Small Spanish onions are perhaps best for this dish, but ordinary onions can be used. Cut the onions cross-ways after peeling them, so that they fall in rings, and remove the white core. Two Spanish or half a dozen ordinary onions will be sufficient. Fry these rings of onions in butter till they are tender, without browning them. Take them out of the frying-pan and put them aside. Add a spoonful of flour to the frying-pan, and make a paste with the butter, and then add sufficient milk so that when it is boiled and stirred up it makes a thick sauce; add pepper and salt, a little lemon-juice, and a small quantity of grated nutmeg. Put back the rings of onions into this, and let them simmer gently. Take half a dozen hard-boiled eggs, cut the eggs in halves, remove the yolks, and cut the whites into rings, like the onions, mixing these white egg-rings with the onions and sauce; make the whole hot and serve on a dish, using the hard-boiled half-yolks to garnish; sprinkle a little chopped parsley over the whole, and serve.
The philosophy of a sauce, when understood, enables even an untrained cook to make a great variety of every day sauces from materials usually found in every household; to have them uniform, however, flavorings must be correctly blended, and measurements must be rigidly observed. Two level tablespoonfuls of butter or other fat, two level tablespoonfuls of flour, must be used to each half pint of liquid. If the yolks of eggs are added, omit one tablespoonful of flour or the sauce will be too thick. Tomato sauce should be flavored with onion, a little mace, and a suspicion of curry. Brown sauce may be simply seasoned with salt and pepper, flavored and colored with kitchen bouquet. Spanish sauce should also be flavored with mushrooms, or if you can afford it, a truffle, a little chopped ham, a tablespoonful of chives, shallot and garlic. Water sauce, drawn butter and simple sauce Hollandaise, when they are served with fish, must be flavored with a dash of tarragon vinegar, salt and pepper.
2 lbs. of chestnuts, 1 head of celery, 1 large Spanish onion, 1/2 lb. of Allinson fine wheatmeal, 4 oz. of butter, pepper and salt. Boil the chestnuts until partly tender, and remove the skins; cut the celery into pieces, removing the outer very hard pieces only, slice the onion and stew until tender in 1 pint of water; mix all the ingredients together, adding 1 oz. of the butter and seasoning to taste; make some pastry of the meal, 3 oz. of butter, and a little cold water; turn the vegetables into a pie-dish, cover the dish with the pastry, and bake the pie for 1 hour; serve with brown gravy.
Wash well 1/4 lb. rice and put on to simmer slowly with 1-1/2 pints milk and water, a Spanish onion and 2 sticks of white celery. Blanch, chop up and pound well, or pass through a nut-mill 1/4 lb. almonds, and add to them by degrees another 1/2 pint milk. Put in saucepan along with some more milk and water to warm through, but do not boil. Remove the onion and celery from the rice (or if liked they may be cut small and left in), and strain the almonds through to that. See that it is quite hot before serving. NOTE.--For this and other soups which are wanted specially light and nourishing, Mapleton's Almond Meal will be found exceedingly useful. It is ready for use, so that there is no trouble blanching, pounding, &c.
1/2 lb. of lentils, 1 lb. of potatoes, 1 lb. of tomatoes, 1 Spanish onion, 1 heaped-up teaspoonful of herbs, 3 hard-boiled eggs, 1-1/2 oz. of butter, pepper and salt to taste. Have the lentils cooked beforehand. Peel, wash, and cut into dice the potatoes and onion, and fry them in the butter until nearly soft. Scald and slice the tomatoes, and mix the fried vegetables, lentils, tomatoes, herbs, and seasoning well together. Turn the mixture into a pie-dish, and pour over as much water or vegetable stock as may be required for gravy. Quarter the eggs and place them on the top. Cover with a short crust, and bake the pie for 1 to 1-1/2 hours.
1 small onion 2 Tb. butter 1-1/2 c. steamed or boiled rice 1 c. chopped meat 1/2 c. meat stock or gravy 1/2 c. canned tomatoes 2 Tb. grated cheese 1/4 c. stale crumbs
Chop the onion and brown it in butter. Mix well the browned onion, rice, chopped meat, stock or gravy, and tomatoes, and pour all into a buttered baking dish. Then sprinkle the cheese and crumbs on top of the mixture and bake for 1 hour in a slow oven. Serve hot.
Put one cup of washed rice in frying-pan with four or five tablespoons of poultry fat; add three onions chopped and two cloves of garlic minced fine. Fry ten minutes; add one red pepper or one canned pimento chopped, or one teaspoon of paprika, and three ripe tomatoes or two cups of strained tomatoes and one teaspoon of salt. Cook slowly about one hour, and as the water evaporates, add more boiling water to keep from burning.
Grease small custard or timbale cups and put inside of each a cooked Spanish pepper. Drop in the pepper one egg. Dust it lightly with salt, stand the cups in a pan of boiling water and cook in the oven until the eggs are "set." Toast one round of bread for each cup and make a half pint of cream sauce. When the eggs are "set," fill the bottom of the serving platter with cream sauce, loosen the peppers from the cups and turn them out on the rounds of toast. Stand them in the cream sauce, dust on top of each a little chopped parsley and send to the table.
One lb. No. 8 "Nutton," put through a food chopper, 1/2 Spanish onion boiled and finely chopped, 2 teacupsful zweiback bread crumbs, a little sage, salt to taste. Have quantity required of puff pastry, roll out and divide into squares, putting a little sausage meat in the centre, wet the edges and fold over. Place in a hot oven and bake 10 minutes to 1/4 hour.
Get the small ribs of beef and put on with water enough to cover, seasoning with salt, pepper, an onion and a tiny clove of garlic. Let it cook about two hours, then add a can of tomatoes and season highly either with red peppers or paprika. Cook at least three hours.
