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

ASPARAGUS SALAD. — Asparagus makes a capital salad, and one excellent receipt for dressing it is the following : — First take some butter and oil it by placing it in a saucer in the oven. Then take it out and add to it, supposing an ounce of butter has been oiled, a brimming teaspoonful of English-made mustard, a dessert-spoonful of English vinegar, and some black pepper. Mix it well up with a fork, and when it begins to get thick, which it soon will do as the butter cools, dip the asparagus in the sauce. The sauce will cool round the asparagus and stick to it. This is a most delicious salad which can be produced at five minutes’ notice, if housekeepers will only have the forethought to have a few tins of asparagus always in the house. ASPIC JELLY. — There are few things more useful in the way of garnishes for cold dishes than aspic jelly, yet the majority of English cooks rarely use it. The fact is that it is a decidedly troublesome thing to make, as unless it is as bright as sherry it is useless. It would be a good lesson to plain cooks to occasionally look in the shop window of some good French cook in those provision shops devoted to the sale of galantine, game pies, fresh truffles, etc. There is a capital model in Princes Street, Soho, where the various dishes displayed in the window are rendered doubly tempting by the garnish of bright aspic jelly, yellow and pink, and deep green parsley. There are many houses where the housekeeper would never hesitate, in the case of preparing a supper-party, in ordering in a bottle* of orange jelly and another of lemon jelly, yet would probably omit to order that most useful of all, one of aspic jelly. What a difference would this one bottle make in the appearance of the various dishes. Housekeepers should bear in mind that aspic jelly can be bought in quart bottles, pint bottles, and half-pint bottles. The way to use aspic jelly depends upon the purpose you require it for. Suppose you want to use it at a minute’s notice. Say you have a cold roast fowl, and, owing to some unexpected arrival, you wish to make the dish look as nice as possible. Dip a quill pen — the feather part — in a bottle of soy, and glaze the breast and legs with it. Next open a bottle, say half a pint, of aspic jelly ; scrape out the jelly with anything — a marrow-spoon, for instance. Then with two silver forks mince it up into little pieces. Pile up a little heap on the fowl — on the breast— and place a few heaps round the base with some cut lemon and nice dark-coloured double parsley. What a difference this dish has in appearance compared to a fowl sent up just as it is ! Suppose, however, that time is no object, and you want to ornament, say, a couple of roast fowls, a tongue, and a piece of galantine. Take the bottle of aspic jelly and place it in warm water, just sufficiently long to enable you to pour out the jelly. Now take two flat plates, and pour the jelly out a quarter of an inch thick, or rather deep. See that the plate stands flat, or else one part of the jelly when it is cold will be thicker than another; Then take a bottle of cochineal, and drop a few drops into one plate, and stir it up till it is the colour you wish — a bright red. Let the jelly set, and you now have two round cakes of jelly a quarter of an inch thick, one a bright yellow and the other a bright red.