Page:The English housekeeper, 6th.djvu/414

386 bunch of sweet herbs, and what salt and pepper you think it requires. Let it boil, and then simmer gently by the side full three hours, or longer if the peas be not done; stir the peas up from the bottom now and then. When you have neither meat nor pot-liquor, mix 2 or 3 oz. of dripping with an equal quantity of oatmeal, and stir it, by degrees, into the soup, or boil in it some dumplings of flour and suet.

In houses where a brick oven is heated once a week or oftener, for bread, it would give little additional trouble to bake a dish of some sort or other for a poor family. Soup may be made in this way: first put the meat on the fire in just enough water to cover it; when it boils, take off the scum, pour off the water, put the meat into an earthen pan, with 3 carrots cut up, a turnip, 2 onions, pepper and salt, and stale dry crusts of bread; pour over boiling water, in the proportion of a gallon to 2 lbs. meat, and let it bake three hours. Shanks of mutton, cowheels, ox and sheep's head, may be cooked in this way, but the two latter must be parboiled, to cleanse them; and will require four or five hours' baking. The soup made of ox head is not so nourishing as that of shin of beef. If there be room in the oven, a plain pudding may be baked as follows. Pour boiling skim milk over stale pieces of bread, and cover with a plate or dish. When it has soaked up the milk, beat the bread, dust in a little flour, add sugar, an egg or two, or shred suet, or pieces of dripping, and more milk if required; butter a brown pan, pour in the pudding, and bake it three-quarters of an hour.—Or: a batter pudding, made with two eggs, a quart of milk; or if eggs be scarce, leave them out, and use dripping; rub it into the flour, with a little salt, mix this by degrees with some milk into a batter and bake it. A batter pudding of this kind, rather thick, is very good with pieces of meat baked in it; in the proportion of 1 lb. solid meat, to a batter made with 1 quart of milk. Pickled pork, not very salt, makes a very good pudding. A plain rice pudding, without egg or butter, made with skim milk, and suet or dripping, is excellent food for children. But rice costs something, and my object is to point out to young housekeepers how they can best assist the poor without injury to their own purses; and, therefore, I do not