Put tomatoes and onion over the fire with the hot water. Boil half an hour; strain and rub through a colander, working the tomatoes to a pulp. Meanwhile, boil the milk, stir in soda, butter and flour, and after one boil, keep hot. Put pepper, salt, and sugar with the tomatoes; simmer five minutes; pour into the tureen; stir in the crumbs, and one minute later the thickened milk. Serve at once. If the milk be cooked with the _purée_, it will almost surely curdle.
Clean a fine bass, and sew up in a thin cloth. Put into boiling water in which you have mixed four tablespoonfuls of vinegar, with six whole black peppers, and a little salt. Cook about twelve minutes to the pound. Prepare a cupful of drawn butter, boil half a can of mushrooms twenty minutes; drain, chop up and stir, with the juice of half a lemon and a little pepper, into the drawn butter. Simmer together three minutes—put the fish upon a hot dish, and pour one-third of the sauce over it, serving the rest in a boat.
3 or 4 fine sweetbreads. 1 raw egg. ½ cup rolled crackers. 1 cup of gravy (saved from yesterday’s fricassee). 2 tablespoonfuls melted butter. 1 tablespoonful mushroom or walnut catsup. Pepper and salt. Rounds of fried bread.
Parboil and blanch the sweetbreads. Dry, and dip, first, in egg, then, in cracker-crumbs. Lay in a small dripping-pan; pour the butter over them, set in the oven, and roast, covered, three-quarters of an hour, basting often with the gravy. Dish upon fried bread. Add the catsup to the gravy; boil up and strain over the sweetbreads.
Prepare as usual, and pass with the fish.
Drain off the can liquor; cook the succotash half an hour in boiling water; drain, add a cup of hot milk, and stir in pepper, salt, and a great spoonful of butter cut up in flour. Simmer three minutes and pour out.
Make a good puff-paste, cut out large, and round as a dinner-plate, and bake to a light brown in a quick oven. Draw to the oven door; lay strawberries, rolled in sugar, over it, and cover these an inch deep with a _méringue_ made of the whites of four eggs whisked stiff, with three tablespoonfuls of powdered sugar. Bake until the _méringue_ is faintly tinged with yellow brown. Eat fresh, but not hot. It is delicious.