Clean and wash the duck. Stuff with a dressing of bread-crumbs seasoned with pepper and salt, a little onion and sage. Sew up the vent, and tie the neck to keep in the flavor. Fry the duck in a great spoonful of butter until lightly browned, turning it often. Add the butter used for frying to the gravy saved from yesterday; thin with boiling water, and, having put the duck into a saucepan, strain this gravy over it. It should half cover the fowl. Stew slowly forty-five minutes, or until tender, keeping the lid on all the while. Take up the duck, cover to keep it warm, strain the gravy, and if very oily, take off the top. Boil sharply ten minutes in an open saucepan; thicken with browned flour; put back the duck into it, and set the saucepan, again covered, in boiling water for a quarter of an hour. Serve the gravy in a boat.
Purée of Green Peas.
Open a can of peas, drain off the liquor, and cook twenty minutes in boiling water slightly salted. Strain off the water through a colander; mash the peas with the back of a wooden spoon, and rub through the colander into a bowl below. Put two tablespoonfuls of butter into a saucepan, with pepper, salt, and a little sugar, and, if you fancy it, three mint leaves finely chopped. Heat, but not to boiling, stir in the pulped peas, and toss about with a silver fork or spoon until they are a smoking mass. Pile in a hot dish, with triangles of fried bread laid up around the base.
Cauliflower à la Crème.
Boil a fine cauliflower, tied up snugly in coarse tarlatan, in hot water, a little salt. Drain and lay in a deep dish, flower uppermost. Heat a cup of milk; thicken with two tablespoonfuls of butter, cut into bits, and rolled in flour. Add pepper, salt, the beaten white of an egg, and boil up one minute, stirring well. Take from the fire, squeeze the juice of a lemon through a hair sieve into the sauce, and pour half into a boat, the rest over the cauliflower.
Corn-Meal Pudding without Eggs.
- 2 cups Indian meal.
- 1 cup of flour.
- 2 tablespoonfuls of molasses.
- 3 cups of sour milk—“loppered,” or “bonny-clabber,” if you can get it.
- 1 great spoonful of melted butter.
- 1 full teaspoonful of soda.
- 1 teaspoonful of salt.
- ½ teaspoonful of cinnamon.
Sift the salt with the flour, and mix up well with the meal. Make a hole in the middle, and pour in the milk, stirring the meal and flour down into it. Beat smooth. Mix molasses, spice, butter, and the soda—this last dissolved in hot water—all together, and beat into the batter—well and hard. Butter a tin mould with a cover; pour in the pudding, and boil steadily an hour and a half. Eat hot with butter and sugar.
Third Week. Saturday.