1 small cabbage.
1 cup cream sauce.
Take off the outside leaves of the cabbage; cut it up in four pieces, and cut out the hard core and lay it in cold, salted water for half an hour. Then wipe it dry and slice it, not too fine, and put it in a saucepan; cover it with boiling water with a teaspoonful of salt in it, and boil hard for fifteen minutes without any cover. While it is cooking, make a cup of cream sauce.
Take up the cabbage, press it in the colander with a plate till all the water is out; put it in a hot covered dish, sprinkle well with salt, and pour the cream sauce over. This will not have any unpleasant odor in cooking, and it will be so tender and easy to digest that even a little girl may have two helpings.
If you like it to look green, put a tiny bit of soda in the water when you cook it.
Lima Beans
Sh.e.l.l them and cook like peas; pour over them a half-cup of cream sauce, if you like this better than having them dry.
Peas
Sh.e.l.l them and drop them into a saucepan of boiling water, into which you have put a teaspoonful of salt and one of sugar.
Boil them till they are tender, from fifteen minutes, if they are fresh from the garden, to half an hour or more, if they have stood in the grocer"s for a day or two. When they are done they will have little dents in their sides, and you can easily mash two or three with a fork on a plate. Then drain off the water, put in three shakes of pepper, more salt if they do not taste just right, and a piece of b.u.t.ter the size of a hickory-nut, and shake them till the b.u.t.ter melts; serve in a hot covered dish.
String Beans
Pull off the strings and cut off the ends; hold three or four beans in your hand and cut them into long, very narrow strips, not into square pieces. Then cook them exactly as you did the peas.
Stewed Tomatoes
6 large tomatoes.
1 teaspoonful of salt.
1 teaspoonful of sugar.
1 pinch soda.
3 shakes of pepper.
b.u.t.ter as large as an English walnut.
Peel and cut the tomatoes up small, saving the juice; put together in a saucepan with the seasoning, the soda mixed in a teaspoonful of water before it is put in. Simmer twenty minutes, stirring till it is smooth, and last put in half a cup of bread or cracker crumbs, or a cup of toast, cut into small bits. Serve in a hot, covered dish.
Asparagus
Untie the bunch, sc.r.a.pe the stalks clean, and put it in cold water for half an hour. Tie the bunch again, and cut enough off the white ends to make all the pieces the same length. Stand them in boiling water in a porcelain kettle, and cook gently for about twenty minutes. Lay on a platter on squares of b.u.t.tered toast, and pour over the toast and the tips of the asparagus a cup of cream sauce. Or do not put it on toast, but pour melted b.u.t.ter over the tips after it is on the platter. To make it delicious, mix the juice of a lemon with the b.u.t.ter.
Sometimes put a little grated cheese on the ends last of all.
Onions
Peel off the outside skin and cook them in boiling, salted water till they are tender; drain them, put them in a baking-dish, and pour over them a tablespoonful of melted b.u.t.ter, three shakes of pepper, and a sprinkling of salt, and put in the oven and brown a very little. Or, cover them with a cup of white sauce instead of the melted b.u.t.ter, and sprinkle with salt and pepper, but do not put in the oven.
Corn
Strip off the husks and silk, and put in a kettle of boiling water and boil hard for fifteen minutes; do not salt the water, as salt makes corn tough. Put a napkin on a platter with one end hanging over the end; lay the corn on and fold the end of the napkin over to keep it warm.
Canned Corn
Turn the corn into the colander and pour water through it a moment.
Heat a cup of milk with a tablespoonful of b.u.t.ter, a teaspoonful of salt, and three shakes of pepper, and mix with the corn and cook for two minutes. Or, put in a b.u.t.tered baking-dish and brown in the oven. Many people never wash corn; it is better to do so.
Sometimes Margaret had boiled rice for dinner in place of potatoes, and then she looked back at the recipe she used when she cooked it for breakfast, and made it in just the same way. Very often in winter she had--
Macaroni
6 long pieces of macaroni.
1 cup white sauce.
1/2 pound of cheese.
Paprika and salt.
Break up the macaroni into small pieces, and boil fifteen minutes in salted water, shaking the dish often. Pour off the water and hold the dish under the cold-water faucet until all the paste is washed off the outside of the macaroni, which will take only a minute if you turn it over once or twice. b.u.t.ter a baking-dish, put in a layer of macaroni, a good sprinkle of salt, then a very little white sauce, and a layer of grated cheese, sprinkled over with a tiny dusting of paprika, or sweet red pepper, if you have it; only use a tiny bit. Then cover with a thin layer of white sauce, and so on till the dish is full, with the last layer of white sauce covered with an extra thick one of cheese. Bake till brown.
Margaret"s mother got this rule in Paris, and she though it a very nice one.
After the soup, meat, and vegetables at dinner came the salad; for this Margaret almost always had lettuce, with French dressing, as mayonnaise seemed too heavy for dinner. Sometimes she had nice watercress; once in a long time she had celery with mayonnaise.
DESSERTS
Corn-starch Pudding
1 pint of milk.
2 heaping tablespoonfuls of corn-starch.
3 tablespoonfuls of sugar.
Whites of three eggs.
1/2 teaspoonful vanilla.
Beat the whites of the eggs very stiff. Mix the corn-starch with half a cup of the milk, and stir till it melts. Mix the rest of the milk and the sugar, and put them on the fire in the double boiler.
When it bubbles, stir up the corn-starch and milk well, and stir them in and cook and stir till it gets as thick as oatmeal mush; then turn in the eggs and stir them lightly, and cook for a minute more. Take it off the stove, mix in the vanilla, and put in a mould to cool. When dinner is ready, turn it out on a platter and put small bits of red jelly around it, or pieces of preserved ginger, or a pretty circle of preserved peaches, or preserved pineapple.
Have a pitcher of cream to pa.s.s with it, or have a nice bowl of whipped cream. If you have a ring-mould, let it harden in that, and have the whipped cream piled in the centre after it is on the platter, and put the jelly or preserves around last.
Chocolate Corn-starch Pudding
Use the same rule as before, but put in one more tablespoonful of sugar. Then shave thin two squares of Baker"s chocolate, and stir in over the teakettle till it melts, and stir it in very thoroughly before you put in the eggs. Instead of pouring this into one large mould, put it in egg-cups to harden; turn these out carefully, each on a separate plate, and put a spoonful of whipped cream by each one.