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together, but not too wet. Place in a basin, tie a cloth over, and boil. Time: Four hours. Meat Cakes. Ingredients: Cold fowl, meat, or game, one cup bread crumbs, one teaspoonful anchovy paste, parsley, pepper and salt, one egg. Mode: Mince the meat very fine by passing it two or three times through the machine, taking out all skin and gristle. Add to it the bread crumbs, anchovy paste, parsley, pepper and salt, mix all well together. Flour your hands and fashion the meat into little flat cakes. Dip in beaten egg, then into bread crumbs, and fry in oil, or good dripping a light brown. Pile |
on the dish and garnish with fried parsley and snippets of pastry.
Rissoles. Ingredients: Some cold meat, fowl,or fish, boiled rice, one onion, a little parsley, egg, bread crumbs. Mode: Mince up some cold meat, or fowl, or fish, whichever you happen to have. Have your rice boiled, also the onion. Mix together well the meat, rice, onion, and chopped parsley, season with pepper and salt to taste. Make up into little flat cakes; dip them in flour, or better still, in egg, and then bread crumbs. Put plenty of dripping in a frying pan; when very hot drop in the rissoles, and fry till a nice brown. |
STEWING AND BRAISING.
VERY few so-called cooks make any difference between stewing and boiling. To make a stew they cut up the meat, add an onion, season with pepper and salt, and then pour in a good share of water, so that they won't have to bother again about it burning, put it over the fire and leave it till ten minutes or so before dinner, when they mix some flour and water, stir it into the stew and serve. The result is a most unappetising mess, unpleasant alike to the eye and palate.
Stewing is really boiling very slowly, simmering over a small fire to get all the goodness out of the meat, and yet have the whole fit to eat. Braising is also done very slowly, but in the oven, in a special pan made for the purpose. I have had one made lately, after an idea of my own. It is merely a tin pan, just large enough to hold a fowl easily, but I have a second pan for it to fit into, in which water is put, so that in reality it is a double pan, and the water prevents any burning. Servants are so careless; they put a thing in the oven, and leave it, never looking at it till it is time to serve the dinner. Of all stews, the very nicest for a family dinner is the Irish stew ; it can be made of any cold meat or chops, but should be mutton, if possible. The pieces trimmed off cutlets make as nice a stew as anything, if not too fat.
