I’ve been doing some reading on leftovers lately, and yesterday I read this beauty:
It’s part leftover advice book, part advertorial for Hood’s Sarsaparilla, a cure for all that ailed folks in 1891.
It’s quite a combination, and the two topics are interspersed throughout the 17-page booklet. So after some helpful advice on using stale bread, you’ll get a testimonial from a Civil War amputee on how Sarsaparilla headed his wound. Fascinating stuff, and it makes me at least want to drink the bastardized soda.
Anyway, the content (and prose) on leftovers is as interesting as the editorial combination. For example, there’s this handy list of uses for sour milk: biscuits, gems, corncakes, shortcakes rye muffins, doughnuts, gingerbread, griddle cakes, cookies, cakes and cottage cheese.
Meanwhile, I learned that brewis is milk-soaked bread crumbs usually cooked with fish that likely tastes like frugality. And I found out that there are a baked good called gems that remain a mystery.
And speaking of gems, I find this one inspiring and useful:
One is often puzzled to think of ways of using the whites or yolks of eggs left over when the other part has been used. In making…dishes requiring only the yolks, plan to make at the same time either a white or snow cake, apple snow, charlotte ruse, meringues, pudding sauces, cream whips, frosting for cakes, maccaroons or cocoanut [sic] cakes what will use up the whites.
By the way, you really should try my charlotte ruse–it’s quite clever!