FoodNetArchive

The household gas cookery book

1900

Page 98 · 3 recipe records on this page

Presented as published in 1900. Historical recipes may not meet modern food-safety standards. Cook from the modern interpretation, not the original instructions.
Apples and their Uses. — Apples as human food have not been sufficiently estimated. Besides con¬ tributing a large portion of sugar, mucilage, and other nutritive matter, in the form of food, they contain such a fine combination of vegetable acids, abstractive substances, and aromatic principles with the nutritive matter, as to act powerfully in the capacity of tonics, refrigerants, antiseptics, and when freely used at the season of their ripening by rural labourers and others they prevent debility, strengthen digestion, correct the putrefactive tendencies of nitrogenous food, avert scurvy, and maintain and strengthen the powers of productive labour. The operatives of Cornwall con¬ sider ripe apples nearly as nourishing as bread, and more so than potatoes. In the year 1801 — a year of great scarcity — apples, instead of being converted into cider, were sold to the poor; and the labourers asserted that they could stand their work on baked apples without meat; whereas a potato diet required either meat or fish. The French and Germans use apples extensively; indeed, they rarely sit down in the rural districts without them in some shape, even at the best tables. The labourers and mechanics depend on them to a very great extent as an article of food, and frequently dine on sliced apples and bread. Stewed with rice, red cabbage, carrots, or by themselves, with a little sugar and milk, they make a pleasant and nutritious dish,. A Ribston Pippin eaten before breakfast and a walk of half an hour will greatly assist in preventing gout. Apple Butter, or Beurre aux Pommes. — This is an excellent dish for tea, supper, or dessert. It is placed on the table like orange marmalade. Those families having an abundance of apple trees may, by the aid of the following recipe, be enabled to preserve their crops as a luxury until another comes in the following year. GAS COOKERY BOOK. 179 Take four lbs. of sweet apples, peel and quarter them, remove the core and pips, put them into a stew-pan with a little water over a glimmer of gas, and let them come to the boil gradually. When the apples begin to be soft, add the juice of one lemon, one gill of rum, and one pound of loaf sugar dissolved in half a pint of waterApple Butter, or Beurre aux Pommes. Boil it up, pour it into jars, cover with jam covers, and put in a dry place ready for use. If to be eaten by children or young people, rum or wines should certainly not be added. Stewed Plums. — Put into a stewpan a pint of water and a pound of sugar; put on the gas, and let it boil until it becomes a syrup (about 15 minutes quick boil¬ ing). Take a pound of plumsStewed Plums (previously well wiped and picked), and put them into the syrup; let all simmer gently for about fifteen or twenty minutes, pour into a glass dish, and serve when cold. Baked Bananas. — Take six large bananas and peel them. Cut them in halves lengthwise. Have ready a well-buttered baking-tin, put the bananas in it and cover them with sugar and the juice of two lemons; put into the oven for ten minutes, and then add half a cupful of hot waterBaked Bananas, and bake until the fruit looks transparent. Melt some red currant jelly, put the bananas in a glass dish, pour the jelly over them, and leave to get cold and then serve.