Gwen Lowrey
"YOURS MERRILY"
1 pint of milk 1/2 cup sugar 1 tablespoon vanilla Place in a saucepan and let come to a boil.
In a bowl, mix two tablespoons of powdered chocolate and one tablespoon of corn starch into a paste with a little cold milk.
Many Pherrily ohe 1916 HELÉNE ST. JOHN Add this to the boiling milk and when the whole thickens a bit, remove from the fire and whip until it is quite smooth.
Serve chilled with whipped cream.
This is most convenient as a hurry-up dessert and easy to make. Abue
RAGOUT OF KIDNEYS
Soak the lamb kidneys in cool water an hour.
Drain and clean, then cut in slices, season with pepper and salt and sauté in butter. Fry one sliced onion, one-half chopped shallot in three tablespoons of butter until yellow. Add three tablespoons of flour and one and a fourth cups brown stock. Cook five minutes, strain and add half a cup mushroom tops, cut in quarters. Season with salt and pepper, add kidney and serve when hot through.
Simply great for late supper or "brunch."
Sincerely,
Two unrelated dishes sit on this page: a cornstarch chocolate pudding and a sauté of lamb kidneys. Both are quick, and both depend on restraint at the end.
- Powdered chocolateIn 1916 this most likely means cocoa powder rather than grated bar chocolate, though sweetened drinking-chocolate powders were also sold under similar names. Two tablespoons in a pint of milk gives a mild pudding; three to four suits modern palates used to darker chocolate.
- Slaking the starchThe cornstarch and cocoa must go in as a smooth cold-milk paste, added to milk already at a boil, then cooked until it thickens. Whisk constantly; cocoa scorches on the pan bottom faster than plain starch does.
- Whip until quite smoothThis is the hinge of the pudding. Cornstarch custards set up lumpy and skin over as they cool, so beat hard off the heat and press a sheet of film onto the surface before chilling.
- Pudding yieldA pint of milk gives about four small servings. It needs several hours in the cold to set and chill; despite the "hurry-up" claim it is not ready in twenty minutes.
- Preparing the kidneysThe hour's soak in cool water draws out some of the ammoniacal smell. After draining, split each kidney and cut away the white core and any surrounding suet, then slice.
- Kidney timingSauté the slices hard and fast, two to three minutes, until just browned outside and rosy within. Kidney that goes grey through has already turned to rubber, which is why the recipe says only "serve when hot through" once they rejoin the sauce.
- Brown stock and mushroom topsBrown stock is beef or veal stock made from roasted bones; a good dark beef stock works. "Mushroom tops" means the caps, stems discarded or saved for stock.
- Straining the sauceThe onion and shallot are cooked for flavour and then strained out, leaving a smooth gravy. Skip the strain if you want the texture, but the flour needs a full five minutes' cooking either way or the sauce tastes raw.
- Kidney yieldThe recipe never says how many kidneys; the sauce quantities would suit roughly four to six lamb kidneys, serving two to three over toast, rice or mashed potato.
Recipes signed by performers point to the kind of subscription or charity volume common in this period, and they say as much about theatrical hours as about cooking. A ragout of kidneys is exactly the sort of thing that suited a household eating at midnight after a performance: offal was cheap, it cooked in minutes, and the sauce could be built while the pan was still hot. The chocolate pudding belongs to the same logic from the other end — a cornstarch-thickened milk dessert of the kind that filled American recipe columns from the later nineteenth century onward, once boxed cornstarch and packaged cocoa were both cheap grocery staples.