Vegetarian meals do not appeal to me. There is a sense of sudden and temporary repletion followed shortly afterwards by an aching void, which can only be assuaged by a period of comparatively gross feeding. Besides, judging from the appearance of my vegetarian friends (in whom maybe I am unfortunate) they often seem so much to resemble some of the foods they eat as to render themselves liable to be dubbed cannibals. But this is probably mere prejudice.
Minced Chicken or Game.
To resume the cult of Chaffinda. Here is another dish which I recommend to the beginner. It is a simple mince. Take any remains of chicken or game, pheasant for choice, and mince it (or have it minced) small, but not too small. Never use a mincing machine. Put the mince aside, and mix in the Chafing Dish the following sauce: a full walnut of butter, a tablespoon of flour, and a pinch of salt and pepper; add gradually about a tumblerful of milk. Keep continually stirring this and cook it well for five minutes, adding three drops of Tabasco sauce and half a tablespoon of Worcester sauce, also a squeeze of a lemon. When it is thoroughly amalgamated throw in the mince and let it get hot without burning. Serve it with toast or very crisp biscuits.
The only objection I know to this mince is that all cold birds, especially cold pheasant, are so excellent that it seems almost superfluous to hot them up. But there are occasions when the gamey fumes from Chaffinda are very alluring, and, after all, it is poor work eating cold cates at midnight, however tempting they might be at breakfast.
Our forebears were unanimous in their praise of the lordly long-tail. In a letter from Sidney Smith to “Ingoldsby” Barham, the worthy cleric says: “Many thanks, my dear Sir, for your kind present of game. If there is a pure and elevated pleasure in this world, it is that of roast pheasant and bread sauce; barndoor fowls for Dissenters, but for the Real Churchman, the Thirty-Nine times articled clerk, the pheasant! the pheasant!”
Toast.
It should perhaps be mentioned that the making of toast on the Chafing Dish is the easiest of functions. The asbestos tray, already referred to, is placed over the flame, and on the metal side the bread in rounds, triangles, or sippets; a few minutes serve to toast the one side adequately, and on being turned over it can easily be browned through. Mrs. Beeton is loquacious on the art of toast-making, and lays down divers rules, but she knew not Chaffinda. A modern essayist who discourses learnedly and most sensibly on toast, makes a remark in his chapter on breakfasts, which although not entirely germane to my subject, is so true and, to my thinking, so characteristic, that I cannot refrain from quoting it. He is referring to marmalade. “The attitude of women to marmalade,” he says, “has never been quite sound. True, they make it excellently, but afterwards their association with it is one lamentable retrogression. They spread it over pastry; they do not particularly desire it at breakfast; and (worst) they decant it into glass dishes and fancy jars.”
How true, how profound, how typical!
But this is wandering from the point, which is cookery, not casuistry. Women are never out of place in connection with the good things of the table, although they do not often aspire to the omni-usefulness of the well-meaning, if ill-educated, lady who applied for the position of nurse to one of the field hospitals during the Boer war, and mentioned as her crowning qualification that, “like Cæsar’s wife, I am all things to all men.”
Mutton Cutlets.