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Fourth Day
"Girls, let us give them all a surprise to-morrow," whispered Aunt Jane mysteriously one evening. "Suppose we ask Rhoda to let us cook the breakfast." "All by ourselves?" asked Mabel with large eyes. "All by ourselves! That will be the joke of it. How astonished your papa and mamma will be to see a breakfast that their own little daughters have prepared for them! They will think we are getting on famously."
So they all stole out to the kitchen, and finding Rhoda in a good humor, the plan of operations was soon made. The recipes were as follows:
No. 27-VEAL HASH.
Cut off every scrap of fat, gristle and skin from the veal, chop rather fine, and heat together with a small lump of butter, a little milk or cream, and salt and pepper to taste. When done there should be no liquid visible. Serve on toast, which should be dipped in boiling water as fast as toasted, and immediately buttered. Set in the oven or heater until the last moment, as it is very poor when cold. When served for dinner, the dish may be garnished with slices of lemon.
No. 28-LEXINGTON AVENUE POTATOES.
Chop cold boiled potatoes as fine as for corned beef hash. Put them in a sauce-pan with a lump of butter and milk or cream enough to cover them; add a little chopped parsley, and salt and pepper to taste. Stir until the milk is quite absorbed, and serve hot.
No. 29-ELMHURST JOHNNY CAKE.
One and a half cups corn meal, half a cup of rice, two eggs, two tablespoonfuls sugar, two heaping do. of butter, three heaping do. of flour, one cup milk, three teaspoonfuls baking powder. Scald the meal until every particle of it has been wet by the boiling milk, then add the rice, and afterward the other ingredients.
No. 30-PLAIN OMELETTE.
Take one egg for every two persons at table; beat them well with a pinch of salt and a little parsley; for four eggs a frying pan about the size of a dinner plate will be required. Put a tablespoonful of butter into the pan, and when this is melted pour in the omelette. The moment it begins to cook raise the edge (which will be done first) with a knife, and as soon as the whole is "set" that no liquid part remains, fold it together and serve. If more than this is required, it will be best to make two omelettes.
Four breakfast dishes for a household with cold roast veal and boiled potatoes waiting in the larder. They are simple, but the Johnny cake in particular assumes knowledge the text does not spell out.
- "do." means dittoIn the Johnny cake, "two heaping do. of butter" and "three heaping do. of flour" carry over the word tablespoonfuls from the line above. So: 2 heaping tablespoons butter, 3 heaping tablespoons flour.
- The half cup of rice is cooked riceThe half cup of rice is almost certainly cooked rice -- nothing here would cook raw grains, so half a cup of cold cooked white rice, broken up with a fork and stirred into the scalded meal, is the likeliest reading. It keeps the crumb moist rather than adding structure.
- The scalding step is the hingeBring the cup of milk to a full boil and pour it over the cornmeal, stirring until no dry meal remains, then let it stand a few minutes to swell before the eggs go in. Skip it and the cake is gritty; add the eggs while the mush is still hot and they scramble.
- No oven temperature is givenNo oven temperature -- indeed no cooking instruction of any kind -- is given. A batter of this sort is normally baked: a moderately hot oven, in the region of 400F, in a greased 8-inch square pan or skillet, about 25-30 minutes until the centre is set and the edges pull away. Books of this date assumed the cook knew her own range.
- Both hashes need cooked meat and potatoesThe veal is leftover roast or boiled veal, not raw, and the potatoes are cold boiled. This is a using-up breakfast; raw veal will not do.
- Dipped toastPlunging hot toast into boiling water and buttering it at once appears in period cookery as a way of softening the crust so it would take gravy without going leathery. Do it quickly, one slice at a time, or the bread collapses.
- Holding it in the oven'the oven or heater' here means a warm holding spot rather than a working oven, so keep it very low. Any hotter and the cream cooks away and the veal dries out.
- The omelette is underscaled by modern habitOne egg for every two people made a garnish, not a course. Two to three eggs per person is the current expectation, and the advice to make two smaller omelettes rather than one large one still holds -- a pan much over 10 inches gives a thin, tough result.
Six Little Cooks belongs to a genre of late nineteenth-century American children's cookery books in which an aunt or governess teaches a group of girls to cook by way of a story, the recipes numbered consecutively as lessons. The dishes here are frankly domestic: two of them are ways of using up yesterday's veal roast and yesterday's boiled potatoes, which is what a real household breakfast looked like before refrigeration made leftovers optional. "Johnny cake" is a New England and mid-Atlantic name for a cornmeal bread, generally traced to "journey cake" or "Shawnee cake", though neither derivation is documented beyond tradition; this version, enriched with eggs, butter, wheat flour and rice, is a long way from the plain water-and-meal griddle cake of earlier decades. The place names attached to the potatoes and the Johnny cake may reflect what is often said to have been a habit of the period, in which a recipe travelled under the name of the street or house it was collected from.