Unless you are really an experienced cook, it is unwise to attempt too complicated a dish, but a little practice will soon put you quite at ease, and a little thought will enable you to serve your Sunday-night supper or a midnight lunch quite as easily this way as any other.
We are most of us familiar enough with simple cooking to prepare any ordinary dish, and without entering into a list of formulæ, the following suggestions will be found all sufficient:
Ham, oyster, bacon, cheese, potato, jelly, celery or preserved fruit omelets; scrambled eggs; curried oysters or chicken; minced ham or minced tongue souffle; fried shad roe, calves brains, chops, sausages or sardines; creamed chicken with mushrooms, creamed sweetbreads, liver, bacon, lobster, oysters, cold boiled fish of all kinds; fried oyster, clam, corn, pineapple, peach, orange or banana fritters (fried in butter); cheese fondue, Welsh rarebit, sardines in cheese sauce, or any other simple little dish your fancy may dictate. With such an array as this to choose from, and a hundred other equally simple dishes in reserve, is it possible for any one to despair over the impossibilities of the chafing dish and its limited qualifications for a quick, hot supper?
Chafing Dish Chat.
While recipes for chafing dish cookery abound, the little hints which make all the difference between success and failure in the concoction of any given dish are usually omitted.
The chafing dish novice is usually obliged to learn them by that hardest of all teachers, experience.
To ameliorate this difficulty, the following suggestions are given:
Have plenty of alcohol on hand to avoid the possibility of the lamp's going out just before some dish is completed, otherwise, if you are a man, you may be tempted to use language almost warm enough to cook the ingredients.
If your chafing dish lamp has not been used for some time, pour only a little alcohol into it at first, let it stand, and then fill it up.
If obliged to refill the lamp in the process of cooking, do not do it while the lamp is very hot, as the igniting point of alcohol is low.