Cookery for beginners

and keeping it hot in the plate warmer or over boiling water. Add to the gravy left in the pot two tablespoonfuls of chopped parsley, a heaping tablespoonful of butter cut up in the same quantity of flour, half a teaspoonful of salt, and a quarter of a teaspoonful of pepper. Stir to a boil. Meanwhile, beat up an egg in a bowl, add a teaspoonful of cornstarch, and a small cupful of milk, and when these are mixed, a cupful of the boiling gravy. Beat hard and pour into the pot where is the rest of the gravy. Bring to a quick boil, take at once from the fire and pour over the chicken. Cover and let it stand over hot water three minutes before sending to table. Smothered Ohicken. The chicken must be split down the back as for broiling, washed well and wiped dry. Lay it, breast upward, in a baking pan; pour in two cups of boiling water, in which has been dissolved a heaping tablespoonful of butter, and cover with another pan turned upside down and fitting exactly the edges of the lower one. Cook slowly half an hour, lift the cover and baste plentifully with the butter water in the pan ; cover again and leave for twenty minutes more. Baste again, and yet once more in another quarter of an hour. Try the chicken with a fork to see if it is done. An hour and ten minutes should be enough for a young fowl. Baste the last time with a tablespoonful of butter; cover and leave in the oven ten minutes longer before transferring to a hot dish. It should be of a fine yellow brown all over, but crisped nowhere. Thicken the gravy with a tablespoonful of browned flour, wet up in a little water, salt and pepper to taste, boil up once and pour a cupful over the chicken, the rest into a gravy boat. There is no more delightful preparation of chicken than this. Boiled Corn Beef. Lay in clean cold water for five or six hours when you have washed off all the salt. Wipe and put it into a pot and cover deep in cold water. Boil gently twenty-five minutes per pound. When done, take the pot from the fire and set in the sink with the meat in it, while you make the sauce. Strain a large cupful of the liquor into a saucepan and set it over the fire. Wet a tablespoonful of flour up with cold water, and when the liquor boils, stir it in with a great spoonful of butter. Beat it smooth before adding the juice of a lemon. Serve in a gravydish. Take up the beef, letting all the liquor drain from it, and send in on a hot platter. (Save the pot-liquor for bean soup.) Boiled Mutton. Sew up the leg of mutton in a stout piece of mosquito net or of " cheese cloth ; " lay it in a pot and cover several inches deep with boiling water. Throw in a tablespoonful of salt, and cook twelve minutes to the pound. Take up the cloth with the meat in it and dip in very cold water. Remove the bag and dish the meat. Before taking up the mutton, make your sauce, using as a base a cupful of the liquor dipped from the pot. Proceed with this as you did with the drawn butter sauce for the corned beef, but instead of the lemon juice, add two tablespoonfuls of capers if you have them. If not, the same quantity of* chopped green pickle. IN attempting to make out under the above heading, a list of receipts, I have laid down my pen several times in sheer discouragement The number and variety of esculents supplied by the American market-gardener would need for a just mention of each, a treatise several times larger than our volume. I have, therefore, selected a few of the vegetables in general use on our tables, and given the simplest and most approved methods of preparing them. As a preface I transcribe from ** Common Sense in the Household" "Rules applicable TO THE COOKING OF ALL VEGETABLES." Have them as fresh as possible.