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

Take, say, two or three nice fresh cabbage lettuces, which should be washed and carefully dried and then thrown into the salad-bowl. If possible get three or four fresh tarragon leaves, chop them up finely, and sprinkle them over the salad. Then take a brimming saltspoonful of salt and half a one of black pepper ; place them in the bowl of a tablespoon ; fill the spoon with oil, and mix them in the oil with a fork, and pour it over the lettuce. Now add two or three more tablespoonfuls of oil, tossing the lettuce about lightly with a spoon and fork, that the whole of the outside of the lettuce leaves may be oiled over. The reason for putting in the oil before the vinegar is this — the oil will not soak into the vegetable, but the vinegar will ; and when you add vinegar before oil to any salad it is very apt to soak into the leaves, the consequence being that after the salad is mixed some of the leaves are very acid, while some will have, comparatively speaking, no vinegar at all. Now take a tablespoonful of ordinary vinegar, and add it to the salad. Mix the lettuce I well together, and the salad can be served. Some persons prefer a slight flavour of onion or garlic. For my own part I think garlic very superior to onion, but the garlic should be added with caution. Care should be taken that no solid pieces of the garlic itself get into the salad. The proper method of flavouring salad with garlic is to take a bead of garlic and to rub the saladbowl with it before putting in the lettuce. This will be quite sufficient to impart a good strong flavour. Should rather more be required, take a small knob of crusty bread and rub upon it a bead of garlic, or two beads. The bread will absorb some of the garlic, and by simply tossing the bread about amongst the salad a very strong flavour of garlic will be imparted. Another great improvement to salad is to serve with it a few hard-boiled eggs. When hard-boiled eggs are served with salad they should not be cut up into quarters till just before the salad is wanted, as if they are cut up too early, and stand for two or three hours, the yolks will turn a sort of dirty brown colour, and look stale and withered. I would warn housekeepers when using hard-boiled eggs against fancying the eggs are not quite fresh when they cut them open. Perfectly fresh eggs when boiled hard and cut open will often emit a slight smell, the smell being simply the sulphuretted hydrogen gas which is contained in all eggs. A very minute quantity will make its appearance felt immediately, but I have known cases in which many eggs have been thrown away which were to all intents and purposes perfectly wholesome and fresh. One of the most delicious salads known — namely, mayonnaise salad — is made from oil, but the beauty of the mayonnaise entirely depends on the purity of the oil itself. Mayonnaise sauce made from oil which through ignorance has been kept too long, of course would be as objectionable as melted butter made from rancid butter. Good mayonnaise sauce can only be obtained when the oil itself is perfectly fresh and pure, and the yolks of eggs used are obtained from perfectly fresh eggs. Most cooks experience considerable difficulty in making mayonnaise sauce, and a very great deal of this difficulty is owing to the misdirections given in several works