At five o’clock put the half leg of mutton into boiling water, only enough to cover it; put with it one carrot cut, one turnip, one onion, and when it has boiled very slowly half an hour, put in a very scant tea-spoonful of salt. Put some macaroni to boil. Put the turnips, cut into strips, on the fire in boiling water at half-past five, also the potatoes. Let the turnips boil fast, the potatoes slowly.
Make three gills of white sauce instead of half a pint, never forgetting when you increase the milk also to increase butter and flour in same proportion; then when the macaroni is tender put a layer of it in a small dish, pour over it a table-spoonful of white sauce and the same of grated cheese with pepper and salt, then another layer of macaroni, more white sauce, cheese and seasoning, and over all strew bread crumbs and bits of butter, and bake till brown.
The turnips strain when tender and let them stew five minutes in some of the white sauce made for the macaroni, reserving the rest for caper sauce. To make it, add capers in proportion of one good tea-spoonful of capers to the half pint, and just as it goes to table stir in a tea-spoonful of caper vinegar; if it stands after this it will be apt to curdle.
Take up the mutton, put it to keep hot, skim and strain the broth and let it boil down fast till there is enough for dinner and no more; beat an egg, mix a very little of the broth with it, and put both into the tureen, with a tea-spoonful of parsley chopped fine. Let the broth remain off the fire one minute, then pour it to the egg, stirring quickly, then serve it.
Molly had a busy morning arranging her store-room, and making a list of what it contained. This list she nailed behind the door, with a pencil attached, so that when anything was used a mark was made against it. In this way, when any article was nearly out she would be reminded to replace it. It was not so necessary, perhaps, with a girl as careful as Marta, or in her small family as in a larger one, but it had been her mother’s way, and she followed it. She could then keep track of everything at a glance.
One hour and a half before dinner Molly put on a saucepan of water to boil, and then chopped six ounces of beef-kidney suet very fine, which she mixed with half a pound of flour and a pinch of salt. She made a hole in the centre of the mixture, and poured in enough cold water to make a stiff firm paste (not so stiff as to be hard to roll out); it was handled as little as possible, only worked enough to keep it together. It was rolled out once to a sheet half an inch thick, then spread with raspberry jam, which was not allowed to come within an inch of the edge all round; the edge was wetted, the paste rolled up and the ends pinched closely to prevent the jam coming out, as was also the flap along the centre. A pudding-cloth was scalded and floured, the roly-poly laid on one side of it and rolled up; each end was tied close to the paste, and the centre pinned. No string was passed round the centre, as Molly had sometimes seen done, for as the pudding swells the string cuts into it. When finished the cloth was not very loose on the pudding, nor tight, but what may be called an easy fit. When it would leave the water, after an hour and quarter constant boiling, it would be swelled and plump.
Molly saw that the water boiled fast when it was dropped in, and that there was plenty of it.
“Marta, take care that the pudding never ceases to boil, and once in a while look that it floats round, so that it may not stick to the bottom.”
The next day Molly had to make Dresden patties, and some fritters the recipe for which she had unearthed from the old last-century book; it was written in the quaint language and indefinite fashion common to cooking-books of that date. Molly had often thought, in reading them, that housekeepers’ wits must have been much more brilliant in those days, or the books could have done little good.
But she had thought out the matter, and her knowledge of old cook-books told her that a “handful” probably meant a man’s hand full, as the book was written by a man cook; that when you were told to “beat and search your sugar” it was because they had not latter-day improvements and probably no powdered sugar was sold. Reduced to present-day terms and small dimensions, the recipe was as follows: