Dinners and Luncheons - Paul Pierce (best novels for beginners .txt) 📗
- Author: Paul Pierce
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Pate Franciere.—Line eight fluted pate tins with a delicate pastry crust, then fill with rice and bake a dainty brown in moderate oven. Remove the rice and fill them with the following force meat: Two pairs of chicken livers, steamed tender then minced fine, four steamed cocks combs, one cup of fried scallops. Moisten the ingredients with a brown gravy highly seasoned with paprika and truffle, and fill neatly into the crusts. Put on a perforated top previously baked, and serve on a folded napkin.
Roses Glace Daintee.—One half package of gelatine soaked in one and a half cups of white wine for thirty minutes, then set the bowl into boiling water, until the gelatine is dissolved. Add one half cup of sugar, a few drops of orange flower water to flavor, a few drops of spinach extract to color a delicate green. Strain and set away to cool.
When it begins to thicken beat in one pint of whipped cream. Add two ounces of candied rose petals, turn into square mold and when set turn out on lace paper mat on crystal dessert platter. Garnish with roses.
Here are three more menus:
Out of the beaten track:
Little Neck Clams on the Half Shell, and without the customary slices of lemon and various sauces and horseradish. It is a mistake to spoil the flavor of any food with highly-seasoned sauces.
Next, Chicken Okra Soup, into which, just before serving, is poured a small pitcher of plain cream.
For the fish course, instead of the usual small separate portions, have a Planked Whitefish served from the plank, with Plain Butter Sauce. Accompanying this have small Baked Potatoes, cut open in the center and with a small piece of butter placed in each one.
Instead of the hereditary Cucumber Salad, have young cucumbers quartered lengthwise, not sliced. Cucumbers prepared in this way are much more delicious, because the knife cuts through most of the seeds. They should be pared so that a great deal of the outside is taken off. The best dressing is about three parts olive oil and one part vinegar, with a little pepper and salt, poured over the cucumbers just before serving. Cucumbers allowed to stand in dressing for any length of time become rubbery and indigestible.
Here serve for each guest half a small Broiled Chicken on Toast, with Potatoes au Gratin, and large delicious young Marrowfat Peas.
Serve as a separate course, Lettuce cut in thin strips, over which is sprinkled powdered sugar and a plentiful amount of plain cream is poured.
For dessert have a large dish of delicious ripe strawberries.
Following this have plain unsweetened wafers buttered with Roquefort Paste (which is made of Roquefort cheese and butter in equal quantities) and dusted with cinnamon. Then serve Turkish coffee.
A Mid-Summer Dinner.Have table prettily decorated with a centerpiece of ice and ferns. The ice frozen in a miniature iceberg, and encircled by low, spreading maidenhair ferns and gleaming tiny opalescent lamps. Keep the candles for the lamps in the ice chest all day and they will burn slowly and steadily through the evening. Let cut glass canoes hold the nuts, olives and bonbons. The meat courses should be served in thin white Japanese porcelain, but the other viands are to be served in cut glass dishes. The name cards are made of squares of gray paper simply lettered with the guests' names and the date—the letters formed by icicles. The menu is as follows:
The clams are served in ice shells, lying on beds of crisp cress, and the bouillon, strong and highly seasoned, served in little cut glass bowls. With the fricasseed crabs serve a smooth cool sauce, having lemon and mustard as its predominating flavor. Juicy little fillets of beef, that melt in the mouth, are next brought on lettuce leaves, with fricasseed mushrooms on toast, frozen pickled beets and potato straws. The sweetbreads are parboiled, chopped up with asparagus tips and truffles, and formed into cones with white chaudfroid sauce, then chilled to the freezing point. With them are served tomatoes filled with shaved ice, chopped cress and tartare sauce. But the triumph of cookery is the salad, each ingredient proportioned and blended into a pleasing whole. The white meat of two chickens, cut into small fillets and each dipped into a semi-fluid jelly made as follows: Three hard boiled eggs, an anchovy, one tablespoonful of minced capers, two tablespoonfuls of grated ham, one teaspoonful of chopped parsley and a pinch of chili pepper rubbed through a sieve and mixed well with two tablespoonfuls of mayonnaise and three of semi-fluid aspic. Then small molds are lined with aspic and a fillet—ornamented with strips of beets and cucumbers—put in each; enough aspic to cover poured in and the molds set on ice.
A rich mayonnaise is made, and peas, cut up cucumbers and string beans stirred through it. When the time comes to serve the salad, the molds are turned out on leaves of crinkly white lettuce, with a border of mayonnaise around them. The peach sherbet is served in little fluted cups of ice, set in a circle of fern fronds and pink carnations on cut glass plates. Three drops of cochineal are added to the ice just before freezing to give it a delicate pink hue. After the gelatine is dissolved in a rich custard and begins to thicken, the curacoa and the whipped cream are added, and stirred together very lightly. Individual orange-shaped molds are filled with the cream and put on ice to harden. When turned out of the molds, a little twig and leaves of crystalized ginger are inserted in each orange. Sherry wine is poured in the heart of the melon, and, after it has ripened on ice for two hours, the melon is cut open and the seeds removed. Cut out oval-shaped pieces with a big spoon and set back on the ice till wanted. Take to the table in a deep glass bowl, splints of ice shining among its juicy pink morsels. Then the coffee, the toasted crackers and blocks of frozen cheese.
Luncheon Menus.There are but few particulars in which a formal luncheon differs materially from a dinner. Fruit or a fruit salpicon is usually preferred to oysters as a first course. The soup or bouillon is served in cups rather than soup plates, and entrees or chops take the place of heavy joints or roasts. The usual hour for a luncheon is between one and two o'clock, and artificial light is considered inappropriate for such an occasion. If the table used is a handsome and highly polished one, the cloth may be dispensed with, if desired. Instead use a handsome center piece with small doilies under the plates and other dishes to protect the table. If there are a large number of guests, they are usually served at small tables, prettily decorated with a few flowers.
If the luncheon is to be a formal affair word your invitation thus: "Mrs. Harris requests the pleasure of Mrs. Brown's company at luncheon, Tuesday, September twenty-seventh, at one o'clock." If it is an informal affair simply write a little note on this order:
Dear Mrs. Brown,
Will you not join us at luncheon Tuesday at one o'clock? My friend, Mrs. Black, is with me and I should like to have you meet her.
Sincerely yours,
Date.
Put your street and number at the head of the note. Invitations to informal luncheons are also permissible by telephone or verbally.
Simple Luncheon.Have the fruit at each place when the guests are assembled. Garnish with any preferred flowers, which should serve also as a souvenir of the occasion. Substitute other fruit if grapes are not seasonable. Both timbale cases and Saratoga potatoes given in the next course, may be prepared early. The potatoes, of course, must be reheated. Fill the creamed oysters into the cases, surround with the potatoes and serve the biscuits, olives and pickles on the same plate. Make the biscuits with baking powder, roll out the dough half the usual thickness, cut out and put two rounds together, brushing first the lower round with melted butter. To make the moulded chicken, separate some stewed chicken into small pieces. Fill loosely into small buttered moulds with a slice of hard boiled egg in the bottom of each. Cover with the strained and clarified chicken broth, to which sufficient gelatine has been added to stiffen it, and stand aside to harden. Turn out on shredded lettuce and serve surrounded with mayonnaise. Bake a sponge cake in a large sheet, cover thickly with boiled icing and decorate with marshmallows cut in halves, and placed on the top at regular distances. Cut in squares, with a marshmellow in the center of each. The orange jelly may be made more elegant if candied fruit and nuts are added to it.
More Elaborate Luncheon.For the salpicon of fruit, make a foundation of three-quarter orange juice, one-quarter lemon juice, and powdered sugar to sweeten. Add sliced bananas and other fruit in season. Serve very cold in punch glasses. Serve the cream of celery in bouillon cups with whipped cream on top. The puff paste points and patty shells may be made of the same paste. Serve the fried chicken, vermicelli toast and potatoes on one plate. If very young spring chickens are used, cut in halves or quarters; larger chickens may be cut in smaller pieces. It is nice, only rather expensive, to use the breasts only, cut in two or three pieces. To make the vermicelli toast, cut the bread in rounds and toast it, cover with a rich, thick cream sauce, to which add the chopped whites of several eggs, and sprinkle thickly over all the yolks rubbed through a ricer. A pretty way of serving the Waldorf salad is in apple cups. Cut off the tops and hollow out some large red apples, fill with a mixture of the scraped apple, celery, nuts and mayonnaise, replace the top and insert a celery plume for the stem. Serve surrounded with hot buttered popcorn. A plain, but very elegant frozen pudding is easily made of whipped cream, sweetened and flavored. Pack in a mold in layers, dot each layer liberally with candied fruit, nuts and grated chocolate. Pack in ice and salt for at least four hours.
Of course these dishes can be varied to suit the season and the occasion. The main thing is to be prepared for your company by being at home yourself, and in this way you will make everybody else at home.
A Berry Luncheon.For table decorations, ribbons and candle shades use crushed strawberry
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