2 meals in this book
“There is a peculiar etiquette relating to every course in a dinner. The soup is eaten with a bowl-like spoon, and it is the grossest breach to place this in your mouth, or approach it, endwise. You approach the side and suck the soup from it. To make a noise would attract attention. The etiquette of the fish is to eat it with a fork; to use the knife even to cut the fish would be unpardonable, or to touch it to take out the bones; the fork alone must be used. The punch course is often an embarrassment to the previous wines, and is followed by what the French call the _entree_. In fact, while the Americans boast that everything American is the best, French customs are followed at banquets invariably, this being one of the strange inconsistencies of the Americans. Their clothes are copied from the English, though they will claim in the same breath that their tailors are the best in the world. For wines they claim to be unsurpassed, producing the finest; yet the wines on their tables are French or bear French labels. Game is served--a grouse or perhaps a hare, and then a vast roast, possibly venison, or beef, and there are vegetables, followed by a salad of some kind. Then comes the dessert--an iced cream, cakes, nuts, raisins, cheese, and coffee with brandy, and then cigars and vermuth or some cordial. After such a dinner of three hours a Southern gentleman clapped me on the back and said, "Great dinner, that; but let's go and get a drink of something solid," and I saw him take what he termed "two fingers" of Kentucky Bourbon whisky--a very stiff drink. I often wondered how the guests could stand so much.”
Make this in the same way as chicken soup, with the addition of one tablespoonful of rice, a slight grating of nutmeg, a tiny bit of mace, and a piece of stick cinnamon about an inch long, and the omission of the parsley. When the time required for the cooking has expired, take out the spice and pour the soup into a fine sieve. Rub all the rice through, using a wooden vegetable masher. Put the strained mixture in a clean saucepan with a pint of milk, and let it boil up once. If you have cream in plenty, use half cream and half milk. The soup will be much smoother if it is strained a second time, after the milk has been boiled with it.
Recipe from Miss Parloa's Young Housekeeper of 1893.
“The daring of the American woman impressed me. This same lady asked me not to remain with the men to smoke but go on the veranda with her, where _tete-a-tete_ she produced a gold cigarette-case and offered me a cigarette. This I found not uncommon. American women of the fast sets drink at the clubs; an insidious drink--the "high-ball"--is a common one, yet I never saw a woman under the influence of wine or liquor. The amount of both consumed in America, is amazing. The consumption per head in the United States for beer alone is ten and a half gallons for each of the eighty millions. My friend, a prohibitionist, a member of a political party whose object is to ruin the wine industry of the world, put it stronger, and, backed by facts, said that if the wine, beer, whisky, gin, and alcoholic drinks of all kinds and the tea and coffee drank yearly by the Americans could be collected it would make a lake two miles square and ten feet deep. The alcoholic drinks alone if collected would fill a canal one hundred miles long, one hundred feet wide, and ten feet deep. May their saints propitiate this insatiate thirst!”
If treated at once such stains seldom give much trouble. Place the stained part over a large bowl and pour boiling water upon it until the stain disappears. If, however, the stains be of long standing, and have been washed with soap, it will be difficult to get rid of them. Javelle water (which can be made at home or bought of a druggist) will do it. Put about half a pint of Javelle water and a quart of clear water into an earthen bowl; let the stained article soak in this for several hours; then rinse thoroughly in three waters. It is only white goods that can be treated in this manner, as the Javelle water bleaches out the color. Another way to do is to put a little of the Javelle water in a saucer or small bowl, and soak the spot in this until it disappears. Rinse thoroughly.
Recipe from Miss Parloa's Young Housekeeper of 1893.
Sources: Every passage above is quoted verbatim from As A Chinaman Saw Us, free to read in full at Project Gutenberg. The recipes come from cookbooks of the period, also free in full. All are in the public domain in the United States. The binding is ours — moss cloth, teapot stamp.