Creamed stewed chicken
Cut up a fowl as for fricassee, and put over the fire in enough cold water to cover it well. Bring gradually to a gentle boil. When it begins to bubble, add a stalk of celery, some chopped parsley and two tablespoonfuls of minced onion, with a bay leaf. Simmer until tender before seasoning with salt and pepper.
Make a white roux in a frying-pan of two tablespoonfuls of butter cooked with the same quantity of flour. As soon as they are well mixed, stir into them, a teaspoonful at a time, a large cupful of strained and skimmed gravy from the pot. Have ready half a cup of cream, heated, with a pinch of soda. Add this to the thickened gravy also, very slowly, not to curdle the cream. Do not boil after the cream goes in. Arrange the chicken upon a broad platter; pour the creamed gravy over it, and garnish with dumplings cooked in the gravy left in the large pot, after the reserved cupful and the chicken are taken out.
Dumplings for chicken stew
Into a pint of flour sift a heaping teaspoonful of baking-powder, and a quarter-teaspoonful of salt, and sift the flour twice. Now rub in a tablespoonful of shortening and wet with enough milk to make a dough that can be rolled out. Roll and cut into rounds, and drop these into the boiling gravy. They should be done in ten minutes.
Mexican hot tamales (No. 1)
Boil a fowl until tender; salt while boiling. Chop very fine and season with plenty of cayenne pepper and a little garlic. Have ready a thick paste made of one cupful of corn-meal mixed with a little boiling water. Shape the meat into rolls the size of the little finger, and encase each in the corn-meal paste. Take the inner husks of Indian corn, cut off the ends, leaving the husks about six inches long, and wash them in boiling water.
Wrap each tamale in a corn husk; throw two or three Mexican peppers into the liquor in which the chicken was boiled, and cook the tamales in it for fifteen minutes.
Mexican hot tamales (No. 2)
Boil a fowl until tender; strip the meat from the bones and chop fine. Mince half a pound of seeded raisins, and a half-cupful of stoned olives, with one young red pepper chopped “exceeding fine.” Mix all well together, and stir to a paste with two cupfuls of Indian meal; wet with scalding water, season with salt, onion juice and a teaspoonful of sugar. Add more boiling water until you can stir over the fire for fifteen or twenty minutes. Then add six hard-boiled eggs minced fine; meantime lay smooth the soft inner husks of green corn, and tear some into strips for tying; lay upon two of the husks as much of the paste mixture as they will contain, wrap them about it and tie each roll with the stripped husk; drop these rolls into boiling salted water, and boil them for one hour.