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

on cookery on the subject, which recommend adding pepper and salt and vinegar before the sauce is formed. When this is done the result is not so much mayonnaise sauce as salad dressing, which can be poured from a bottle, but which cannot be used to mask over the surface. I will give directions how to make a small quantity. To make mayonnaise sauce proceed as follows : — First take a good fresh egg, break it and separate the yolk carefully from the white, and throw the yolk into a basin of tolerable size. The yolk can now be broken and the two little threads in the yolk removed. Next take some good pure olive oil of proper temperature. The oil should be cold, but not so cold as to be cloudy. Cooks will do well to remember that oil will freeze at a much higher temperature than water, and that in cold weather a bottle of oil will be cloudy and look like a mass of ice long before any ice has made its appearance even out of doors at night time. When the oil is in this condition it should be placed for a short time in a little tepid water, allowing it to remain till it is perfectly bright. When in this state, however, it will be perhaps too warm ; if so, place the bottle in cold water and take it out every now and then and look at it. The instant the slightest symptoms appear of the oil turning cloudy it will be fit for use. Take the basin in the left hand and take the fork in the right. ( I would here mention that in making mayonnaise sauce a wooden fork is far better than a silver one. ) Now pour the oil drop by drop on the yolk of egg, beating it lightly with the fork. Gradually you will find that these two fluids commence to form a semi-solid substance, which is the mayonnaise sauce. Although the oil is perfectly fluid, yet, strange to say, the more oil you add the thicker the sauce becomes. When the sauce has become tolerably thick you can add half a teaspoonful or even more of oil at a time. One yolk of egg will absorb very nearly half a pint of oil, and will make nearly (not quite) half a pint of sauce, and the sauce itself will be of the consistency of good butter in summer-time. Now add a little white pepper, salt, and a small quantity of vinegar. French vinegar is best for the purpose. In summer-time, do not add too much vinegar, because if you require the sauce to mask over a surface, of course, by adding a considerable quantity of vinegar, it will be made more liquid. Mayonnaise sauce can be flavoured in various ways, and when used for fish salads very often tarragon vinegar will be found preferable to ordinary vinegar. It can also be flavoured with chili vinegar, according to taste. There is one great purpose, however, to which oil might be applied in this country, but for which, alas ! it is rarely used in private houses. I refer to the practice of using oil for frying. This is greatly owing to the fact that cookery in this country has been handed down by tradition from mother to daughter, and the most well known of these traditions is that abominable practice of keeping a cook’s grease-box. Frying, properly so called, is boiling any substance in fat, but the frying that we generally meet with in ordinary houses is cooking things in a frying-pan which has been smeared over with a little fat barely sufficient to do more than prevent the meat or fish from sticking.