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

This dish, which is an extremely delicious one, and, not counting the truffles, by no means very expensive, should be ornamented now with a few little red crayfish. The dish is, of course, somewhat rich. A very nice and suitable dish for an invalid is made by simply warming up a piece of the horny part of a calf’s head in a little plain tomato sauce. This is very delicate and appetising. TOMATO SAUCE. — Tomato sauce differs from conserve of tomato, inasmuch as certain spices, vinegar, etc., have been added to it to make it ready for use. It possesses this slight advantage over conserve of tomato, that when opened it will keep much longer. The drawback to conserve of tomato is that when once opened it must be finished up almost directly. It will not keep good more than one or two days at the outside. On the, other hand, tomato sauce, owing to the different ingredients that have been mixed with the tomato itself, will keep good for some time. Tomato sauce is very nice when eaten cold, simply poured out of the bottle just as it is, with a little cold meat. It can also be used for all the purposes I have mentioned under the heading of “Tomato Conserve” (see Tomato Conserve). TOMATOES WHOLE IN TINS.— Tomatoes can now be obtained whole in tins, and in England are far superior to fresh ones, unless, owing to a very exceptional state of the weather, they can be gathered and sent to table quite ripe. Like pineapples, the majority of tomatoes sent to this country are picked in an unripe state, otherwise they would all fall to pieces long before they could be retailed in our markets. Tinned tomatoes have this advantage, that they have been allowed to ripen according to nature in the sun. The fruit, if it is picked in an unripe state and allowed to ripen after, gets partially rotten at the same time that it ripens. This is particularly noticeable in the case of pineapples. Tinned tomatoes are exceedingly nice served as they are. Open the tin and take the tomatoes out as carefully as possible without breaking them up, and put them in the oven, with pepper, salt, and butter, sufficiently long to make them hot through, occasionally basting them with their own juice ; then serve them plain. A still more delicate way of cooking them is with the assistance of a few mushrooms, either tinned or fresh. Open first of all a tin of tomatoes whole and carefully remove the pips from the inside. Now take a handful of mushrooms or a small tin. If fresh mushrooms are used, of course they must be carefully peeled. Chop them up with a piece of onion about as big as the thumb down to the first joint, and a good brimming teaspoonful of chopped parsley. Place them in a frying-pan with sufficient scraped bacon fat, scraped from cold boiled bacon, to cook