Cookery for beginners

the fish while hot. Add also, when the potato has been rubbed until free from lumps, the beaten yolk of an egg. Work this in well with a wooden or silver spoon. Now stir in the chopped fish, a little at a time, mixing all together until you have a soft mass which you can handle easily. Drop a tablespoonful of the mixture on a floured pastry board, or a floured dish. Flour your hands, roll the fish and potato into a ball, and pat it into a cake, or make it as round as a marble. Lay these as you form them on a dish dusted with flour, and when all are made out, set in a cool place until morning. Half an hour before breakfast, have five or six great spoonfuls of sweet lard hissing hot in a frying-pan or doughnut-kettle. Put in the balls a few at a time, turn as they color; take them out when they are of a tawny brown, lay them in a hot colander set in a plate, and keep warm in the open oven until all are fried. A Breakfast Stew (very nice). Two pounds of lean beef. (The "second best cuts " may be used here.) A quarter of a medium-sized onion. A tablespoonful of browned flour. Half a teaspoonful each of minced parsley, summer savory, and sweet marjoram. As much allspice as will lie on a silver dime. One teaspoonful of Worcestershire sauce. One saltspoonful of made mustard. One saltspoonful of pepper. Strained juice of half a lemon. Cut the meat into pieces an inch square. Put it with the chopped onion into a saucepan with a pint of lukewarm water; cover closely and cook slowly, at least two hours and a half. The meat should not be allowed to boil hard at any time, and when done, be so tender that it is ready to fall to pieces. Pour the stew into a bowl, add the salt and pepper, cover it and set in a cool place until next morning. Then put it back into the sauce-pan, set it over a quick fire, and when it begins to boil, stir in the spice and herbs. (The latter may be bought dried and powdered at the druggist's if you cannot get them fresh.) Boil up sharply five minutes. The flour should be browned the day before, by spreading it on a tin plate and setting this on the stove, stirring constantly to keep it from burning black. Or a better way is, to set the tin plate in a hot oven, opening the door now and then to stir it. It is a good plan to brown a good deal — say a cupful of flour — at a time, and keep it in a glass jar for thickening gravies, etc. Wet up a heaping tablespoonful of this with three tablespoonfuls of cold water, the lemonjuice, mustard and Worcestershire sauce. Rub smooth and stir well into the stew. Boil two minutes longer to thicken the gravy and turn out into a deep covered dish. This is a good dinner, as well as breakfast dish. A teaspoonful of catsup is an improvement. \ VOLUME, instead of a single chapter, -^ ^ might be written upon the various methods of preparing what the French call '' rec/iatiff/s,*' and we speak of, usually con- » temptuously, as "warmed-over*' meats. Cold meat is seldom tempting except to the very hungry. Cold tongue, ham and poultry are well enough on picnics and as a side-dish at tea. At breakfast they are barely admissible; for a simple luncheon tolerable; for dinner hardly excusable. At the first and last meal of the day, the stomach craves something hot and relishable, A wife told me, once, with strong disgust e9 in the remembrance, that when her husband took her on the wedding-trip to visit his mother, a frugal Massachusetts matron, they were set down within half an hour after their arrival, to lunch on a cold eel-pie left from the day before. The daughter-in-law, forty years later, spoke feelingly of the impression of niggardliness and inhospitality made on her mind by the incident.