The housekeeper's guide to preserved meats, fruits, vegetables, &c

largest and finest should be selected to ornament the dish, and the remainder of the prawns be picked. In making salad of this kind cooks should always scrape out from the head of the prawn the little soft meat, as this very greatly assists the flavour of the salad. In addition to these fish salads there are a large number of salads made from meat, one of the nicest being that of chicken. When salad is made of chicken the meat should be cut from the bone and every particle of skin and gristle removed. First-class chicken salad should contain only the white part of the meat. Cold turkey, especially the breast, makes an excellent mayonnaise salad. One great advantage of mayonnaise sauce is that it always makes an extremely handsome dish. I will endeavour as well as I can to describe how to ornament a mayonnaise salad of >any description, but of course no amount of written description would be equal to a lesson learned by seeing one done. Certainly in this respect our French neighbours are far superior to ourselves. There is a refinement of taste in French cooking which it is to be regretted English cooks do not more readily copy . I will now give a general outline of the best method of ornamenting mayonnaise salad. We will take the case of an ordinary lobster salad. First of all the lettuce should be thoroughly cleaned and dried, and placed at the bottom of the dish, and as much as possible formed into a mound in the middle. The whole meat of the lobster, or fish, or meat of any description, is now placed on the top, and should be made as smooth as possible. Next with a silver knife or spoon the whole of the surface is masked over with the thick white creamy-looking sauce. Very often in making mayonnaise sauce at home the cook will not be able to get it sufficiently thick ; in the case of preserved mayonnaise sauce, however, there is no difficulty. It is made just the right consistency, and the whole surface can be masked over. Next take a small quantity of chopped parsley, about enough to cover a sixpence. Place the chopped parsley at the end of a knife and flip it, holding the knife about a foot above the salad. Let the little green specks fall naturally over the surface of the sauce. Next take an equal quantity of lobster coral and act in like manner. In ornamenting the surface of sauce with green and red specks the cook should be careful not to overdo it. A very few will set off the appearance of the dish ; too much, however, will not improve it, as we do not wish to lose too much of the white surface. Next a few green capers can be stuck in the sauce lightly at intervals of an inch or an inch and a half apart. Then round the base of the white mayonnaise should be placed a I trellis-work of filleted anchovies (see Anchovies, To Fillet), which will greatly [ improve the appearance of the salad. | This can be placed alternately with cut pickled French beans. The base of the salad should now be ornamented with hard-boiled eggs cut in quarters.