Roley Poley.
Make a potato crust, or a paste of light bread, with butter rolled in, or one of cream tartar biscuit, as you prefer; roll it narrow and long, about a third of an inch thick; spread it with raspberry jam or apple sauce; take care that this does not come too near the edge of the crust; roll it up and close the ends and side as tight as possible, to keep the sauce from coming out and the water from soaking it. Sew it up in a cloth, and boil it an hour and a half or two hours, according to its size. Make a sauce.
[The quart measure used in the following articles, and throughout this book, is the beer quart, except where a small quart is specified. In cooking such dishes as those which immediately follow, the milk should always, as in making custards, be boiled in a pail set into a kettle of hot water. They are much more delicate than when it is boiled in a saucepan; and then there is no danger of its being burned.]
Potato Starch Flummery.
To one quart of boiled milk, put four beaten eggs and four spoonfuls of potato starch, wet in a little milk. Add the starch and a little salt first; then the eggs, and boil the whole a minute more. Take it up in a mould and eat it with sauce. Boil a few peach leaves in the milk if you like the flavor.
Ground Rice.
Measure a quart of milk, and then take out two cupfuls. Set the remainder into a kettle of hot water; then wet a teacupful of ground rice, and a teaspoonful of salt, with the reserved cold milk. When that which is in the kettle boils, add the ground rice mixture gradually, and continue to stir it, until it is well scalded, else it will be lumpy, or lie compactly at the bottom. Let it remain in the kettle eight or ten minutes, and stir it now and then. Just before you take it up, stir in a large table-spoonful of dry ground rice, and as soon as that is well mixed take the pail from the water-kettle, and put the mixture into a bowl, or blanc-mange mould, wet in cold water. If it is of the right consistency, it will turn out in good shape in fifteen or twenty minutes. To be eaten like blanc-mange with sugar and milk or cream. It is nice cold, and if it is made for the next day, a half a spoonful less of dry rice will be enough. It should be only stiff enough to retain the shape. For this and all similar milk preparations, peach leaves are better than any spice. Boil in the milk three or four fresh leaves from the tree. Remember to take them out before you stir in the rice. If you put in too many, they will give a strong flavor to the article. Experience will teach how many to use.
Farina.
Set a pail containing a quart of milk into a kettle of boiling water. Put in a few pieces of stick-cinnamon. When the milk boils, take out the cinnamon and add a teaspoonful of salt, and stir in, very gradually, four table-spoonfuls of dry farina; beat out the lumps, and stir it often during the first ten minutes, then leave it to boil half an hour or more, remembering to stir it repeatedly during that time. Put it in a mould till the next day. Serve it as blanc-mange.
Made thin, like gruel, it is excellent food for young children.