Common-sense papers on cookery

In frying sweetbreads it should be borne in mind that the sweetbreads should be soaked some hours in water first, and then boiled for about five or ten minutes, according to their size, and placed in cold water to get cold. When cold they should be carefully dried, and egged and bread-crumbed like the Uses and Abuses of a Frying-pan. 19 fish, and then covered over with the bread-raspings, to ensure their being of a good and equal colour. Should the fat not be sufficient to cover them, they must be turned occasionally in the frying-pan. The fat, as before, must boil before they are put in. Tomato or rich brown sauce can be poured round them, or served separately, but should not be poured over them, as they should possess a dry golden-brown colour. We have now described some of the uses of the frying-pan, and have given an instance of both a thick and thin substance for frying; but what are its abuses? Cooks are very apt to use the frying-pan for what they ought not. Too often they will use it instead of the gridiron to cook a chop or a steak, and if there is one thing in the world utterly spoilt in the cooking, it is a good rump steak cooked in a frying-pan. Yet it will often be found, even in decent houses, that chops and steaks, especially the former, are cooked in this manner. A dish of chops appears, perhaps at lunch, the dish swimming in gravy, in which can clearly be tasted the ketchup that has been added. After a few minutes the gravy will be seen to be studded with blotches of grease about the size of wafers. The chops taste greasy and sodden, and the roof of the mouth becomes soon coated with hard mutton-fat. How different to a chop properly cooked on a Common-sense Cookery. gridiron ! Black outside, red in, and brought up on a hot plate, on to which about a tea-spoonful of clear red gravy may have run. The first mouthful you take ought to burn your mouth. Such is a mutton chop as it ought to be ; and there are often times when an invalid or a person of delicate appetite feels as if there is nothing else he can eat. It, however, requires a tolerably thick gridiron, a clear fire, and common sense. A singular instance of audacity in the way of cooking a steak occurred at a country inn where we were once unfortunate enough to try and dine. The waiter was a model of a dirty man in the right place. Everything was in unison- — table-cloth, forks, wine-glasses, and thumb-nails to match. He might have been the original for that admirable little sketch in Punch, where the elderly gentleman exclaims, “ Why, confound you ! you are wiping my plate with your pocket-handkerchief!” — the reply being, “Oh, it’s of no consequence, sir ; it’s only a dirty one!” We had a steak, the cooking of which completely baffled us. What possible method was adopted to make it what it was, we could not conceive. We made friends with the dirty man, and in time extracted the information that the cook always boiled the chops and steaks for a few minutes, previous to browning Uses and Abuses of a Frying-pan. them in a frying-pan. This, the waiter informed me, was a capital thing for the soup.