Take six lemons and half a pound of sugar, and rub the sugar on the outside of three of the lemons; the lemons must be hard and yellow, the peel should not be shrivelled. Now squeeze the juice of all six lemons into a basin, add the sugar and a pint of water. Of course, the lemon-juice must be strained. (If wine is allowed, add half a pint of good golden sherry or Madeira.) Bring this to the boil and thicken it with some corn-flour in the ordinary way, allowing a tablespoonful of corn-flour for every pint of fluid. Pour it into a mould and when it is set turn it out. A lemon jelly like this should be turned on to a piece of ornamental paper placed at the bottom of a silver or some other kind of dish. The base of the mould should be ornamented with thin slices of lemon cut in half, the diameter touching the base of the mould and the semicircular piece of peel outside. If a round basin has been used for a mould, place a corner of a lemon on the top in the middle, surrounded with a few imitation green leaves cut out of angelica. This improves the dish in appearance and also shows what the dish is made of.
Pears known as cooking pears take a long time to stew. They should be peeled and the cores removed, and then stewed very gently in a syrup composed of half a pound of sugar to about a pint and a half of water; add a few cloves to the syrup, say two cloves to each pear. The pears will probably take from two to three hours to stew before they are tender. When tender add a glass of port wine and a little cochineal. If the pears are stewed, like they are abroad, in claret, add cinnamon instead of the cloves.
Take an onion, carrot, small head of celery, and some turnip, and boil them till they are tender in some stock. The water in which some rice has been boiled is very well suited for the purpose. Add also to every quart a brimming tablespoonful of mixed savoury herbs. Rub the whole through a wire sieve, thicken it with brown roux till it is as thick as cream; add a few drops of Parisian essence--(sold in bottles by all grocers)--to give it a dark colour. Add a wineglassful of sherry or Madeira, or, if the use of wine be objected to, the juice of a hard lemon. Flavour the soup with a little cayenne pepper, and serve some egg forcemeat balls in it, about the size of small marbles.
Ices are too often regarded as expensive luxuries, and show how completely custom rules the majority of our housekeepers. There are many houses where the dinner may consist daily of soup, fish, entrees, joint, game, and wine, and yet, were we to suggest a course of ices, the worthy housekeeper would hesitate on the ground of extravagance. It is difficult to argue with persons whose definition of economy is what they have always been accustomed to since they were children, and whose definition of extravagance is anything new. The fact remains, however, that there is many a worthy signor who sells ices in the streets at a penny each, and manages to make a living out of the profit not only for himself, but for his signora as well. Under these circumstances, the manufacture of these "extravagances" is worthy of inquiry. Ices can be made at home very cheaply with an ice machine, which can now be obtained at a, comparatively speaking, small cost. With a machine there is absolutely no trouble, and directions will be given with each machine, so that any details here, which vary with the machine, will be useless. Ices can be made at home without a machine with a little trouble, and, to explain how to do this, it is necessary to explain the theory of ice-making, which is exceedingly simple. We will not allude to machines dependent on freezing-powders, but to those which rely for their cold simply on ice and salt mixed. We will suppose we want a lemon-water ice, i.e., we have made some very strong and sweet lemonade, and we want to freeze it. It is well known that water will freeze at a certain temperature, called freezing-point. By mixing chopped ice and salt and a very little water together, a far greater degree of cold can be immediately produced, viz., a thermometer would stand at 32 degrees below freezing-point were it to be plunged into this mixture. An ice machine is a metal pail placed in another pail much larger than itself. The "sweet lemonade" is placed in the middle pail, and chopped ice and salt placed outside it. The proportion of ice to salt should be double the weight of the former to the latter. It is now obvious that if we have filled two pails, the one with "the sweet lemonade," and the other with the ice and salt, very soon our lemonade will be a solid block of ice. To prevent this it must be constantly stirred, and, as the lemonade would of course freeze first against the sides of the pail, these sides must be constantly scraped. Inside the inner pail, consequently, there is a stirrer, which, by means of a handle, continually scrapes the side of the pail. It is obvious that if the stirrer is fixed, and the pail itself made to revolve, that is the same as if the pail were fixed and the stirrer made to revolve. To make lemon-water ice, therefore, place the lemonade in the inner pail, surrounded with chopped ice and salt, two parts of the former to one of the latter, turn the handle, and in a few minutes the ice is made. Now, suppose you have not got a machine, proceed as follows: Take an empty, clean, round coffee-tin (the larger the better). [We mention coffee-tin as the most probable one to be in the house, but any round tin will do.] Get a clean piece of wood, the same width as the inside diameter of the tin, only it must be a great deal longer. We will suppose the tin rather more than a foot deep and five inches in diameter. Our piece of wood, which should be clean and smooth, must be nearly five inches wide, say a quarter of an inch thick, and about two feet long. Next get a small tub, say nine inches deep, place the round tin in the middle, with the sweet lemonade inside; next place the piece of wood upright in the tin, so that the wood touches the bottom. Next surround the tin with chopped ice and salt up to the edge of the tub, fill it as high as you can, and then cover it round with a blanket, i.e., cover the ice and salt. Now get someone to hold the wooden board steady; take the tin in your two hands, and turn it round and round, first one way and then another. In a very short time you will find the tin to contain lemon-water ice. The following hints, rather than recipes, for making ices, i.e., for making the liquid, which must be frozen as directed above, are given, not because they are the best recipes, but because cream, which is the basis of all first-class ices, is often too expensive to be used constantly. Of course, real cream is far superior to any substitute.
12 small sponge cakes, 1/2 lb. jam, 1 pint of custard made with Allinson custard powder. Soak the sponge cakes in a little raisin wine, arrange them on a deep glass dish in four layers, spread a little jam on each layer and pour the custard round, decorate the top with candid cherries and almonds blanched and split.
The simplest way of making cinnamon sauce is to sweeten some butter sauce with some white sugar, and then add a few drops of essence of cinnamon. The sauce can be coloured pink with a little cochineal. A little wine is an improvement. The sauce can also be made by breaking up and boiling a stick of cinnamon in some water, and then using the water to make some butter sauce.
Peel some apples, cut them in slices across the core, and stamp out the core. It is customary, where wine, &c., is not objected to, to soak these rings of apples for several hours in a mixture of brandy, grated lemon or orange peel and sugar, or better still, to rub some lumps of sugar on the outside of a lemon or orange and dissolve this in the brandy. Of course, brandy is not necessary, but the custom is worth mentioning. The rings of apple can be soaked for some time in syrup flavoured this way. They must then be made dry by being dipped in powdered sugar, then dipped into batter and thrown, one at a time, into a saucepan containing smoking hot oil in which a wire frying-basket has been placed. Directly the fritters are a nice brown, take them out, break off the rough pieces, shake some finely powdered sugar over them, pile them up on a dish, and serve.
Like most soups that are either sweet or sour, this is a German recipe. Put a piece of butter, the size of a large egg, into a saucepan. Let it melt, then mix it with a tablespoonful of flour, and stir smoothly until it is lightly browned. Add gradually two pints of water, a pound of black cherries, picked and washed, and a few cloves. Let these boil until the fruit is quite tender, then press the whole through a sieve. After straining, add a little port, if wine is allowed--but the soup will be very nice without this addition--half a teaspoonful of the kernels, blanched and bruised, a tablespoonful of sugar, and a few whole cherries. Let the soup boil again until the cherries are tender, and pour all into a tureen over toasted sippets, sponge-cakes, or macaroons.
This is a sweet soup, and is simply juice from stewed rhubarb sweetened and flavoured with lemon-peel and added either to cream or beaten-up yolks of eggs and a little white wine. It is rarely met with in this country.
Take one large carrot, a small head of celery, one good-sized onion, and half a small turnip, and boil these in a quart of water till they are tender. Rub the whole through a wire sieve, and thicken the soup with some brown roux till it is as thick as good cream. Next add a brimming saltspoonful of aromatic flavouring herbs. These herbs are sold in bottles by all grocers under the name of Herbaceous Mixture. Flavour the soup with cayenne pepper, a glass of port wine (port wine dregs will do), dissolve in it a small dessertspoonful of red-currant jelly, and add the juice of half a lemon. N.B.--Aromatic flavouring herbs are exceedingly useful in cooking. It is cheaper to buy them ready made, under the name of Herbaceous Mixture. They can, however, be made at home as follows:--Take two ounces of white peppercorns, two ounces of cloves, one ounce of marjoram, one ounce of sweet basil and one ounce of lemon-thyme, one ounce of powdered nutmeg, one ounce of powdered mace, and half an ounce of dried bay-leaves. The herbs must be wrapped up in paper (one or two little paper bags, one inside the other, is best), and dried very slowly in the oven till they are brittle. They must then be pounded in a mortar, and mixed with the spices, and the whole sifted through a fine hair-sieve and put by in a stoppered bottle for use.
