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

When fried bread is used for sandwiches, the salmon should be spread lightly over each of the pieces of fried bread, and then two pieces put together.' The sand- wiches should be piled up in a pyramid form on a dish, and the base of. the dish can be ornamented with bright green parsley. A few slices of the best part of the salmon should be put by when the tin is first opened, to be laid on the parsley at the base of the dish, so that this will denote what the sandwiches are. Potted salmon is also very useful for making salmon salad. This tinned salmon makes, too, a very excellent salad mayonnaise. Open a tin and take out the salmon, being as careful as possible to keep the fish in slices. It should also be drained from any liquor which may be in the tin. Next take a silver dish, and pile up two or three French lettuces in the middle, taking care that they are perfectly clean, and each leaf separated from every other leaf. Let these be piled up in the shape of a dome. The salmon should then be placed round the base, and the mayonnaise sauce spread over the top. A very good instrument for spreading mayonnaise sauce, when a silver knife cannot be obtained, is an ordinary paper-knife. A steel knife should never be used, as it is apt to make the sauce taste of the knife. If the mayonnaise sauce is made at home it should be flavoured with a very little tarragon vinegar, but if it is taken from a tin it is so perfectly made that it requires no addition of any kind whatever. In ornamenting the salad, round the base outside should be placed some cold boiled eggs cut into quarters. About a couple of dozen stoned olives should also be placed round the dish, and a trellis-work can be made round the base on the sauce itself with some fillets of anchovy (see Anchovies, How to Fillet). A few bright French capers should be dried and stuck in the sauce at intervals of about an inch apart, while finely chopped chilies should be shaken over, and a few specks of lobster coral may be shaken over it as well. If no lobster coral can be obtained it is very easy to colour a few bread-crumbs pink with cochineal, and to use them instead. This is an admirable dish for supper parties at all times of the year. Of course, in those households in the country where the housekeeper has taken the precaution to have by her one or two tins of preserved salmon and one or two tins of mayonnaise sauce, a first-class, handsome-looking dish can always be placed on the table at a few minutes’ notice.