Take two or three ox-tails; put them in a saucepan, with turnips, carrots, onions, and some black peppercorns; stew them for four hours. Take them out; cut them in pieces at every joint; put them into a stewpan with some good gravy, and scraped turnip and carrot; or cut them into the shape of a ninepin; pepper and salt to your taste; add the juice of half a lemon; and send it to table very hot.
Peas, to stew.
Take a quart of fine peas, and two small or one large cabbage lettuce; boil the lettuce tender; take it out of the water, shake it well, and put it into the stewpan, with about two ounces of butter, three or four little onions cut small, and the peas. Set them on a very slow fire, and let them stew about two hours; season them to your taste with pepper and a tea-spoonful of sugar; and, instead of salt, stew in some bits of ham, which you may take out or leave in when you serve it. There should not be a drop of water, except what inevitably comes from the lettuce.
Another way.
To your peas, add cabbage lettuces cut small, a small faggot of mint, and one onion; pass them over the fire with a small bit of butter, and, when they are tender and the liquor from them reduced, take out the onion and mint, and add a little white sauce. Take care it be not too thin; season with a little pepper and salt.
Green Peas, to keep till Christmas.
Gather your peas, when neither very young nor old, on a fine dry day. Shell, and let two persons holding a cloth, one at each end, shake them backward and forward for a few minutes. Put them into clean quart bottles; fill the bottles, and cork tight. Melt some rosin in a pipkin, dip the necks of the bottles into it, and set them in a cool dry place.
Another way.
Shell the peas, and dry them in a gentle heat, not much greater than that of a hot summer’s day. Put them when quite dry into linen bags, and hang them up in a dry place. Before they are boiled, at Christmas or later, steep them in half milk, half water, for twelve or fourteen hours; then boil them as if fresh gathered. Beans and French beans may be preserved in the same manner.