Spread slices of stale bread with butter, then with jam. Fit them closely into a buttered pudding-dish until it is two-thirds full. Make a custard by adding the beaten eggs and sugar to the scalding milk, but do not let them boil. Lay a heavy saucer upon the bread and butter to prevent floating, and moisten gradually with the hot custard. Let all soak for fifteen minutes before the dish goes into the oven. When it is hot throughout, take off the saucer, that the pudding may brown equally. Eat cold.
Tea, and Albert Biscuits
Third Week. Wednesday.
Sheep’s-head Soup.
Get your butcher to clean a sheep’s head with the skin on, as he would a calf’s head for soup. Let him also split it in half that you may get at the brains. Take them out, with the tongue, and set aside. Break the bone of the head, wash it well in several waters, and soak for half an hour in salted water. Cover it with fresh water, and heat gradually to a boil. Drain off the water, and thus remove any peculiar odor from the wool or other causes, and add four quarts of cold water, with two turnips, two roots of salsify, two carrots, two stalks of celery, and a bunch of sweet herbs, all chopped fine. Boil slowly four hours. Strain the soup into a bowl, pressing all the nourishment out of the meat, and let it stand in a cool place until the fat rises thickly to the surface to be taken off. The vegetables should be soft enough to pass freely through a fine colander, or coarse strainer, when rubbed. While the soup cools, prepare the force-meat balls. The tongue and brains should have been cooked and chopped up, then rubbed to a paste together and mixed with an equal quantity of bread-crumbs, salt, pepper, and parsley, bound with a raw egg, and rolled into small balls, dipped in flour. Set them, not so near as to touch one another, in a tin plate or dripping-pan, and put in a quick oven until a crust is formed upon the top, when they must be allowed to cool. Return the skimmed broth to the fire; season; boil up once; take off the scum, and add a cup of milk in which you have stirred a tablespoonful of corn-starch. Simmer, stirring all the while, for two minutes after it boils. Put the force-meat balls into the tureen and pour the soup gently over them so as not to break them.
This is a good and cheap soup, and deserves to be better known.
Roast Hare.
Have the hare skinned and well cleaned. Cooks are often careless about the latter duty. Stuff, as you would a fowl, with a force-meat of bread-crumbs, chopped fat pork, a little sweet marjoram, onion, pepper, and salt, just moistened with hot water. Sew up the hare with fine cotton; tie the legs close to the body in a kneeling position. The English cook it with the head on, but we take it off as more seemly in our eyes. Lay in the dripping-pan, back uppermost; pour two cups of boiling water over it; cover with another pan and bake, closely covered, except when you baste it with butter and water, for three-quarters of an hour. Uncover, baste freely with the gravy until nicely browned; dredge with flour and anoint with butter until a fine froth appears on the surface. Take up the hare, put on a hot dish, and keep covered while you make the gravy. Strain, and skim that left in the pan; season, thicken with browned flour, stir in a good spoonful of currant-jelly, and some chopped parsley; boil up; pour a few spoonfuls of it over the hare; serve the rest in a gravy-boat. Clip, instead of tearing hard at the cotton threads. Send currant-jelly around with it.