Trim off fat and skin; dip in egg, then in rolled cracker, mixed with pepper, salt, nutmeg, and powdered parsley. Lay upon a dripping-pan. Pour over each a teaspoonful of melted butter, and set in the oven. When they begin to hiss, baste with hot water, in which has been boiled a little onion, mixed with butter. If the oven be good, half an hour should be enough for them. They should be tender, juicy, and brown. Baste six or seven times. Strain the gravy, and thicken with browned flour. Add a little lemon-juice and tomato catsup, and send up in a boat. Lay the chops around your spinach.
Spinach.
Boil twenty minutes in plenty of boiling salt water. Drain, and chop very fine. Return to the saucepan, with a little sugar, pepper, salt, and a tablespoonful of butter rolled in flour. Stir until hot, and dry enough to be moulded. Turn out; shape into a flat-topped ridge upon a hot dish, and lay the chops at the base.
Whipped Potatoes.
Whip boiled potatoes to creamy lightness with a fork; beat in butter, milk, pepper, and salt; at last, the frothed white of an egg. Toss irregularly upon a dish; set in the oven two minutes, to re-heat, but do not let it color.
Boiled Rice, with Sauce.
Dilute what gravy you have left from your duck fricassee with water, or make a weak broth of the duck bones, boiled with a little lean ham in a quart of water, until you have less than a pint left. Or, add hot water to the remains of yesterday’s soup, and strain it. But get a pint of weak gravy from somewhere, and, having soaked a cup of rice in just enough water to cover it, for an hour, put it over the fire in a farina-kettle, pour in the gravy, and cook until the rice is soft, shaking up from the bottom, now and then, but never stirring. Take out some for your soup. Heap the rest in a deep dish, and pour over it a cup of drawn butter, in which have been stirred a beaten egg and two tablespoonfuls of tomato sauce. N. B.—The gravy should be well seasoned.
Apple Charlotte.
Beat two cups of nice apple sauce, well sweetened and flavored, to a high froth, with the whipped whites of three eggs. Make into a mound in a glass dish, and cover with lady’s-fingers, or other small sponge-cakes, fitted neatly together. Send around sugar and cream with it.