The Belgian Cookbook | Page 7

with
gravy, season with salt and pepper, put them back in the butter and stir
in the yolk of an egg. Add also a little of the lemon juice that remains.
While you are doing this you must get another person to cut and toast
some bread and to butter it. Pour on to the bread the mushrooms (which
are fit for the greatest saints to eat on Fridays), and serve them very hot.
POMMES CHÂTEAU
Take twenty potatoes, turn them with a knife into olive shape, boil
them in salted water for five minutes; drain them and put them on a
baking-tin with salt and butter or dripping. Cook them in a very hot
oven for thirty minutes, moving them about from time to time. Sprinkle
on a little chopped parsley before serving.
CHIPPED POTATOES
Take some long-shaped potatoes, peel them and smooth them with the
knife. Cut them into very thin rounds.
Heat the grease pretty hot, dry the slices of potato with a cloth, put
them into the frying basket and plunge them into the fat. When they are
colored, take the basket out, let the fat heat up again to a slightly higher
temperature, and re-plunge the basket, so that the slices become quite
crisp. Serve with coarse salt sprinkled over.
CHICORY À LA FERDINAND
Boil and chop in medium-sized pieces the chicory, mince up a few
chives according to your taste and heat both the vegetables in some
cream, adding salt and pepper. Pour on a dish and decorate with
chopped hardboiled eggs.
APPLES AND SAUSAGES
This dish comes from the French border of Belgium; it tastes better
than you would think. Take a pound of beef sausages, and preferably
use the small chipolata sausages. (What a delightful thing if the English

would make other kinds of sausages as well as their beef and pork
ones!) Fry then your sausages lightly in butter, look upon them as little
beings for a few moments in purgatory before they are removed to
heaven, among the apples. Keeping your sausages hot after they are
fried, take a pound of brown pippin apples, pare them and core them.
Cut them into neat rounds quarter of an inch thick, put them to cook in
their liquor of the sausages (which you are keeping hot elsewhere), and
add butter to moisten them. Let them simmer gently so as to keep their
shape. Put the applerings in the center of the dish, place the sausages
round them. This dish uses a good deal of butter, but you must not use
anything else for frying.
STUFFED CHICORY
Make a mince of any cold white meat, such as veal, pork or chicken,
and add to it some minced ham; sprinkle it with a thick white sauce. In
the meantime the chicories should be cooking; tie each one round with
a thread to keep them firm and boil them for ten minutes. When cooked,
drain them well, open them lengthwise very carefully, and slip in a
spoonful of the mince. Close them, keeping the leaves very neat, and, if
necessary, tie them round again. Put them in a fire-proof dish with a
lump of butter on each, and let them heat through. Serve them in their
juice or with more of the white sauce, taking care to remove the
threads.
[Madame Limpens.]
TOMATOES STUFFED WITH BEANS
Halve and empty the tomatoes, and put a few drops of vinegar in each.
Cook your beans, whether French beans or haricots or flageolets, and
stir them, when tender, into a good thick bechamel sauce. Let this get
cold. Empty out the vinegar from the tomatoes and fill them with the
mixture, pouring over the top some mayonnaise sauce and parsley.
[Madame van Praet.]
CABBAGE AND POTATOES

Boil the cabbages in salted water till tender. Chop them up. Brown an
onion in butter, and add the cabbage, salt, pepper, and a little water.
Slice some potatoes thickly, fry them, and serve the vegetable with
cabbage in the center, and the fried potatoes laid round.
[Mdlle. M. Schmidt, Antwerp.]
SPINACH À LA BRACONNIÈRE
Cook two pounds of well-washed spinach; drain it, and pass it through
a sieve; or, failing a sieve, chop it very finely with butter, pepper and
salt. Do not add milk, but let it remain somewhat firm. Make a thick
bechamel sauce, sufficient to take up a quarter of a pound of grated
Gruyère, and, if you wish, stir in the yolk of a raw egg. Lay in a
circular dish half a pound of minced ham, pour round it the thick white
sauce, and round that again the hot spinach. This makes a pretty dish,
and it is not costly.
[_Mme. Braconnière_.]
A DISH OF HARICOT BEANS
Put the haricots to soak for six hours in cold water.