Virginia Cookery-book

To one peck of green peppers and four firm heads of cabbage chopped fine, and sprinkled with salt, add, after they have been kept a day and the salt is drained from them, a handful of horseradish, shredded and cut into bits, three-quarters of a pound of mustard-seed, six large onions chopped, and a table-spoonful of turmeric (if you prefer a yellow color), with a gallon of vinegar. Boil the spices a few minutes in half the vinegar, and pour it boiling hot over the vegetables. After cooling add the rest of the vinegar, cold. Put away in wide-mouthed bottles. Cranberry Sauce. Put the berries, after carefully picking out defective ones, into a kettle with just enough water to prevent burning, and stew until the whole becomes a homogeneous mass, with no semblance of whole berries, stirring all the time, and then add the clarified sirup previously pre- pared, and stir a few minutes while boiling. The sirup is made by allowing a quart of water to three pounds of sugar. Allow equal weights of fruit and sugar. Celery Sauce. Cut a clean bunch of celery into little bits and boil it slowly until it is tender ; add half a pint of cream, a few blades of mace, a little nutmeg pulverized, and a heaping teaspoonf ul of butter rolled in flour ; then boil it gently. This is a good sauce for roasted or boiled fowls, turkeys, or partridges. Drawn-butter Sauce. Put for one sauce-boatful a quarter of a pound of nice fresh butter in a stewpan and set it on some embers until it begins to melt ; then take it off and stir one way until the whole is melted. It will be quite thick and white. Dutch Sauce. The yolks of two eggs and a gill of rich cream, two and a quarter table-spoonfuls of elder-flower vinegar, one table-spoonful of the best butter, one blade of mace, and flour enough creamed in to render it of the consistency of rich custard, which it should nearly resemble. Fish Sauce. Put in a nicely cleaned tin saucepan a pint of portwine, a gill of white-wine, half a pint of walnut catsup, the rind and juice of a lemon, twelve anchovies and their liquor, a gill of walnut pickle, four or eight shallots, Cayenne pepper to taste, three ounces of scraped horseradish, three blades of mace, and two teaspoonfuls of made mustard. Boil gently until the rawness is gone, then put it in small bottles for use. Cork very close and seal. This quantity would serve a small family for the whole of one season, and will be found very convenient to have on hand. Lobster Sauce. The lobster should be chopped much smaller than ordinary, and the sauce should be composed of three parts cream to one of butter, a little salt, and a slight infusion of Cayenne pepper. The whole of the inside and coral of the lobster should be beaten up with the cream and butter, and the meat then cut in. Sauce for Rockfish. One pound of butter to be creamedy not oiled, twelve eggs boiled hard for several hours, so that they can be reduced to a powder, a teacupful of thin flour-starch made so as to be perfectly smooth — if not, strain, so that it be entirely free from lumps — then stir the butter and starch together. To the yolks of the eggs add three or four salt-spoonfuls of salt, one of Cayenne pepper, two of black pepper, three teaspoonfuls of mustard (mixed), with a wineglassful of walnut catsup. The eggs, pepper, salt, etc., to be well mixed together before putting with the butter and starch. If made any while before the hour comes for it to be served, put the sauce where it will keep warm, but not hot enough for the butter to be allowed to oil. The above quantity is suited for a pair of large rockfish, sufficient to dine a company of twenty. Sauce for Roasted Wild Duck.