the material together. It is usually very highly seasoned and made of two or more differ- ent food-stuffs, which are mashed before being put together. Each timbale is baked in a sep- arate greased ramekin, and when done is emptied out upside down, on the serving plate. It may be served hot or cold, and with or with- out a sauce. Baked beans and ground cooked ham make a very appetizing timbale combination. Mash the beans smooth, add the ham, a few drops of lemon-juice, and a quarter of a teaspoonful of prepared mustard. Add to this one beaten egg for each cupful of beans, — as much ham being used as you like, — stir the mixture, and divide it among the desired number of ramekins. Tin gelatine molds will do very well instead of china or earthenware ramekins. Set the ramekins in a shallow baking-dish containing hot water. Put this in a moderately hot oven, and bake until the timbales are solid and a little brown on top. By running a blunt-bladed knife around 51 A PEIMER OF COOKING the edges and underneath, you can get the timbales out of the cases easily. Salmon or other fish timbales are perhaps im- proved by being served cold, with a slice of lemon on top of each, or with one of the fish sauces. If it is to be served cold, let the timbale stand in its ramekin until it is ready to be served. It will come out of the mold better when cold. FKITTEBS In fritters, which are really a form of batter- cake, eggs, again, are used for the purpose of holding the material together. They are the simplest egg-combination of the three, but the most limited, for only certain things are good in fritter form. Canned corn, chopped ham, or other cooked meat, rice, mashed potatoes, shredded cooked green peppers, bananas, ap- ples, pineapple, and peaches virtually complete the list. The last four are suitable for only a very dainty lunch menu. They should be served with powdered sugar over them. To make fritters, beat one egg for every cup- ful of material. Season the egg with salt and 52 THE MAIN LUNCH DISH pepper, add the left-over food to it, stir in two tablespoonfuls of flour mixed with two tea- spoonfuls of baking-powder, and two table- spoonfuls of milk. If canned com is used, no milk need be added Beat the mixture until it bubbles, then drop it, a tablespoonful at a time, into a frying-pan in which some cooking-fat has been melted. Have the fire under the pan low until the fritters have begun to cook through, then turn up to moderate heat. Turn each fritter wjien the under side is brown. Pile, at one side of the pan, those that are done, while the rest are being fried. Mash bananas for fritter-making. Slice apples, peaches, and pine- apple. One cupful of material will make enough fritters for three. There is an Italian dish of fried vegetables that belongs in the list of fritters. Its name is fritto misto, and it is an attractive form in which to serve assorted left-over vegetables. Suppose there are, in the ice-box the following : a tablespoonful of spaghetti cooked with to- mato sauce, a few slices of beets, a quarter of a cup of mashed potato, and some peas. This is a good foundation for fritto misto. Put all these 53 A PEIMER OF COOKING things into separate heaps on a big platter or bread-board. Chop the spaghetti and the beets fine, and mash the peas, keeping each vegetable separate. Then beat up an egg in a bowl, and pour some bread crumbs into a shallow dish. Make each vegetable into two or three small compact rolls or cakes. Dip each roll, first into the eggy then into the bread crumbs, using a sieve spoon. Fry the rolls in hot melted butter or other cooking-fat, until they are brown all over. Serve them with hot tomato soup poured over them for a sauce. HASH AND STEWS When there are left-over gravy and cooked meat and potatoes, the main dish may be put together with gravy instead of with eggs, and you will have a stew or a hash which can be baked, or browned on the top of the stove. The secret of good hashes and stews lies in the preparation of the meat. There must be no gristle or fat on it. And it must be cut or chopped into small, uniformly shaped pieces. Mix it thoroughly with the gravy before putting it on to cook. Season it with something tangible, such as a quarter of raw onion run through the 54 THE MAIN LTJNCH DISH meat-grinder, a teaspoonful of "Worcestershire sauce, or a pinch of powdered sage. To make a stew, put the meat, mixed with gravy and seasoned, in a frying-pan. Add half a cupful of potatoes and any other vegetable which you may have on hand. If there is no cooked potato, and you want the stew to be bulkier, add one raw potato, cut into very small pieces. Season, add enough cold water to come half-way up the material, and cover the pan with a tight-fitting lid. Cook over a medium fire for fifteen minutes, when the gravy and water will be blended and the whole thing thick- ened by the potato. Hjash may be baked or fried. Prepare the meat as for a stew (chopping it a little finer, however), and add cooked potatoes or any other vegetable desired. Raw potatoes must not be used. Melt a tablespoonful of cooking-fat in the frying-pan, and lay the hash in, flattening it down into a solid mass. If you are going to do the cooking on top of the stove, turn the flame down low, cover the pan, and let the bottom side of the hash get brown. Then, with a broad 55 A PEIMEE OF COOKING spatula, turn it, keeping it in a mass if possible. When both sides are brown it is done. If you prefer to bake the hash, add half a cupful of hot water to the pan, leave it uncov- ered, and put it in a moderately hot oven. After about ten minutes take the pan out, turn the hash, add another half -cupful of water, and re- place in the over. Bake until the other side is brown. It is obvious that baking is a little more trouble; its advantage is that it gets the hash drier than frying. CREAMED DISHES Cream sauce is the third combining agency to be used in putting left-overs together. It is particularly good for potatoes, salted meats^ and fish. It is very easy to make a good cream sauce. Eemember to use approximately as much flour as butter, and for the ordinary sauce take a cup of milk — or half milk and half water, if nec- essary — to one tablespoonful each of butter and flour. Melt the butter over a slow fire, add the flour, and stir until it and the butter are smooth. Then slowly add the milk, making sure that the part added is thoroughly blended with the 56 THE MAIN LUNCH DISH flour and butter before you pour in more. Keep on stirring, after the milk is in, and have the fire still low. When the sauce begins to get thick, put into it the left-over materials to be used. Season with salt and pepper, and serve when just at the boiling-point. Creamed potatoes by themselves are an in- sipid thing to have for the main lunch dish. So put something in with them, to give them tang. Some chopped ham, or shredded beef, or a little cooked meat of any kind will do. Or put a few slivers of mild cheese in with the sauce. This will melt while the potatoes are warming. To add to the attractiveness of a creamed dish, you might set the saucepan under the flame in the grill, where you make toast. Lower the grill rack to accommodate the pan. Leave the pan under the flame for a few minutes, until the top of the sauce is coated with brown. CROQUETTES Using a creamed dish for a basis, you can very easily make the more elaborate left-over dish, croquettes. Make the cream sauce a little thicker than usual, using two tablespoonfuls of 57 A PEIMER OF COOKING flour to one of butter. Then, after having added to the sauce whatever you want to make the croquettes of — cooked fish shredded, chopped cooked meat, or minced ham — form the mixture into small balls, or into flat ovals; put them away in the ice-box to get firm ; finally dip each ball into beaten egg, then into bread crumbs, and fry as you would fry oysters. (See Page 119.) Serve with tomato sauce, or with a hot sauce tartar. (See Page 109.) 58 m DESSERTS FOR LUNCH These may be as simple as you like, — canned fruit of any kind, first cooled in the ice-box, and set out invitingly; sliced bananas or peaches with powdered sugar on them; half an orange or grape-fruit, prepared and sugared; stuffed dates ; cake ; candy ; or fruit sauce with cookies. Prepare the orange and the grape-fruit in the same way. First cut around inside of each com- partment with a sharp knife, to separate the pulp from the white skin. Then with a pair of scissors snip off the rays of the white fibrous center, cut underneath it and remove it, filling its place with sugar. To stuff dates, have ready a saucer of granu- lated sugar. Crack and shell some nuts. Eng- lish walnuts, pecans, and peanuts are all good for this purpose. Then take out the stones of the dates, fill each date with a piece of nut, and roll it in sugar until it is no longer sticky. 59 A PEIMER OF COOKING Prunes, when well prepared, are both rich and delicious. But they must be soft and sweet, and have a heavy syrup. And they must be served cold. Wash them with a fruit brush and soak them overnight in cold water. In the niorning pour off most of the water, leaving about a cupful. Add for each prune half a tea- spoonful of either brown or granulated sugar. Cover the pan in which they soaked and set it in a slow oven. Let the prunes bake for about an hour, adding more water, if necessary, to keep the amount the same. Cool them before serving. Apple sauce is quickly made, with a minimum of trouble. Pare five or six good-sized cooking- apples, and cut them into small pieces, throw- ing away all cores and imperfect parts. Barely cover them with cold water in a saucepan, put a lid on the pan, and let them cook rather slowly, scarcely boiling, for fifteen or twenty minutes, or until the apples are soft when tested with a spoon. Then drain them in a wire colander, until they are as dry as you can get them. Put them back in the saucepan, mash them, and add two tablespoonfuls of granulated sugar and 60 DESSERTS FOR LUNCH a pincli of cinnamon. Stir until the sugar is melted. Pour out into a glass dish, or into in- dividual dishes, to cool. Strawberry sauce^ — not quite so elaborate as strawberry preserves — is made just as apple sauce is made, except that very little water is used. To a pint of berries add only half a cup- ful of water. Cook them until they are soft; drain, mash, and add granulated sugar, and a drop or two of lemon-juice. 61 w CAKE It is important to understand cake-making in general before you begin trying individual recipes. Because as soon as you know the basic principle you can invent your own recipes. There are two main divisions of cake, — ■ sponge cake, which is made without shortening or liquid; and butter cake, which does use shortening and liquid. Both kinds of cake must be beaten thoroughly. For both the yolks and the whites of the eggs should be beaten separately, — the yolks added first, and the whites folded in last. For sponge cake and virtually all forms of butter cake it is best to have the oven cold at the beginning of the baking. This gives the cake a chance to rise slowly before it starts to brown. In order to mix up a cake quickly you should have a half-pint flour-sifter, which measures approximately a cupful. You will need, toOj a- 62 CAKE large-sized mixing-bowl, — ^big enough to accom- modate an egg-beater without letting the batter splash over. Note: The word ** shortening'' is synonj- mous with cooking-fat. For cake-making, but- ter or one of the manufactured vegetable fats is used instead of meat fats. (See Page 84.) SPONGE CAKE For sponge cake, this is the usual proportion : To one cup of flour use one cup of sugar and three eggs. Add a pinch of salt and half a teaspoonful of either lemon-juice or vanilla flavoring. If you want to omit one egg, add a teaspoonful of baking-powder to the flour before sifting it. To make a white sponge cake, use the whites of eggs only, adding one extra egg- white, and put half a teaspoonful of cream of tartar with the beaten whites. Mix a sponge cake in this way : Put the egg- yolks in the mixing-bowl, with a third of a cup- ful of cold water. Beat them with an egg-beater until they are frothy. Then beat in, in turn, gradually, the sugar, the flavoring, and the flour. As the mixture gets too solid for an egg- 63 A PRIMER OF COOKING beater, begin beating it with a spoon. Lastly, stir in, without beating, the beaten whites. Pour the mixture into a greased tube pan and put it in a cold oven. Light the fire just after you put in the cake. The oven must be at a low tem- perature during the whole process of baking. The cake should bake in about three quarters of an hour. Stick a toothpick or a broom straw into the center of the cake. If it comes out dry, the cake is done. Let it get almost cold before you try to take it out of the pan. When only the whites of egg are used, beat the flour and the sugar into the whites. BUTTER CAKE A butter cake is mixed with a spoon. Mash the shortening first, until it is almost liquid, then add the sugar to it and mix the two thor- oughly. Add the beaten egg-yolks, beat vigor- ously for about three minutes, then add the flour and the liquid alternately, beating well after each addition. Add the flavoring, then stir in the beaten whites carefully and turn the batter out on greased layer-cake pans or a loaf pan. Start in a cold oven. A standard-sized 64 CAKE layer-cake should bake in less than half an hour ; a loaf cake will need from three quarters to an hour. The proportions of a butter cake are these : To three cupfuls of flour, use three teaspoonfuls of baking-powder, one cupful of sugar, one cupful of liquid, — either milk or water (milk will make the cake more nourishing but water, on the other hand, will give a lighter consist- ency), — one-third of a cupful of shortening, a half-teaspoonful of salt, and three eggs. Add a teaspoonful of whatever flavor you like. If you want to make a white butter cake, leave out the yolks of the eggs, and add one additional egg-white. OHOCX)LATE CAKE To make a chocolate cake, use half a cupful more of sugar and add two squares of^hocolate. Melt the chocolate over a slow fire, with enough water to cover it. You can use cocoa instead, ^Ye tablespoonf uls, but if you do, use a half -cup of shortening instead of a third of a cup. Cocoa lacks the fat of chocolate, and the cake would otherwise be too dry. Put either the chocolate 65 A PEIMEE OF COOKING or the cocoa in the cake just before you add the whites of egg. SPICE CAKE A spice cake is made by adding a teaspoonful each of cinnamon and allspice, a half -teaspoon- ful of powdered clove, and, if you want them, three tablespoonfuls of chopped raisins. Put these ingredients in before you add the beaten egg-whites. It is advisable to bake a spice cake in a loaf. If you want to make a quick icing for it, melt five tablespoonfuls of butter and beat into it half a cup of granulated sugar and two tablespoonfuls of cinnamon. Spread this over the top of the cake when it is ahnost done. It will melt in the oven, and form a glazed covering. OUP CAKES For cup cakes make half the usual amount of cake batter and pour it into greased muffin rings, making each ring about two thirds full. Cup cakes will bake in about twenty minutes. A good addition to cup cakes is a cup of chopped nuts put with the batter. Then when the cakes are done, decorate the top of each one with half a nut meat. 66 CAKE COOKIES Cookies are a form of butter cake, made very stiff. They are mixed in virtually the same way as ordinary butter cake. They are to be rolled out in a thin sheet before they are baked, so a little bit of batter will go far. This is a safe estimate for a batch of two or three dozen cookies: one fourth cup of shortening, three quarters of a cup of sugar, one egg, two table- spoonfuls of milk and about two and a half cupfuls of flour. The amount of flour must he indefinite because it depends upon the growing stiffness of the batter. You can use either sweet or sour milk with cookies. Sour milk furnishes a more agreeable taste. If you use sour milk, dissolve in it, before adding it to the batter, a half-teaspoonful of baking-soda. This is to neutralize the acid and render the milk sweet in effect. To make cookies, mix the shortening and the sugar together, add the egg unbeaten (the aim in the making of cookie batter is for compact- ness rather than lightness) then add the milk, half a teaspoonful of vanilla or other flavoring, and lastly the flour, cup after cup until the batter 67 A PRIMER OF COOKING is stiff enough to be taken up in your hands, and formed into one mass. When it has reached this point, set it away for several hours, or overnight, if possible, to get it stiffer, so that it can be rolled out very thin. When you are ready to bake it, work with the batter in small quantities at a time, rolling it out, cutting it into shapes with assorted cookie-cutters, and baking these on the reverse side of pie pans, in a hot oven. It will be necessary to grease the pie pans only once. You can bake many series of cookies one after the other. Watch the cookies closely while they bake. A panful will brown in a few minutes. As each set is done lay the cookies out flat on a big platter or a piece of paper, and dust powdered sugar over them while they are hot. Cookie batter may be kept for several days, if there is a cool place for it. You will not have to roll it all out at one time. CHOCOLATE COOKIES There is a quick kind of chocolate cake that amounts ahnost to cookies in its finished form. It can be mixed and baked in about twenty minutes, all told. 68 CAKE Here is the way it is made : In a small sauce- pan put a heaping tablespoonful of shortening and a square of chocolate. Melt these over a slow fire. Meanwhile beat an egg in a mixing- bowl, add to it half a cup of sugar, a quarter of a cup of flour, and a few drops of vanilla. Beat well, then add the melted shortening and choco- late. Pour the batter out on a greased pie pan. Cover the top of the batter with chopped nut meats and bake in a hot oven until the top is set, or about ten minutes. The batter will still be soft underneath, when you take it out of the oven. Let it stand for a while, to cool, then cut it in squares like fudge. These cakes, as soon as they are cold, should be placed in a covered jar. GINGERBREAD Gingerbread follows rules of its own. It is a butter cake, but it is made with molasses instead of sugar and depends for its flavor upon spices. Here is an easy recipe for soft gingerbread: Break an egg into a bowl and slowly stir into it three fourths of a cup of molasses. Add a cupful of flour with which are sifted one tea- spoonful each of cinnamon and ginger. Heat 69 A PRIMER OF COOKING to the boiling-point half a cnp of water. Pour this over a tablespoonful of butter and a tea- spoonful of baking-soda, in a cup; it will in one operation melt the butter and dissolve the soda. Add this liquid to the batter, beat well, and pour into a cake pan. Bake in a very slow oven for about half an hour, or until a straw inserted into the cake will come out dry. ICINGS Cake icings may be either cooked or mixed cold. The cold ones are simpler of course and for most purposes they will be satisfactory. Manufactured cake icings of vanilla and choco- late may be bought, which require only a min- ute ^s time to moisten them and spread them on a cake. Or you can make cold icings your- self, by using cocoa, powdered sugar, milk, and a flavoring. For a cold chocolate icing for a standard- sized cake, take a cup of sugar and half a cupful of cocoa. Mix them and add gradually enough milk to make the icing of the right consistency to spread. There is danger of adding too much milk. Half a tablespoonful is enough to start 70 CAKE with. If you add too much you will have to add more sugar and cocoa. To make a white icing use a cup and a half of powdered sugar, with milk and a drop or two of vanilla or lemon-juice. A cooked chocolate icing is made like fudge. Put half a cupful of grated chocolate in a saucepan with a cup of sugar and one fourth of a cupful of milk. Let this boil without stir- ring for ten minutes. Then take it from the fire, put it in a cool place for ^ve or ten minutes, add a small piece of butter, and beat it until it is thick enough to spread. A few marsh- mallows beaten with the icing will improve it. Make a caramel icing with a cupful of brown sugar and one fourth of a cupful of water. Let this boil until it will spin a thread when you drop it from the spoon. Beat, when it is partly cooled, flavor it with vanilla or lemon- juice, and spread it on the cake. A boiled white icing will require the whites of two eggs. Have them beaten stiff, ready in a big bowl. In a saucepan cook together a cupful of sugar and one third of a cupful of water, 71 A PEIMER OF COOKING boiling them until they make a syrup that will spin a thread. Pour the syrup, as soon as it is done, into the beaten egg-whites, stirring the mixture as you pour. Keep on beating, after the syrup has been poured in, until the icing gets thick. Add a few drops of vanilla before you spread it on the cake. Cocoanut or chopped nuts might be mixed with the icing or sprinkled over the cake after the icing is spread on. Can- died cherries sliced make a pretty decoration. 72 DINNER DINNER A perfect dinner satisfies but does not stuff you. It is pleasant to eat because it is made up of a number of surprising, delicious things, each one of which leaves you wishing for just a bite or two more. And in the end the com- posite effect is satisfying. By all means let it be served in courses. This will not mean jumping up from the table. The main course and dessert can sit on a side table or on a tea-wagon, beside the hostess, until they are needed. Covers may be kept on the hot dishes. Then as each course is finished the dishes from it can be put on a lower shelf of the tea-wagon or at one side of the serving-table. All this is possible without any one 's getting up once from the table. There is an economical reason for having a soup course at dinner: it begins the satisfying of hunger so that by the time the meat is served some of the corners of the appetite have been 75 A PEIMER OF COOKING rubbed off. And there is a digestive reason, too ; soup prepares the system for more solid food, by warming and stimulating it. But it is not wise to serve more than a cupful of soup at dinner. More than this will spoil the appetite for the things to follow. In planning dinner, the great point is to have it a balanced meal. That is, the courses should dovetail into one another, without repetitions of the same food element; and no one course should be too heavy in itself. A meal of cream of potato soup, roast pork, sweet potatoes, cole- slaw, and blanc-mange, for instance, would be poorly chosen for two reasons: it repeats the milk element by having milk both in soup and in blanc-mange; it repeats the potato element by having potatoes both in the soup and in the main course ; then the main course is much too heavy to follow a heavy soup course. If this dinner were changed to a thin soup, roast pork, sweet potatoes, a plain lettuce salad with French dressing, and blanc-mange, it would be balanced. In general, with roasts of meat, steaks and braised meat dishes, a thin, light soup or bouil- lon is preferable, and the salad and dessert 76 DINNER courses should be light. By a light dessert is meant one not using much milk, eggs, or flour in the preparation. Fruit, gelatine, fruit whips, and cottage-pudding are light desserts. Pie, custards, puddings, and rich cakes are heavy ones. Make a festival of dinner, by using always the finest china, silverware, and table coverings you have. Use a low light for the table,— a chandelier or a table lamp. Finish the meal with after-dinner coffee in little cups. 77 SOUP Perhaps the easiest thing to learn to make well — and certainly the most economical thing — is soup. There are three kinds, — ^meat soup, vegetable soup and cream soup. The theory of soup-making is the drawing out of juice from a solid substance. So the soup must be begun with cold water ; hot water would sear the surface of the material and in that way keep in a large proportion of the juices. The process of drawing out juice is a long one. Therefore the soup must be allowed to cook at a very low temperature for a long time. And since the juices, as they are drawn from the solid substance, must not be lost by going up in steam, the soup kettle needs a tight-fitting lid, to be kept on it during the period of cooking. Of the three kinds, meat soups are the most important, for they have the widest range of variation and are most appropriate for dinner. 78 SOUP Never buy meat or meat bone for soup. Scraps of steak, chops, and boiling pieces, and gristly, bony parts of roasts will do just as well and cost nothing. Soup can be made with either cooked or uncooked meat. You must keep a big stock of seasonings. These come in little paper boxes with perfor- ated lids for sifting out easily. You will need the following: thyme, sage, powdered clove, whole cloves, cinnamon, ginger, allspice, celery seed, mace, and some bay leaves. Besides these get a bottle of kitchen bouquet, — a liquid used to give flavor and a brilliant brown color to soups and gravies. Onions should be on hand always, and so should parsley, fresh or dried. MEAT SOUP If, then, you have just had a roast of beef or veal, have used every bit of the lean meat, and have nothing left but the foundation of bone, fat, and stringy meat, put all this in the soup kettle, salt it as freely as you would salt that much meat at the table, add to it half a tea^ spoonful of kitchen bouquet, half a bay leaf, a slice of onion, three cloves, and just enough water to cover it. Put the lid on tight and set 79 A PEIMEB OF COOKING the kettle over a barely lighted fire. Start the soup in the morning, if possible. Let it simmer all day until bedtime. Add more water during the day, if necessary, to keep about the orig- inal quantity. You will not have to stay at home to watch the soup, for it cannot go dry if the lid is on tight and the fire very low. After it has cooked all day, take it off the fire, strain it through a wire colander to remove from it all solid matter, and let the liquid stand overnight in a cool place. In the morning it will be cov- ered with a thin cake of white fat. Lift this off, carefully, and save it for cooking purposes ; soup fat is always savory from the seasonings. The soup, if it has stood in the ice-box all night, will probably be in the form of gelatin, — an infallible sign of good soup. But whether it has gelatinized or not, it may be thinned a little, like canned soup, before being heated up for serving. During the re- heating you might cook a tablespoonful of rice in the soup, or a stalk or two of celery cut into dice. And there are many brands of noodles on the market that are made particularly for soup, notably alphabet noodles and vermicelli; they can be cooked in about ten minutes. If there 80 SOUP is more soup than can be used at one meal, the rest will last for two or three days in the ice- box. You can change the character of it, on the second reheating, by adding a spoonful of to- mato sauce to it. You can of course use two or more kinds of meat in the same soup, and both cooked and uncooked meat. The seasonings may be varied to suit your taste. But use only a little of each seasoning — particularly of bay leaf — and try to have one flavor more dominant than the rest. Onion would be dominant in the soup just described. Cabbage might have been used in- stead — only two leaves of it — and a pinch of mace instead of bay leaf, or a teaspoonful of dried parsley instead of cloves, VEGETABLE SOUP The vegetable soups, commonly called purees, are thick and very nourishing. They may be made in an hour or less. Potatoes, cooked dried beans or peas, and canned vegetables of all kinds are used for a foundation. They follow the principle of meat soups. Cut the vegetables into small pieces, salt them, and add some seasoning element. This may be a 81 A PEIMER OF COOKING slice of onion, some celery tops, a pinch of dry mustard. Cover with cold water, put a lid on the kettle, and cook over a slow fire. At the end of an hour, hold a wire colander over a bowl and strain the soup into the bowl. With a potato-masher force the vegetable itself through the colander. With a tablespoon you must keep clearing the under part of the colander as the vegetable pulp comes through. When this is done, melt a tablespoonful of butter in the empty saucepan, add to it a tablespoonful of flour, and stir them together until they are smooth. Gradually add the soup mixture, with the saucepan over the fire, stirring as you pour it, and let the whole thing come to a boil. It will be thick and well blended. It is now ready to be served, or to be set away to be reheated and served later. CREAM SOUP Cream soups are more expensive than the others, a little more complicated in the making, and too rich to serve with any but a very light dinner or as the main dish for lunch. They are made in the top part of a double boiler. Almost any vegetable except dried 82 SOUP ones that require long cooking, may be used. These may be used too, of course, if they have first been cooked soft. Celery, com, string beans, carrots, lettuce, and asparagus are most often used. For an example, choose cream-of-celery soup. Use only the rough, outer stalks, saving the tender ones for an hors d'oeuvre at lunch. Wash the stalks and leaves, scrape away any brown places, and cut the celery into small pieces. Put these, with all the leaves, in the double boiler. Salt them, add half an onion- cut into slices and half a carrot cut into thin threads. Pour over this a pint of milk or half a pint each of milk and water. Put boiling water in the bottom of the double boiler and set the soup on over a high flame until the water is boiling rap- idly in the lower pan. Then turn the fire down rather low, — just high enough to keep the water at the boiling-point. Let the soup cook, tightly covered, for three-quarters of an hour. At the end of this time strain it through a wire col- ander, then carefully take out the pieces of celery and carrot and add them to the liquid. In the saucepan mix butter and flour and add the soup to them gradually as you did when 83 A PEIMER OF COOKINa making the puree. But be sure not to let the soup reach the boiling-point, for it is likely to curdle if it boils. It may be reheated without the double boiler, but must never boil. CfOOKING-FATS You will find it convenient to keep the fat that you lift off meat soups (See Page 80), in a glass jar separate from the fat drained from bacon or ham ; for both types of fat have their special uses. Soup fat may be used for all meat- frying, for frying fritters, batter-cakes, and croquettes, and even for making dumplings to go with a meat stew (See Page 98) or for the pie crust of a salmon pie (See Page 117). Bacon and ham fat may be substituted for butter in frying eggs (including omelet and scrambled eggs) and potatoes. Tomatoes (See Page 148) are much improved in flavor if they are fried in bacon fat rather than butter. The choice of appropriate fats for each kind of cooking lies with your own tastes, and with the demands of economy. Butter might be used for every kind of cooking or baking. But it is expensive. Olive-oil, which is excellent for frying steaks or reheating green or canned veg- 84 SOUP etables, also is expensive. Lard's uses are lim- ited almost exclusively to pastry-making and to the frying of batter-cakes, fritters, and breaded meats, — ^when the cheaper and more savory soup fat is lacking. A reliable, mod- erately economical fat which can be used for virtually every purpose except for the making of cream sauces, for the butter-and-milk dress- ing for potatoes, and for frying eggs, is the manufactured compounds made from peanut- oils, cotton-seed oils, or vegetable oils. These come in cans of various sizes, fitted with detach- able lids, and are mild in flavor, and as white as lard. This manufactured cooking-fat can safely be used instead of butter in any kind of baking. In the baking of white cakes, particularly, it is superior to butter, because of its lack of color. 85 n MEATS There is no absolute way to cook any cut of meat. Personal taste enters into consideration ; so do the amount of time you have to spend and the amount of money. If you are interested in creating meat dishes, — ones that will be remem- bered for a new flavor or for a peculiar piquancy of sauce and garnish, — ^you will more than likely cook the same cut of meat differently every time you have it. But at least you will want to avoid bleakness in your meat-cooking, — pale, stringy boiled beef, served with only its own thin liquid to give it zest ; steak that always tastes the same, with a uniformly mild, usual gravy; ungamished, bedraggled-looking baked meat; stews that never vary their carrots, potatoes and lamb. If you once understand the principle upon which all meat is cooked, you can form your own theories : and you will find that the cooking 86 MEATS of meat becomes a fascinating, never-solved game. Meat, to be made appetizing, must undergo two processes. It must first be browned to keep in its flavor and juices. Then it must be cooked long enough to soften its fibers. The browning is done on top of the stove, usually in the pan in which the meat is to be cooked tender. The cooking is done in the oven, under the grill of the oven, or on top of the stove, according to the nature and the size of the cut. The meat is seasoned during the second process rather than the first because salt is apt to make the juices run out. And, since it is the seasoning, even more than the cooking, that makes the meat good, you can see how important it is to surround the meat, during the period of softening, with savory elements for it to absorb. If the piece of meat is not one of the tender cuts — such as tenderloin steak, lamb chops, sir- loin or porterhouse steak, or veal liver — or if it is chunky in shape and therefore suitable for roasting or baking, then this surrounding ele- ment should be liquid. Otherwise it may be sliced vegetables, herbs, or a dash of condiment. 87 A PEIMER OF COOKING So we get to this general rule : Tender, thin cuts of meat, including tender steaks and chops, are cooked quickly without any surrounding liquid. They are either fried or broiled. They are made savory with dry seasonings, not added, sometimes, until the process of cooking is fin- ished ; that is, the seasonings are often put into the sauce that is served with the meat. On the other hand, the bigger pieces of meat, such as three- or four-pound roasts and boiling-cuts, and the pieces that come from the muscular parts of the animals : flank steaks, rump steaks, shoulder, and shank, are cooked for a long time, in some sort of liquid. Then, in most cases, this liquid forms the basis for the sauce to be eaten with the meat. STBAK Because the process is shorter, you might be- gin with steak-cooking. But steak is an ex- pensive cut ; having learned how to cook it, you will be wise to keep it only for special occa- sions and concentrate upon the more slowly cooked meats. Unless there is a strong reason for serving the steak whole you will find it easier and more 88 MEATS attractive to cut it into little individual rounds before you begin to cook it. Wipe each side of the steak with a piece of damp white paper, and lay it out on a slightly floured board. Cut the rounds, trimming off some of the fat. Lay away any steak that you don't use, to make into a lunch dish for the next day. Let each piece of steak get covered lightly with flour. Put two tablespoonfuls of butter or cooking-fat or olive- oil into a hot frying-pan to melt. Then lay the steak in with the flame turned up high. After a few minutes turn each piece. When both sides are beginning to brown, turn them often, keep- ing the fire high. Season the pieces after about five minutes, with salt, pepper, a pinch of sage, and a pinch of powdered clove. The steak will be done in less than ten minutes. Lay it at one side of the frying-pan, away from the intense heat. Turn the flame down a little. Then add to the juice in the pan a cupful of canned peas or lima beans or mushrooms or stuffed olives cut in halves, or celery cut into half -inch pieces. Brown this gently. When it is done lay the steak on a platter, garnish it with the browned vegetable, and cover it with a sauce made from the grease and juices in the pan. 89 A PRIMER OF COOKING A simple sauce is made by adding a very little flour to the juices, — ^half a tablespoonful is a safe amount, — stirring this until it is brown and blended, then slowly adding less than a cupful of cold water or cold left-over soup if you have it. Stir constantly and season with salt and pepper. When this is smooth, it is ready to be poured over the steak. If you want to broil the steak, light the oven before you begin the cutting up and flouring of the meat. Put the rounds in a broiling-rack and hold the handles of it securely shut. When the grill of the oven is hot, open the grill door, stick the broiler in, and expose each surface of the steak to the flame for a minute, to sear the skin. Turn the broiler two or three times during this process. Then lower the grill flame slightly and continue turning until the steak is cooked through. Lay it on a hot platter and pour a sauce over it. You might use one made thus : Melt a tablespoonful of butter, add to it the juice of half a lemon, and beat it with a fork until it is foamy. Put some of it on each round of steak then add a bit of parsley on top. 90 MEATS CHOPS AKD LIVER Lamb chops are cooked just like steak. Pork and veal chops need a little longer period after they are browned. Lamb chops may be broiled because they are as tender as steak; but it is safer to fry pork and veal chops. Turn the flame down very low and let them simmer with a lid on the pan for fifteen or twenty minutes. Veal liver must have a preliminary coating over it to hold in the juices even before it is put in the pan to brown. This coating is put on with boiling water. Put the liver in a colander and pour the water over it until the surfaces get white. Cook liver just like pork chops, allow- ing it to simmer after it is brown. BOAST BEEF If you want a roast of beef, try a three-pound piece from the rump, called a rump boiling- piece, instead of buying the more expensive rib roast. You will find the flavor excellent and there will be more meat left over for the next day, for a rump boil is a very lean, meaty cut, while a rib roast has all the waste of the rib bones. Here is one way to cook it : In a baking-pan 91 A PRIMER OF COOKING which has a tight-fitting lid, — preferably an iron Dutch oven, — melt two tablespoonfuls of butter. Drop into this two medium-sized onions, pared and sliced. Salt them and stir them until they are pale brown and beginning to soften. Then push them to one side of the pan. Lay the piece of meat in. Hbld each surface of it against the bottom of the pan until it is seared all over and brown. Then season it with salt and pepper and a pinch of mace, and take it out of the pan. Add a tablespoonful of flour to the grease in the pan, stir it, and let it get brown and blended. Mix the onions with the flour and add two cupfuls of cold water, slowly, stirring all the time. When this sauce has reached the boiling-point put the meat back in the pan, turn out the fire under it, cover the pan tightly, and put it in a hot oven. As soon as the pan is in the oven turn the flame down to a low temperature. Let the meat bake for about two hours. Look at it once or twice in that time to see if there is enough water in the pan. If you like, you can cook potatoes in with the meat. This will give them a savory meat taste and brown them, too. Pare the potatoes and cut them into quarters or slice them with a 92 MEATS cabbage-cutter, to make them attractive. The more finely cut they are, the less time they will need to cook. Lay them beside the meat and turn the oven fire up higher. They will be done in from twenty to twenty-five minutes. Then the meat and the potatoes are ready to go on their platter. The sauce is ready, too, all brown and smooth and savory of onions. POT BOAST This way of baking meat is scarcely different from oven-roasting, except that a pot roast is cooked entirely on top of the stove. So, if it is a pot roast you want, proceed just as before, but allow the baking pan to simmer over a slow burner for about three hours. And instead of putting potatoes in with it you could make macaroni or rice the starchy vegetable; both of these need the richness of taste that meat juice can give them. Put them in an hour be- fore the meat is done. BAKED MEATS ^ If you are cooking one of the flatter baking- pieces,— such as round or flank steak,— double pork chops or hreaded chops, you will follow the same principle of browning the meat first 93 A PEIMER OF COOKING in a frying-pan or baking-pan, then making a sauce to bake the meat in or simply putting water or soup stock in the pan instead. Of course the smaller and flatter the piece of meat is, the less water is necessary, and the less time is needed to cook the meat tender. As a rule add just enough liquid to come halfway up the bulk of the meat. Baked steak and stuffed or breaded chops need some special preparation before they are ready to be browned in the pan and baked. Steak is often breaded or stuffed before being baked. To bread it, cut it into rounds, just as you would cut sirloin or tenderloin steak into rounds for frying, and remove most of the fat. Beat an egg in a bowl ; season it with salt and pepper. Put some bread or cracker crumbs in a shallow dish. Dip each piece of steak first into the egg, then into the crumbs. Finish by putting it in the hot frying-pan. Veal chops, pork chops, and mutton chops are breaded the same way. To stuff a steak, rub it thoroughly with a damp piece of paper, lay it out, whole, on a 94 MEATS floured board, and sprinkle it with crumbled bits of bread. Season the bread with salt and powdered sage. Dot the bread with butter. Then roll the steak up like a jelly roll, tie it with string, and put it in the frying-pan. Either lamb or pork chops may be bought double, with a pocket cut between the two to hold a stuffing. Lamb chops are so small that they may be fried, slowly, when they are stuffed, instead of being baked. But it is safer to bake them, for from half an hour to three-quarters, in a moderate oven. Make the stuffing of crum- bled bread, seasoned with leaf sage and salt and pepper. With lamb chops you can get a deli- cate flavor if you moisten the stuffing with a teaspoonful of tomato sauce. (For an accom- panying sauce, see A on Page 105.) Experiment with your stuffed pork chops and lamb chops, by baking them without a lid over the baking-pan, and without any liquid added to them. Use more grease in the browning of them, and as they bake, occasionally lift up some of the grease in the bottom of the pan with a spoon and pour it over them. They 95 A PRIMER OF COOKING should get crisp on the outside and mealy in- side. This process is real roasting. It is suitable for all fat roasts, such as roasts of veal, pork, or lamb. It is not best for beef roasts, unless it is very skillfully done. It has the advantage of making the roast drier inside than baking makes it, of getting the outside crisper, and of keeping from the meat all extraneous flavors, which seasoned sauce or hot water will give to it. This plain roasting may be varied by roast- ing with the help of sliced vegetables. Make a bed of sliced potatoes, carrots, and any sort of canned vegetables. Season these, and lay the roasting-meat on top of them after you have browned it in another pan. As the meat roasts, the vegetable liquid will mix with the grease from the meat itself, so that what you will have to baste the roast with will be a most savory gravy. To roast, have the fire high for about twenty minutes, then turn it to a moder- ate height for the rest of the cooking. The meat is done when you can prick little shreds from it easily, with a fork. 96 MEATS MEAT LOAP Meat loaf is economical, depending for its flavor upon tlie seasoning it gets ; ground meat at best is almost flavorless. The loaf must be held together with egg. Beat up one egg for each pound of ground steak. Season the egg with salt and pepper and add the meat to it. Then add half a cupful of bread crumbs to increase the bulk. Cooked rice or mashed po- tatoes will do even better if they are on hand. Make the meat into a flat loaf and when it is compact lay it in the frying pan. When the under side of the loaf is brown, turn it, to brown the upper side. Lift it with a spatula, carefully, so that the loaf does not break. You can cook an onion, sliced, in the grease around the meat, to form the foundation for a piquant sauce, or, instead of that, a sliced tomato, or a quarter of a can of stewed tomato. Or, if you sprinkle flour on top of the meat loaf and rub some flour with a spoon into the grease in the pan, before pouring on the boiling water in which the loaf is to bake, there will be a gravy around the meat when it is done. Drop some Worcestershire sauce or catsup into this, before serving it over the loaf. 97 A PRIMER OF COOKING STEW If yon intend to have a meat stew, it will save cooking-time to tell the meat dealer to cnt the boiling-meat up into small pieces. Drop these, after yon have floured them, into the frying- pan, and be sure to brown every side of every piece. Stewed meat is cooked entirely under water. So, after browning the pieces, pour over them enough boiling water — or soup, if you have it — to cover the meat. Put the lid on the pan, turn the flame down to simmering heat, and let the stew cook for an hour or more. Then add any vegetables you want: sweet potatoes will go well with veal or lamb ; rice or Irish po- tatoes with beef ; add carrots, cooked or canned lima beans, asparagus, string beans, peas, or celery. Cook the stew a half-hour longer, to soften the potatoes, which should of course be cut up fine. Then, in a small mixing-bowl, make dump- lings to finish and thicken the stew. Sift a tea- spoonful of baking powder with a cupful of flour and a pinch of salt. Mix with the flour a teaspoonful of butter, until the two are blended. Do this mixing with your fingers. 98 MEATS Then add just enough cold water, — ^not more than a quarter of a cupful, — to make the flour into a soft wad. Drop this, a little at a time, into the stew. When it is in, put the lid on the stew tight and cook for fifteen minutes. Then the stew and dumplings are ready to be served in a tureen. CASSEROLE DISHES Based on the principle of the stew — ^that is, meat cut into pieces, browned, and cooked for a long time in a covering liquid — ^is the theory of casserole baking. It is the favorite cooking- method with the French. Their casseroles are fitted to cook either on top of the stove or in the oven, which is a good plan because it makes it possible to do the browning and cooking all in the same pan, thus conserving every flavor and bit of juice. However, these casseroles cannot very well be used for serving the finished dish, so some of the essence is lost, finally, in the transferring of the meat to a serving-dish. But this difficulty is solved by the use of one of the old-fashioned baking dishes of enameled ware, — the kind meant for baked beans and macaroni with cheese. It can cook over the fire and in 99 A PEIMER OF COOKING the oven and later it will fit into a silver holder, ready for the table. It is only necessary to find for it a tin lid that will fit tightly over it, dur- ing the process of cooking. For casserole cooking you can use any kind of meat, cooked or uncooked, with almost any kind of sauce or vegetables. But the season- ing must be adequate. The meat must cook long enough to be thoroughly soft. The vege- tables must be adapted to one another in both color and taste. Carrots and sweet potatoes, for instance, would not be good in combination because they are the same color. But carrots and peas or lima beans or string beans would be very attractive together. Celery is almost tasteless, — although it is pleasantly redolent when it is cooked, — so it should be put with canned corn or beets or tomatoes. Here is a suggestion for a casserole dish : In a frying-pan melt a tablespoonful of butter. Brown in it a quarter of a pound of ground steak and two sliced onions. Put these in a greased casserole, season them with salt, pep- per, a pinch of mace, and one of powdered 100 MEATS clove. On top of them put three pared and diced potatoes, season them, then pour half a can of tomatoes over the whole thing. The tomato liquid should come to the top of the po- tatoes ; if necessary, add enough cold water to fill out. On the very top put a. tablespoonful of washed, uncooked rice. Season the rice. Put a cover over the casserole and bake for an hour and a quarter in a moderately hot oven. It is done when the rice is crisp and brown. Serve in the casserole. If you use one of the enameled casseroles, do the preliminary brown- ing in it, too. Even small amounts of meat may be made into casserole dishes by putting vegetables with them and cooking the whole thing in a good sauce. If you have a small piece of round or sirloin steak, cooked or uncooked, left from another meal, you can cut it into little strips and combine it with a quarter of a can of to- matoes, a quarter of a can of corn, and a potato sliced thin, and bake it until the potato is soft. If the steak is uncooked, brown all of its sur- faces before putting it in the casserole. 101 A PRIMER OF COOKING HOW MUCH MEAT TO BUY A sirloin steak weighing about a pound and a half will serve four persons. A small tenderloin steak will serve two, if it is cut thick. A porterhouse steak will serve four or five. It is a safe estimate to allow two chops for each person; or one double chop. One pound of liver will serve four persons. A meat loaf made from one pound of steak will serve three. A three- or four-pound piece of meat, baked or in a pot roast, will serve about six persons. One pound of ste wing-meat will hardly do for more than two persons, because of the amount of waste in bone and fat. In buying veal steak, pork steak, or round steak allow one pound for two persons. 102 in SAUCES It is obvious that in the cooKing anu serving of meat you are limited in point of variety only by the number of sauces you can invent. Take the serving of a veal cutlet, for instance. It may have a tomato sauce one day, a velvet sauce the next, a brown sauce, an onion sauce, a cheese sauce. And the difference in the taste of the cutlet will be surprising. The same is true of the serving of fish and vegetables. So it is important to understand the forma- tion of sauces. A sauce is, basicly, the juice extracted from meat, fish, or vegetables, separately or in com- bination. This juice may be gotten by putting soup in the sauce instead of water; by using, instead of butter, the grease left in the frying- pan after the meat has cooked in it, as the foundation of the sauce-thickening; by cooking for a short time sliced vegetables and herbs in 103 A PEIMER OF COOKING butter, to extract their liquid ; or by using juice squeezed from uncooked fruits and vegetables. Which of these methods is to be used depends upon the occasion, the supplies on hand, and the demands of the particular sauce. A sauce is usually thickened a little. This is done by first mixing flour with butter or other grease that has been melted in a frying- pan, then adding the liquid element slowly, stirring all the time, and having the flame turned low. The color of the sauce will depend in large measure upon the way you prepare the thick- ening. If you leave the flour in the grease long enough to brown it, the sauce will be brown. If you add the liquid immediately after the flour is blended, the sauce will be white. Of course a dark soup stock added to the sauce will make it dark in any case. So will a few drops of kitchen bouquet, which will be found most use- ful in sauce-making. With the help of kitchen bouquet you can make a meaty, brown sauce to serve with warmed-up meat, even if you have no left-over soup or gravy. Here are some representative sauces: 104 SAUCES A If you are having stuffed pork chops (See Page 95), that have been baked with a little hot water around them, so that there will be no thick sauce with them when they are done, you can make a sauce in this way: Take the chops from their baking-pan and put the pan over the fire; it will have in it a mixture of grease and meat stock. With a tablespoon lift off most of the grease, leaving the browned stock in the pan. Put the grease in a small bowl, blend with it a tablespoonful of flour and pour a spoonful of liquid from the pan into the bowl. When the thickening is smooth add it to the liquid in the pan, then pour on enough soup stock or cold water to make as much sauce as you need. Season it with salt and pepper. When it is thick and boiling, serve it. If you find that the water has all boiled away, or if you roast the stuffed chops instead of baking them, simply add half a cupful of cold water co the grease in the pan, set it over a hot fire, season it and bring it to a boil, stirring vigorously to include in the sauce all particles of browned fat. 105 A PEIMEE OF COOKING B Suppose you are having broiled steak (See Page 90) and want a new sort of sauce to pour over it. In this case you will not have any resi- due of grease or liquid to use as a foundation for the sauce ; you will have to manufacture the whole thing. Put a tablespoonful of butter in a pan. Cut a small carrot into shreds, break up a branch of parsley, and season these with sage. Let them fry gently in the butter for a minute. Then pour two tablespoonfuls of milk over them and cover the pan. After they have simmered for ten minutes, strain the resulting liquid through a wire colander. Moisten half a tablespoonful of flour in a cup with half a tablespoonful of butter, then with a little of the vegetable liquid. Next add the thickening to the rest of the liquid. Bring it to the boiling- point and serve it over the steak. Or you may make a simpler sauce for a steak, or fish without any thickening element at all. Put the hot meat or fish on a hot platter and drop on each piece some unmelted butter which you have seasoned in a bowl with salt and a 106 SAUCES teaspoonful of either lemon juice or vinegar. The hot meat will melt the butter. Garnish this sauce, after it is on the platter, with chopped parsley or sliced celery stalks. D Another butter sauce is made by melting the butter in a saucepan, adding to it the juice of half an orange, and salt, pepper, and paprika, then beating it with a fork until it is foamy. Pour it over the meat. E Velvet sauce is very nourishing in itself. It uses the yolk of an egg in its preparation and is very good to serve with warmed-up white meat, such as veal, pork, lamb, or chicken. To make this sauce, melt a tablespoonful of grease in a pan and blend a tablespoonful of flour with it just long enough to make the mixture smooth. Add a cupful of either milk or water, cold. Stir this until the sauce is beginning to thicken, then set it off the fire. Beat an egg yolk in a bowl with a teaspoonful of cold water, added to make the egg blend easily. Season the egg. Add to it a little of the hot sauce, stirring hard. 107 A PEIMER OF COOKING Then pour the egg mixture into the rest of the sauce. Put the saucepan over the fire again, but be sure to take it off before the sauce boils, or it will curdle. F A cheese sauce is made with the same foun- dation as velvet sauce, — ^butter, flour, and milk (water cannot be used). After the sauce is be- ginning to thicken, add half a cupful of sliced cheese to it and turn the flame down low, until the cheese melts. This sauce is thick and rich, and particularly fine to serve over an omelet or with a slice of halibut steak. a Then there are two other simple sauces, made without thickening. For roast beef, fried fish, or breaded meat, try a hot sauce vinaigrette. Warm together in a pan one tablespoonful of vinegar, two tablespoonfuls of olive-oil, salt, pepper, and the following things chopped fine : one onion, a slice of cabbage, a sprig of parsley, and a sweet pickle. Pour this over the meat or fish. 108 SAUCES H Tartar sauce may be served hot or cold. It is made of cream sauce — ^half a cupful of it — added to an equal amount of oil mayonnaise with the addition of a pinch of mustard, a sweet pickle cut fine, either two or three stuffed olives chopped or a teaspoonful of chopped capers. Serve tartar sauce with left-over meat or with fish of any kind. In order to have materials on hand for sauce- making, you will have to preserve every atom of food that has flavor in it. When you find half -wilted pieces of celery on a stalk, cut them up and cook them for an hour or so in cold, salted water. The resulting juice, strained, will make a delicious sauce for that evening ^s meat course. Use it instead of plain water. Cab- bage leaves may be treated in the same way, and so may any vegetables. Eadishes cooked for two hours or less will get soft enough to be pushed through a wire strainer. Season them with a dash of salt, pepper, and dry mustard. This semi-liquid you will discover to be a piquant sauce for halibut or fried oysters. Before washing a baking-pan, put a little cold 109 A PRIMER OF COOKING water in it and with a spoon or a fork scrape down from the sides all brown particles. Let these come to a boil with the cold water. Sea- son the liquid and set it away to form the liquid part of your next dinner sauce. Note: A recipe for cream sauce is to be found on Page 56. 110 IV FISH Fish is already very tender when it is bought. So the cooking is never a long process. In all city fish-markets, now, the dealer will scale and clean the fish for you. This makes it possible for you to have fish two or three times a week without the trouble of preparation. Fresh fish may be fried, baked, broiled, or stuffed, just like meat. FRIED FISH Trout, bass, and perch are all adaptable to frying. Wash them first with cold water and dry them with a paper napkin. Salt them in- side and out. Dip them in milk, then in flour, and drop them into hot fat. Cook them fast until they are brown on both sides (this will take about eight minutes), then put them out on a hot platter garnished with a stalk of parsley that has cooked for a minute or two in 111 A PEIMER OF COOKING the hot fat. Just before serving add a tea- spoonful of tomato sauce on top of each fish. If you want to fry a larger fish, such as a shad, cut it into several pieces first, meanwhile lifting out the backbone. BAKED FISH Any fish may be stuffed or baked. Wash it first and dry it. Make a stuffing of crumbled bread, a quarter of an onion minced fine, and salt and pepper. Lay this along one side of the fish and then squeeze lemon- juice over it. Close the other side of the fish down over the stuffing. Tie with string. Put the fish in a frying-pan with a little melted butter, and sprinkle flour over the skin. When it is browned in the butter, put a strip of bacon on top of the fish, add half a cup of boiling water, put the lid tightly on the pan, and bake in a moderate oven for half an hour. Instead of baking the stuffed fish you might grill it. Set it between the grilling racks and grill it as you would grill a beefsteak, starting with a hot fire to brown the skin, then lowering 112 FISH the flame to cook the fish through. The grill- ing will not take more than fifteen minutes. With baked or grilled fish a velvet sauce is good (See E, Page 107). Or you may use the simpler one of melted butter with lemon-juice (C, Page 106). FISH IN CASSEROLE If you can get a piece from the small end of a salmon or halibut, — weighing about two pounds, — you can make a baked casserole dish with a delicious sauce. Melt two tablespoon- fuls of butter in a pan and fry in it two small sliced onions, until the onions are soft. Add a cupful of tomato soup, let the soup heat, then season the sauce with salt and pepper. Put this in the bottom of a greased casserole, add the piece of fish, — ^washed and dried, — cover the casserole, and bake for half an hour in a mod- erately hot oven. It will be done when the fish falls away from the bone if you touch it with a fork. Serve in the casserole. Pickerel or whitefish may be baked in this same way. A very delicate way to cook either large or small fish is to chop up about a cupful of vege- tables and herbs, — mushrooms, parsley, onions, 113 A PRIMER OF COOKING celery, and thyme. Then in a soup kettle or a casserole that can stand on top of the stove melt a tablespoonful of butter. Sprinkle a tablespoonful of flour over the butter and add half of the herbs. Lay on this one or two small fish, — ^washed, dried, and salted, — and cover them with a layer of bread crumbs. Put on next the other half of the herbs and add another layer of crumbs. Squeeze over this the juice of one lemon and add a cupful of some liquid, — ^preferably a vegetable or thin soup of meat, otherwise hot water. Cover the pan and cook on top of the stove, at simmering temperature, for half an hour. Serve all of this dish, using the herbs for a garnishing. HALIBUT Halibut is the most easily obtainable fish steak. The quickest way to cook it is to fry it, having first dipped it in milk, then in bread crumbs. Use two tablespoonfuls of cooking- fat for one slice of halibut. Brown each side in the hot fat, then turn the flame down low, cover the pan, and let the fish cook for twenty minutes. Serve it with tomato or cheese sauce (See F, Page 108). 114 FISH Or you may bake halibut, after you have dipped it in milk and bread crumbs. Have more cooking-fat in the pan than you would have for frying. Cover the baking-pan and set it in a rather slow oven for half an hour. Turn the halibut once during this time, to allow both sides to get brown. "When tomatoes are in season, try this way of baking halibut : Lay it in a frying-pan with melted butter. Season it well with salt and pepper, then slice tomatoes over the top of it. On top of the tomatoes put about half a cupful of shredded green peppers. Season these and bake in a moderately hot oven, with no lid on the pan, until the top of the fish is brown. Serve with a dab of unmelted butter on top of the halibut. Halibut may be poached, if you want to make a very elaborate, decorative dish of it. In a frying-pan melt a tablespoonful of butter. Cook gently in it, for a few minutes, one small sliced onion. Stir in a tablespoonful of flour, blend it with the butter and onion, and add a cup of milk. Season this sauce. Bring it to 115 A PRIMER OF COOKING a boil, stirring it. Then add to it a few thin shreds of carrot. Lay the halibut in the pan. Cover the pan and cook the fish at the simmer- ing-point for about twenty-five minutes. Lift the lid occasionally, baste the top of the fish and lift the slice with a spatula to let the sauce run under it. About five minutes before the halibut is done, light the oven. Then, after the poaching is done, set the pan under the flame of the grill to brown the fish and sauce. Serve it covered with sauce. SAXMON IiOAF Canned salmon may be made into several quickly cooked dishes. Perhaps the most prac- tical of them is salmon loaf. This is really a form of souffle. To make it, drain a pound can of salmon and separate the fish from the bones and skin. In a greased baking-dish that has a rounded bottom, beat two eggs. Salt them. Add the salmon and mash it down to mix it thoroughly with the egg. Add about a quarter of a cup of milk. Set the baking-dish in a moderately hot oven. In twenty minutes or less the loaf will be done, with the top of it firm and brown. Have a hot platter ready to 116 FISH receive it. Then, with a blunt knife or a spatula loosen the loaf around the edges and run the knife underneath. Drop it out upside down on the platter. Pour over it a cream sauce (See Page 56) or any piquant sauce you can make from vegetable liquid, — such as rad- ish or celery sauce (See Page 109). Be sure not to take the loaf out of the baking-dish until it is firm on top. SAIiMON PIE A salmon pie is made by creaming the salmon first, — a cupful of plain cream sauce to a can of salmon, — then by putting the creamed sal- mon in the bottom of a greased shallow baking- dish. Cover the top with pie crust. Bake in a hot oven until the crust is brown; about ten or fifteen minutes. BAKED TUNA A tasty dish is to be made of a can of tuna fish combined with a cupful or more of mashed potatoes. Butter a baking-dish. Beat an egg and mix the tuna fish with it. Add and mix the mashed potato and half a cup of milk. Put this in the baking-dish and bake it without a 117 A PEIMER OF COOKINa lid, in a hot oven, until the top is brown. Serve with a hot sauce vinaigrette (See B, Page 108). OYSTER SOUP Since oyster soup does not fall precisely un- der the category of soups, it must be treated by itself. You can see that in the making of oyster soup, the important point is to conserve for the soup every particle of oyster flavor. So never wash the oysters first, and particularly never throw away the oyster liquor. This latter is of vital importance to the piquancy of the soup. But look the oysters over carefully, before using them, to make sure there are no bits of shell sticking to them. In a saucepan melt a tablespoonful of butter, blend a tablespoonful of flour with it, and slowly stir in a pint of milk, — or, if necessary, half milk and half water. Stir the mixture until it is smooth. Then add a quarter of a pint, — or more if you like, — of small oysters, and as much liquid as you can drain off from them. Season the soup with salt, pepper, and paprika. Keep it below the boiling-point and cook it until 118 FISH the gills of the oysters curl up. Serve it while it is still at the simmering-point. If you want it to be very inviting-looking, add a little but- ter to it, just before you take it from the stove. FRIED OYSTERS Fried oysters are very simple to prepare. Use large-sized ones. Drain them. Put them in pairs, with the gills at opposite ends. Have a beaten egg in a bowl and a shallow dish of bread or cracker crumbs. Dip each pair of oysters first in egg, then in crumbs, and lastly drop it into hot cooking-fat. This fat need not be abundant enough to cover the oysters. Use about three tablespoonfuls to a pint of oysters. When the under side of each fried oyster is crisp and brown, turn it, but not be- fore ; turning it too soon would make the oysters separate. Keep the fire at moderate heat. Don't cover the pan; that would make the oys- ters soggy. They will fry in from ten to fif- teen minutes. Serve with the oysters the following sauce: Drop a little flour into the fat the oysters cooked in. Stir a tablespoonful of catsup with it. Add the juice of a whole lemon and half a cupful of 119 A PRIMER OF COOKING water. With the flame up high, stir this sauce rapidly and when it is bubbling pour it into a sauce-boat, to be served at the table. HOW MUCH FISH TO BUY One pound of halibut will serve two persons. Allow at least two small fried fish to a serv- ing. A large fish, such as shad, weighing over two pounds, will serve three or four. One pound can of salmon will make a salmon loaf large enough for three persons. Use a small can or half of a big one, for a salmon pie for two. One can of tuna fish will make a baked dish for three. Allow three or four fried oysters to a person. One pint will make enough fried oysters for two persons, and will leave plenty for oyster soup. One pint of milk will make oyster soup — al- lowing for large portions — ^for two. 120 POULTRY Before ordering or choosing a chicken be sure that you have decided upon the way you are going to cook it, because your requirements in the matter of size and age will depend upon that alone. If it is a young f rying-chicken you want, or a chicken to broil, it must not weigh more than a small fraction over a pound. For fried chicken for more than two people you will need a fowl weighing about two and one half pounds. For a chicken fricassee get a four-pound chicken. For roasting, about a three-pound one. Young frying-chickens, or broilers, can be had during July, August, and September. In the late autumn and early winter months the older chickens are at their cheapest. The chicken will come from the retail dealer — in practically every case without special re- quest on your part — dressed and partly cleaned. 121 A PEIMER OF COOKING The first thing for you to do is to singe the skin, to get off the hairs. Do this over some flame other than gas, in order not to get its fumes into the skin. A tallow taper is a very good thing to use, if it is obtainable ; but the easiest thing to keep on hand for this purpose is a can- dle. Hold the chicken over the flame, turning it and letting it hang first by one leg, then by the other, until the heat has reached every part of the surface. After the singeing, wash the skin under running cold water Next comes the cleaning of the chicken, which the dealer will have done more or less thor- oughly, putting back the parts which are edible. You will find, inserting your hand into the opening cut at the tail end, the heart, the liver, the gizzard, and the neck, the first three of which are called the giblets. The liver will pos- sibly be in one or two pieces ; the mutilation of it will be due to the difficulty of removing from it the gall bladder, which lies on its under sur- face. The dealer will have opened the gizzard, taken out the craw, and left the gizzard smoothed out and clean. With the giblets taken out and the neck re- moved, it will be easy to look in to see if the 122 POULTRY lungs and kidneys have been removed. Often these are not touched by the dealer, because they are in rather remote places and because their removal is not absolutely essential. The lungs are found one on each side of the back- bone ; they cling to the ribs, and are easily rec- ognized by their red color. The kidneys are at the end of the backbone, resting in a slight depression. You will know that the chicken is thoroughly cleaned when you can see no red particles in- side. When you are sure of this, let cold water run through it, — making an outlet for the water at the neck end, if there is not already one, — until the water finally runs out clear. Clean the giblets by cutting away from them any extraneous-looking membranes, or pieces of fat. Cut through the heart to the center of it and take out a little blood vessel you will find there. Wash the giblets under cold running water. The chicken is now ready for stuffing, if it is to be roasted. BOAST CHICKEN Wipe the chicken inside and out with a damp 123 A PEIMER OF COOKING cloth covered with salt. Light the oven with a brisk flame. Then make a stuffing of two cupfuls of crumbled bread, seasoned with salt, pepper, and leaf sage, dampened with just enough milk to hold the mass together. Fill the chicken with the stuffing, putting it in from the tail end, then stick one big piece of bread in the opening, as a plug. (This should be taken out when the chicken is done.) Melt two tablespoonfuls of cooking-fat in the roaster, lay the chicken in, on its back, sprinkle it lightly with flour, and let it brown in the oven, with the lid off the roaster, for above five minutes. Turn the chicken several times, during this period, to expose all the surfaces. Then add three cup- fuls of hot water to the pan, drop in the giblets cut into inch-square pieces, cover the pan, and continue the cooking at a moderate heat until the chicken seems tender when it is touched with a fork. Halfway through the cooking salt the chicken and giblets. Baste two or three times. Add more hot water if necessary. An hour or an hour and a half should be an adequate length of time for the roasting of a three-pound chicken. 124 POULTEY When the chicken is done, get it out on a hot platter and make a milk gravy to serve with it. This is done by dissolving a heaping tablespoon- ful of flour in enough milk to cover it, then adding half a cup of milk to this, stirring until the milk is even in consistency, and lastly add- ing it to the liquid left in the roasting-pan. Sea- son this gravy and stir it until it boils and thickens. Leave the giblets in the gravy. BROILED CHICKEN Cut the chicken in half, splitting it along the back and through the breast. Follow the di- rections given for the broiling of steak on Page 90, but have a slower fire, and test the flesh with a fork, to determine when it is cooked thor- oughly. It will cook in about twenty minutes. FRIED CHICKEN To prepare a chicken for frying you must first cut it into pieces. This will require the sharpest knife you have. For ease in cutting and to get an approximate uniformity in the size of the pieces, it will be best to follow this general plan: Holding the chicken on its back, take one of 125 A PEIMER OF COOKING the legs in your left hand, while with the knife in your right hand you slash down through the skin close to the body. Do not be afraid of cutting away too much skin from around the leg. Then bend the leg back until the bone sepa- rating it from the body cracks; cut between the interstices of the broken bone and remove the leg. In the same way, having turned the chicken around so that the remaining leg is at your left, cut off the other leg. Cut through each leg as near as possible to the joint in the middle, which you can locate by feeling for it. Then you will have the thigh pieces separated* from the drumsticks. Cut off each wing next. This will be easy to do, because there is no hard bone to cut through. Then cut off the end of the back, running the knife along just below the ribs. Next separate the rest of the back from the breast by following the ends of the ribs and cutting as far as the collar-bone. Lastly slit the breast down, keeping near to the center bone. The piece of neck that will be found attached to the end of the breast-bone may be left on, and that piece of breast-bone will do for soup-making or for stewing. After 126 POULTRY cutting the chicken up, wash every piece in running water. If it is a young frying-chicken, weighing scarcely more than a pound, it is ready to be fried immediately. Roll each piece in flour and drop into a frying-pan in which three or four tablespoonfuls of cooking-fat are sizzling. Brown the pieces over a quick fire, until they are the same color all over. Then put a lid on the pan, turn the flame down, and continue the cooking for five or ten minutes, or until the chicken is tender. If the chicken is a good-sized one, it will need parboiling before it can be fried until tender. Put the pieces in a soup kettle, with salt, pepper, and not quite enough cold water to cover them. Bring the water slowly to a boil, with the kettle covered, then simmer for as long as is neces- sary to get the chicken tender. Ten or fifteen minutes will do for a young fowl, but an older one may require an hour's time. Test the de- gree of tenderness, from time to time, by lift- ing up bits of the flesh with a fork. When the chicken is tender take the pieces out of the water, roll them in flour, and fry them fast. 127 A PEIMER OF COOKING They will not need to cook in the frying-pan after they are brown. BBAISED CHiaEEN Instead of parboiling the chicken first, you may fry it, after rolling it in flour, then put it in a baking-pan which has been greased, cover it with about four cups of water, put the lid on the baking-pan, and allow the chicken to bake at a rather low heat for two hours. CHICKEN FRICASSEE This is a variation of braised chicken, cooked in a casserole. Parboil the chicken, allowing it to remain only a short time in the water; half an hour should be long enough, even for a four- pound chicken. Then brown the pieces in hot fat, and pack them into a deep casserole. Add a tablespoonful of flour to the grease left in the frying-pan, blend the grease and flour until the flour is brown, then add slowly a pint of milk, stirring until the milk begins to thicken. Pour this sauce over the chicken. Season with celery salt and pepper. Add half a can of mushrooms cut into halves, a green pepper shredded, a piece of pimiento cut fine and two medium-sized sweet potatoes run through the 128 POULTEY meat-grinder. Cover the casserole and bake the chicken in a moderately hot oven until it is tender, or for about two hours. CHICKEN POT PIE For a pot pie choose a two-and-a-half -pound chicken. Cut it up, brown the pieces quickly in hot fat, then put them in a stewing-pan with enough boiling water to come half-way up the bulk. Cover the pan and simmer until tender. About twenty minutes before it is done add seasoning, two or three potatoes cut into quar- ters, and a bunch of new onions, cut in halves ; cook for ten minutes, then add dumplings (See Page 98). Serve in fifteen minutes. The whole process of cooking will take from one to two hours. CHICKEN BROTH Let the water in which the pieces of chicken were parboiled for frying or fricasseeing go on simmering for an hour or two after the chicken has been taken out of it. Leave the giblets in, and the neck, and any other pieces — the wings, for instance — ^which are not very meaty. Allow the broth to stand overnight, so that you can remove the fat from it (See Chap- 129 A PRIMER OF COOKING ter on Soups). Then warm it up the next day with two tablespoonfuls of rice to cook in it to thicken it. Pick the meat from the wings and add that to the broth. GIBIiETS ON TOAST After the giblets have served their purpose for making broth, they may be cut up fine and rewarmed in cream sauce (See Page 56) and served on rounds of toast for a breakfast or lunch dish. OmCKEN SALAD This is an appetizing and attractive way to serve left-over chicken. Cut it from the bones, removing skin and gristle, and dice it. Add to it celery cut into small pieces, sweet pickle, pi- miento, green peppers shredded, — or whatever you have at hand that seems appropriate. Put the salad together with oil mayonnaise (See Page 154). Serve a slice of chilled beet on top of each plate of salad, if practicable. TURKEY, DUCK AND GOOSE Turkey, duck, and goose must be singed and cleaned exactly like chicken. In stuffing them for roasting it will be found 130 POULTRY necessary to sew up the open places through which the stuffing was put. In stuffing goose include one onion, cut up fine, with the bread crumbs. Duck needs a hot fire during the whole process of roasting. If it is a young duck it will roast in from three quarters of an hour to an hour. Goose will require one and a half to three hours. Turkey needs about two and a half hours. HOW MUCH POULTRY TO BUY For seven or eight persons a roast turkey weighing about eleven pounds will be enough. For the same number of persons two roast ducks, or a large goose will be needed. A capon (a chicken fattened especially for the market) which is tenderer and has a more delicate flavor than chicken, and fatter, will serve five persons. One roast chicken weighing about three pounds, will serve three or four. One chicken weighing two and a half pounds will make enough salad for four. Fricasseed chicken in casserole, may be made to serve as many as six, or as few as two, ac- cording to the quantity of other ingredients you 131 A PRIMER OF COOKING put in to cook with it. Where there is a four- pound chicken, it is good plan to fricassee half of it, for two or three persons, then to use the rest for salad, or creamed on toast. In general, a chicken weighing under two pounds will serve only two. 132 VI POTATOES, RICE, AND MACARONI If you treat potatoes, in your cooking of them, as if they were a rare vegetable ; if you are continually in search of strange new ways to fix them ; and if you serve just a little of them at a time rather than a big tureenful, you will find that you can make them the most interest- ing item of a meal. STEAMED POTATOES By far the best way to cook them is to steam them in a steam boiler. For this they should be cut into quarters, without being pared, and put into the boiler without liquid, salted, and with each piece of potato dotted with butter. They should be soft in three quarters of an hour. Cooked this way they will be flaky and perfectly seasoned. They may be served just as they are, — ^with the skins removed before they are put on the table, — or they may be 133 A PEIMEE OF COOKINa skinned, and mashed with a fork with a little more milk and butter added. Let them stay in the steamer for a few minutes to absorb the milk, then serve them. BOILED POTATOES An objection to steaming is that it takes longer than boiling. Often you will not have time to wait. You can get almost the same flaky effect from boiling potatoes, if you boil them properly. Select as small ones as pos- sible and of course choose ones as nearly as possible uniform in size. Wash them with a vegetable brush and drop them into boiling, salted water. Cook for from twenty minutes to half an hour, or until you can see, by testing them with a fork, that they are soft. Have no lid on the saucepan. When they are done, drain them, then put them back in the pan, on the fire, with the burner turned very low, and the pan covered. Leave them there for several minutes, to dry out the excess moisture. Serve them on a deep plate, covered with a napkin to keep their heat in. Unless they are to be eaten plain-boiled or mashed, it is better to boil potatoes several 134 POTATOES, EICE, AND MACARONI hours before they are to be used, and to let them cool. They harden a little as they cool and become easier to dice or slice, for frying, for creaming, for making into an au gratin dish, or for salad (See Page 45). BAKED POTATOES Baked potatoes need careful cooking. Scrub the potatoes first, with a vegetable brush, then rub the whole skin over with lard or vegetable fat. This is to lubricate the skin and to keep the potato from getting too dry. Have a mod- erate fire in the oven ; too hot a fire will harden the skins and cook the potato unevenly. Me- dium-sized potatoes will bake in three quarters of an hour. As soon as they are done slash each one with a slit about two inches long, to let out the steam. Serve them in a covered tureen, with a piece of butter pushed into each opening. STUFFED POTATOES Stuffed potatoes are made from baked ones. Cut each potato in half lengthwise, scoop out the contents, and mix this together in a bowl with warm milk, butter, and pepper and salt. Use just enough milk to moisten the potato. 135 A PRIMER OF COOKING Put the potato back in the shells, set these in a shallow baking-pan in the oven, with a hot flame, and leave them there until they are brown on top. MASHED POTATOES If you are in a great hurry to get potatoes boiled, for mashing, pare them before you put them to boil and cut them in small pieces. Pre- pared this way they will get soft in ten or fif- teen minutes To mash them, drain them, set them back in their pan on the stove for a min- ute to dry, then mash them thoroughly, getting out all the lumps. In a small saucepan heat almost to the boiling-point half a cup of milk and a tablespoonful of butter seasoned with salt and pepper. Add this to the mashed pota- toes, beat with a spoon until the mixture is light, and serve in a covered dish. If you want to serve mashed potatoes in a very attractive way, spread them, after they are mashed, over a buttered pie pan. Set this under the grill of a hot oven until the top of the potato is uniformly brown. Garnish a steak platter, or a dish of chops, with this browned potato. 136 POTATOES, EICE, AND MACARONI FRIED POTATOES They are very attractive fried whole. After they have been steamed or boiled in their skins and allowed to cool, peel them and drop them into a frying-pan with hot fat. It will take only a few minutes to brown them, if you keep the fire high, and turn them often. Salt them while they are browning. If you have a vegetable scoop, that will shape things into balls, you may use this on boiled potatoes before frying them, to make them into a decorative garnish. Otherwise, slice the po- tatoes, drop them into hot melted fat, salt them, and with a broad-bladed knife chop them as they brown, into small pieces. Have a brisk flame under the pan. Plain raw-fried potatoes can be prepared in about fifteen minutes. Have a tablespoonful of cooking-fat melted in the frying-pan. Pare and slice as finely as you can one or two large po- tatoes. Put them in the pan, salt them, and cover the pan tight. Let the potatoes cook over a moderately high flame, occasionally taking off the lid to turn the mass with a spatula, as the under side browns. Test the potatoes with 137 A PRIMER OF COOKING a fork, and as soon as they are soft and browned, serve them. HASHED BROWN POTATOES Hashed brown potatoes are an elaborated form of plain fried ones. They must be finely cut, so run them through the meat grinder. Mix with them a small ground onion, salt, pepper, and ground parsley. Melt butter or cooking- fat in a frying-pan, — ^not more than a table- spoonful for four potatoes, — and when the fat is hot drop the potatoes in. With a spatula flatten the mass down into a roll at one side of the pan. When it is brown underneath turn it, keeping the roll as compact as possible. Brown the second side, and serve immediately. POTATOES AU GRATIN Potatoes au gratin are baked creamed pota- toes, with cheese and bread crumbs added. Peel and cut into dice two or three boiled po- tatoes. Make a cream sauce with one table- spoonful each of butter and flour and a cup of milk. When this is thick and seasoned drop the potatoes into it. Grease a baking-dish, put a layer of bread crumbs in the bottom of it, 138 POTATOES, EICE, AND MACARONI then a layer of creamed potatoes. On top of this put a layer of mild cheese cut into slivers. Repeat the layers until the potato is all used. Put a few bread crumbs on top. Set the baking- dish, uncovered, in a hot oven until the top crumbs are brown. When you are frying steak or chops you can very easily cook potatoes with the meat. (See Pages 89 and 91.) But it will be necessary to have them sliced very fine so that the pieces will not be more than an eighth of an inch thick. A good plan is to cut each potato in strips lengthwise, then cut each strip into a number of small strips. Put these in the pan with the cooking-fat about five minutes before you put the meat in. Salt them and let them cook with a moderately slow fire with a lid on the pan. They will cook in their own liquid. When you put in the meat, pile the potatoes to one side of the pan, as much away from the hottest flame as possible. Or you can take them out of the pan and heat them up again after the meat is cooked. Serve the potato strips as a garnish for the meat. Sweet potatoes are more decorative for this purpose than Irish ones, 139 A PRIMER OF COOKING RICE Rice, to be dry and flaky, must be cooked rapidly in plenty of boiling salted water. Half a cupful of rice will make about two cupfuls, cooked. Wash the rice by holding it under cold running water in a wire colander. "When the salted water is boiling fast, drop the rice in and leave the lid off the pan while the rice cooks. Twenty-five minutes' boiling should be enough to make it soft. Drain it in a wire colander and turn it into a tureen. Put dabs of butter on top of it, then cover the tureen. A half-cupful of rice will, when boiled, be enough for two persons. MACARONI AND NOODLES Cook macaroni and noodles — unless you are cooking them in soup — just as you cook rice. Wash them first, break them up, then boil them rapidly for about twenty-five minutes. Drain them. Reheat them in a brown sauce, or in tomato sauce with a piece of cheese melted in it, or simply fry them brown in hot butter and serve them with Parmesan cheese grated over them. 140 POTATOES, EICE, AND MACARONI One third of a standard package of macaroni or noodles will serve two persons. HOW MANY POTATOES TO USE Steamed or boiled, two small ones to a per- son. Baked, one large one or two small ones. Stuffed, two to a person. Mashed, one large one or two small ones for each person to be served, with two more added. Fried, one or less for each person. An gratin, one or less for each person. Raw-fried, one small one for each person. 141 VII GEEEN VEGETABLES Of vegetables in general the most important fact to be remembered is that they should not be served with cream sance. Peas, carrots, lima beans, and string-beans, asparagus, and even mushrooms are all too often merged into one individuality by being heated in a thick white sauce which calls at- tention only to itself. These vegetables have delicate flavors of their own, each one distinct. It is only by developing the flavors that you can use them to advantage. When the vegetables are new and green their delicacy is of course more marked. Cook them the day they are picked, if possible, or at least before they are more than two days old. Peas, lima beans, and string-beans, carrots, and as- paragus should be put to cook in a covered saucepan with barely enough boiling salted 142 GEEEN VEGETABLES water to cover them. Let them simmer until they are soft (the time will vary with the vege- tables). Just before they are done add a little butter to them, and when this has been thor- oughly absorbed, they will be ready to serve. Carrots, before being cooked, must be pared and cut into dice. Any of these vegetables may be reheated, after being cooked until soft, in a frying-pan with steak or chops. (See Pages 89 and 91.) This will bring out their flavor and give them the tang of the meat. Mushrooms are so soft in their natural state that they will need only this one cooking to make them ready for the table. Cut them fine and leave them in the fry- ing-pan with the meat for five or six minutes. There are more complex ways of reheating vegetables, either fresh or canned. One way is to make a sort of soup of an onion sliced and fried slowly in butter until it is soft. A cup of water is added and allowed to come to a boil. Put the vegetable in this (asparagus is espe- cially good treated so) and as soon as the mix- ture is hot turn it into a tureen to serve. Cover with bits of butter, before taking to the table. 143 A PRIMER OF COOKING BEETS Beets, if they are new ones, will need from an hour to an hour and a half to soften ; old beets must cook for several hours. Before putting the beets to boil wash them and cut olf the tops, leaving about an inch of the stem on the beet. After they have softened in plenty of boiling, salted water, drain them, plunge them for a few minutes into cold water, and skin them. They are ready then to be reheated for the table. This sauce is very often used for them. Melt a tablespoonful of butter in a saucepan, add to it a tablespoonful of flour, blend the two, stir into them half a cup of vinegar and a table- spoonful of sugar. Into this, when it has boiled, drop the beets, sliced. Serve hot. Beets may be warmed up in butter alone, with lemon-juice squeezed over them while they are in the pan. 6BEEN OOBN Com on the cob will cook in boiling (salted) water, in about twenty minutes. CABBAGE If you are going to cook cabbage, cut it into 144 GEEEN VEGETABLES quarters first, and take out the hard center. Have salted water boiling hard, in a wide cook- ing kettle. Drop the pieces of cabbage in and leave the lid off the pan while the cabbage cooks fast for twenty minutes. Cooked in this way the cabbage will have scarcely any odor. Drain the cabbage when it is done, and pre- pare it for the table by chopping it with a knife and spoon until it is minced. Then make a cream sauce (See Page 56). Cabbage is the one exception to the cream-sauce rule; this is be- cause its flavor is vigorous enough not to be dominated. Season the sauce and put the minced cabbage in it. Put the cabbage and sauce in a greased flat baking-dish and set it under the flame of the oven grill until it is brown on top. CELERY Celery makes a dainty cooked vegetable. Like mushrooms, it can be cooked enough by including it in a frying-pan with meat. Treated in this way it will still keep some of its crisp- ness and get brown, as it cooks. If it is boiled in salted water for twenty minutes it will be soft. Drain it, — ^being sure to keep the cook- 145 A PKIMER OF COOKING ing-water to use for a sauce at another meal, — and reheat it in a brown or a cheese sauce, or simply fry it in butter and add a half-teaspoon- ful of tomato sauce to it just before you take it from the fire. Celery needs a pungent sea- soning. OAimED VEGETABLES Canned vegetables need only to be drained and reheated in melted butter, in a frying-pan with meat, or in casserole combinations. BASED BEAirS Dried navy beans must be washed and soaked over night in cold water. One cupful will make a medium-sized baking-dish full of baked beans. After the beans have soaked, drain them and cook them in boiling salted water until they are soft, which will be in about an hour and a half. Then light the oven, with a moderately hot flame. Put the beans, with enough of their cooking-water to cover them, in a shallow bak- ing-dish, — or in a bean-pot if you have one, — • and add two table spoonfuls of molasses and two slices of either bacon or salt pork. Put the baking-dish or the pot in the oven and bake un- til the beans get brown and absorb most of the 146 GREEN VEGETABLES water around them. Keep adding hot water if they get dry before they are brown. They will require from one hour to an hour and a half to bake. DRIED LIMA BEANS Dried lima beans will not need to soak over- night. After you have washed them under run- ning water, in a colander, put them to cook in just enough boiling salted water to cover them. Let them simmer with a lid on the pan for two hours, or until they are soft. To serve them, pour off (and save, for cooking purposes), all their water but a cupful. Stir a teaspoonful of cornstarch with a teaspoonful of cold water in a cup until the cornstarch is dissolved. Add it slowly to the beans and stir them until they come to a boil. Serve in a covered tureen. TOMATOES Fresh tomatoes make a very substantial dish, baked. Wash them, cut off a slice from the stem end, and scoop out a spoonful of the in- side. Salt the hollow, and fill it with crumbled bread, seasoned with salt and sweetened with a pinch of granulated sugar. Put the tomatoes 147 A PRIMER OF COOKING in a shallow baking-dish, containing a cupful of hot water, and bake in a hot oven, uncovered, until the tomatoes are soft and the bread crumbs brown. Canned com or green beans of any- kind may be used for a stuffing instead of bread. Or you can fry tomatoes. Wash them and cut them into thick slices, making only three slices out of one tomato. Put these in a fry- ing-pan with two table spoonfuls of melted fat, flour each slice, and fry them until they are soft, over a slow fire. Serve them either alone or on hot toast. If you like you can make a sauce to go over them by mixing half a table- spoonful of flour with the grease in the pan, then pouring on enough cold water to make a thin sauce. Add some chopped parsley and seasoning and let the sauce come to a boil. Pour it over the fried tomatoes. ONIONS Onions may be stuffed and baked just like tomatoes. Tomatoes themselves make a good stuffing for the onions. Use only a teaspoonful of stewed tomato to each onion. Bake the on- ions in a shallow pan in a little hot water or milk. 148 GEEEN VEGETABLES HOW MANY VEGETABLES TO BUY A standard can of vegetables will serve three or four persons. One cup of dried lima-beans will make enough for two. One pound of green peas will serve two. One-half pound of string beans will serve two. One pint of green lima-beans (shelled) will serve three. Two medium-sized carrots will serve two. One bunch of asparagus will serve two. One bunch of beets, or a pound of old ones, will serve three or four. Allow two or more ears of com to a person. One large head of cabbage will serve four persons. One pound of tomatoes, or two or three large ones, baked, will serve two. Two medium-sized ones, fried, will serve two. Sliced, one large one will be enough for two Allow one or two onions, either baked oi: stewed, to a person. 149 VIII SALADS To be able to make salads comfortably and on short notice you will need a medium-sized mixing-bowl, an egg-beater, a wooden fork and spoon, a pair of kitchen scissors, a lettuce bag made of mosquito netting or some other loosely woven goods, and a soft napkin to dry lettuce in. Think of salad as something crisp and cold, — the most succulent part of dinner. Plan it to fill its place adequately but not too well: a heavy fruit salad with mayonnaise would make your dinner top-heavy, unless the salad were to be salad and dessert in one; and a fish or a meat salad would be inappropriate. Potato salad with dinner would not only be too heavy, but it would more than likely repeat the potato element which had been served with the main course. Make your salads so that they will be easy to eat. Shredding the lettuce will help, and 150 SALADS dicing the vegetables or fruit. Tomatoes, if they are served whole, should have their skins taken off first to make them soft enough to be cut with a fork. There are two basic salad dressings. And these tend to separate salads themselves into two main divisions. French dressing, made of an oil and an acid, with seasoning, is generally used with light salads, — those made of lettuce alone, or of lettuce with some light added ele- ment such as asparagus tips or string-beans in small quantity. Mayonnaise goes with sub- stantial fruit and vegetable salads, tuna fish, and salmon. FB£NCH DBESSINQ French dressing is so easy to make that it is much better to mix it fresh every time you need it than to make it in quantity and set it away. It should not simply be poured over the salad ingredients. That would not mix it with them. It would leave the oil and the acid separate, and the seasoning half with the oil, half with the acid. French dressing should be made and added to the salad all in one operation. If the salad is to be of lettuce and a small 151 A PRIMEK OF COOKING quantity of some cooked vegetable, — ^beets, for instance, — shred the lettuce, after you have dried it in a napkin, and put it in the mixing- bowl. Pour a teaspoonful of vinegar or lemon- juice into the bowl and stir vigorously with a wooden spoon until the lettuce has been well moistened with it. Put a pinch of salt in the spoon, fill the spoon with oil, and with the fork stir the oil until the salt is dissolved. Then add the oil to the lettuce and stir the salad again. Sprinkle with white pepper and paprika. Add the sliced or diced beets, toss them around once or twice to let them absorb the dressing, — ^but not forcefully enough to force out their juices, — and serve the salad at once. Never mix lettuce with French dressing un- til just before you want to serve it. The acid will draw the water from the lettuce and wilt it. But if you are going to serve a heavy salad of vegetables with French dressing, — a salad in which the lettuce is only for garnishing, — mix the vegetables with the dressing at least half an hour before the meal. This gives them time to absorb the oil and vinegar thoroughly. At the last minute put the salad on lettuce. 152 SALADS VABIATIONS OF FRENCH DRESSING Plain French dressing may be varied by the addition of new seasonings. Worcestershire sauce may be used with the vinegar, half and half. If you chop up a branch of parsley and a sour pickle or a stuffed olive, and add them to the salad when you add the vinegar, you will have a vinaigrette dressing, which will do very well to serve with left-over fish or with a tart salad of apples and cream cheese. With salads of fruit, lemon-juice is better to use than vine- gar because it is milder. With lettuce alone, vinegar will be better. Catsup, tomato sauce, ground onion, dry mustard, chopped capers, and orange-juice may all be used, with discre- tion, at different times. If the salad ingredi- ents are insipid, try to supply piquancy with the dressing. MAYONNAISE Mayonnaise dressing may be mixed cold or boiled. There will be a difference in the taste. Boiled mayonnaise, although it may have oil added to it after it cools, will lack the smooth- ness and the gliding quality of oil mayonnaise. It is much lighter in composition, softer and 153 A PEIMER OF COOKING more delicate. For sandwich-making, for fruit salads that are to be served with whipped cream after the dressing is added, and for salmon salad, boiled mayonnaise might be more pal- atable. BOILED MAYOKNTAISE Boiled mayonnaise is made in this way: Cream together in a saucepan one tablespoon- ful each of butter, sugar, and flour, one half teaspoonful of salt and one half teaspoonful of mustard. Add the yolk of one egg, unbeaten. "When the egg is mixed with the rest, add three fourths of a cup of milk slowly, stirring it as you pour. Then set the pan over a slow fire and bring the mayonnaise gradually to a boil, stirring it continually. As it heats, add little by little a fourth of a cup of vinegar. The mayonnaise is done when it has boiled up once, and is smooth. Set it in a cool place. After it is cold, you can stir oil into it, if you like, to make it richer. OIL MAYONNAISE To make oil mayonnaise that will not sepa- rate during the making, you have only to add the acid ingredient before you add the oil. 154 SALADS This partly curdles the egg and makes it re- ceptive of the oil. Put in a cold mixing-bowl a half-teaspoonful each of salt, dry mustard, and powdered sugar, a pinch of white pepper, and a pinch of paprika. Mix these seasonings and add to them one and a half tablespoonfuls of either vinegar or lemon- juice. Add to them the yolk of one egg and beat the whole with an egg-beater. When it is blended, add the oil, — preferably olive-oil, but, lacking it, any reliable vegetable oil, — at first by the tablespoonful, then, as the mayonnaise thickens, in larger quantities. Altogether a cup and a half of oil may be absorbed by the egg. If the mixture will not thicken at first, which happens occa- sionally, set the bowl in the ice-box for an hour or so. You will find the mayonnaise thick, when you take it out again. VARIATIONS OF MAYONNAISE With either boiled or oil mayonnaise as a foundation you can make other dressings. Thousand-island dressing is mayonnaise with a teaspoonful of tomato sauce in it and either pickles or olives chopped with a branch of cel- ery and a teaspoonful of capers. Tartar sauce 155 A PRIMER OF COOKING is made by adding to mayonnaise a pinch of mustard, some chopped parsley, a teaspoonful of onion juice, and a chopped hard-boiled egg. For fruit salad you can make a fluffy dressing by beating sweetened whipped cream into the mayonnaise. Keep your mayonnaise in a covered glass jar or earthenware bowl, in the ice-box. As soon as you get lettuce home from the store prepare it for salad-making. Wash it under cold running water and separate the leaves. If it is head lettuce, cut off and throw away the stem. If it is Chinese lettuce (a com- paratively new product in this country, — a heavy, succulent lettuce with a thick stalk and pale green leaves), take off the outer leaves, but let the center of the stalk remain intact. This may be sliced down crosswise, as you need it, as cabbage is sliced. Place the washed let- tuce in a lettuce bag or wrap it loosely in a nap- kin, and put it on ice. If there is no ice, keep it in a bowl of cold water, covered. Treat celery in the same way. Separate and wash every stalk, cutting off the leaves to be used for sauce-making or in cream-of-celery 156 SALADS soup. Save the centers of heart celery for serv- ing as a relish on the table. Put away the smaller stalks to make into stuffed celery as an hors d'ceuvre at lunch. Slit the big stalks down lengthwise into two or three strips. This will make them crisp and curly. Keep the cel- ery on ice. Cucumbers, when they are in season, may sometimes take the place of lettuce in salads. Wash the cucumber and run a fork lengthwise over the whole surface of the skin. Then peel the cucumber and slice it, and you will find that the edges of each slice are attractively scal- loped. Keep the slices in cold salted water for an hour before using them._ Eadishes may be sliced or peeled and served whole. To prepare tomatoes for a salad, wash them and drop them into boiling water off the stove. Leave them for a few minutes, then take them out and plunge them into cold water. The skins will now come off easily. Set the toma- toes in the ice-box to get cold and firm. Cabbage, if it is to be used in salads, should 157 A PEIMER OF COOKING be kept either in the ice-box, wrapped in a cloth to keep its odor from the other food, or in some other cool place. To make it into cold slaw, slice it down crosswise of the head and chop it in a bowl. Mix it with boiled mayonnaise, sweetened with a little powdered sugar. The theory of salads is simple. It consists in serving in a cold, highly seasoned form any kind of food material that you have on hand. So a wide variety of kinds of salad is pos- sible. You cannot divide salads into fruit, vegetable, fish, meat, or plain lettuce, with ac- curacy, because these all overlap. Vegetables might belong in your salad of cold chopped veal, a few pieces of tart apple would give flavor to your vegetable salad, fish salad might need vegetables with it, and plain lettuce is much im- proved by both meat and fish. The question you have to decide continually is the question of assortment and flavoring: What elements combine successfully? Which dressing should the salad have, French dress- ing or mayonnaise? — or both? You must take the matter of salad seriously. It will make a big difference whether the string- 158 SALADS beans are put together with oil and vinegar or with mayonnaise. Beets will lose all character if they are mixed with mayonnaise. Sometimes a salad will be quite without a crisp element; when you might easily have added to it either celery or nuts. Since flavor and seasoning are so important, you must be ingenious in distributing them. If, for example, you are making a salad of several kinds of fruit, — ^bananas, say, and fresh peaches and Malaga grapes, — instead of cutting the fruit all up and adding mayonnaise to it in a mass, make the salad interesting and unex- pected by diffusing the dressing. In the bot- tom of the salad bowl lay lettuce leaves. Put a spoonful of mayonnaise on them. Peel the bananas and slice them in thin strips length- wise. Squeeze lemon-juice over the strips and lay them on the lettuce. Then cut up the peaches into slivers and stir them thoroughly with sweetened mayonnaise. Distribute them well over the bananas. Finally drop the grapes — seeded, and sprinkled with lemon-juice — on top of the salad. In this way, you see, the bananas will be covered with mayonnaise be- 159 A PRIMER OF COOKING cause they are covered with peaches. Yet they will keep their own lemon flavor, too. This scheme of double dressing may be ap- plied to vegetable salads. Let the vegetables stand for half an hour in French dressing. Then shred lettuce, mix it with mayonnaise, and stir it up among the vegetables. Serve with a dab of mayonnaise on top of the salad. 160 rx DESSERTS Desserts, like soups and salads, must be adapted to dinner with a nice calculation of the need they are to supply. There are pies, cus- tards, and puddings to give heaviness to a meal; and tarts, fruit whips, and gelatine to give delicacy. Customs differ in households, and many peo- ple prefer to bring the dessert to the table in one bowl, and serve it there. But individual desserts are daintier, offer wider opportunity for decoration, and are economical and dietet- ically correct. There is this psychology behind the idea of individual desserts: the sight of an individual dessert — a cup custard, a molded bread-pud- ding, a tart, a garnished slice of pie — somehow implies that personal, special consideration has been given to the one who is to eat it ; that the amount of the dessert has been carefully gaged 161 A PRIMER OF COOKING to round out a finished and adequate meal; in short, the individual dessert is a compliment. Of all cooked desserts custards are the sim- plest and the most quickly made. They are made with milk, sugar, and a flavor- ing element, and are thickened with either eggs or corn-starch, or with both. PLAIN CUSTABD To make a plain, eggless custard for two peo- ple, put half a pint of milk in a saucepan with a heaping tablespoonful of sugar. Set this over a moderate fire. In a cup mix half a tablespoonful of corn-starch with a tablespoon- ful of milk. Stir the milk and the sugar until they just reach the boiling-point. Then pour the dissolved corn-starch into them and turn the flame down low. Stir the custard for sev- eral minutes longer, then take it from the fire, add a quarter of a teaspoonful of vanilla, and pour into custard cups or sherbet glasses to cool, ready to serve. This will need some decorative feature, such as a teaspoonful of canned cherries, or of apple jelly, or two or three slices of banana in the center of each custard, added after it has cooled. 162 DESSEETS Or shredded cocoanut may be scattered over the top. COFFEE CUSTABD To make this same custard flavored with cof- fee, put half coffee and half milk in the sauce- pan with the sugar and proceed as before. Use fresh, strong coffee, well strained. OHOOOLATE CUSTABD To make chocolate custard, put a tablespoon- ful of cocoa in the saucepan first, add just enough milk to dissolve it, then gradually stir in the rest of the milk. Add the sugar and proceed as before. It will lighten and improve chocolate custard to beat half a dozen soft marshmallows into it, while it is still hot. Gar- nish the cold custards with marshmallows cut into pieces. EGG CUSTARD Custards made with egg will of course have more nourishment in them. They are made in the proportion of two eggs to one pint of milk. If you omit one egg you may substitute for it half a tablespoonful of corn-starch to supply the quota of thickening. Separate an eggy put- ting the white in a bowl ready for beating. Put 163 A PEIMEE OF COOKING the yolk in a saucepan. Stir the yolk and add to it a tablespoonful of sugar, then, gradually, half a pint of milk. Put the saucepan over a medium fire and stir until the custard thickens. Never let it boil. Keep it at the simmering- point. Add vanilla after you have taken it from the fire. Beat the white of egg^ sweeten it with a pinch of sugar, and pour the hot custard over it. Stir gently, to let the white of egg come to the top of the custard. Then pour the mixture into serving cups and set it away to cool. This is called floating island. Coffee or chocolate custard may both be made with egg if you want them to have more body to them. If you make a pint of custard and use only one eggj add the corn-starch when the custard first reaches the bubbling point. CUP CUSTARDS For cup custards use the same proportions as for boiled ones. Mix the custard in a bowl, putting in first the whole eggy then the sugar, the corn-starch if one egg is omitted or if no egg is used, the flavoring, and lastly the milk. 164 DESSERTS Dissolve the corn-starch in milk before adding it. When the materials are blended ponr them into small, buttered baking-dishes. Set these in a pan of hot water and bake in a slow oven until a knife inserted in a custard will come out with a clean blade. Half a pint of milk will make two cup custards. PUDDINGS A pudding is usually a heavier dessert than a custard. It is made with some dominant ma- terial, — rice, bread or fruit. It may be steamed or baked. Unlike custards, puddings are better baked in one mass, ready to be sliced into individual servings after they are cold. A pudding needs the richness that bulk cooking can give it. Have your baking-dishes of tin, aluminum or earthenware. KICE-PUDDING Rice-pudding is the most quickly mixed. Grease a baking-dish and put in it one table- spoonful of washed rice to half a pint of milk. Add a pinch of nutmeg and three tablespoon- fuls of sugar. Cover the dish and bake in a very slow oven until the rice is soft and has ab- 165 A PEIMEK OF COOKING sorbed the milk, and the pudding has browned on top. This will serve two. BREAB-PUDIXQTO Bread-pudding, made well, is far from being a conunon dish. Grease a small baking-dish and put in it a cupful of crumbled bread, — preferably not too fresh. In a bowl beat the yolk of an egg with a cup of milk. Pour this over the bread and stir in a tablespoonful of seeded raisins, being careful to cover the raisins with milk and bread, so they will not be exposed directly to the heat of the oven. Lastly, add half a cup of either brown or granulated sugar. Bake in a moderate oven until the pudding is set and brown. Then beat the white of eg^, slightly sweetened, and spread it over the top of the pudding. Return it to the oven and let the meringue brown. Serve the pudding either hot or cold. This amount is for two. This is the basis of bread pudding. Using it, you may elaborate or change it as you wiU. You may put strawberry jam in it instead of raisins, or cold cocoa instead of milk. Or you may bake it without fruit, — using a fraction 166 DESSEETS more sugar, — and serve it with chocolate sauce, made by melting a cake of sweet chocolate in a quarter of a cup of milk. Or you can make a marshmallow sauce for it out of ten marshmal- lows melted in a tablespoonful of milk. PEACH-PUDDING To make a pudding out of fresh or canned fruit, the simplest way is to use a plain muffin batter, highly sweetened. If you want to make a peach-pudding, for instance, pare and slice four peaches and squeeze over them the juice of half a lemon. Add a pinch of powdered clove. In a mixing-bowl beat one eggy and add two tablespoonfuls of sugar to it and half a cup of milk. Sift in one cupful of flour and a heap- ing teaspoonful of baking-powder. Beat, add the peaches, and pour into a greased baking- dish. Bake in a moderate oven until the pud- ding is brown. Serve with a sauce made by cooking two tablespoonfuls of sugar with four tablespoonfuls of water and the juice of half a lemon, — thickened, after several minutes' boiling, with a level teaspoonful of corn-starch dissolved in a little cold water. This quantity will serve four people. 167 A PEIMEE OF COOKING DATE-PUDDING There are modifications of plain fruit pud- dings, in which less flour and relatively more eggs are used. They are richer in composition. Such a pudding is made with dates and nuts. Beat one egg with a pinch of salt, add half a cup of sugar to it, half a cup of seeded and chopped dates, a quarter of a cup of chopped nut meats, and a tablespoonful of flour sifted with half a teaspoonful of baking-powder. Beat together and pour into a buttered baking-dish. Bake in a slow oven for about twenty minutes or until the pudding is set. Serve with whipped cream. This quantity of ingredients will make only two portions. The same pudding may be made with cooked prunes instead of dates, or with apricots or any canned or fresh fruit. You can see that it is only a sweetened souffle, with the addition of flour and baking-powder. APPLE-PUDDING There is another kind of fruit pudding, too, that is made without flour or eggs or any liquid. It depends upon fruit juices for moistening. 168 DESSERTS So watery fruits, like apples and pears, should be chosen for it. To make one of these, with apples, butter a baking-dish and put in the bot- tom of it slices of pared and cut-up apples, sprinkle them plentifully with granulated sugar and cinnamon, then cover with raisins. Repeat the layers, leaving a layer of sugar on top. Cover the baking-dish and bake in a quick oven until the apples are soft and glazed by the melted sugar. Take them out of the oven and set marshmallows over the top. Return to the oven to brown the marshmallows, with the lid off the baking-pan. Serve the pudding hot, with a lemon sauce. Four apples will make a pudding for four people. FRUIT WHIP Under the head of puddings might fall fruit whips, which are much too fragile in construc- tion to be called puddings, properly, but which are baked, and served with a sauce. They are made with the white of egg^ alone. Beat the whites of two eggs very stiff, add two tablespoonfuls of sugar and two tablespoonfuls of flour sifted with a teaspoonful of baking- powder. Drop in a cupful of chopped fruit, — 169 A PRIMER OF COOKING dates, prunes, peaches, cherries, bananas, or berries, — and pour immediately into a shallow greased baking-dish. Bake in a slow oven until the egg rises and browns slightly. Serve cold, in two sherbet glasses. When a sauce is served with fruit whip, it must necessarily be as light as the whip itself. Whipped cream sweetened and colored pink with a few drops of gelatine flavoring is ap- propriate. So is a sauce made of candied cher- ries, chopped and cooked with half a dozen marshmallows soaked in milk. Directions for making gelatine are always found on the package, and they differ with dif- ferent brands. Try to have several flavors of gelatine on hand, at once, so that you can make a little of each, to get a contrasting effect. Orange and strawberry together will be eaten with twice the relish of either flavor alone. And garnish your gelatine desserts with pieces of fruit, whipped cream, ground maca- roons, marshmallows. Never use nuts; gela- tine makes them soggy. If you beat gelatine with an egg-beater just 170 DESSERTS as it is beginning to harden you can double the quantity of it. You can beat whipped cream into it, too, or cold cocoa or coffee. PIES The most substantial of desserts is pie. And it is not hard to make ; it follows very definite, easy rules. To make the crust, first have spread out in front of you on an adequately large table space a big bread-board, a mixing-bowl, a rolling-pin, a pie pan, a small half -pint flour-sifter, baking- powder, butter, lard or any good vegetable fat, and a glass of cold water, a fork, and a sharp knife. First light the oven with a moderate flame. Then grease the pie pan and sprinkle flour over the bread-board. Into the mixing-bowl sift two half-pints of flour, putting two teaspoonfuls of baking-pow- der and half a teaspoonful of salt with the second sifterful. Add to this about half a cup of shortening (See Page 84), and with your fin- gers work at it until the flour has taken up the shortening and turned into a sort of coarse meal. Make a hole in the center of the flour 171 A PRIMER OF COOKING and pour into it a very little cold water. Make the flour and water into a big ball, adding more water if necessary. When the ball is compact enough to be picked up, divide it in two and lay half of it out on the floured board. Flour the rolling-pin and roll the dough out very flat, as nearly round as you can make it. Fit it over the buttered pie pan and with a sharp knife trim it around the edge of the pan. You are now ready tc put the ingredients of the pie in place. Suppose it to be apples, in this case. Pare and cut into small pieces about four good- sized apples, distributing them evenly over the pie crust. In the bowl that you mixed the dough in, put half a cup of sugar and two table- spoonfuls of flour. (The flour is to thicken the juice made by the apples and melting sugar. With apricots, peaches, or other less watery fruits flour is not needed.) Sprinkle the flour and sugar over the apples, add a pinch of either clove or cinnamon and a dab or two of butter. Then roll out the top pie crust and lay it over the apples. Trim the edge of the pan. Make indentations along the edge with a fork, and cut two or three short slashes in the top of the 172 DESSERTS pie, to allow the steam to escape during cook- ing. Bake the pie for about half an hour, in not too hot an oven. Test it, when the crust is brown, by sticking a fork in one of the slashes. If the apples are soft to the touch, the pie is done. It will be better not to cut the pie until it has cooled. A cream pie or a lemon pie is made with only a lower crust. Prepare half the usual amount of dough and spread the crust over the bottom of the pan. Bake the crust in a hot oven. When it is done, and has partly cooled, add the cream or lemon filling, with its meringue, and reheat to brown the meringue. The filling for a cream pie is the same as an egg custard. (Page 163.) A pint of milk will make enough custard for one pie. If you like, you can add half a cup of shredded cocoanut to the custard before pouring it into the pie shell. Instead of pouring the custard over the beaten egg whites, put the egg whites on top of the custard after it is in the pie shell. TABTS Tarts may very easily be made out of left- over scraps of pie dough. Roll the dough out 173 A PEIMER OF COOKING very thin and press it down over the reverse side of a muffin pan, greased beforehand. Bake in a hot oven. Take the shells carefully from the muffin rings and set them to cool. Just be- fore serving them fill them with fruit preserves or cooked custard. These same tart shells will do as patties for creamed oysters or meat. LAST-MINUTE DESSERTS Besides these cooked desserts, there are doz- ens of quick desserts, ready to be got together in a few minutes. Cheese and crackers make a reliable one. Fresh fruit is always a wise dessert. So are nuts and cluster raisins. Or you may have stuffed dates, fruit cup, an elab- orate sweet fruit salad, individual squares of devil's food cake with whipped cream and a candied cherry on top of each one, half a grape- fruit with a teaspoonful of jam in the center of it, salted nuts, or after-dinner mints. 174 INDEX SUBJECT PAGE Appetizers 47 Apple Pie 172 Apple Pudding 168 Apple Sauce 60 Asparagus 142 Bacon 28 Baked Beans 146 Baked Fish 112 Baked Meats 93 Baked Potatoes 135 Bass Ill Beans 142 Beette 144 Biscuit 35 Boiled Mayonnaise 154 Boiled Potatoes 134 Braised Chicken 128 Breaded Meats 94 Bread-Pudding 166 Broiled Chicken 125 Broiled Steak 90 Broth— Chicken 129 Buckwheat Cakes 32 Butter Cake 64 Butter Sauces 106 Cabbage 144-157 Cake 62 Canned-Fruit Marmalade 39 Canned Vegetables 146 Caramel Icing 71 Carrots 142-143 Casserole Dishes 99 SUBJECT PAGE Celery 145-156 Cereals 41 Cheese and Crackers.... 174 Cheese Sauce 108 Chicken 121 Chicken Broth 129 Chicken Fricassee 128 Chicken Pot Pie 129 Chicken Salad 130 Chinese Lettuce 156 Chocolate Cake 65 Chocolate Cookies 68 Chocolate Custard 163 Chocolate Icing 70-71 Chops 91 Cocoa 23 Coffee 22 Coffee Custard 163 Cookies 67 Cooking Fats 84 Corn Bread 36 Corn on Cob 144 Creamed Dishes 56 Cream Pie 173 Cream Sauce 56 Cream Soup 82 Croquettes 57 Cucumbers 157 Cup Cakes 66 Cup Custard 164 Custard (Eggless) 162 Date Pudding 168 Dates (Stuffed) 59 175 INDEX SUBJECT PAGE Desserts 161 Dried Lima Beans 147 Duck 130 Dumplings 98 Egg Custard 163 Eggs 24 Fish Ill Fish in Casserole 113 Flannel Cakes '32 Floating Island 164 Frankfurters 30 French Dressing 151 Fried Chicken 125 Fried Eggs 24 Fried Fish Ill Fried Oysters 119 Fried Potatoes 137 Fried Steak 88 Fritters 52 Fritto Misto 53 Fruit Salad 159 Fruit Whip 169 Gelatine 170 Giblets 130 Gingerbread 69 Goose 130 Grape Fruit 59 Green Corn 144 Green Vegetables 142 Grilled Fish 112 Halibut 114 Ham 29 Hash 54 Hashed Brown Potatoes 138 Hors d 'CEuvres 47 Hot Cakes 31 Icings Individual Desserts 70 161 Kitchen Bouquet 79 Kitchen Utensils 13 SUBJECT PAGE Lard 85 Last Minute Desserts. . . 174 Layer Cake 65 Left-overs, Use of 49 Lemon Pie 173 Lima Beans 142 Lima Beans (Dried) 147 Liver 91 Macaroni 140 Maple Syrup 33 Marmalade 39 Marshmallow Sauce 167 Mashed Potatoes 136 Mayonnaise 153 Meat Loaf 97 Meats 86 Meat Soup 79 Muffins 34 Mushrooms 143 Navy Beans 146 Noodles 140 Nuts 174 Oil Mayonnaise 154 Olive Oil 84 Omelet 25 Onions 148 Orange Marmalade 39 Oranges 59 Oysters— Fried 119 Oyster Soup 118 Peach Pudding 167 Peas 142 Perch Ill Pies 171 Plain Custard 162 Poached Eggs 26 Popovers 36 Potatoes 133 Potatoes au Gratin 138 Pot Pie— Chicken 129 176 INDEX SUBJECT PAGE Pot Roast 93 Poultry 121 Prunes 60 Pudding 165 Puree 81 Radishes 157 Radish Sauce 109 Raisins 174 Rice 140 Rice Pudding 165 Roast Beef 91 Roast Chicken 123 Roast Meats 96 Salads 150 Salmon Loaf 116 Salmon Pie 117 Sauces 103 Sauce Tartar 109 Sauce Vinaigrette 108 Sausage 29 Scrambled Eggs 26 Seasonings 79 Shad 112 Shortening 63 Souflle 50 Soup 78 Soup Seasonings 79 Spice Cake 66 Spices 79 Sponge Cake 63 Steak 88 SUBJECT PAGE Steamed Eggs 27 Steamed Potatoes 133 Stew 54-98 Strawberry Sauce 61 Stuffed Dates 59 Stuffed Fish 112 Stuffed Meats 94 Stuffed Peppers 47 Stuffed Potatoes 135 Syrup 33 Tartar Sauce 109-155 Tarts 173 Tea 22 Thousand Island Dress- ing 155 Timbales 50 Toast 37 Tomatoes 147-157 Trays 19 Trout Ill Tuna 117 Turkey 130 Utensils and Accessories 13 Vanilla Icing 71 Vegetable Fats 85 Vegetables 142 Vegetable Soup 81 Velvet Sauce 107 Vinaigrette Dressing . . . 153 Vinaigrette Sauce 108 177