A year's cookery

The Easiest Way of Cooking a Sweetbread. — After parboiling and skinning the sweetbread, cut it into small pieces. Make some good, well-flavoured white sauce as thick as cream ; put in the sweetbread and stew gently for twenty minutes, and shake the pan occasionally. Add a little lemon-juice at the last moment, and serve on squares of toast. Sweetbread Cutlets— Parboil the sweetbread, lay in cold water, and peel it. Dry well, then cut into neat slices. Dust the slices with flour, brush with egg, and roll in breadcrumbs, and fry until well browned. Serve in a circle round a mound of green peas or French beans, and serve white sauce or tomato sauce as an accompaniment. As sweetbread is rather insipid in itself, it is always advisable to try to impart flavour to it by cooking it in stock flavoured with onion, herbs, mushrooms, lemon-rind, or some other strongly-tasting ingredient. Bacon rolls are excellent served with it. A pleasant change may be obtained by stewing sliced sweetbread in oyster broth, and adding cream and thickening thereto as for oyster sauce. Vegetables and Petits. Vegetables are generally a very necessary addition to the diet of an invalid. Green peas, beans, celery, cauliflower, seakale, asparagus, onions, and spinach are all allowable when they are to be had, and tomatoes, raw or cooked, are a never-failing resource. Potatoes are not always advisable. The doctor should be consulted before they are provided. If approved, however, they are generally acceptable, especially when daintily fried. Recipes for cooking all these vegetables in various ways may be found by referring to the index. Vegetable Puree. — When vegetables are required for health, and there is a difficulty about digesting them, they are sometimes prepared as a puree with milk, and in this form are both nourishing and easy of digestion. To make vegetable puree, boil the vegetable in the usual way, and drain it well to get the water from it. Cover it with milk, and let it simmer for a quarter of an hour, then rub as much as possible through a fine hair sieve, season with salt and pepper, and serve. Lettuces, green peas, French beans, cauli¬ flower, cabbage, carrots, turnips, onions, and asparagus may all be prepared thus ; and, if milk is not agreeable to the patient, whey or thin gruel may be substituted for it. Fruits . — Fresh fruit, especially grapes and oranges, are often a most cooling and beneficial addition to the invalid’s diet. When there is a fear that raw fruit will not agree, almost all fruits can be made into purees, following the recipe given for puree of vegetables. For the most part, however, the fruits should be boiled in water, then rubbed through a sieve, and milk, should be added to make the puree thin enough for drinking. When fruit is rubbed through a very fine sieve, the skin, seeds, cores, and hard portions, which are likely to be specially difficult of digestion, are kept back. When the puree is daintily sweetened it constitutes a most acceptable and delicious food. Eggs. Eggs are amongst the most valuable of our resources for the use of invalids. They are most wholesome and altogether nourishing, and they can be served in all sorts of ways. Of course, it is im¬ portant that they should be freshly laid. There are one or two ways of testing the condition of eggs in this respect.