Domestic French Cookery, 4th ed Part 15

Potato flour is excellent for sponge-cake, and other things which require extraordinary lightness. It is also good for young children, and for convalescent sick persons.

Take the best and most mealy potatoes; pare them, and wash them through several waters. Then rasp or grate them over a tureen half full of cold water. Continue to grate the potatoes till the lower half of the tureen is filled with the pulp, so that the water may rise to the top. The mealy part of the potatoes will sink to the bottom, while the remainder or the useless part will rise to the surface. When nothing more rises, pour off the water carefully, and dry the flour which you find at the bottom. When quite dry, pound it in a mortar to a fine powder, and sift it through a sieve.

Potato flour is much lighter than that of wheat.

COLD PICKLES.

Season some of the best vinegar with a little garlic, a little tarragon, and a little sweet-oil. Put it into a gla.s.s jar, and keep it well covered. You may throw into it the green seeds of nasturtians, morella cherries, little onions, small young carrots when but a finger long, radish pods, and various other things. Keep the jar well closed, and the pickles will be as good and keep as long as if they had been boiled.

Nasturtians and cherries will keep in plain vinegar without any seasoning.

CORNICHONS, OR FRENCH CUc.u.mBER PICKLES.

Take ten pounds of very small cuc.u.mbers. Brush them all over to clean them well, and cut off the stems. Put them into an earthen pan with two handfuls of salt. Let them rest twenty-four hours, and then drain them.

When they are well drained, put them back into the same pan, and pour in a quant.i.ty of boiling hot white wine vinegar, sufficient to cover them.

Then cover the pan carefully with a lid or dish, and let the cuc.u.mbers set in the vinegar twenty-four hours. They will then be yellow. Pour the vinegar from them, and cover them with vine-leaves. Boil the vinegar again, and when it boils throw it over the cuc.u.mbers, stirring them well.

When the vinegar is cold, pour it from the cuc.u.mbers, and boil it again.

Then pour it over them, and proceed in this manner four or five times, till they become of a fine green. Keep them in the interval always covered with a layer of vine-leaves, fresh each time, and also with a cloth kept down by a large dish. This, by keeping in the steam, will a.s.sist them in greening.

Then drain them on a sieve, and put them into gla.s.s jars.

Afterwards, boil some fresh white wine vinegar, first mixing in it the following seasoning. To every quart of vinegar allow half an ounce of mace, half an ounce of sliced ginger, half an ounce of whole black pepper, six cloves, a few sprigs of tarragon, and half a clove of garlic.

Boil the vinegar with these ingredients for five minutes, and then pour it hot on the pickles. Tie them up carefully. They may be used in a week.

The generality of French pickles, are made in a manner similar to those of England and America.

FINE COLOGNE WATER.

Procure at an apothecary's the following oils and have them all put into the same phial:--Oil of lemon, 2 drams; oil of rosemary, 2 drams; oil of lavender, 1 dram; oil of bergamot, 2 drams; oil of cinnamon, 10 drops; oil of cloves, 10 drops; oil of roses, 2 drops; tincture of musk, 8 drops.

Put 2 pint of highly rectified spirits of wine into a bottle, and pour the oils into it. Shake it hard for a few minutes, having corked it tightly. It will be fit for immediate use, but it improves by keeping.

If you wish it stronger, double the quant.i.ty of all the oils, but have only a pint of spirits of wine.

THE END.