Marion Harland's Complete Cook Book: A Practical and Exhaustive Manual of Cookery and Housekeeping

from any of my printed pages. Bacon and apples This is a favorite southern dish, and good enough to be transplanted. Slice bacon thin and fry it crisp. Transfer to a platter and keep it hot while you fry thick slices of unpeeled sweet apples in the bacon fat. When these are tender, drain and put in the center of a hot platter. Lay the fried bacon about the edge of the dish, sprinkle sugar over the apples, and serve. Bacon and polenta Wet a cupful of fine Indian meal with two cupfuls of cold water and stir it into a quart of boiling water. Add a teaspoonful of salt, beat up hard, and let it cook steadily for two hours, stirring up often to prevent lumping. Should it thicken too much, add boiling water. When done, pour out into a broad platter and set aside until perfectly cold and stiff. If you are to have it for breakfast, cook it over night. Cut in squares, triangles or rounds, roll in raw meal (salted), and fry in plenty of boiling dripping or cottolene or other fat to a delicate brown. As each piece is done, transfer to a hot colander to drain. Serve in the center of a hot dish, with thin slices of fried bacon laid about it. A pretty way of varying a plain but excellent dish is to pour the hot polenta into fancy molds wet with cold water, leaving it there until you are ready to cook it, when turn out and fry. Bacon and sweet peppers Cut the stem ends from green sweet peppers, handling very cautiously, lest the seeds should touch the walls of the peppers and make them “hot.” With a small sharp knife extract core and seeds and throw them away. Cut the peppers into rings, lay in ice-cold water slightly salted for half an hour. Fry sliced bacon in a clean pan, take up and keep hot. Dry the peppers by patting between two clean cloths and fry until clear and tender in the fat left in the pan. Arrange the