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Some Kitchen Kinks: Slip
Slip little paper frills on the bones, and serve with a spoon of green peas.
A delicious way to cook chops for an invalid is to broil them inside paper cases. Make an envelope of thick glazed note paper and rub it with butter. Slip the chop inside. Fold the paper so there are two sheets covering the meat, put the little case between the wires of the broiler and move about over a clear, hot fire. If it is turned quickly and often, there will be no danger of the paper taking fire. A chop ought to cook in this fashion in five or eight minutes.
It is constantly basted in the butter and its own juices, and is very sweet and tender. Turn out onto a hot plate, being careful that all the gravy is saved. Chicken or birds may be cooked in the same fashion.
Creamed Asparagus. - Wash a few stalks of asparagus and cut off the white part. Divide the tender green portion into pieces an inch long.
Cook in boiling salted water until tender. Arrange on a piece of buttered toast, seasoning with pepper and salt, and pour a little melted butter over it. If the invalid desires, a few tablespoonfuls of white sauce may be used instead of the butter.
Gum-gluten Biscuits.-1 cupful of self-raising gum gluten; dash of salt; 1 tablespoonful of butter; milk.
Sift the dry ingredients, rub the butter into the flour, and add enough milk to make a soft dough. Roll it out, cut into little biscuits, and bake quickly.
Bran Muffins.-l cupful of Hours 2 cupfuls of bran; 1 teaspoonful of soda; 3 tablespoonfuls of molasses; 4 tablespoonfuls of butter; 1½ cupfuls of sour milk; dash of salt.
Mix the dry ingredients, rub the butter between the fingers, add the molasses and sour milk; beat hard for five minutes. Pour into greased, hot pop-over irons, and bake in a quick oven.
Raw-beef Sandwiches. - Meat is often served in this fashion to a patient whose stomach will not retain it when cooked. Take about 2 tablespoonfuls of the raw meat prepared as described in scraped beef, season lightly with pepper and salt, spread it between two slices of buttered bread, and toast the outside delicately. Be careful not to allow the meat to reach the edges of the bread or it may nauseate the patient.
A run of sickroom cookery from the invalid-diet chapter: chops broiled in paper, creamed asparagus on toast, two quick breads and a raw-beef sandwich. Most of it still works; the last item does not.
- The raw-beef sandwichTwo tablespoonfuls of scraped raw beef, spread in a sandwich and browned only on the outer crust, never reaches any temperature that would kill E. coli O157:H7, salmonella or listeria. Scraping and mincing spreads surface bacteria through the whole mass, which is exactly why ground and scraped beef is riskier than a whole cut, and the intended eater here is a sick person with reduced tolerance for infection. This item should not be made; use a current recipe if you want steak tartare, and understand that it carries its own risk.
- Paper cases for the chopUse baking parchment, not "thick glazed note paper." Coated and glazed modern papers may carry clay coatings, optical brighteners or synthetic finishes that have no place against food. Parchment butters and folds the same way and takes direct heat better.
- Broiling versus the fireThe technique assumes a wire broiler held over live coals and turned constantly. Under a domestic overhead broiler the paper sits still and scorches; a heavy ribbed pan over medium-high heat, turning every 30 to 45 seconds, reproduces the method more faithfully. Five to eight minutes suits a thin chop about half an inch thick.
- Doneness, since none is givenA lamb or pork chop cooked in a sealed parcel will not brown, so colour tells you nothing. Pork wants 145F at the centre with a short rest; lamb is a matter of preference from 130F up. Open the parcel over the plate so the juices are not lost.
- Gum glutenSelf-raising gum gluten was a commercial low-starch flour sold for diabetic patients and is no longer on the market. Vital wheat gluten sold today is a concentrate, not a substitute measure for measure, and contains no leavening; a cupful used straight will give something closer to rubber than a biscuit.
- Bran muffins: sour milk and sodaSour milk here means naturally soured raw milk, acid enough to react with the teaspoonful of soda. Cultured buttermilk is the direct replacement; pasteurised milk left out will spoil rather than sour usefully. A quick oven is roughly 400 to 425F, and popover irons are simply deep muffin cups, well greased and preheated.
- Creamed asparagusTrimming off "the white part" means snapping away the woody base. Period recipes tend to boil asparagus far longer than we would; three to five minutes in well-salted water is enough for inch lengths, and cold water stops the colour going grey. The white sauce alternative is a thin bechamel, the few tablespoonfuls the recipe calls for.
- ScaleEach of these is a single-invalid portion except the quick breads; a cupful of flour will give roughly eight to ten small biscuits, and the muffin batter is bulkier and will fill rather more irons than that.
Invalid cookery was a standing department in American household manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when serious illness was nursed at home and the diet was considered part of the treatment. The recipes here show the whole range of that thinking: bland, buttery, easily chewed food; bran and gluten breads aimed at constipation and diabetes respectively, the latter sold as proprietary low-starch flours before insulin made such diets less central; and raw scraped beef, which physicians of the period genuinely prescribed for wasting patients and anaemia on the theory that uncooked meat was more readily assimilated. Cooking in a buttered paper case is the domestic form of en papillote, generally traced to French professional practice, and it appears in invalid chapters because it needs no fat beyond a smear of butter and loses none of the juices the patient was supposed to benefit from. The instruction not to let the meat reach the edge of the bread is a reminder that presentation was treated as half the medicine.