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A bill of fare

A Terrible Temptation: A Story of To-Day

by Charles Reade

A TERRIBLE TEMPTATION: A SCHARLES READE
Our binding, not the publisher's

“Already spits were turning before great fires; a rump of beef, legs of pork, and pease-puddings boiling in one copper; turkeys and fowls in another; joints and pies baking in the great brick ovens; barrels of beer on tap, and magnums of champagne and port marching steadily up from the cellars, and forming in line and square upon sideboards and tables.”

From a cookbook of 1861

A cook of roughly the same moment, setting down the same dish.

1861  ·  Beeton
LITTLE RAISED PORK PIES

836. INGREDIENTS.--2 lbs. of flour, 1/2 lb. of butter, 1/2 lb. of mutton suet, salt and white pepper to taste, 4 lbs. of the neck of pork, 1 dessertspoonful of powdered sage. _Mode_.--Well dry the flour, mince the suet, and put these with the butter into a saucepan, to be made hot, and add a little salt. When melted, mix it up into a stiff paste, and put it before the fire with a cloth over it until ready to make up; chop the pork into small pieces, season it with white pepper, salt, and powdered sage; divide the paste into rather small pieces, raise it in a round or oval form, fill with the meat, and bake in a brick oven. These pies will require a fiercer oven than those in the preceding recipe, as they are made so much smaller, and consequently do not require so soaking a heat. _Time_.--If made small, about 1-1/2 hour. _Seasonable_ from September to March.

Sources: The passage is from Charles Reade, A Terrible Temptation: A Story of To-Day, free to read in full at Project Gutenberg. The recipe is from Beeton, The Book of Household Management of 1861, also free in full. Both are in the public domain in the United States. The binding above is ours — ochre cloth, boar stamp.

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