CHAPTER XVI
PREPARATION OF MEALS AND TABLE SERVICE
The preparation of a number of dishes assembled for a meal requires a skill quite different from that necessary for the making of a single dish. A menu being decided upon, it needs an accurate sense of time, forethought, and promptness, to have a number of dishes ready at the same time, or in proper sequence if several courses are served. Such questions as the following must be answered:
_Technique of preparation._
1. What steps in preparation can be taken ahead of time, as washing, paring, cutting, etc.?
2. What dishes take the longest to cook?
3. Which must be served the moment they are done?
4. Which can be kept hot for some time without injury?
5. Which can be finished and cooled perhaps several hours before?
6. Do the dishes selected require the same utensils at the same time? (If so, the menus must be changed.)
7. What is the order of serving?
To understand the bearing of these questions you will need to select some menu and make a plan for preparing it. (See exercises at the end of this chapter.)
The fact is obvious that in preparing a meal you cannot finish the dishes one at a time, but that steps individual to each dish must be interwoven with each other, and the cook must have them all “on her mind,” and is often doing half a dozen things at once. As a high school girl, preparing a part of her first meal, remarked, “This is as good training as mathematics.”
The woman at home will devise many ways of easing and shortening the labor just before the meal is served, avoiding haste and anxiety in this way. With the fireless cooker and other slow-cooking apparatus, the heavy work may sometimes be done far ahead of mealtime. A dessert can be prepared and be cooking as breakfast dishes are washed, and at the time left overs are put away they can be arranged ready for serving, as in the case of poultry or meat to be served cold. While the preparation of the midday meal is in progress, something can sometimes be done for the last meal, too. This, indeed, is a field for generalship, and it is a successful campaign when the meals are all on time and well prepared, and the cook and family cheerful.
=Important points in serving each dish.=——Each dish should be perfectly done, neither over nor under cooked. All hot dishes should be hot, and cold dishes cold. Lukewarm food is not agreeable. Bread and cake and some kinds of pastry are the only foods that may have the temperature of the room. Sliced meat and salads should be _cold_. Chill chocolate éclairs before serving and see how much they are improved; indeed, experiment with a number of foods that are usually served at room temperature.
=To keep food hot.=——A hot closet above a coal or gas range is made for this purpose, and steam heaters sometimes have hot-closets. A double boiler is a help, and one utensil may be set into a larger, filled with boiling water. Some dishes can be set back on the stove, or over a simmering gas burner with an asbestos mat underneath. The oven may be used sometimes, with the door set ajar. The food may be kept covered unless it will steam, in which case cover it with a towel. Serve food in hot dishes.
=To keep food cool.=——Leave the dish in the ice box until the last possible moment. Sometimes serve with ice (butter in warm weather). If ice is lacking, use other cooling devices. Serve in chilled dishes.
=Garnishing the dish.=——All food must be neatly placed in the dish, and arranged or piled with some sort of symmetry, and this is the most that some people have time to do. Many foods may be served in the utensil or dish in which they are cooked, and in the case of a baking dish, if its appearance is not neat, a napkin can be folded about it. The simplest form of garnish is browning on the top, which makes many dishes attractive (mashed potato).
_Make the garnishing simple_, and have it eatable when possible. Slices of hard-boiled eggs on spinach, chopped parsley and butter on boiled or mashed potato, parsley and slices of lemon, with meat and fish.
_Vegetable borders_ are attractive and save labor in dish washing. Arrange the meat in the center of the platter, and pile mashed potato, or boiled rice or peas or beans, or a mixture of hot vegetables around the edge. This saves time in table service, too.
The garnishing of salads, desserts, and cakes is treated in previous chapters.
=Table equipment and service.=——This is a place where beauty is a large element, and most people understand the charm of a daintily laid table, as the family gathers for a meal. But many factors must be taken into account, for it is an easy matter to pass from the simple and beautiful to an extravagant display, to spend more on the dining-room equipment than the income warrants, and to waste much energy in unnecessary work. Our great need here is to learn to see beauty in simplicity. We must remember, too, that many people in our country live in crowded quarters, and have no time for anything but the simplest kind of table service.[16]
The _table_ should be firm, large enough to accommodate the family comfortably, and it should permit of extension when occasion demands a larger board. The top should have an oil finish that will not easily mar and that can be washed off. Have a thick cloth or pad to protect it——the “silence cloth.”
_Table covers_ may be the small doilies with centerpiece, strips of fine linen crash, or blue or brown and white Japanese toweling laid across both ways, a cloth that just covers the table, or a large cloth that hangs well below the table edge. The doilies and strips are used conventionally for breakfast and luncheon, but save much labor when used for all meals. The color may be white, or tinted, but the dark-colored cloth should be banished.
The material may be linen or mercerized cotton. Many people think white table oilcloth is impossible, but a table covered with it may be made very pretty; it can be kept clean by washing at the end of each meal, and the saving in labor is incalculable.
The pattern and quality and cost of table linens are mentioned in