Books and My Food: With Literary Quotations and Original Recipes for Every ..

PRUNES, to be eaten with meat, should not be sweetened. Soak a pound of carefully washed prunes in cold water over night. Put them into a stew-pan with a quart of fresh water, and two lemons that have been cut into thin slices, from which the seeds have been removed. Let them simmer gently for three hours. Serve cold. They are to be eaten with pork, veal or duck, in place of the sour apple-sauce usually served. MARCH i8th " Shall we pay respect to this haunch, Mr. Quin ?" — Charles Reade ("Peg Woffington"). A HAUNCH of mutton cooked with care gives a change from the leg and chops which are the usual winter resource. It should not be used till it has hung some time. Rub it well with vinegar several times the day before cooking it, when it should be covered with a thick paste of flour and water and cooked in a very slow oven for several hours. Three-quarters of an hour before eating it the paste should be removed and the mutton basted often. There will not be much gravy in the roasting-pan, so a brown or stock gravy should be made to serve with it. This * should give a juicy roast. Currant jelly should be passed with roast mutton. MARCH 19TH "Dear Mrs. B — Chops and tomato-sauce. Yours, Pickwick." — Charles Dickens ("Pickwick Papers"). TOMATO-SAUCE with more flavor than that usually served with chops is made by adding to one quart of canned tomatoes a chopped onion fried in a little butter and two cupfuls of strong brown soup, highly seasoned with salt and pepper. Cook for three hours on the side of the range. Strain through a puree-sieve. Return to the stove and thicken with a tablespoonful of flour rubbed into an equal quantity of butter. MARCH 20TH ''The meat o' the meal folk made some fifty years ago." — Browning ("Fifine at the Fair"). THIS is one of Browning's abstruse utterances which we might refer to the Browning Societies. In the meantime we may assume that meat o' the meal is plain flour, and may be used in making a flour-soup, which is better than its name sounds. Brown a tablespoonful of flour in the same quantity of melted butter. Pour into it a pint of milk and bring to the boil. Season with salt, red-pepper and parsley. After taking it from the fire stir through it the beaten yolk of an egg, A teaspoonful of onion- juice may be added if liked. MARCH 2IST "Do you put cayenne into your cream-tarts in India, sir?"— Thackeray ("Vanity Fair"). CAYENNE cannot be recommended as a flavoring for cream-tarts, but preserved ginger can be. Bake in round patty-pans a plain piecrust dough till a light golden brown. When cold pour into the pie-crust shells a cream made by stirring into a cup and a half of boiling milk two-thirds of a cup of sugar, two eggs, beaten lightly, whites and yolks together, and two tablespoonfuls of flour, made smooth with cold milk; a pinch of salt should be added when the cream has cooked for fifteen minutes and two tablespoonfuls of preserved or candied ginger, chopped fine. Put on each tart a small round of the pastry. MARCH 22D "Mrs. Bates, let me propose your venturing on one of these eggs. An egg boiled very soft is not unwholesome. Serle understands boiling an egg better than anybody . . . you need not be afraid, they are very small, you see — one of our small eggs will not hurt you.'' — ^Jane Austen ("Emma"). EVEN Mr. Woodhouse would have found eggs boiled in the following manner wholesome. "Serle" herself could not have improved upon it. Cover the eggs with boiling water, allow them to boil one minute, then move back to where the water remains at the boiling point but does not actually simmer. In five minutes remove from the fire, when the whites and yolks will be cooked to a jelly-like consistency, but not hardened. MARCH 23D «