For luncheon they had all sorts of things from the garden. Often the
main dish was a vegetable salad,--string-beans or stuffed tomatoes, or
cucumbers and tomatoes,--with freshly made cottage cheese bought from a
neighbor, and bread and butter and iced tea, coffee or chocolate. Or, if
the day was cool, they had the vegetable hot,--baked corn, or creamed
peas, or tomatoes, baked, filled with crumbs and seasoning,--and for a
second course there was usually fruit. Luncheons such as these were
nothing to get up. The vegetables were prepared directly after
breakfast. If they were to be served as salads, they were cooked, cooled
and set on the ice; if hot, they were made all ready to put in the oven
at the last moment.
Their cold dinners, however, were their pride. They found so many good
things to have that they fairly hesitated which to choose for any
particular night. Sometimes they began with clear soup. This, of course,
was made the day before in the tireless stove, and only strained and put
on ice the next morning for the second evening. On very hot days
sometimes they put it in a small pail, and set this in another and
larger one, with ice between, and put it back in the stove for the
afternoon; then it came out full of splinters of ice, a most
delightfully cool affair. Fruit soups they experimented with, but found
they did not care for, so they clung to this clear bouillon when they
had soup at all.
Usually, however, their dinner began with meat. This was made ready
either the day before it was needed, or else it was prepared early in
the morning. They had veal loaf sometimes, surrounded with sliced
tomatoes and French dressing; or slices of cold mutton with peas in
mayonnaise; or occasionally, as a treat, jellied chicken with the peas.
Sometimes they had bits of lamb, cooked very tender with a knuckle-bone,
and then made exactly like the jellied chicken, the meat turning out set
in an aspic. Often peas were mixed with the lamb in the mould, and then
a little gelatine was added to ensure its setting firmly. Usually, with
the dish, they had dressed lettuce.
After this combination course of meat and salad, came dessert. They
often had an ice or sherbet made from the fruit in the garden, costing
nothing but the small amount of sugar used in making it and the ice used
in freezing. This was alternated with some sort of mousse made in the
fireless stove. Sometimes there was fruit jelly, raspberries, possibly,
set with lemon jelly, moulded in a circle with whipped cream in the
middle. Or there would be a chilled rice pudding; or peaches, cut up,
sugared, and put in a pail with ice around them and set away till they
were half frozen. These things, too, could all be prepared early in the
day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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