The Belgian Cookbook | Page 7

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 �� 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 �� LA BRACONNI��RE
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 Gruy��re, 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. Braconni��re_.]
A DISH OF HARICOT BEANS
Put the haricots to soak for six hours in cold water. Boil them in water with one carrot, one onion, salt, two cloves, a good pinch of dried herbs. Drain off the liquor from the haricots. Chop up a shallot, and fry it in butter; add your haricots, with pepper and salt and tomato pur��e. Stir well, and serve with minced parsley scattered at the top.
[Mme. Goffaux.]
POTATOES IN THE BELGIAN MANNER
Take some slices of streaky bacon, about five inches long, and heat them in a pan. When the bacon is half-cooked, take it out of the pan and in the fat that remains behind fry some very finely-sliced onions till they are brown. When the onions are well browned, put them in a large pot, large enough for all the potatoes you wish to cook, adding pepper, salt, and a coffee-spoonful of sweet