Giblet Soup.
Clean and cut the giblets of your fowls into three pieces each. Stew tender in a pint of water. Take the cake of fat from the broth set by yesterday. Put a half cupful aside for your macaroni sauce. Warm the rest and strain out the bones, etc. Return to the fire, boil up and skim, chop the giblets fine and put them in with the water in which they were boiled. Simmer a quarter of an hour; stir in half a cupful of fine, dry bread-crumbs. Season, if necessary; boil ten minutes longer, stirring often, and pour out.
Smothered Chickens.
Prepare the chickens as for broiling, splitting each down the back. Lay flat in a dripping-pan, pour a cupful of boiling water upon them; set in the oven and invert another pan over them, so as to cover them tightly. Roast half an hour, lift the cover and baste freely with butter. In ten minutes more, baste with gravy from the dripping-pan. In five more, with melted butter—abundantly—going all over the fowls. Keeping the chickens covered except while basting them, increase the heat, until you ascertain, by testing with a fork, that they are done. They should be coffee-colored all over, rather than brown. Dish, salt and pepper them; cover while you thicken the gravy with browned flour, adding a little hot water, pepper, salt, and chopped parsley. Boil up; put a few spoonfuls over the chickens—the rest in a gravy tureen.
They are extremely nice, if faithfully basted.
Macaroni with Tomato Sauce.
Break half a pound of macaroni into inch lengths. Cover with salted boiling water, and cook twenty minutes, or until tender. Have ready a sauce prepared as follows: open a can of tomatoes; take out half the contents and cut up very small. Add, with pepper and salt, and a little minced onion, to the half cup of broth reserved for this purpose, and stew together twenty minutes. Put the macaroni into a deep dish, stir well into it a large tablespoonful of butter. Add to the sauce two great spoonfuls grated cheese; boil once and strain over the macaroni, loosening the latter with a fork that the sauce may penetrate. Serve hot.
Potato Chips.
Peel and slice, round, some fine potatoes. Lay in cold water for one hour. Dry by laying them upon a dry towel and pressing with another. Fry in salted lard, quickly, to a delicate brown. Take out as soon as they are done; shake briskly in a hot colander to free them from fat, and send to table in a deep dish—uncovered—lined with a napkin.
Apple Cake.
- 2 cups of powdered sugar.
- 3 even cups of prepared flour.
- ½ cup of corn-starch, wet up with a little milk.
- ½ cup of butter, rubbed to a cream with the sugar.
- ½ cup of sweet milk.
- The whites of 6 eggs whipped stiff.
Add the milk to the creamed butter and sugar; then the corn-starch, lastly the flour and whites alternately. Bake in greased jelly-cake tins.
Filling.
- 3 tart pippins, grated.
- 1 beaten egg.
- 1 cup of sugar.
- Juice and grated peel of one lemon.
Beat sugar, egg, and lemon together. Grate the apples into this mixture. Put into a farina-kettle and stir until it boils. Cool before putting between the cakes.
Coffee
May to-day be passed with the cake.