Just a word about jellied things. You can have a pint of stock, white if possible, season it with an onion, a bay-leaf, a bit of thyme, a clove, and pepper and salt. Then put in a good half-ounce of dissolved gelatine; and turn about one quarter of it, after straining, into a mould and set on ice to cool. Have the rest of the jelly in a liquid state, but perfectly cold. When that in the mould is set, have any sort of cold meat, chicken, turkey, ham or tongue cut into strips free of skin and bone, and pack it into the mould with alternate layers of the jelly, finishing with the latter. Now see how successful you can be in making such a dish a joy to the eye. Use sliced olives, gherkins, capers, truffles, fanciful shapes of beet or anything that your artistic eye will permit, and sprinkle these through the dish as you go along. Run a thin knife blade in between the jelly and mould and then plunge the mould into boiling water and the jelly will unmould easily.
Cheese Salad
Then there are salads. To make one of cheese rub the yolk of a hard-boiled egg in a basin with a tablespoonful of salad oil; add one teaspoonful of salt, a bit of cayenne and a little made mustard; when all is well mixed stir in about half a pound of grated Parmesan cheese, the juice of an onion, and a tablespoon of vinegar. Serve on lettuce leaves. You will find that this will go particularly well with sandwiches of bloater paste.
But for a salad to be served with a jellied meat, make one of nuts, one kind or several, broken into bits, mixed with an equal quantity of sliced olives and spread with only a very little mayonnaise.
I did want to tell you of ways to make some very appetizing beverages, for the sort of occasions we are discussing, but they will have to wait. And perhaps it’s just as well; already my conscience is troubling me for fear that you are going to be so taken up with the goodies I have told you of that you will have no inclination to think on “better things” when it comes Sunday. But it can’t be helped now.
Last spring a certain Boston man with his family moved into the country. Not so far out, however, but that he could come to town daily to attend to business, and yet far enough from the gilded dome to be able to buy sufficient land for a small farm without paying all creation for it. The next move was the stocking of the farm. So a Jersey cow was bought to keep the family supplied with cream, a flock of prize hens was set at work in a bran new henhouse that there might be fresh eggs on hand, and last but not least, a pair of tiny young pigs were secured to provide the household with sweet, home-made pork when winter should set in. And having secured the stock, the owner proceeded at once to make pets, collectively and individually, of the whole equipment. Actually the cow would manage to look half-way intelligent when he stroked her neck and told her she was the sort that deserved to live in clover the year round; the hens really did add a note to their regular cackle when the master was about, to show him that they knew who gave them heaping measures of grain, and the pigs, which he called Tim and Jim, got in no time to know their names when they were spoken by his voice. Well, cold weather came on and with it those crisp, frosty mornings when a toothsomely seasoned sausage with a potato purée makes an ideal breakfast. So Tim and Jim went the way of all pork, and in due course of time their owner had the satisfaction of seeing on his own breakfast table pork “of his own raising.” And what do you think happened then?
“Susan,” said he to his wife, “I can’t do it; if you will believe me, I can’t eat that pork. Give it away—give it all away. Never have any more put on this table. Why, dash it all, Susan, I may be a ninny, but I was actually fond of Tim and Jim, and don’t see what I was thinking of when I had them killed.”
“Samuel,” said the wife, a woman who knew how and when to point a moral, “you needn’t call yourself a ninny; be thankful for the feeling you have, because it can give you a glimpse, though from afar off, of the mighty power that will make of us a nation of vegetarians, if we ever do become such.”
And I, when I heard of this little episode, fell to wondering if it would be such terribly hard lines after all to be put on a strictly vegetarian diet. At any rate, I managed to turn out one dinner, sans fish, sans flesh, sans fowl, that didn’t appear in the least like a substitute for something better. You shall have the menu: