Living on a Little

"You can also make purées of any fresh vegetable, carrots, or garden peas, or a mixture of several kinds of vegetables; cook them with onion and salt and pepper and bits of celery or parsley, and put them through the sieve and thicken them. All of them are improved by adding a little milk, but they will do as they are if you have none to spare."

"Do you put a bone in purées?"

"If I happen to have one I do, but not otherwise; I never buy a bone for such a soup. Remember that these thick soups go with the dinners with the light meat course, because they are so substantial. Now we will go on to the next kind.

"The stock soups are made with water, bones, meat, and vegetables. Some housekeepers keep a stock pot on the back of the range and put in it any odds and ends they happen to have, adding more water and seasoning from time to time. When they want a soup, they pour off enough of the stock, strain and clarify it, and either use it as it is or put in something like tomato or potato. This is all very well if you have a range which goes day and night, and if you are careful to completely empty the pot twice a week in winter and three times a week in summer and scrub it out thoroughly and start an entirely fresh lot of bones and meat; otherwise the whole will have a sour taste. I think a better way is to start a soup on the fire and cook it all night in the tireless stove; start it over again in the morning, and cook it half a day more, and then cool and use it."

"Do you mean you pour off the soup, and it is all right just as it is?"

"No, indeed; you first put what bones and meat and vegetables you have in cold water and slowly bring them to the boiling point and skim well. Then you must simmer and simmer on the stove or in the tireless box. When it is done you cool it, take off the white cake of fat on top and save it for frying purposes; heat the soup again and clarify it by stirring in a washed and broken up egg-shell and a little of the white. When this has boiled with the soup for two minutes, the whole will clear. Then you strain it and divide it; half you can have one night with tapioca or barley or minced vegetables, and the other half another night with perhaps tomato in it."

"Do you buy bones and things for stock soup?"

"No, because I use what I have. I don't think it is necessary to buy things for it; but one thing I do; I keep a little kitchen bouquet in the house. It comes in a small bottle on purpose, and it flavors the soup and at the same time colors it brown; that is really necessary, making soup out of odd things, for too often it has little color.

"Milk soups come next, and those are always nice; cream of celery or cream of corn are among the best things we can have. Unfortunately, if you have to buy your milk, they are rather expensive; however, I will tell you how to make them in case you have an extra pint to use up at any time. You take about a cupful of any vegetable and cook it in a pint of water till it is pulpy, adding a little onion, salt, and pepper; then you put it through the sieve, and add a pint of milk, or, rather, add as much milk as you have water, for often you can use only half a pint of each. Then you thicken it slightly, cook it up once, strain, and serve. You can use left-overs of any sort for this, – the outer leaves of lettuce, a little spinach, a few cooked beets, or minced carrot, or a mixture of any different thing you happen to have in the refrigerator. I often make this soup in the morning and just heat it up for dinner, to save time; or, I get the vegetables ready and add the milk at night. Now that is the end of the soup lesson; it is too easy to spend more time over."

"But I can think of ever and ever so many more soups you have not so much as mentioned," said Dolly, indignant at having her thirst for information treated in this summary manner. "You have not spoken of oyster soup or clam chowder, or tomato bisque, or potato soup, or – "

Mary put her hands over her ears. "I won't listen," she said. "I am not compiling a cook-book, as I keep on telling you over and over. I am only laying down general instructions, and after you get those fixed in your mind you can go on by yourself and have no trouble at all. I am in such a hurry to get on to meats, to tell the truth, that I feel like skipping everything to get to that, because to my mind it is the most important of all the subjects we have to learn about. It is where most housekeepers come to grief, if they do. I consider that a girl who wants to really live on a little cannot know too much about meat; she must simply have the whole subject at her finger-ends.

"Remember what I told you in your last lesson, that you cannot have regular dinner meat at all, but instead must have plain and cheap dishes of all sorts and kinds. Now we will begin with beef, because that is really our staple; it is good and nourishing and has no waste about it. Also it does not vary much in price in the different seasons of the year; it is a plain, substantial, dependable sort of meat.

"Though we cannot have regular roasting-roasts, we may have pot-roasts. To make those you buy a sort of square piece from the round. Do not let the butcher persuade you to get a long, thin piece; insist on a chunk. Sear this all over by pressing it down in a hot frying-pan, first on one side and then on the other; this makes a covering that keeps in the juices. Then simmer it a long, long time in a deep covered dish; a casserole, or a crock, or some such thing. When it is half-done put in salt and pepper, chopped onions, and plenty of finely minced vegetables, and keep on cooking till it is tender and the juice is pretty well absorbed. You can cook it in the tireless stove all day, or keep it shut up in the oven of the range, or let it cook slowly on the back of it; but it must cook very slowly and a long, long time. This is all good solid meat, and a four-pound piece will easily make three meals, with perhaps something over for croquettes.

"Beef stew is just this same sort of thing; beef cut in finger lengths, and cooked with vegetables till very soft. Serve that with the gravy thickened. Chopped beef you can have in a dozen ways. Buy cheap beef and put it through your own meat-chopper, to be quite sure it is perfectly clean. Sometimes I get three pounds at once, and make up two pounds into beef loaf, mixing it with a cup of bread crumbs, an egg, salt, and pepper, and a little bit of salt pork. I put it in a bread tin and bake it two hours, basting it well with melted butter and water mixed, and serve it hot, with either a brown gravy or a tomato sauce. That is a dish good enough for a king. For the second dinner you slice what is left, and heat this in the gravy or tomato; or, have brown gravy with the loaf and thick tomato with the slices.

"The other pound I make into a steak. Now real porter-house steak is far too costly for you and me, but I recommend this substitute; you will be surprised to see how exactly it looks like a porter-house and how good it tastes. Copy the shape and size of the real thing, and flatten out the chopped meat and make it into a long piece, larger at one end than the other. Have the butcher give you some strips of suet and press one down through the middle, to represent the bone; put the other one all around the steak to look like the edge of fat. Then put this into a hot, dry frying-pan and cook it, turning it only once and dusting with salt and pepper as you do so. Do not overcook it, as it should be pink inside. Take it up on a hot platter, put a little butter on top and parsley around the edge, and, behold, a perfectly gorgeous porter-house!

"When I am going to make a beef loaf, and do not intend to have this steak, however, I get only two pounds and a half of the meat, and the extra half-pound I make up into little balls and fry. At the same time I fry thick rounds of banana and put one on each ball when I take them up; this is a very good combination. Or, Dolly, if you will never betray me, I will tell you a horrid secret. Twice a year, when the equinoctial storm rages and I am positively certain no one can go out or come in that evening, I make up a plain little steak without suet of the extra half-pound, and all around the edge I put – fried onions!"

"I don't wonder you said it was a horrid secret. I don't think I shall ever sink to that low level; fried onions are not romantic."

"Still, put it down, equinoctial and all, my dear, for Fred probably will approve the dish in spite of your prejudice. And now one thing more about steak: did you ever hear of a flank steak?"

"Never in my life."

"That is the answer most women would make to the question, I fancy; yet, strange to say, many epicures think this one of the best dishes of beef there is. You get the butcher to cut you one, and hang it till it is tender. Then broil it, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and dot with butter mixed with chopped parsley; if you have any doubts about its being tender, score it all over with a sharp knife and lay it in a little oil and vinegar mixed for half an hour or more before you cook it. You will really find it a delicious piece of meat, and you will have enough over for a second dinner, at least."

"Do you ever have corned beef?"

"Once in awhile. When we have it, I cook it till it is very tender and serve it as it is the first night; then I put it back in the water it was cooked in, to keep it from drying out, and the second time I have it I cut it up in even cubes and cream them and put them in a baking-dish with crumbs and butter on top, and brown it in the oven. It is difficult to use up corned beef, for it is not good sliced and warmed over, as most meats are. Sometimes we have it cold, with a hot soup and vegetables; or I have a dish of hash put in a mould and baked. I turn this out and surround it with a ring of minced carrots and turnips; that does very well indeed. The stock I make into bean soup.

"Veal I find a most useful meat, for there is so little waste about it, like beef. When I have a roast I get the breast and stuff it and it is just as good as the higher priced roasts. I get the cheap cut from the leg too, and have a stew with dumplings in it, or a meat pie; if I have any over I sometimes mix it with egg, gravy, and crumbs and make a loaf of it. Or I mince it, add chopped hard-boiled eggs, and serve it that way. Then there is veal stew cooked with tomatoes; to make that, cut up the meat, add a slice of onion and a small cup of tomato, with a tablespoonful of rice or barley, and simmer them all till they are almost solid. This is very nourishing and good. Veal cutlet is expensive, but half a pound goes a long way if you have it cut in small bits and pound them out, and bread and fry them.

"Then there is veal loaf; that is a delightful dish. Get the cheapest veal you can buy and chop it; add a little chopped salt pork, bread crumbs, seasoning, some celery if you have any, or chopped nuts, and bake it as you did the beef loaf; that will make at least two dinners. In summer you can have that for dinner, cold.

"And also for summer, do not forget to have veal and ham pie. You get about a pound of veal, a slice of ham, and a veal knuckle bone, and simmer them all together till the meat drops apart; put this in layers in a deep baking-dish, and add seasoning. Boil down the stock to a cupful, strain it, add a level teaspoonful of gelatine dissolved in cold water, and pour it all over the meat; put on a thin crust and bake it. Set it away to get ice-cold, and you will have a pie with the meat set in a delicious aspic jelly."

"Wasn't that the 'Weal and hammer' of the Boffins?"

"It was indeed, and worthy of immortalization, too. And now as to a second dinner off one of these firsts. One of the perfectly improper dinner dishes you will want to have is croquettes. You can make them of any sort of meat, but they are particularly nice of veal. Learn to make good croquettes, Dolly. So few amateur cooks can do it, and it is the easiest thing in the world to do if only you will remember a few simple things."

"I'll write the rule down; I love croquettes."

"Chop your meat evenly, to begin with; then make the white sauce with double the usual quantity of flour. Instead of using one cup of milk, one tablespoonful of butter, and one of flour, you must take two of flour; that is the first thing to emphasize. You mix this with the meat and seasoning and cook it till it is a smooth paste; spread it out thickly in a platter and let it get perfectly cold before you take another step. I leave mine an hour, at the very least. Then cut it up into small pieces and roll them under your hand and square the ends; dip each one in finely sifted bread crumbs – have them well sifted, Dolly. Next dip in half-beaten egg yolk, then in crumbs again, and then dry them thoroughly before you go any farther. I usually make the paste after breakfast and set it away, bread the croquettes after lunch and set them away again. Then just before dinner I fry them, two at a time, in the wire basket in deep fat. I keep them in only enough to brown the crumbs; then I put them in the oven on paper to drain, leaving the door open. That way you make delicious croquettes, pale golden brown outside and creamy inside and with a soup – "

"A good thick purée," interrupted Dolly.

"Yes, and vegetables, you will have a substantial meal.

"Now for pork. I do hope you are going to see that you get that from a reliable man, and have it once in awhile, especially in winter, for it is to my mind neither indigestible nor unwholesome for a change, and it is such an inexpensive meat that it saves you ever so much. You can see for yourself that two pork chops, with all the other things you are to have for dinner, will be plenty of meat for two people, and so cheap! Pork tenderloins I think are the greatest economy. Try getting two of them and opening them lengthwise, filling them with bread-crumb stuffing, and roasting them with nice brown gravy; you will be perfectly surprised to see how good they are. There will be enough meat left over for a second dinner, either croquettes or scallop or something else. And there is this other way of cooking them: tell the butcher to French them for you; that is, to cut them into rounds and pound each one out into a little cake. Cook these in the frying-pan till they are a pale brown; arrange them on a hot platter, and put an edge of mashed potato around. One good-sized tenderloin will make a dinner.

"As to mutton, you can get what are called steaks of that; really they are chops from the top of the leg, round, with a bone in the middle. Those you can simmer a little, as they are inclined to be tough, and then fry them; or broil them and have peas with them. And there is mutton stew, and scrag of mutton – a part of the neck, – and minced mutton made up into collops with Worcestershire sauce, and mutton stewed with barley into a thick Scotch broth and served like a stew; all those are cheap. As to roasts, once in a long time you can get a small leg of mutton and parboil it, to save roasting it all the time in the oven, and so shrinking it more or less. Brown it at the last, however, and serve it with peas and mint jelly. For the second dinner there will be plenty to slice with the gravy, and enough still to offer again, perhaps disguised as a curry. Of course the stock in which the meat was boiled must make a soup. Tomatoes would go well with mutton, and after the bone was free, that could go in bean soup. As to lamb, I spoke of having stew of that, the cheap parts such as the neck, of course; and occasionally the forequarter for parties. We will experiment with that later on, so I am going to skip it now."

"Yes, do; I want to talk about chicken. Are we never, never to have that? I think you are dreadfully severe."

Mary smiled. "Well, as a concession, I will say that you can have it once in a long, long time, provided you conscientiously make up beforehand for the extravagance by going in for a regular diet of cheap things. When you do indulge, buy a large fowl, because that goes farther for the price. Stew it till it is tender, and serve it in sections. Cut the breast in four pieces, and lay two away; cut the second joints lengthwise, take out the bone and lay half the meat away with the breast. Cook some boiled rice, to put around your platter; have plenty of gravy, and the first four pieces will do very well for two people. For the second dinner, brown the corresponding four pieces, and serve these with sweet potatoes. The third night, open the drumsticks, take out the bones, fill the centres with stuffing, and brown these. Serve them on toast, like birds; you might well pretend that is what they are, too. You will still have the bits on the wings, neck and back for a nice luncheon dish or for croquettes; and the liver, gizzard, and heart should go into an omelette. After all, a fowl is not too expensive for two people provided they will make three meals of it; not too expensive for an occasional change, that is. It would be too much for daily consumption."

"It would do provided the fowl was not too tough," corrected Dolly.

"It is tolerably sure to be tough, but long cooking corrects that. Try this sometimes: instead of simmering it, cut it up and fry each piece a little; as you do so, put them in a kettle and add a very little water. When all are in see that the water just covers them; put a cover on and put this away in the tireless stove, or simmer it very slowly on the back of the range for four or five hours. It will come out brown and tender."

"And put all left-over gravy and bones in the stock pot," Dolly muttered to herself as she wrote this down. "Now, before I forget it, tell me why the drumsticks are to be served 'on toast?' I see I have that expression down over and over. Are you so awfully fond of toast as all that?"

"Toast, my dear child, is the way of making a small dish larger. When things are scanty it conceals the fact as nothing else does. Don't you know how often the cook-books say, 'serve with sippets of toast?'"

"Now you mention it, I do seem to recall the phrase, though I thought it said 'snippets' of toast. I supposed they were a sort of garnish, like parsley."

"They are a garnish, but at the same time they are one of the small economies of cooking. They get rid of bits of bread, and at the same time give an air to a dish while they help eke it out.

"And now for the left-overs of meat. I have spoken of some of those as we have gone along, but there are heaps and heaps more. If you have a good deal of meat left over you can have English rissoles, for one thing; generally you make them out of beef, but not necessarily. You chop the meat, mix it with gravy and a raw egg to bind it, add a few crumbs and some seasoning, and roll the whole into balls. Dip each one in flour and fry it in a wire basket. Beef olives are thin slices of beef with a spoonful of crumbs put on each slice, and these rolled over once and pinned in place with a tiny wooden skewer – in other words, a wooden toothpick. Any other meat can be used in the same way. Mutton can be served a la marquise; that is, mince it, mix it with boiled rice and curry-powder and a tiny bit of onion, and a raw egg to bind it all; make into balls and fry them. Sliced mutton is nice dipped in French dressing and broiled. Cottage loaf is good, especially for an extra busy day. For that, line a dish with mashed potato, put the minced and seasoned meat in the centre and cover with more potato; bake this and turn out in a mould. Tomato sauce goes well with this dish by way of gravy. Baked hash is just minced meat mixed with gravy, pressed into a mould and baked in the oven till it will turn out.

"When you have only a little meat left over and can make none of these dishes, try soufflé; I have never found anything so good to help out. You chop the meat till you have a cupful; or, if there is less, measure everything else in the same proportion. With a cupful take as much white sauce, a little minced onion and parsley, salt and pepper, and put it all on the fire with two beaten egg yolks. Cook this three minutes; take it off and cool it, and fold in the stiffly beaten whites. Put it in a buttered baking-dish and bake it half an hour and serve at once while it is nice and puffy.

"Besides this have croquettes, and if you are short of meat for those, put in a little boiled rice. And when your meat gives out altogether, try this cheap and very nice Mexican dish: put in a saucepan a quarter of a pound of dried beef cut up rather small, with a cup of tomato and a quarter of a cup of rice, a little onion and seasoning; cook till the rice is soft. The rest of the beef in the box, if you buy it that way, you can broil; it is like delicate ham.

"I should think all these things ought to make it easy for you to at least begin to manage; afterwards you can go on and have anything more you can find to make that is good and cheap."

"I think somebody once told me that twice-cooked food was not wholesome; do you really believe it is a good idea to have warmed-over things for dinners?"

"Think of the French once more! They have the greatest number of made dishes in the world and they never have dyspepsia. And then you are to have warmed-over things only every other night, at the worst, and not always then, by any means, and I am sure you will thrive on them."

"One thing more; do you believe it pays to spend so much time and thought and all that on doing over things? Don't you think you might as well buy fresh ones as to put so much strength in these?"

"My dear girl, if you are going to save your money you must expend your time and ingenuity in doing so. I don't believe in wasting strength, but I do believe in using it wisely in order to save buying unnecessarily. But you will learn that as you go on. Now do you think I have told you enough about meat to enable you to keep the wolf from the door?"

"I do, indeed; I only hope Fred will consent to eat these things. If he finds out he is dining on left-overs and dried beef and scrags of mutton, I am afraid he will think me a pretty poor sort of housekeeper."

"Do you suppose any mere man is going to know that he is eating cheap meat unless you actually tell him so in plain words? Not at all; he will eat all these delicacies and declare that they are far better than roasts of beef and spring lamb, and wonder how you can possibly afford to have such good things on your little housekeeping income. You will simply be covered with glory, and he will never know how you are deceiving him for his own good."

"I think it is going to be dreadfully trying to live on an allowance, anyway. It will be just like being shipwrecked on a raft, and having exactly so much hardtack and so many ounces of water doled out to you each day. If you eat any of your to-morrow's provisions you won't be alive when a ship sights you at last. In other words, you will never get your salary raised if you don't live within what you have now."

"You won't deserve to have it raised if you can't live within what you have now; so much is sure. But you won't have any trouble. Remember to keep within your week's allowance, not your daily one; there's comfort in that for you. You can see that one day you may buy two days' food at once, and so spend part or all of the dollar that properly belongs to to-morrow; but the end of the week straightens that out comfortably, and if that account comes out all right you cannot run over the whole."

"I really believe we had better be vegetarians and live on pea soup and lentils and peanuts and such things. Being both cheap and filling, what more could one ask?"

"Well, vegetarians have taught us all a great deal. I think, however, that men who have been brought up to have meat at least once a day do not take kindly to a diet which cuts it out altogether. But I am sure they are far better off without too much meat, and if they can be made to think they are getting as much as usual when really they are getting only half as much, that is a distinct gain. Always remember what I told you, that they do not inquire too closely exactly what they are getting to eat if only it is good; that is something to count among your mercies."

"Have you any idea what you spend for meat a day?"

"Yes; we have it for dinner only, and, as I explained, I buy enough one day for at least two dinners. Dividing the two or possibly three pounds up in that way, of course it makes the daily total absurdly small; I suppose it averages only about twenty cents, – probably less."

"That does seem impossible, except as I review the baked hash and other dinner meats you mentioned. And with this enormous expense you pay for vegetables, milk, eggs, butter, and all the rest, and yet put pennies in the kitchen bank?"