LECTURE THIRD.

Our lesson this morning is the clarifying of soup, or the soup stock that we made yesterday; caramel for coloring soup, gravy and sauces; baked whitefish, after a very nice Western fashion; beefsteak, broiled and fried; and baked apple dumplings.

The first thing I prepare will be the whitefish, after a method which I learned from one of my Cleveland friends, who, by the way, is one of the nicest cooks I know of. I shall use only a little butter, and tell you about the wine which the recipe calls for. When the fish is prepared especially for gentlemen, wine is considered exceedingly nice, but that, as in all other cookery, is a matter of choice. We to-day will use some butter, pepper and salt. I will tell you the kind of wine, and the quantity that is used, when I come to cook the fish. In the winter, of course, all the fish is frozen. We were speaking of that yesterday, how to prepare frozen fish. In the first place, thaw it in plenty of cold water. Put it in a large pan of cold water and let it stay till it is perfectly thawed. Then cut it from the bone and take off the skin. Now, please write down the directions, and then watch and see how I do it. The fish simply has been scaled; to cut it from the bone, make one cut down to the bone through the middle of the side of the fish, lengthwise; having made that line, cut round under the head, to the bone; now lay the knife against the bone of the fish, and turn it until you have the blade cutting against the bone, holding the knife flat; it will take that entire piece of the fish off; cut two pieces from one side of the fish. Now I am going to cut from the other side in the same way, and then I shall take the skin off. First take the four pieces of fish off the bone; you will not find this at all difficult to do, ladies; after you have done it once or twice it will be very easy, and if you have fish that has not been frozen it will be much more easy to do than if you have frozen fish, which, of course, will break a little. It is not possible to keep the pieces entire, cutting from a frozen fish. One of the ladies asks if this can be done as well if the fish has been dressed by the fishmonger; that is, if the entrails have been taken out. Yes, quite as well. This is not dressed simply because it had been sent from market without being dressed. I did not take the trouble to have it dressed here, as I am not going to use the bone of the fish. After I have finished giving you the direction for taking off the skin, I am going to tell you how you could use the bone of the fish. To cut the skin off the fish, lay the pieces of fish skin down on the board; then, holding the knife down straight, cut through the fish until you feel the skin under the knife; as soon as you feel the skin under the knife, flatten the knife out so that it lies against the skin; cut away from you, holding the knife perfectly level, leaving the skin between the board and the knife. Hold the piece of fish in your fingers; lay it flat on the board, skin down, keeping hold of the skin all the time. That takes the skin off, and none of the fish; there is no waste there, and it certainly is very much easier to eat fish in this shape than it is if you have the skin and bone on it. Now, I assure you, ladies, if you only hold the knife flat, you will have no trouble whatever in taking the skin off. If you slant it you will cut through the skin of the fish, but if you hold it perfectly flat you will have no trouble. Of course, with certain kinds of fish there are bones that run transversely from the spine out through the sides of the fish. You do not take these bones out by this operation, but you take out the large back bone. It comes out every time, and I assure you it is a very easy operation.

After you have taken all the skin and bones from the fish, then, for this special dish, cut it in small slices three inches long and a couple of inches wide. Use two soup plates, or two dishes of the same size, deep dishes that you can send to the table. Butter them very thickly, both of them. Lay the fish in one of the dishes, season the layers with salt and pepper, and put a very little butter between each layer, and plenty of butter on the top. Turn the second plate over the first one, upside down on it. Put the dishes with the fish between them into the oven to bake for about twenty minutes, or until the fish flakes. You can tell about that by opening the oven at the end of twenty minutes, and lifting off the top plate; then you can see whether the fish is done or not. Now, in the recipe of which I spoke to you first, the addition of Sauterne wine is made. After the fish is put into the dish, being seasoned as I have told you, using less butter than you would without the wine, with half as much butter on the layers, pour on Sauterne wine,—that is a light, rather acid wine,—just enough to moisten the fish. In placing the fish into the dish it does not make any difference which side you put down. You simply want to put the pieces nicely together so that when you come to help them you can lift each piece out with a spoon. There is no acid that will take the place of the wine and give the same taste. The fish is very nice cooked simply with the butter, pepper and salt. You do not need the wine to make a nice dish, only wine is used by the lady of whom I speak. That is her special preparation of the dish. The wine is put in after the fish is in the dish, just enough wine to moisten it. You will notice that often I will make dishes that have no wine in them; if I make dishes that require wine, I of course put it in, saying that you may use the wine or not, as you please. In this instance I use butter, pepper and salt because it makes a very nice dish, a very nice plain dish, but it is a distinct dish, entirely different to the dish cooked with wine; simply two ways of cooking fish, making two different dishes. For a fish of this size—which probably weighed nearly three pounds—you may use about a heaping tablespoonful of butter in all; that is, besides what you put on the plates. You will butter the plates, and distribute butter throughout the dish. The oven should be moderately hot, not hot enough to brown it—hot enough to heat the plates, which are very thick, and to cook the fish within twenty or twenty-five minutes.

If you wash the board on which the fish is cut, at once, in plenty of hot water, with soap and a little soda or borax all the odor of the fish will be removed. Don’t let any of the utensils stand with the fish drying on them, because if you do it will be very much harder to destroy the odor. And, by the way, ladies, the odor of onions is another thing that troubles some persons. The odor of onions on boards, knives and dishes you can do away with entirely by using parsley. If you take a knife with which you have cut onions, and chop a little parsley with it, or draw the knife through the root of parsley two or three times, it entirely destroys the odor of the onion. So that you see you never need have any trouble in that way in the kitchen.

One of the ladies asks me how to prevent the odor of onions going through the house when you are cooking them. What makes onions, cabbage and turnips smell when you are cooking them is the escape of an exceedingly volatile oil which they all contain; in all of them it has the same characteristics; it does not begin to escape until they are tender. The oil does not begin to escape until the vegetables are tender; if you continue to boil them after that, it will escape. If you take up cabbage or turnips as soon as they are tender, that is, as soon as their substance begins to grow tender, you will notice there will be comparatively little odor; but if you keep on boiling them, according to the old-fashioned rules, for an hour, two hours, or three hours,—you know you sometimes boil cabbage all day long,—you will be sure to have a nice odor through the house. In cutting the onions, of course, if you bend over them, that same oil rising from them escapes as you cut into their substance, and will be sure to make you cry; but if you hold them a little away from you in peeling them, or under water, or if you stand where there is a draught blowing over your hands, it will blow that oil away. In eating onions at the table, if you will subsequently eat parsley dipped in vinegar, you will find that there will be very little odor of the onion remaining in the breath.

Now to return to our fish. After you have taken the flesh of the fish off the bone, you still would see a little of the fish remaining, even if you cut closely. Then draw the fish, and trim the bone; that is, cut off the head, and the fins, and the tail, and take out the entrails of the fish; then make a paste of dry mustard, salt, and a dust of Cayenne pepper. For a bone the size we have here, a long bone like that, use two heaping tablespoonfuls of mustard, a dust of Cayenne pepper and enough vinegar, or Worcestershire sauce, to moisten the mustard to make a paste, which is to be spread over the fishbone. Have the double wire gridiron very thickly buttered, put the bone into the gridiron, brown it quickly at a hot fire, and serve it simply as a relish. A sort of Barmecide feast, but I assure you it is very nice with bread or crackers and butter. It makes a very nice little relish. I might say, ladies, that you can treat any kind of bones in this way. Cold roast beef bones are exceedingly nice. Of course there will be more flesh on the beef bones than on the fish bones.

PLAIN PASTRY.

Use butter, or lard, or very finely chopped suet. If you can get good lard it makes nice pastry; by that I mean lard which has a very little water in it. A good deal of the lard that you buy in the stores has a large proportion of water in it, and I believe in these days it is apt to be sophisticated with several articles which are not exactly lard, so that home-made lard is decidedly the best; that which you try out yourself. First take the butter, or whatever shortening you use,—butter, lard, or suet,—and mix it with twice the quantity of flour. For instance, if you are going to use a pound of flour allow half a pound of shortening. Take half the shortening and mix it with the flour, using a knife. Then wet the mixed flour and butter with just enough cold water to form a paste which you can roll out. If you mix with a knife or spoon you avoid heating the pastry. After the flour and the first half of the shortening have been mixed to a paste roll it out, about half an inch thick, and put the rest of the shortening in flakes on it. One of the ladies asks about putting flour on the pastry board: Extra flour, of course, besides the quantity that you put in the pastry. The only object in washing the butter is to get out any buttermilk that there may be in it. After putting the butter—the second half of the butter—over the pastry in rather large pieces, put just a little flour over it, fold the pastry in such a way that the edge is turned up all round to inclose the butter; that is about an inch and a half all round. Fold the pastry together thin, and roll it out, and fold it several times. Remember that the oftener you fold it and roll it the more flakes you will have in the cooked pastry. Take care to use flour enough to keep it from sticking to the board or the roller. You will remember the pastry is not salted and unless the shortening has enough salt in it to salt the flour, you must add it. Good lard makes a more tender pastry than butter.

Question. Do you ever mix them?

Miss Corson. Yes, you can mix them if you like, using part lard and part butter. To roll out the pastry, roll it in a rather long strip, that is, a strip about three times as long as it is wide. That enables you then to fold it and keep it in a nice shape. It does not make any difference whether you roll it from you or towards you. As many times as you roll and fold it you give it three additional layers. Now I might keep on rolling and folding indefinitely, and I simply should make the pastry have more layers than this has, but I think you thoroughly understand that, so that I will roll it out, and make our dumplings now. Only remember that the more times you roll it the more folds you make, the more layers you have in the pastry. Keep it as cool as possible all the time. If you roll and fold it three times remember that you have nine layers of butter and pastry. You can roll it out more than that if you want to. Puff paste, which is rolled and folded in this way, has what is called nine turns. Rolling and folding it three times makes a turn. The object of using marble or stone pastry slabs is to keep the pastry cool. If you make more pastry than you want to use, wrap it in a floured towel and put it in a very cool place; then when you are ready to use it roll and fold it two or three times, and it will be very much better than when first made. I am going to roll up a strip of the pastry that I cut off the edge in such a way that you will see how the layers are formed, and you can pass it about. One of the ladies has asked me about heating the flour. It is not necessary to heat the flour for pastry, on the contrary, it would rather tend to spoil it. You want to keep it as cool as possible. But in the winter when you are going to make bread, if you heat the flour it facilitates the rising of the bread; there you need the heat.

BAKED APPLE DUMPLINGS.

For apple dumplings, after the pastry is made, cut it in pieces about four inches square and about a quarter of an inch thick. One of the ladies asks about sifting the flour. That is necessary, always. For apple dumplings, peel the apples and take out the cores, leaving the apples as whole as possible. The corer that I have here is nothing but a round tin cylinder. Use any apple corer that will take the core out without breaking the apple. For this purpose Greening apples are the nicest. These are table apples. Put an apple on each piece of pastry. In the core of the apple put as much sugar as it will hold, and a very small pinch of powdered cinnamon—about a quarter of a saltspoonful of powdered cinnamon, or any powdered spice you prefer. Then fold the corners of the square pieces of pastry up over the apple so that they will lap over on the top of the apple. Fasten the corners by moistening them a little with cold water. After the dumplings are all made, brush them over the top with water, or with melted butter, or with egg, beaten; the entire egg, or if you have the white or the yolk, you can beat that up; of course if you use just the yolk you make them a little yellower. If you use the yolk of an egg, beat it with a little water. Ladies are asking me about that little rolling pin. It is like that little knife, it is bewitched, but the magic consists simply in keeping the rolling pin perfectly smooth, and the knife sharp. That is made of hard wood, and is polished so that it is perfectly smooth, and of course I keep it so by not having it soaked in water. Instead of putting water and soap on to clean it, it simply will be wiped with a wet cloth, and then with a dry one. The thousand dents it has in it it has got by travel; it has been knocked around in my traveling trunk for the last five years. The dents did not get in it by using it. It may be made of any hard wood. One of the ladies asks me why I leave the corners of the dumpling open. I could pat the crust around and bring it right up close to the apple, but it would not be so light in the first place. The crust will hold together, it will not break apart in baking, and you leave the ends nice and light; and it makes a nicer-looking dumpling. The idea seems to be that if I should close up the corners the juice of the apples would stay in. It won’t boil out much, anyway.

Now, ladies, I am going to take a little of the soup stock that we made yesterday out in a cup and pass it, so you can see what it looks like before it is clarified. That is the soup stock or broth that we made yesterday. You will remember where your recipe ended yesterday, about the soup stock being poured into a bowl and allowed to cool. That is the condition in which the stock is now. After a little, I am going to tell you about the clarifying of it, but now I want to finish telling you about dumplings, so you will have all your dumpling recipes in one place.

The question was asked, I believe, about the temperature of the oven. About the same as for the fish—a moderate oven, so you can put your hand in and count, say fifteen, quickly. It takes from half an hour to three-quarters to bake the dumplings. Be careful not to brown them. If the pastry seems to be browning before the apples get done,—and something will depend upon the kind of apples you use,—cover the pastry with a buttered paper. The object of the egg on the dumplings is to make them a little glossy. Use either butter, or egg, or water for brushing over the tops.

STEAMED APPLE DUMPLINGS.

For steamed dumplings usually a suet crust is used. You could use this crust if you wanted to, but it would not be sure to be light. It might possibly absorb a little of the steam. For suet crust you would use half a pound of suet chopped very fine, a teaspoonful of salt and a pound of flour. Mix carefully the flour and suet and salt with enough cold water to make a pastry just soft enough to roll out. Roll it out about a quarter of an inch thick, and then cut it in little squares; prepare the apples just as I prepare them for the baked dumpling; instead of folding the crust up and leaving the corners open, pat it with your hands so that you entirely inclose the apple. Just roll the pastry out once and then inclose the apples in it, and put the dumpling into the steamer; that is, an ordinary tin steamer; set over a pot of boiling water and steam the dumplings until they are done. You must decide that by running a trussing needle or knitting needle through the pastry into the apple. It may take an hour and a half to steam the dumplings; be sure they are done.

For another kind of pastry that has been described to me by enthusiastic gentlemen who used to have mothers, a kind of pastry “that melted in your mouth;” it is very easy to make that; not a flaky pastry, but a soft, exceedingly tender pastry that really crumbles. To do that you simply rub all of the shortening into the flour. Half a pound of shortening and a pound of flour; put the shortening into the flour with the salt; rub them with your hands till you have the shortening thoroughly mixed with the flour. It looks like meal; the ingredients must be thoroughly mixed, but not melted together; then use just enough cold water to make the pastry, and roll it out just once, and use it; be sure to keep it cool.

Question. Did you say an hour and a half for steamed dumpling?

Miss Corson. It will take nearly that, but you must try them; try them at the end of an hour. For the dumpling you can use one of the sauces I told you of yesterday morning, white cream sauce, or you can use simply powdered sugar, or powdered sugar mixed with a little cinnamon. You can use a hard sauce, which is butter and sugar mixed together in equal quantities, with any flavoring you like.

FRIED BEEFSTEAK.

That is supposed to be the great abomination of American cooking, so that we are going now to see whether it can not be nearly as nicely fried as broiled. It seems a heresy, but it is true, and there are very many occasions where it is not possible to broil in an ordinary kitchen; the fire may not be good, or uncovering it may cool the oven. There is a very important secret in frying beefsteak, or chops, and that is to have the pan hot before you put the meat into it. It doesn’t make any difference what kind of a pan you use. Use the ordinary iron frying pan, the old-fashioned spider, or dripping pan, if you wish to; but have the pan hot; have the pan hot enough to sear the outside of the meat directly it touches it; after the pan is hot put the beefsteak, or chops—because they are both cooked in the same way—into the hot pan. If the meat is entirely lean, if there is not a particle of fat on it, you may put not more than half a teaspoonful of butter in the pan; run it quickly over the bottom of the pan. But I never saw meat yet so lean, unless the fat was all trimmed off, that there was not fat enough to cook any chop or steak. The portion of fat you will usually find on meat is about one-third, unless you take the meat from the short loin; that is called the porterhouse, or tenderloin steak. In that case you have an excess of fat; there is more than one-third, reckoning in the kidney fat, or suet. You may cut away some of the fat, unless the butchers have cut it away. The butcher has already cut it away from this piece, and, by the way, I notice that Minneapolis butchers cut a very long and thin steak. Now I would not advise the cooking, broiling or frying of that thin end. I would rather buy two steaks of that kind and cut off that and use it for stewing, because it would stew very nicely; broiled it will be rather tough.

As my frying pan is small I am going to cut the steak short. These steaks are cut too thin. A beefsteak to be nice should be over an inch thick—an inch and a half thick. You can easily economise on a thick steak by simply cutting it in halves, and using only as much of it as you want at once, because in almost any weather steak will keep at least over night. Have it too thick rather than too thin. Have it just the thickness you want and then cut it in two, using part only if you only need part of it. Trim off the outside skin, the tough skin; scrape the steak to make sure that there are no particles of bone on it. That bone, of course, comes in sawing the steak. Cut off the cartilage at the top of the steak, otherwise the steak may curl up. Have your pan hot enough to make it sear. Put the steak in and brown it quickly, first on one side and then on the other. In turning the steak run a knife or fork under it and lift it. Don’t stick a fork into it, because by doing that you make little holes in the fibre of the steak and so let the juice escape.

Question. Will you pound your steak?

Miss Corson. No, decidedly not; that lets out the juice. You make little holes in the steak if you stick a fork into it, and by pounding you let the juice out. Now, you want to keep all the juice in the steak, all the juice that you can; so that, in turning the steak simply lift it with a fork or knife and turn it over; when it is brown on both sides push the frying pan back toward the back part of the fire, and finish cooking it until it is done to your taste. After it is brown on one side, turn it over; and then, after that, you can turn it once or twice; the frequent turning does not make any difference after you have got it browned on both sides and you can keep all the juice in. Turn it as soon as it is brown at first; have the hottest kind of a fire; get it brown on the under side as fast as you can; don’t be afraid of burning it; then turn it over and brown it on the other side; after that you can turn it as often as you please. Some people like their steak rare, some medium rare, and some well done. To test steak, do not cut into it to see if it is done, but press your finger on it, on the substance of the steak. If you do that quickly you won’t burn your finger. As long as the steak is very rare the fibre of the meat will be elastic, and directly you take your finger up the fibre will press up again; there will be no dent there. When it is medium rare just a little dent will remain from the pressure, because the fibre is less elastic. When it is well done you can press on it and make a little hollow that will stay there. Do not season the meat until after it is done; don’t put salt on any meat before cooking; you draw out the juice by salting it.

Now for the seasoning of the steak. I have already said that to apply salt to the cut fibre of meat will be sure to draw out the juice, so that you do not want to season a steak until it is done. When it is done season it with salt, pepper and butter. The quantities you use depend upon the taste. That rule applies whether steak is broiled or fried. On that plate you will see the drippings, all that was in the frying pan. There is no juice of the meat there; it is simply browned fat. Whatever juice there was in the meat is still there. Broiled steak is cooked on precisely the same principle. It is to be put just as near the fire as you can get it. After the broiled steak is browned on one side and then on the other, just as fast as you can brown it; don’t be afraid of burning it; you need to watch it; then move it away from the fire, and let it cook as much as you like. Test it in the same way I told you to test fried steak. When it is done put it on a hot dish; put butter, pepper and salt on it, and serve it hot.

Question. What do you do when the fat drops in the fire and blazes?

Miss Corson. Of course it will do that, but that will help brown the steak. If it is possible to broil under the fire it is very much nicer. Sometimes the front of the stove is so arranged that you can let it down and run the gridiron under it; before you begin to broil over the fire you can get the top of the fire very red and clear by throwing a little salt upon it; that will help to destroy the odor. If the meat is frozen you should put it in cold water to thaw before cooking it; you can not avoid in that case washing the meat. To return to the matter of pounding steak: If you pound or break the fibre of meat in any way you let the juice escape; that makes the meat dry.

Question. What do you say to the notion that so many have, that pounding the meat makes it tender?

Miss Corson. You do nothing but break the fibre and save yourself the trouble of chewing the steak. To encourage laziness it is a very good idea. But remember, if you drive the juice out of the steak by pounding you destroy its nutriment. You need the juice in the steak. Now, there is a remedy for the toughness of steak, which I can give you, depending upon whether you like salad oil. If you do not, you ought to learn to, because it is one of the most nutritious and purest of the fats when it is perfectly good. Good sweet salad oil is preferable to any animal or vegetable fat for purposes of nutriment. There is no reason why you should not use salad oil on the score of health. A great many people object to it; they do not like the idea; they think it is rather foreign, and to some people it is distasteful, but they have very strong memories of childhood and another kind of oil. You know even that kind of oil in these days does not taste badly. Olive oil, the peanut oil, or lard oil, when they are fresh and sweet, are very desirable. To soften the fibre of the meat with vinegar and salad oil put on the platter about three tablespoonfuls of salad oil, and half a teacupful of vinegar and a pinch of pepper; no salt. Put these on the platter; then lay the raw steak on the platter, and let it stand at least an hour; then turn it over and let it stand another hour. The longer you can let it stand, if it is in the daytime, turning it over every hour, the tenderer you will make it. The vinegar makes the fibre of the meat tender, and the oil keeps it so. That is, the vinegar softens the fibre of the meat and the oil keeps it soft. If you want to prepare it for over night put it in the oil and vinegar about 6 o’clock, about supper time, and let it stand till bed time, then turn it over, and let it stand till morning. When you come to cook the steak do not wipe the oil and vinegar off; simply let what will run off, and then lay the meat on the gridiron and broil it, or fry it; there will be no taste perceptible if the oil is good.

CARAMEL FOR COLORING SOUP.

A heaping tablespoonful of common brown sugar if you have it; if not, use any kind of sugar; put it in the frying pan and stir it until it is dark brown; that is, until it is on the point of burning; see that it browns evenly. Then put in a tablespoonful of water, either hot or cold—it does not make any difference; stir that until it is mixed with the sugar; then another tablespoonful, until you have used about half a cupful of water. If you should pour the water all in at once the sugar would simply boil over and burn you. Use about half a cupful of water, adding it gradually, and stirring until the burnt sugar is dissolved. That gives you the caramel. Now, while I am making the caramel, I will describe to you the clarifying of the soup.

CLARIFYING SOUP.

To clarify soup stock: For each quart use the white and shell of one egg and one tablespoonful of cold water. Put the white and shell of the egg and the cold water into the bottom of the saucepan, and mix them together. Then put in the soup stock. Set the saucepan over the fire and let it boil gradually, stirring it every minute to mix the egg thoroughly so that it will not cake on the bottom of the pan before it begins to boil. When you have the stock made quite hot, when it begins to boil, then you do not need to stir it; but let it boil until the egg rises to the surface in the form of a thick, white scum, and the soup underneath looks perfectly clear, like sherry wine. Then strain it. When the egg is thick and white, as you see this, and the soup is clear underneath, set a colander in an earthen bowl, put a folded towel, doubled, in it, pour the soup into the bowl, and let it run through the colander without squeezing the towel. You see that is a repetition of the direction I gave you for straining the soup in the first place. The egg is in the towel. Now, I am going to put some of the soup into a goblet before coloring it, so that you can see the natural color. A light straw-color is the proper color for clear soup. You will very often find clear soup served to you, even at nice hotels, much darker than that; as dark as what I am going to make now, which is the proper color for the luncheon soups called bouillon. The coloring is a matter of taste. The clear soup, or consomme, is to be served plain like that, or with the addition of any macaroni paste, or poached eggs, and then it takes its name from the additional ingredient which goes into the clear soup. Julienne soup is served with strips of vegetables in it, as I may tell you in some subsequent lesson.