Lay in clean cold water for five or six hours when you have washed off all the salt. Wipe and put it into a pot and cover deep in cold water. Boil gently twenty-five minutes per pound. When done, take the pot from the fire and set in the sink with the meat in it, while you make the sauce.
Strain a large cupful of the liquor into a saucepan and set it over the fire. Wet a tablespoonful of flour up with cold water, and when the liquor boils, stir it in with a great spoonful of butter. Beat it smooth before adding the juice of a lemon. Serve in a gravy-dish. Take up the beef, letting all the liquor drain from it, and send in on a hot platter.
(Save the pot-liquor for bean soup.)
Boiled Mutton.
Sew up the leg of mutton in a stout piece of mosquito net or of “cheese cloth;” lay it in a pot and cover several inches deep with boiling water. Throw in a tablespoonful of salt, and cook twelve minutes to the pound. Take up the cloth with the meat in it and dip in very cold water. Remove the bag and dish the meat.
Before taking up the mutton, make your sauce, using as a base a cupful of the liquor dipped from the pot. Proceed with this as you did with the drawn butter sauce for the corned beef, but instead of the lemon juice, add two tablespoonfuls of capers if you have them. If not, the same quantity of chopped green pickle.
11
VEGETABLES.
IN attempting to make out under the above heading, a list of receipts, I have laid down my pen several times in sheer discouragement. The number and variety of esculents supplied by the American market-gardener would need for a just mention of each, a treatise several times larger than our volume. I have, therefore, selected a few of the vegetables in general use on our tables, and given the simplest and most approved methods of preparing them.