Peanut stuffing for roast duck
Prepare the ducks for roasting and make a stuffing of bread-crumbs seasoned with butter, pepper and salt. Chop a cupful of roasted and shelled peanuts to a powder and rub them into the bread-crumbs. Stuff the ducks with this mixture and roast, basting frequently.
Savory chestnuts
Boil and shell and skin large Spanish chestnuts; break each in half and cover with a thin giblet gravy. Or you may make a gravy of the legs and necks of a pair of fowls, and thicken it with browned flour rolled in butter. The gravy must be brown. Cook the chestnuts in it for ten minutes. This is a pleasing accompaniment to roast poultry of any kind, particularly roast turkey.
EVEN-THREADED LIVING
“Come what may, appearances must be kept up!” wrote a venerable gentlewoman to her daughter, with whom life had grown suddenly hard by reason of her husband’s pecuniary losses. “Show a brave front to the world although there may be an empty purse and an empty larder behind it. Noblesse oblige!”
The motto is grand—sometimes sublime.
There is an heroic side to the question, of which I shall treat presently.
The ignoble side, and that which forms the basis of most treatises on this subject, crops up when appearances are all in all, and make the life a continual lie, like an embroidered silk stocking drawn over an unwashed foot.
One of my childish recollections is of a rich woman, whose “pair of parlors,” as she called them, were richly carpeted, curtained and furnished, as was also a spacious dining-room on the same floor. When there was no company the family sat in a back room adjoining the kitchen. The worthy woman, visiting a sister-housewife, was scandalized at learning that she, her husband and six children actually used the parlors “every day and Sunday, too,” and ate habitually in a dining-room “where there was an elegant Brussels carpet on the floor.”