APPLES, PEACHES, BLACKBERRIES AND STRAWBERRIES.
“The liberal use of various fruits as food is conducive to good health. Fruit is not a solid and lasting element like beef and bread, and does not give strength to any great extent. But fruits contain those acids which refresh and give tone to the system during the season when it is most needed. They should never be eaten unless thoroughly ripe, or cooked. Stale fruits, or those that have been plucked some time, are unhealthy in the extreme. The proper time to eat fruit is in the morning and early afternoon. At night it is ‘leaden,’ according to the Spanish, who call fruit ‘golden in the morning and silver at noon.’” These words of general advice fitly introduce our “apples, peaches, strawberries, and blackberries,” for whose use, fresh and uncooked, we would strongly plead.
Ripe Fruit.—Wash and polish apples with a clean towel, and pile in a china fruit basket, with an eye to agreeable variety of color. Of peaches and pears the finest should be selected, handling as little as may be, and pile upon a salver or flat dish, with bits of ice between them, and ornament with peach leaves or fennel sprigs. One of the prettiest dishes of fruit I ever saw upon a dessert table was an open silver basket, wide at the top, heaped with rich red peaches and yellow Bartlett pears, interspersed with feathery bunches of green, which few of those who admired it knew for carrot tops. Wild white clematis wreathed the handle and showed here and there among the fruit, while scarlet and white verbenas nestled amid the green. Send around powdered sugar with the fruit, as many like to dip peaches and pears in it after paring and quartering them.
Never wash strawberries or raspberries that are intended to be eaten as fresh fruit. If they are so gritty as to require this process keep them off the table. You will certainly ruin the flavor beyond repair if you wash them, and as certainly induce instant fermentation and endanger the coats of the eaters’ stomachs, if, after profaning the exquisite delicacy of the fruit to this extent, you complete the evil work by covering them with sugar, and leaving them to leak their lives sourly away for one or two hours. Put them on the table in glass dishes, piling them high and lightly; send around powdered sugar with them and cream, that the guests may help themselves. It is not economical, perhaps, but it is a healthful and pleasant style of serving them—I had almost said the only decent one. “But I don’t know who picked them,” cries Mrs. Fussy.
No, my dear madame! nor do you know who makes the baker’s bread, or confectioner’s cake, creams, jellies, salads, etc. Nor, for that matter, how the flour is manufactured out of which you conjure your dainty biscuits and pies. I know God made strawberries. “Doubtless,” says Bishop Butler, “he could have made a better berry, but he never did.” The picker’s light touch can not mar flavor or beauty, nor, were her fingers filthy as a chimney sweep’s, could the delicate fruit suffer from them as from your barbarous baptism.—Marion Harland in “Common Sense in the Household.”
Puddings and Pies.—Apple Dumplings.—Make a crust as for biscuit, or a potato crust, as follows: Three large potatoes boiled and mashed while hot. Add to them two cups of sifted flour and one teaspoonful of salt, and mix thoroughly. Now chop or cut into it one small cup of butter, and mix into a paste with about a teacupful of cold water. Dredge the board thick with flour, and roll out—thick in the middle and thin at the edges. A thick pudding-cloth—the best being made of Canton flannel, used with the nap-side out—should be dipped in hot water and wrung out, dredged evenly and thickly with flour, and laid over a large bowl. Upon the middle of this place the rolled-out crust, fill with apples pared and quartered, eight or ten good-sized ones being enough for this amount of crust. Gather the edges of the crust evenly over it. Then gather the cloth up, leaving room for the dumpling to swell, and tying very tightly. In turning out, lift to a dish, press all the water from the ends of the cloth; untie and turn away from the pudding, and lay a hot dish upon it, turning over the pudding into it, and serving at once, as it darkens or falls by standing. In using a boiler, butter well, and fill only two-thirds full, that the mixture may have room to swell. Set it in boiling water, and see that it is kept at the same height, about an inch from the top. Cover the outer kettle, that the steam may be kept in. Peaches pared and halved, or canned ones drained from the syrup, may be used instead of the apples. When canned fruit is used the syrup can be used as a sauce, either cold for cold puddings and blancmanges, or heated and thickened for hot, allowing to a pint of juice a heaping teaspoonful of corn starch, dissolved in a little cold water, and boiling it five minutes. Strawberry or raspberry syrup is especially nice.
Bread and Apple Pudding.—Butter a deep pudding dish and put first a layer of crumbs, then one of any good acid apple, sliced rather thin, and so on until the dish is nearly full. Six or eight apples and a quart of fresh crumbs will fill a two-quart dish. Dissolve a cup of sugar and one teaspoonful of cinnamon in one pint of boiling water and pour into the dish. Let the pudding stand half an hour to swell; then bake until brown—about three-quarters of an hour—and eat with liquid sauce. It can be made with slices of bread and butter instead of crumbs.
Short-Cake.—One quart of flour, one teaspoonful of salt and two of baking powder sifted with the flour, one cup of butter, or half lard and half butter, one large cup of hot milk. Rub the butter into the flour; add the milk and roll out the dough, cutting in small square cakes and baking to a light brown. For a strawberry or peach short-cake have three tin pie-plates buttered; roll the dough to fit them, and bake quickly. Fill either, when done, with a cup of sugar, or with peaches cut fine and sugared, and served hot.