A Monday Soup.
Strip all the meat from your chicken-bones, and set in a cool place, while you break the skeletons to pieces, and put in a soup-pot at the back of the range, with the dressing, skin, and gristly bits. Pour on three quarts of water and leave it to simmer—always covered—for three hours. Strain, rubbing the stuffing through the colander; cool and skim; return to the fire with a cupful of yesterday’s soup (there is always a little left over, if it is only saved from the swill-pail), also strained. Have ready six Boston crackers split and dried in the oven for half an hour, but not scorched. Butter these; lay in the heated tureen; pour upon them two cups of boiling milk, and let soak, covered, while you salt and pepper your soup, and add a little minced parsley. Should there not be dressing enough to thicken it well, stir in a little corn-starch, wet with milk. Boil up, and pour upon the crackers. This soup need not consume fifteen minutes of your time, and is very savory.
Scallop and Baked Eggs.
Mince your chicken, but not small; cover the bottom of a pudding-dish with fine crumbs; put in the chicken, wet with gravy and seasoned to taste; strew a good coating of crumbs on top, and this with butter-bits. Set, covered, in the oven. When the gravy bubbles to the surface remove the lid and break upon the scallop enough eggs to cover it well. Pepper and salt; lay a piece of butter on each, and bake until well “set.”
Mashed Potatoes.
Boil, mash, and whip to a cream with a fork, mixing in butter, milk, salt and a dust of pepper, as you go on. Serve in a deep dish.
Green Peas.
See Sunday of First Week in August.
Raw Cucumbers.
Pare; lay in ice-water one hour; slice and pile upon pounded ice in a glass dish, sending around condiments with them.
Huckleberry Cake.
This cake should have been made on Saturday. It keeps well, and is much better the second day than the first.
5 eggs; 3 cups of powdered sugar; 1 cup of butter; 1 cup of sweet milk; 4 cups of prepared flour; 1 teaspoonful mixed nutmeg and cinnamon; 2 cups of huckleberries dredged with flour; ¼ teaspoonful of soda stirred in boiling water and mixed with the milk.
Cream butter and sugar; add the beaten yolks, the milk, the flour, alternately, with the whipped whites, and, lastly, the dredged berries. Bake in small loaves, or in patty-pans, in a moderate oven, covering as it begins to brown. It takes a longer time to bake than plain cake.
Iced Coffee.
Make more coffee than needed for breakfast. Set by three or four cups of strong coffee, adding nearly one-third as much boiled milk, while both are hot. Set in ice, and, in serving, put a lump of ice in each glass.