Cottage Puffs.
- 2 cups of rich milk—half cream if you can get it.
- 4 eggs, whites and yolks beaten separately.
- 1 good tablespoonful of butter, chopped into the flour.
- A pinch of salt.
- Enough prepared flour for thick batter. Try two cups, and add, by degrees, as you need more.
Mix the beaten yolks with the milk; then the salt and whites; at last, the flour. Bake in greased iron pans, such as are used for “gems” and corn-bread. The oven should be quick. Turn out and eat with sweet sauce.
Second Week. Wednesday.
Giblet Soup.
Clean and cut the giblets of your fowls into three pieces each. Stew tender in a pint of water. Take the cake of fat from the broth set by yesterday. Put a half cupful aside for your macaroni sauce. Warm the rest and strain out the bones, etc. Return to the fire, boil up and skim, chop the giblets fine and put them in with the water in which they were boiled. Simmer a quarter of an hour; stir in half a cupful of fine, dry bread-crumbs. Season, if necessary; boil ten minutes longer, stirring often, and pour out.
Smothered Chickens.
Prepare the chickens as for broiling, splitting each down the back. Lay flat in a dripping-pan, pour a cupful of boiling water upon them; set in the oven and invert another pan over them, so as to cover them tightly. Roast half an hour, lift the cover and baste freely with butter. In ten minutes more, baste with gravy from the dripping-pan. In five more, with melted butter—abundantly—going all over the fowls. Keeping the chickens covered except while basting them, increase the heat, until you ascertain, by testing with a fork, that they are done. They should be coffee-colored all over, rather than brown. Dish, salt and pepper them; cover while you thicken the gravy with browned flour, adding a little hot water, pepper, salt, and chopped parsley. Boil up; put a few spoonfuls over the chickens—the rest in a gravy tureen.