Potato soup is a very good method of using up the remains of cold boiled potatoes. Slice up a large onion and fry it, without letting it turn colour, with a little butter. Add a little water or stock to the frying-pan, and let the onion boil till it is tender. Boil a quart or more of milk separately with a couple of bay-leaves; rub the onion with the cold potatoes through a wire sieve and add it to the milk. You can moisten the potatoes in the sieve with the milk. When you have rubbed enough to make the soup thick enough, let it boil up and add to every quart a saltspoonful of thyme and a brimming teaspoonful of chopped blanched parsley. This soup should be rather thicker than most thick soups. When new potatoes first come into season, and especially when you have new potatoes from your own garden, it will often be found that mixed with the ordinary ones there are many potatoes no bigger than a toy marble, and which are too small to be boiled and sent to table as an ordinary dish of new potatoes. Reserve all these little dwarf potatoes, wash them, and throw them for five or ten minutes into boiling water, drain them off and throw them into the potato soup whole. Of course they must boil in the soup till they are tender. A little cream is a great improvement to the soup, and dried mint can be served with it, but is not absolutely necessary.
Wash some rice and then boil it for ten or eleven minutes in some milk, and let it stand till it has soaked up all the milk. The proportion generally is, as we have said before, a teacupful of rice to two breakfastcupfuls of milk; but as we shall want the rice rather moist on the present occasion, we must allow a little more milk. Now mix in some grated cheese and a little pepper and salt, place the mixture in a pie-dish, and cover the top with grated cheese, and place the pie-dish in the oven and bake till the top is nicely browned, and then serve. Some cooks add a good spoonful of made mustard to the mixture. Some persons prefer it and some don't; it is therefore best to serve some made mustard with the rice and cheese at table. Unless the mixture was fairly moist before it was put into the pie-dish, it would dry up in the oven and become uneatable.
When the remains of cheese have got very dry it is a good plan to use it up in the shape of stewed cheese. Break up the cheese and put it in a small stew-pan with about a quarter its weight of butter; add a little milk, and let the cheese stew gently till it is dissolved. At the finish, and when you have removed it from the fire, add a well-beaten-up egg. This can be served on toast, or it can be poured on to a dish and pieces of toasted bread stuck in it.
These are very similar to potato balls, only they should be smaller and more delicately flavoured. The potatoes are boiled and mashed, and, if the croquettes are wished to be very good, one or two hard-boiled yolks of eggs should be mixed with them. The mixture is slightly flavoured with shallot, savoury herbs or thyme, chopped parsley, and a little nutmeg. One or two fresh well-beaten-up eggs are now added, the mixture then rolled into small balls no bigger than a walnut. These are then dipped in well-beaten-up egg, and then bread-crumbed. The balls are fried a nice golden-brown colour and served. Potato cutlets are exactly the same, only instead of shaping the mixture into a little ball, the ball is flattened into the shape of a small oval cutlet. These are then egged, bread-crumbed, and fried, but before being sent to table a small piece of green parsley stalk is stuck in one end to represent the bone of the cutlet. These little cutlets, placed on an ornamental sheet of white paper, at the bottom of the silver dish, look very pretty. A small heap of fried parsley should be placed in the centre of the dish.
Take half a pound of curds and press the curds in a napkin to extract the moisture. Take also six ounces of lump sugar, and rub the sugar on the outside of a couple of oranges or lemons. Dissolve this sugar in two ounces of butter made hot in a tin in the oven; mix this with the curds, with two ounces of powdered ratafias and a little grated nutmeg--about half a nutmeg to this quantity will be required; add also six yolks of eggs. Mix this well together, and fill the tartlet cases, made from puff paste, and bake them in the oven. It is often customary to place in the centre of each cheese-cake a thin strip of candied peel. As soon as the cheese-cakes are done, take them out of the oven, and if the mixture be of a bad colour finish it off with a salamander, but do not let them remain in the oven too long, so that the pastry becomes brittle and dried up. These cheese-cakes can be made on a larger scale than the ordinary one so familiar to all who have looked into a pastry-cook's window. Suppose we make them of the size of a breakfast saucer, a very rich and delicious cheese-cake can be made by adding some chopped dried cherries to the mixture. Sometimes ordinary grocer's currants are added and the ratafias omitted. Sultana raisins can be used instead of currants, and by many are much preferred. This mixture can be baked in a shallow pie-dish and time edge of the dish lined with puff paste, but cheese-cakes made from curds are undoubtedly expensive.
3 oz. macaroni, which should be boiled in milk until quite tender, place in a buttered pie-dish, and pour over a pint of custard made with Allinson custard powder, bake for 1/2 hour and serve either hot or cold.
Endive is generally used as a salad, but is very nice served as a vegetable, stewed. White-heart endives should be chosen, and several heads will be required for a dish, as they shrink very much in cooking. Wash and clean the endives very carefully in salt and water first, as they often contain insects. Boil them in slightly salted water till they are tender, then drain them off, and thoroughly extract the moisture; put them in a stew-pan with a little butter, pepper, salt, and nutmeg, let them stew for some little time; add the juice of a lemon, and serve. It will make the dish much prettier if you reserve one head of endive boiled whole. Place the stewed endive on a dish, and sprinkle some chopped blanched parsley over it, then place the single head of endive upright in the centre, and place some fried bread round the edge.
4 medium-sized English onions, 1-1/2 oz. of butter, 2 oz. of Allinson breadcrumbs, 4 eggs, 4 tablespoonfuls of milk, pepper and salt to taste. Peel and slice the onions, bake them in a pie-dish with the butter and seasoning, until quite soft. Whip the eggs up, mix them with the milk, breadcrumbs, and the baked onions. Put the mixture into a greased pie-dish, and bake in a moderately hot oven. Serve with tomato sauce.
Pick the beans, wash them and steep them over night in boiling water, just covering them. Allow 2 or 3 oz. of beans for each person. In the morning let them cook gently in the water they are steeped in, with the addition of a little butter, until quite soft, which will be in about 2 hours. The beans should be cooked in only enough water to keep them from burning; therefore, when it boils away, add only just sufficient for absorption. The sauce is made thus: 1 pint of milk, 1 tablespoonful of Allinson wholemeal, a handful of finely chopped parsley, the juice of 1/2 a lemon, pepper and salt to taste. Boil the milk and thicken it with the meal, which should first be smoothed with a little cold milk, then last of all add the lemon juice, the seasoning, and the parsley. This dish should be eaten with potatoes and green vegetables.
When a souffle is made on a larger scale, and served up on a flat dish, it is best to proceed as follows:--Take six ounces of powdered sugar, and mix them with six yolks of eggs and a dessertspoonful of flour and a pinch of salt. To this must be added whatever flavouring is used, such as vanilla. This is all mixed together till it is perfectly smooth. Next beat the six whites to a very stiff froth; mix this in with the batter lightly, put two ounces of butter into an omelet-pan, and as soon as the butter begins to frizzle pour in the mixture. As it begins to set round the edges, turn it over and heap it up in the middle, and then slide the omelet off on to a plated-edged baking dish, which must be well buttered. Put it in the oven for about a quarter of an hour, to let it rise, shake some powdered sugar over the top, and serve very quickly.
