The Cook's Oracle

Excerpt: ...tender, but yet not overboiled. Giblets may be had from July to January; the fresher they are the better. N.B. This is rather a family-dish than a company one; the bones cannot be well picked without the help of alive pincers. Since Tom Coryat introduced forks, A. D. 1642, it has not been the fashion to put “pickers and stealers” into soup. 218 Mock Mock Turtle,-( No. 245.) As made by Elizabeth Lister (late cook to Dr. Kitchiner), bread and biscuit baker, No. 6 Salcombe Place, York Terrace, Regent’s Park. Goes out to dress dinners on reasonable terms. Line the bottom of a stew-pan that will hold five pints, with an ounce of nice lean bacon or ham, a pound and a half of lean gravy beef, a cow-heel, the inner rind of a carrot, a sprig of lemons-thyme, winter savoury, three times the quantity of parsley, a few green leaves of sweet basil, 218- and two eschalots; put in a large onion, with four cloves stuck in it, eighteen corns of allspice, the same of black pepper; pour on these a quarter of a pint of cold water, cover the stew-pan, and set it on a slow fire, to boil gently for a quarter of an hour; then, for fear the meat should catch, take off the cover, and watch it; and when it has got a good brown colour, fill up the stew-pan with boiling water, and let it simmer very gently for two hours: if you wish to have the full benefit of the meat, only stew it till it is just tender, cut it into mouthfuls, and put it into the soup. To thicken it, pour two or three table-spoonfuls of flour, a ladleful of the gravy, and stir it quick till it is well mixed; pour it back into the stew-pan where the gravy is, and let it simmer gently for half an hour longer; skim it, and then strain it through a tamis into the stew-pan: cut the cow-heel into pieces about an inch square, squeeze through a sieve the juice of a lemon, a table-spoonful of mushroom catchup, a tea-spoonful of salt, half a tea-spoonful of ground black pepper, as much grated...