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Reheating Vegetables
Left-over potatoes, turnips, parsnips, carrots, and similar vegetables may be cut into cubes and reheated in cream sauce. It is essential to have the sauce freshly made and very hot when the vegetables are entered. They may be served in this style, or the dish may be sprinkled with buttered bread-crumbs, and browned in the oven. Or, using a thick cream sauce as a "binder," the vegetables may be made into croquettes. Of course, if so used, they must be mashed first.
Left-over stewed tomatoes may be strained and used as stock for tomato sauce, which is an excellent foundation for reheating cold meats. • •
This is a method rather than a fixed formula, so the useful work is in fixing the sauce proportions and the temperatures the original leaves out.
- "Cream sauce"In a book of this period this means a white sauce built on a butter-and-flour roux with milk or thin cream, not cream reduced on its own. For pouring consistency use 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour to 1 cup milk, seasoned with salt and a little pepper or nutmeg.
- The thick "binder"For croquettes double the roux: 4 tablespoons butter and 4 tablespoons flour to 1 cup milk, cooked until it pulls away from the pan in a mass. Chill the mixed puree thoroughly, several hours or overnight, before shaping, or the croquettes will burst in the fat.
- "Entered"Simply means added to the sauce. The instruction behind it is the hinge of the whole page: the sauce must be freshly made and at a full simmer, because cold cooked vegetables will drop the temperature fast and a lukewarm creamed dish is both unpleasant and a food-safety problem.
- Reheat once, and reheat hotCooked vegetables that have been held in the refrigerator should be brought to at least 165F throughout and served straight away. Do not cool and reheat the same batch a second time, and do not leave the finished dish standing warm on the stove.
- Buttered bread-crumbsFresh soft crumbs tossed with melted butter, roughly 1 tablespoon butter to 1/2 cup crumbs. Brown the assembled dish at 400F for 15 to 20 minutes, or under the broiler for a few minutes if the vegetables and sauce are already hot.
- Frying croquettesBread them with flour, beaten egg and dry crumbs and fry at 375F until deep gold, about 2 to 3 minutes. Hotter fat colours the crust before the centre warms; cooler fat lets them absorb grease and slump.
- Tomato stockStrained leftover stewed tomatoes vary enormously in salt and sugar, so taste before seasoning the sauce. Use them within a day or two of the original cooking.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities. As a working guide, about 2 cups diced vegetables with 1 cup sauce would serve four as a side dish, or make roughly eight small croquettes.
Mrs. Fryer's Loose Leaf Cook Book, generally attributed to Jane Eayre Fryer and published in the later 1910s, belongs to the American domestic-science moment when cookery was taught as household management, and its loose-leaf binding was meant to let a cook add, replace and reorder pages as she built her own reference. A page like this one is pure thrift instruction: it teaches a technique rather than a dish, on the principle that a competent white sauce turns any odd cupful of cold vegetables into a course. That principle was under particular pressure in these years, when American food-conservation campaigns during the First World War made the reuse of leftovers a civic virtue as well as an economy. The three treatments given here -- creamed, crumbed and browned, or bound and fried as croquettes -- are the standard escalating trio of the period, and the croquette in particular was a mark of the trained cook, since it depends entirely on getting the binder stiff enough and cold enough to hold its shape in hot fat.