Home › Left-Over Vegetables › Left-Over Vegetables: Pepper
Left-Over Vegetables: Pepper
Cream-of-Corn Soup. 2 cupfuls cold corn, 2 cupfuls boiling water, 2 cupfuls milk, 1 slice onion, Sprig parsley, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 2 tablespoonfuls flour, Pepper and salt.
Put the corn through a meat chopper. Add the boiling water and simmer for twenty-five minutes. Rub through a sieve. Scald the milk with the onion and parsley. Remove the seasonings, and pour the milk over the corn pulp. Melt the flour and butter together and use for binding.
Season with pepper and salt.
Baked-Bean Soup. 3 cupfuls cold baked beans 2 cupfuls water, 4 cupfuls stock, 2 slices onion, 3 stalks celery, 1½ cupfuls canned tomatoes, 2 drops McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce, Salt and pepper, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 2 tablespoonfuls flour.
Put the beans, celery, onion, tomatoes, with the stock and water, into a saucepan and simmer half an hour. Rub through a sieve, leaving nothing in the sieve except the skins of the beans and the seeds of the tomato. Add the seasonings, bind with the butter and flour melted together.
Wilted Lettuce. 1 slice ham, cupful vinegar, 1 egg, + teaspoonful mustard, Pepper and salt, Outside leaves 2 heads lettuce. on.
Fry a slice of ham with some fat When done, remove the ham, leaving the fat gravy in the frying pan. Have ready the vinegar, beaten egg, mustard and pepper and salt to taste. Add the egg to the vinegar slowly so it will not curdle. When well mixed, pour slowly into the ham gravy, stirring well. Let it come to a boil. Put the lettuce in with a fork, toss and thoroughly mix with the hot mixture in the frying pan for two minutes. Cover the pan for two minutes, then turn out in a deep dish.
Vegetable Hash.
From the remains of a boiled dinner there are generally enough leftovers to make a vegetable hash. e a. Meat Chopper: b. Wire Spoon for Beating Sauces: c, Potato Ricer; d, Glass Measuring Cup: e, Cream Whip.
Chop coarsely cabbage, turnips, parsnips, potatoes, and a carrot. Combine in equal quantities and to each pint of the vegetable use a tablespoonful butter melted in a spider. Pepper and salt to taste and add 2½ tablespoonfuls brown stock. Cook slowly, and let it just come to a boil.
Serve hot with pickled beets.
Sauce Robert. 2 drops McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce, 8 tablespoonfuls oil mayonnaise, 4 tablespoonfuls French mustard, 2 tablespoonfuls vinegar, 2 cold boiled onions.
Chop the onions fine and mix with the other ingredients. This is a delicious accompaniment to pork tenderloin, veal cutlet, lamb chops, or a steak.
MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK Cabbage Jelly (German recipe).
Drain cold boiled cabbage perfectly dry, chop fine, add butter, pepper, and salt to taste. Press the whole closely into a small pudding dish, and bake an hour.
Corn Omelet. 1 cupful cold corn 3 eggs, + cupful milk, ½ teaspoonful salt, Dash pepper, 1 tablespoonful butter.
Chop the corn slightly. Beat the yolks of the eggs till thick, mix with the milk, salt and pepper. Add the corn and fold in the whites of the eggs beaten dry. Melt the butter in an omelet pan, pour in the mixture, and cook exactly as you would an omelet.
Corn Fritters. 1 cupful cold chopped corn, 1 cupful milk, 1 teaspoonful Calumet baking powder, Yolks 2 eggs, tablespoonfuls flour, teaspoonful salt, → teaspoonful pepper Whites 2 eggs.
Beat the yolks till thick and lemoncolored, add the milk and seasoning, then the corn, flour, and baking powder. Last of all, cut in the whites of eggs beaten to a stiff froth. Drop from a tablespoon into hot lard, and fry a delicate brown.
Curried Vegetables. 1 cupful cold potatoes, 1 cupful cold carrots, cupful cold turnips, cupful cold peas, 2 tablespoonfuls butter slices onion, tablespoonfuls flour, tablespoonful salt, teaspoonful curry powden 1 teaspoonful pepper, Dash celery salt, 1 cupful milk, 1 teaspoonful chopped parsley.
Cut the potatoes, carrots, and turnips into tiny cubes; add the peas. Pour over them the onion cooked in the butter for five minutes. Add flour, and seasonings, and pour on slowly the scalded milk. Sprinkle with finely chopped parsley.
Spinach Réchauffé (French recipe). 2 cupfuls cold spinach, 4 tablespoonfuls butter, 3 tablespoonfuls flour, cupful chicken stock, 1 teaspoonful powdered sugar, Salt and pepper, Grated nutmeg, Grated lemon rind Chop the spinach fine, reheat in a double boiler with the butter, in which has been melted the flour and chicken stock. Add the seasonings.
Baked-Bean Rarebit. tablespoonfuls butter, teaspoonful salt, teaspoonful paprika, 1 cupful cold baked beans, cupful milk, drops McIlhenny's Tabaseo Sauce, cupfuls chopped cheese.
Press the beans through the potato ricer and sprinkle the pulp with the seasonings. Put in an omelet pan with the butter, and when hot add the milk and cheese. Stir till thoroughly blended. Serve on slices of toast laid on very hot plates.
Onion Soufflé. cupful stale bread crumbs, 1 teaspoonful chopped parsle 1 cupful cold boiled onions, Yolk 1 egg, 1 tablespoonful butter, 1 tablespoonful flour. 4 teaspoonful salt.
Paprika, 1 cupful milk, Whites 2 eggs.
LEFT-OVER VEGETABLES Chop the onions fine. Make a white sauce from the butter, flour, seasonings, and milk. When it boils, add to it the bread crumbs, parsley, chopped onion, and beaten yolk of the egg. Beat the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth and fold them into the onion mixture. Pour into a buttered dish and bake fifteen minutes in moderate oven. Serve with cream sauce. a Scalloped Tomatoes and Onions. 1½ cupfuls cold boiled onions, 6 tomatoes, Pepper and salt, 1 cupful buttered crumbs.
Cut the tomatoes into thin slices and chop the onions fine. Butter a baking pan. Put in a layer of sliced tomatoes, season with pepper and salt. Cover with a sprinkling of buttered crumbs, cover with sliced onions, then a layer of tomatoes. Make the last layer onion slices covered liberally with crumbs. Bake in a moderate oven three quarters of hour.
Monday's Soup. can tomatoes, 6 boiled or baked potatoes, onion, 1 stalk celery, Few celery tops, Pepper and salt, 1 tablespoonful vinegar, 1 cupful hot milk, Pinch soda. an Boil vegetables together until they are soft. Put through a potato ricer, add pepper, salt, and soda. Just before serving pour in the milk with a pinch of soda dissolved in it. Sift over the top dry bread crumbs.
Green-Pea Soup.
Take what remains of the peas cooked for dinner the day before and a little of any kind of soup left, and boil together until the peas are soft.
If you have a heaping cupful peas you can make soup enough for four or five persons. Put in salt and pepper and onion. The quantity of each must depend upon the character of the soup which you have put in. Put a tablespoonful butter into a frying pan, and when it is hot, put a handful stale bread cut in dice. Stir until they are quite brown. Strain the soup, rubbing the peas through a colander. Sprinkle in a little chopped parsley and a few celery tops cut up fine. Put the fried bread in the tureen, and pour in the soup. Savory Cauliflower (Dutch recipe).
Steam cold boiled cauliflower until it is hot, and pour over it a sauce made as follows: Boil 1 cupful thin cream, thicken by adding 1 teaspoonful flour, stirred smooth in a little cold cream; let the mixture boil up, stirring constantly, add a pinch salt, a little pepper, and a small quantity nutmeg.
Cauliflower au Fromage (French recipe).
Put cold boiled cauliflower in a bake dish, and turn over it enough drawn butter to moisten; grate cheese over the top, cover with sifted bread crumbs, put small bits of butter on top, and bake until light brown.
Asparagus Omelet.
Put a tablespoonful butter in a frying pan; when melted, pour in 3 eggs which have been beaten just enough to mix the yolks with the whites; stir constantly; when the mixture thickens, take from the fire, season with salt and pepper, and stir into it what you have left of cold boiled asparagus cut into small bits.
Boiled Potatoes.
A run of leftover-vegetable dishes from a period when a cook was expected to build the second day's meals out of whatever came off the first day's table. Several of the ingredient lists give a unit but no number, so read the method first and season by taste.
- Missing quantitiesIn a number of these lists the fraction or figure has not survived — the vinegar and mustard in Wilted Lettuce, the flour in Corn Fritters, the butter, milk and cheese in Baked-Bean Rarebit, and the stock in Spinach Réchauffé among them. Treat those as cook's-judgment amounts rather than guessing at a printed figure; the Vegetable Hash direction for "24 tablespoonfuls brown stock" per pint cannot be right either, but the original figure is not recoverable from the text, so use only enough stock to moisten.
- SpiderA spider is a cast-iron frying pan, originally one with legs for hearth cooking. Any heavy skillet does the same work.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350–375F. The Onion Soufflé at fifteen minutes and the scalloped tomatoes and onions at three-quarters of an hour are both directed to that heat.
- Meat chopper and potato ricerThe hand-cranked meat chopper does by muscle what a food processor now does; a few pulses gives the coarse texture wanted for the corn soup and hash. Where the recipes call for pressing beans through a ricer or rubbing soup through a sieve, a blender plus a strainer to catch bean skins and tomato seeds is faster and gives much the same result.
- Drawn butterIn this period drawn butter means a simple butter-and-flour sauce thinned with water or milk, not the clarified butter served with shellfish today. Use a thin béchamel for the Cauliflower au Fromage.
- Binding with butter and flour"Melt the flour and butter together and use for binding" is a small roux (used here much as one would use beurre manié) whisked into the hot liquid. Whisk it in off the boil in small pieces, then simmer two or three minutes to cook out the raw flour taste.
- The soda in Monday's SoupThe method calls for soda twice — once with the pepper and salt, once dissolved in the milk — though the ingredient list gives only one pinch. Only the second addition is needed, and only a pinch: it is there to keep the tomato acid from curdling the milk. More than that gives a soapy taste and a dull colour.
- Wilted lettuceThe hinge is the egg. Add the beaten egg to the vinegar slowly and off the heat, then bring the mixture up gently in the ham fat; taken straight to a hard boil it will scramble. The lettuce wants only seconds of tossing, not the full two minutes plus two covered, or the leaves collapse to nothing.
- Frying the corn frittersHot lard, in the region of 350–375F. Vegetable oil behaves the same way. Drop in small spoonfuls and do not crowd the pan, or the temperature falls and the batter soaks.
- YieldsNo yields are printed except in Green-Pea Soup, which states four or five persons from a heaping cupful of peas. On the quantities given, the soups will plausibly serve four to six and the two omelets about two.
These pages belong to the great age of household economy writing, when a middle-class kitchen without refrigeration cooked a large joint or a boiled dinner and then had to account for every remnant before it spoiled. The chapter's logic is visible in its shape: yesterday's corn becomes soup, then omelet, then fritters; yesterday's baked beans become soup, then a rarebit. The tags attached to several dishes — German, French, Dutch — reflect the era's habit of borrowing prestige from continental cookery, though Spinach Réchauffé is simply reheated spinach and Cabbage Jelly is a pressed cabbage pudding. Two brand names, McIlhenny's Tabasco and Calumet baking powder, appear inside the ingredient lists rather than in advertisements, a common arrangement in commercially supported cookbooks of the period and one of the clearer signs of when the book was compiled. Sauce Robert, here a cold mayonnaise-and-mustard mixture with boiled onions, is a considerable distance from the classic French brown sauce of the same name; the borrowing of a familiar name for a loosely related preparation was routine in American domestic writing.