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Left-Over Vegetables
THE possibilities for utilizing cold vegetables are greater than for any dish that comes to the American table. Almost every vegetable in common use, from the ragged outside leaves of lettuce to a cupful cold string beans, may reappear as a tasty hot dish or a tempting salad. Leftover spinach, corn, lettuce, tomato, string beans, peas, squash, cauliflower, carrots, onions, or beans may be converted into savory soups, and nearly every vegetable in the market when cold can reappear as a salad. If the left-overs are many and small, the result may be a Macedoine salad.
This is the name given to a salad in which cold boiled vegetables are combined. Each vegetable is kept separate, and generally the dish can be arranged in such a charming scheme of color that it is a pleasure to the eye. Vegetables may be cut in cubes, strips, triangles, tiny balls, or in fancy shapes, formed by a vegetable cutter. During the summer, when young beets, turnips, carrots, and green vegetables are at their best, these salads may be had in perfection.
If left-overs of vegetables come from the table coated with cream sauce or mayonnaise, put each by itself in a colander. Wash off in cold water, drain thoroughly, chill before using, and it will be as good as if freshly cooked. Plenty of a crisp green vegetable, lettuce, water cress, or parsley, is necessary to make a Macedoine salad perfect. Spinach in Molds. 2 cupfuls cold spinach, Pepper and salt, 1 tablespoonful lemon juice, tablespoonful melted butter.
Drain the spinach and chop fine.
Season and stir in the melted butter.
Butter Dario molds and pack in the mixture. Set on ice until chilled.
Remove from the molds and arrange the spinach on thin slices of cold boiled tongue cut in rounds. Garnish the base of each with parsley, and serve on top a spoonful sauce tartare.
Baked-Bean Sandwiches. cupful baked beans, 1 tablespoonful horse-radish, 1 teaspoonful celery and parsley minced fine, teaspoonful onion juice, teaspoonful mustard, Dash McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce.
Press the beans through a potato ricer, mix with the seasoning, and spread between slices of entire-wheat bread.
Corn Soup. 1 quart veal stock, 1 cupful green corn cut from the cob and chopped.
Add the corn to the stock and simmer slowly for twenty minutes. Add pepper and salt to taste, thicken slightly, and strain.
Pea Soup. 2 cupfuls cold green peas, 4 cupfuls veal stock, 1 slice onion, 1 teaspoonful salt, teaspoonful pepper, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 2 tablespoonfuls flour.
Add the peas and onion to the stock and simmer till they begin to fall to LEFT-OVER VEGETABLES pieces. Rub through a sieve, reheat, season, and bind with butter and flour rubbed together. Peas that are too old to serve as a vegetable may be used for soup.
A short essay on using up cooked vegetables, followed by four small recipes. Several of the ingredient lines have lost their fractions, so treat the quantities below as guides and season by taste.
- Missing fractionsWhere the text reads "tablespoonful melted butter," "cupful baked beans," "teaspoonful onion juice," "teaspoonful mustard" and "teaspoonful pepper," a fraction has dropped out. Since the lost fraction means less than the printed unit, the intended amounts were probably a half or a quarter of what appears; the printed figures are not reliable, so fill in by taste.
- Dario moldsA misprint for dariole molds, the small straight-sided tin cups used for individual timbales and custards. Ramekins, dariole tins, or even a muffin tin lined with plastic will do; the point is a neat unmolded shape, so pack the spinach firmly.
- MacedoineA macedoine is an assortment of cold cooked vegetables cut small and arranged so the colours stay distinct. This text calls for cubes, strips, triangles, tiny balls or vegetable-cutter shapes rather than a single uniform dice, and keeps each vegetable separate; dress them separately just before plating, or the beets will bleed into the rest.
- Rinsing off old sauceThe advice to wash cream sauce or mayonnaise off leftovers under cold water reflects an older willingness to re-serve food that has already been to table. Vegetables that have been dressed with a dairy or egg sauce and left standing are better discarded; rinsing removes the sauce, not the bacteria it has been sitting in.
- Veal stockBoth soups are built on veal stock, once the standard neutral base in American and Anglo-French cookery because it is mild and gelatinous. Unsalted chicken stock is the closest substitute; a light vegetable stock also works, though the body will be thinner.
- Corn soup timingTwenty minutes suits "green corn" cut at the milk stage; modern supersweet corn is tender in five to eight minutes, and longer only dulls the flavour. Strain through a sieve to catch the hulls. "Thicken slightly" is left unspecified — the butter-and-flour binding given for the pea soup is one way to read it.
- Entire-wheat breadAn older name for whole-wheat bread. The bean sandwich filling is essentially a seasoned bean puree; a food processor replaces the potato ricer, and any hot sauce stands in for the branded Tabasco.
- YieldsNone are given in the text. On the quantities printed, the spinach probably makes about four small timbales, the bean mixture enough for a few sandwiches, and each soup roughly four small servings.
This chapter belongs to the American economy-cookery tradition that ran from Catharine Beecher through the domestic-science writers of the 1890s and 1900s, when leftovers were treated as a test of a housekeeper's skill rather than a nuisance. The macedoine it recommends is a borrowing from French professional kitchens ",the word is generally traced to the name for Macedonia and its mixture of peoples ",and its appearance in a household manual shows how far restaurant garnishing had filtered into middle-class home cooking. The named brand of Tabasco is worth noting: McIlhenny's sauce, made in Louisiana since the 1860s, was familiar enough that a general-interest household book could name it without explanation. The reliance on veal stock, meanwhile, marks a kitchen that still made stock as a matter of routine.