Literary Collections
Read books online » Literary Collections » Dinners and Luncheons by Paul Pierce (mystery books to read TXT) 📖

Book online «Dinners and Luncheons by Paul Pierce (mystery books to read TXT) 📖». Author Paul Pierce



1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ... 13
Go to page:
each place a tiny pumpkin made into a candle with a green pumpkin leaf shade. Light the room with jack o' lanterns or yellow Chinese lanterns. For the menu serve cream of corn soup in yellow bowls. Serve turkey, cranberry jelly, mashed turnips, baked sweet potatoes, on yellow plates. Serve fruit salad in the red apple cups, with pumpkin pie and yellow ice cream frozen in shape of pumpkins, for dessert. Serve coffee in yellow cups. Fourth of July Dinner.

A beautiful summer dinner for July Fourth is as follows: On the table have a centerpiece of pineapple cloth over pale green satin, on which place a flat willow basket of green and white striped grasses that border the garden flower beds. From this basket have wavy lines of pale green gauze ribbon reaching to each corner of the table, the ribbons ending in flat bouquets of daisies tied with grasses. The dinner cards should be cut out of water-color paper in the shape of long, narrow spikes of lilies and fastened to the glasses by flaps on the backs. The menu is clam bisque; lobster cutlets with egg sauce; timbales of sweetbreads; new carrots with fine herbs; crown of lamb with mint sauce; potato croquettes and salsify; peach ice; truffle-stuffed squab, cress; asparagus and lettuce salad; green cornucopiae of ice cream filled with lemon ice; white cake with green icing; coffee, nuts glace.

A Luncheon for Thanksgiving.

Have this sentiment painted on a white or dark gray background framed in cedar boughs and placed over your mantel:

The waning year grows brown and gray and dull,
And poets sing November, bleak and sere;
But from the bounteous garnered harvest store,
With grateful hearts we draw Thanksgiving cheer.

Place a row of white candles in pewter candlesticks across the mantel and display all the old china, pewter, brass and copper about the dining-room. Use cedar boughs to decorate the chandelier and plate rail. In the center of the bare table have a miniature stack of wheat (the florist can furnish this). Peeping out of the wheat have toy turkey candy boxes filled with almonds or hickory nut meats and raisins. Have the candles on the table set in flat cedar wreaths and scatter pine needles over the surface of the table. At each plate have a little doll dressed in Puritan costume with the name card tied around her neck. If one wishes to add a bit of color to the table use old-fashioned blue and white or colored bowls, in one pile glossy red apples, in another purple and white grapes, in another oranges. Here are some suitable Colonial dishes: Brown bread, roasted fowl, oysters in every style, cakes of Indian meal called bannocks which are spread before the fire on large tins and baked before the fire, brown sugar and molasses for sweetening; fruit cake, molasses cake, pumpkin, apple and mince pie; jellies, jams and conserves (a sweet mixture of fruits). Use all the old-fashioned china and silver possible.

Thanksgiving Dinner.

First an old-fashioned oyster stew served in old white, gold-banded tureen.

Next fish-balls—not great, soggy old-fashioned fish cakes, but the daintiest little golden-brown balls, fried in a basket in hot fat, and not more than an inch in diameter, just a good mouthful. Have them served individually, smoking hot, heaped up in the daintiest little piles, with a few tiny sprigs of baby parsley for garnish.

Next will come the turkey, a monster bird, "with stuffing" made of Italian chestnuts.

It goes without saying that with this will be served the historic cranberry jelly, which may be moulded in a square tin and served in tiny cubical blocks. After the sweet potatoes are baked the contents will be removed, whipped light as a feather with two well-beaten eggs, a little milk, pepper, salt and butter, the skins refilled, stood on end in a pan and the tops browned in the oven.

Then Roman punch.

Then two good old-fashioned pies, one pumpkin, the other mince, each about two inches thick.

A Christmas Dinner.

If one wishes to develop the idea of Santa and his sleigh, buy a doll and dress as Santa and fashion a sleigh out of cardboard and color red. About Santa and his sleigh, which may be filled with bonbons or tiny gifts like animals from Noah's ark, etc., for the guests, have imitation snow of coarse salt or sugar, or cotton sprinkled with diamond dust. Have tiny sprigs of evergreen standing upright for trees. At each plate have a tiny sleigh filled with red and green candies and light the table with red candles and shades in shape of Christmas bells. Have the dinner cards ornamented with little water-color Santa Claus' heads or little trees. If one uses the Christmas bell idea have the bells covered with scarlet crape tissue and swung from the chandelier. One can have the letters on them spell "Merry Christmas." In the center of the table place a mound of holly with bright red berries; have red candles arranged in any design one chooses, and far enough away so their heat will not ignite the tissue paper bells. White paper shades with sprays of holly painted or tied on make pretty Christmas shades. Have the bonbons, nuts, salads and ice cream served in cases in shape of bells, or have the ice cream frozen in bell shape. If one wishes to decorate with the tiny trees, fasten them upright in flower pots and cover the pots with red paper. Hang bonbons or sparkling objects and tinsel or little favors of bells for the guests from the branches of the trees. The holly wreaths may be used in any way the fancy dictates—a large center wreath and if the table is round, a second larger one near the edge of the table, leaving room for the plates or single candlesticks set in tiny wreaths at intervals between the larger wreaths. A wreath dinner is very pretty and easy to plan, for the different dishes may be garnished with wreaths of parsley, radishes, endive, cress, or the sweets with rings of kisses, macaroons, whipped cream roses, candies, etc.

Here is a suitable menu. Oyster or clam cocktail, wafers, consomme, bouillon or cream of celery soup, celery, radishes, small square crackers. If one wishes a fish course, creamed lobster or salmon with potato balls. Roast Turkey or game of any sort, glazed sweet potatoes, corn fritters, creamed peas, peach, currant or grape jelly, hot rolls. Cranberry sherbet; nut salad with plain bread and butter sandwiches, individual plum puddings with burning brandy, ice cream in any desired shape, white cake or fruit cake if one does not have the plum pudding, cheese, crackers, coffee.

An Unusually Original Dinner.

A quail dinner given recently will furnish ideas for others who wish to give a dinner out of the ordinary. Let the oblong table on which the dinner is served represent a field with miniature shocks of grain and stubble in which are quail, pheasants' and other birds' nests. A border of toy guns stacked mark the edge of the field. At each man's place have a toy figure of a hunter with some toy fastened to the back telling some joke on the diner. The women can have birds' nest candy boxes surmounted by birds. The name cards can be English hunting scene postals.

This is the menu:

Blue Points, Celery Hearts, Olives, Stuffed Olives, Cream of Asparagus with Asparagus Points, Crackers, Broiled Fresh Spanish Mackerel served on Lettuce Ribbons, Cucumbers, Cannon Ball Potatoes, Sherry, Champagne Punch, Quail on Toast, French Peas, Stewed Mushrooms on Toast, Hot Rolls, Champagne, (Salad, Head Lettuce, French Beans, Ring of Chopped Whites of Eggs, Ring of Powdered Yolks of Eggs, French Dressing,) Crackers and Melted Cheese, Chestnut Ice Cream molded in Form of Broiled Quail and Asparagus Tips, Eggnog Sauce, Coffee and Liqueurs in the Drawingroom. A Spring Dinner.

To secure a pretty effect pull the extension table apart and fill in the center space with palms and ferns, keeping the foliage low enough not to interfere with the vision of the guests. Across each end of the table lay a pale green satin and lace cover on which place French baskets filled with yellow daffodils and pink tulips. Before each place set tall stem vases filled with yellow daffodils resting on wreaths of pink begonias. Have the pink and yellow candies in French baskets tied with the same colors. Use monograms of the guests on plain white cards with tiny silver boots tied to a corner for favors. Serve:

Green Grapes Dipped in Sugar, Cream Salsify Soup in Bouillon Cups, Bread Sticks, Deviled Lobster in Shell, Cucumber Mayonnaise, Squab on Toast, Creamed Potatoes, Ice Cream in Form of Fruits, White Cake, Coffee. College Dinners.

To those who may have the planning of college dinners, the description of this Harvard dinner may not come amiss.

In the center of the table have a large bowl of red tulips; red shades on the candles standing at either end of the table. The favors can be small boxes in the shape of foot-balls filled with red candies. The place-cards in the shape of foot-balls, cut out of red cardboard, and painted in black and white; by each plate a roll with a small Harvard flag, of silk. Place the olives, nuts and red candies in small paper cases covered with tissue paper, which match in shape as well as in color, the central bouquet of tulips.

Even in the menu the color scheme may be carried out as far as possible with tomato bisque, deviled crabs served in the shells, chicken croquettes, fillet of beef, garnished with cress and radishes, beet salad and ice cream baskets filled with strawberries. The croquettes can be made in the shape of foot-balls. The beets for the salad are boiled until tender, and when cold scooped out and filled with dressed celery. A few curved cuts made around the sides of the beets give the effect of flower petals. The little cakes, served with the ice-cream, are covered with red frosting.

If Princeton be the Alma Mater in whose honor the feast is spread, tiger-lilies should be the flowers used on the center of the table, and the menu would of course, differ much from the one already given. Instead might be substituted black bean soup with slices of hard boiled egg; fried scallops and Saratoga potatoes; sweet bread patés; chicken with sweet potatoes; and carrots cut with a vegetable cutter into what are called shoestrings; lobster salad served in paper boxes, having around the outside, ruffles of orange crépe paper; and orange ice served in the natural oranges. If one prefers a change from the wishbone creation, Noah's Ark tigers may stand guard over the patés.

A Yale dinner would be the most difficult to arrange as there are no fruits or vegetables that could rightly be called blue, unless some varieties of grapes and plums might be considered as coming under that head. But with a large central bouquet of cornflowers, with blue ribbons extending from this to each cover, where under the bow or rosette will be laid the corn-cob pipe or other souvenir, and with blue crépe paper used to decorate some of the dishes, the table will present quite as attractive an appearance as either of the other dinners; while the genial guests will probably enjoy the feast fully as well, and be quite as loyal, even if the roast and salad do not show the college colors.

CHAPTER IV. "ICE BREAKERS," SUGGESTIONS FOR DINNER, MENU AND PLACE CARDS, TABLE STORIES, TOASTS, TABLE
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ... 13
Go to page:

Free ebook «Dinners and Luncheons by Paul Pierce (mystery books to read TXT) 📖» - read online now

Comments (0)

There are no comments yet. You can be the first!
Add a comment