Читать книгу A Course of Lectures on the Principles of Domestic Economy and Cookery - Juliet Corson - Страница 8

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In boiling a whole fish, or a large piece, use cold water. If you put a large piece of fish into boiling water, the outside will be cooked before it is done near the bone. Nothing is more disagreeable than a piece of fish half raw at the bone; it is uneatable. For a small piece of fish, such as I have here, use boiling salted water enough to cover it, and boil it until the flakes begin to separate, or until, by testing a fin, you can easily pull it out. That will probably be, if you use cold water, soon after the water boils; if you put the fish into boiling water, it may be five or more minutes. Boil the fish, whether it is large or small, until you can pull out a fin, or until the flakes separate. Then drain it, and serve it with any nice sauce. To-day I will make a very simple one—cream sauce. Of course you would always make the sauce while you were boiling the fish, taking care to have both done at the same time. For a pint of sauce, use a heaping tablespoonful of butter and a tablespoonful of flour; put them in a saucepan over the fire, and stir them together until they are smoothly mixed; then begin to add hot milk, half a cupful at a time; when the first half cupful of milk is stirred in, put in another half cupful and again stir until it is smooth; continue to add milk until you have used a pint, or until the sauce is about the consistency of thick cream. There will always be a margin there for a little discretion, because some flour will thicken very much more than others. Flour that is very rich in gluten will thicken more than that which has most starch in it. But you have there about the right proportions—a tablespoonful of flour, a tablespoonful of butter, a pint of milk. Add more or less milk as is required to make the sauce the consistency of thick cream, or of a thickness which will coat the spoon; that is, if you dip a spoon in and hold it up, the sauce will not all run off like water; when all the milk has been used, season the sauce with a level teaspoonful of salt and about a quarter of a salt spoon of white pepper. I speak of white pepper particularly because in making a white sauce, if you use the ordinary black pepper, the sauce will be full of little black specks. The white pepper is quite as cheap, quite as plentiful as the black pepper; all the grocers keep it, and its flavor is nicer, rather more delicate, scarcely as pungent as the black pepper; there is a certain biting, acrid flavor in the black pepper which does not exist in the white pepper; the latter contains all the stimulating property and all the aromatic flavor.

After the same is finished, keep it hot by setting the sauce pan containing it in a pan of hot water, on the back of the stove. A perfectly plain white sauce (which can be made the basis of an infinite variety of other sauces) is made by substituting water for milk; by leaving out the pepper and salt, and using sugar for sweetening, you can make a nice pudding sauce. If you add a tablespoonful of chopped parsley to a pint of white sauce, you make parsley sauce. Putting a few capers into it, makes caper sauce. A teaspoonful of anchovies dissolved in it makes anchovy sauce. It is easily made the basis of a great many sauces, the name of which depends on preferred addition to the white sauce. Egg sauce is made by adding chopped hard boiled eggs to white sauce.

Question by a Lady. Would you ever substitute cornstarch for flour?

Miss Corson. You can if you wish. You must use your own discretion about the quantities. Simply get the thickness of thick cream.

Question. Is it better to use a porcelain vessel, or will tin do?

Miss Corson. Use any saucepan made of material thick enough to prevent burning.

Question. Do you put the fish right into the water, or have you a fish kettle?

Miss Corson. If you are using a fish kettle you will have a little wire frame. You can lay the fish on that, or you can tie it up in a cloth, if you wish to.

Question. Then how can you tell when it is done?

Miss Corson. If you tie it in a cloth you must leave a little space so that you can test it.

Question. How much pepper did you say to put in the sauce?

Miss Corson. About a quarter of a salt spoon; that is, a good pinch of pepper. One of the ladies asked me about using a thick sauce pan—porcelain-lined sauce pan; you will find the advantage of thick sauce pans of all kinds is that they are less likely to burn than thin ones. The thinner the metal the sauce pan is made of, the more likely it is to burn. There are so many different kinds of utensils that every lady can take her own choice. Black sauce pans, lined with tin or with porcelain; tin sauce pans, thin ones, and thick ones made of block tin. You notice that I use copper sauce pans. Coppers are the most durable; they are lined with tin, and they have to be relined about once a year; the cost of relining is very little—comparatively little; I think it costs me about three cents a foot to have them relined, and the copper never wears out. If you buy a copper sauce pan you have got something that lasts you all your life, and you can leave it as an heirloom; if you don’t want to do that, you can sell it for old copper for nearly as much as you paid for it. In using copper, you must never let them become bare on the inside. If the tin wears off and the copper is exposed to any acid in the food cooked, it is apt to form a poisonous combination. But with proper care and cleanliness, copper sauce pans are perfectly safe.

Question. Do you prefer them to the galvanized iron?

Miss Corson. Yes, I do, on the score of cleanliness, economy and ease in cooking.

Question. Do you use a wooden spoon from choice?

Miss Corson. Yes; of course you can understand, ladies, that I could very soon scrape the tin off of the inside of a sauce pan with a metal spoon, a knife, or anything of that sort. Copper sauce pans should be cleaned with a rag, a little Sapolio and hot water. If they are cleaned as fast as they are used they are no more trouble to keep clean than any other sauce pan. I use in stirring simply a small pudding stick—an old-fashioned wooden pudding stick. It does not scrape the sauce pans, and there is no danger of uncooked flour accumulating on the sticks, as it does in the bowl of a spoon. If you are stirring with a spoon, some of the half-cooked flour might get in the bowl of the spoon, and then your sauce would have the taste of the raw flour. I will leave the stick in the sauce pan and pass it about so that you can see what I mean. Anyone can whittle these little sticks out, using any kind of hard wood. Do not use soft wood. You will have noticed, ladies, if you have ever put sauce of this kind, thick sauce, to keep hot, it may have grown very much thicker by standing; in such case add a little more milk or water, and a little more seasoning when you are ready to use it.

Question. How do you make perfectly clear sauce?

Miss Corson. You can make a nearly clear thick sauce by using arrow root. Of course, a clear thin sauce is simply sugar dissolved in water, with butter or flavoring as you like.