Many prefer salads with oil and vinegar only ; others choose more complicated dressings. Some of these can be kept ready in bottles, and are therefore suitable for quick applica- tion or oft-repeated use, as in restaurants. They all resemble mayonnaise sauce ; one is made with puree of boiled yolks, a little milk, and oil or fried butter, salt, sugar, mustard, and at last vinegar ; another is made with boiled yolks and raw yolks added later, oil, vinegar and spices. These sauces or dressings must be creamy, and so thick as to adhere to the lettuce or other vegetable. Other dressings have been mentioned under the heading of Gold Sauces. For Potato Salad the thinly-sliced boiled tubers of suit- able, consistent, not floury quality should be drenched with good bouillon or standard solution of Proust’s meat extract, half an ounce to the pint of hot water. No more bouillon must be added than the thinly-sliced potatoes will absorb. Then salt and pepper, and after them the oil, has to be added, care being taken to lubricate the salad with a sufficiency of the latter. If to this a little good vinegar✪ Potato Salad be added, it forms an excellent dish. It may be made the basis of more compound salads, either with vegetables, or with such and fish, or meat ; such compositions have re- ceived certain names by which they appear appropriated to nationalities, Italian, Polish, Russian, etc. Of these dishes more will be said in subsequent chapters. 23 354 THE SPIRIT OF COOKERY Amongst the herbs useful for Salads of Uncooked Vege- tables, earliest in spring grows Corn Salad, or Lamb’s Lettuce, in the fields, self-sown, here and there also cultivated. It is the field forget-me-not, Myosotis arvensis. When tender and dressed with oil and vinegar, it has a nutty taste, w'hence the Germans call it Niisschen-Salat. In French it is mdche, but it is not used in all the provinces. About Easter-time appear the forced letkices, mainly of the so-called cabbage kind, from their globular shape (German, Kopf-Salat, head- salad) ; later on those grown in the open air. Any salad made with them is best with a simple dressing of oil and vinegar, but bears complicated additions : hens’ eggs, boiled hard, cut in quarters or discs ; turtles' and plovers' eggs, marinaded oysters, tails of shrirngos, lobster flesh, fillets of a7ichovies, olives filled with forcemeat. Some French recipes add a few drops of soy to the dressing. Of all these addi- tions, the lobster commands the greatest popularity in English society, soy, an otherwise useful sauce, the least. The Cabbage Lettuce {Lactuca sativa vericeps) is cultivated in many varieties — early, late, green, brown, yellow — but its heart should always be white, or merely yellowish ; about one-third of its weight consists of succulent ribs, two-tbirds of green or white thin leaf tissue. Its slightly bitter, agreeable taste is due to the presence of a inilky juice, which contains a soothmg prindi^le similar in action to opium, lactucin. The action of the lettuce in this respect was so well appreciated in antiquity, that the Greek ph3’^sician Galen, who practised at Eome, ate of it occasionally daily for supper, for the purpose of procuring sleep. He reports this himself in his treatise on the properties of aliments, and terms the plant pthilosoidiei-'s, or tvise-man’s herb.

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Many prefer salads with oil and vinegar only ; others choose more complicated dressings. Some of these can be kept ready in bottles, and are therefore suitable for quick applica- tion or oft-repeated use, as in restaurants. They all resemble mayonnaise sauce ; one is made with puree of boiled yolks, a little milk, and oil or fried butter, salt, sugar, mustard, and at last vinegar ; another is made with boiled yolks and raw yolks added later, oil, vinegar and spices. These sauces or dressings must be creamy, and so thick as to adhere to the lettuce or other vegetable. Other dressings have been mentioned under the heading of Gold Sauces. For Potato Salad the thinly-sliced boiled tubers of suit- able, consistent, not floury quality should be drenched with good bouillon or standard solution of Proust’s meat extract, half an ounce to the pint of hot water. No more bouillon must be added than the thinly-sliced potatoes will absorb. Then salt and pepper, and after them the oil, has to be added, care being taken to lubricate the salad with a sufficiency of the latter. If to this a little good vinegar be added, it forms an excellent dish. It may be made the basis of more compound salads, either with vegetables, or with such and fish, or meat ; such compositions have re- ceived certain names by which they appear appropriated to nationalities, Italian, Polish, Russian, etc. Of these dishes more will be said in subsequent chapters. 23 354 THE SPIRIT OF COOKERY Amongst the herbs useful for Salads of Uncooked Vege- tables, earliest in spring grows Corn Salad, or Lamb’s Lettuce, in the fields, self-sown, here and there also cultivated. It is the field forget-me-not, Myosotis arvensis. When tender and dressed with oil and vinegar, it has a nutty taste, w'hence the Germans call it Niisschen-Salat. In French it is mdche, but it is not used in all the provinces. About Easter-time appear the forced letkices, mainly of the so-called cabbage kind, from their globular shape (German, Kopf-Salat, head- salad) ; later on those grown in the open air. Any salad made with them is best with a simple dressing of oil and vinegar, but bears complicated additions : hens’ eggs, boiled hard, cut in quarters or discs ; turtles' and plovers' eggs, marinaded oysters, tails of shrirngos, lobster flesh, fillets of a7ichovies, olives filled with forcemeat. Some French recipes add a few drops of soy to the dressing. Of all these addi- tions, the lobster commands the greatest popularity in English society, soy, an otherwise useful sauce, the least. The Cabbage Lettuce {Lactuca sativa vericeps) is cultivated in many varieties — early, late, green, brown, yellow — but its heart should always be white, or merely yellowish ; about one-third of its weight consists of succulent ribs, two-tbirds of green or white thin leaf tissue. Its slightly bitter, agreeable taste is due to the presence of a inilky juice, which contains a soothmg prindi^le similar in action to opium, lactucin. The action of the lettuce in this respect was so well appreciated in antiquity, that the Greek ph3’^sician Galen, who practised at Eome, ate of it occasionally daily for supper, for the purpose of procuring sleep. He reports this himself in his treatise on the properties of aliments, and terms the plant pthilosoidiei-'s, or tvise-man’s herb.

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