American Cookery Part 14

With a round cooky cutter make rounds of pastry. Cut an equal number with the doughnut cutter. p.r.i.c.k, sprinkle lightly with grated cheese and bake a light brown. Place a plain sh.e.l.l on a crisp lettuce leaf, add a slice of tomato, not larger, on top. Then pour on a little mayonnaise and place on top the tart sh.e.l.l with a hole in the center. Serve at once.

Green Tomato Mince Pie

One peck of green tomatoes, put through a food chopper. Boil, drain and add as much water as juice drained out. Scald and drain again. Add water as before, scald and redrain. This time add half as much water, then the following:--

3 pounds brown sugar 2 pounds raisins 2 tablespoonfuls nutmeg 2 tablespoonfuls cinnamon 2 tablespoonfuls cloves 2 tablespoonfuls allspice 2 tablespoonfuls salt

Boil all together, and add one cup of vinegar. Cook till thick as desired. Put in jars and seal.

To one pint of this mixture add one cup of chopped apple and the juice and rind, grated or ground. Sweeten to taste, fill crust and bake as the usual mince pie.

Evaporated apples may be used, but grind before soaking and do not cook.

These pies will not harm children, and are very inexpensive, as compared to those made of mincemeat.

Plum Tomato Preserves Turnovers

Make a circle as big as a saucer, or a square equal in area. Fill the center with plum tomato preserve and fold over matching edges, either as a half circle, or a triangle. p.r.i.c.k and bake.

Turnovers are especially ideal as pies for fitting into lunch boxes, and may be made of any sweetened vegetable preserve for school lunches.

King Cabbage Tarts

Use cabbage, which has been boiled in salted water and seasoned with salt and pepper to taste. Make a white sauce and pour over, mixing well with the cabbage. Fill round m.u.f.fin pans lined with pastry circles, sprinkle with cheese over the top and bake. Carrots may be used the same way, omitting the cheese and using latticed strips of pastry over the top. These will be hardly recognizable as such common vegetables.

M. K. S.

New Ways of Using Milk

While probably the best way of using milk is to drink it in its raw or pasteurized state, many children and adults will not use it in that form. In that case, the problem is to disguise or flavor the milk in some way so that the food value will not be changed or destroyed, and yet be more palatable than the natural product.

It has been found that children will drink flavored, sweetened milk when they will simply not touch pure milk. In order to demonstrate how universal the craving for sweetened, cold drinks has become, and how easy it is for the milkmen to cater to this demand, Prof. J. L. Sammis of the Wisconsin College of Agriculture conducted a booth at the 1921 Wisconsin state fair and dispensed milk in twenty-five new, pleasing, and attractive ways over a soda fountain.

Thousands of these milk drinks were consumed, and a report from a Tennessee county fair also revealed that 10,000 similar drinks were sold there by an enterprising dairyman. There is nothing elaborate about the proposition. If these drinks are to be prepared in the home, and the whole question is largely one of increasing the home consumption of milk, Professor Sammis declares:

"Take any flavor that happens to be on the pantry shelf, put a little in a gla.s.s, add sugar to taste, fill the gla.s.s with milk, and put in some ice. That is all there is to it. Be sure that the milk is drank very cold, when it is most palatable. Vanilla is a very good flavor."

It is not even necessary that whole milk be used, as condensed milk will do very well. Simply dilute the condensed milk with an equal volume of water, and use as whole milk. Condensed milk, however, has a cooked flavor found objectionable by many, and, in that case, a suitable subst.i.tute is powdered milk, which has no such cooked flavor.

To prepare a powdered milk drink, put the flavor into the receptacle first, then the sugar, and then the powdered milk with a little water.

Beat the powdered milk with an egg beater until it is wet through, and then add the rest of the water, finis.h.i.+ng with the ice.

By adding fruit colors these various milk drinks can be given a changed external appearance, and wise is the mother who will prepare them often when her children show an inclination not to drink enough milk. Served at the table, they attract every member of the family. These milk drinks are no more expensive than many of the more watery and less useful compounds, so often subst.i.tuted.

Soda fountains might well consider these various forms of sweetened and flavored milk to attract new trade. At the fountains the various flavoring syrups would naturally be used, and no sugar is necessary. And instead of clear water, carbonated water is used. The variety of these drinks is limited only by the ingenuity of the dispenser.

W. A. F.

Old New England Sweetmeats

Crab-Apple Dainty

Wash seven pounds of fruit and let boil with a little water until soft enough to press through a colander. Add three pounds of sugar, three pints of vinegar, and cloves and cinnamon to taste, and let the mixture boil, slowly, until it is thick and jelly-like.

Pumpkin Preserve

Pare a medium-sized pumpkin and cut into inch cubes. Let steam until tender, but not broken. Or cut the pumpkin into large pieces and let steam a short time and then cut the cubes.

Prepare a syrup of sugar and water, about three pounds of sugar and a pint-and-a-half of water, in which simmer the juice and rind (cut into strips) of two lemons. Drop the pumpkin cubes into the syrup and let simmer, carefully, until the pumpkin is translucent. Dip out the pumpkin and pack in ordinary preserve jars; pour over the syrup and lemon and close the jars.

S. A. R.

Apple-Orange Marmalade

Take seven pounds of apples, all green, if possible; wash and remove any imperfections, also the blossom and stem. Cut, but do not core nor peel.

Cut in very small pieces. Three oranges; wash and remove peel, which put through finest knife of food-chopper, after discarding the inner white peeling, also seeds. Put the apple on to boil, adding water till it shows among the fruit, and boil to quite soft; mash fine and put in jelly bag to drain over night. Boil the juice with the orange pulp, cut in very small pieces; add the orange peel and cook for twenty minutes, or till the orange is cooked. Add five (5) pounds of granulated sugar and let boil until a little in a cold saucer will jell.

This recipe has never been in print to my knowledge and will prove very satisfactory to the majority of people.

B. F. B.

QUERIES AND ANSWERS

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