The "Queen" cookery books: Entrees

The above will give a general idea of the methods of serving up cold meat as practised by good cooks, who, please remember, are all but invariably the most economical in the long run. In England an idea obtains that made dishes are necessarily insipid and inevitably extravagant. If the preceding recipes are intelligently and carefully followed, the result will certainly not be liable to the complaint of tastelessness. Whether they are extravagant or not will depend entirely on the housekeeper and the cook. For instance, if to make a dish of rissoles you insist on opening a tin of button mushrooms, or buying a lb. of fresh truffles, you certainly will not err on the side of economy. But if you once manage to make a cook understand the art of saving all her odds and ends you will be astonished to find how far these scraps will go in making tasty dishes. I have given a specimen in the emince au choufleur grating, and almost every good housekeeper can give similar examples. One of the prettiest specimens of this dainty economy is the egg cutlet, for which you require a hard hoiled egg, a slice or so of bacon left over from the morning's breakfast, a gill of melted butter from the previous night’s dinner, a spoonful or two of cooked peas, asparagus cut up, or mushrooms, according to what you have over, and a little cold sweetbread, brains, or even tongue, cut into dice. This is all stirred together over the fire till well blended, then left to cool, and when cold, shaped into cutlets in your well-floured hands, dipped in beaten egg, and then in sifted breadcrumbs, and lastly fried in boiling fat till a golden brown, and served with fried parsley. This dish was once prepared by Mrs. A. B. Marshall at one of her lessons to show how scraps could be utilized (a subject, by the way, which she is very keen to impress on her pupils). She simply gathered up the scraps left over after an Entire Dinner Lesson, a perfect gallimaufry of odds and ends, and in about ten minutes turned out a dish of the daintiest little cutlets imaginable, fit for the most recherche lunch or breakfast. But if this kind of dainty housewifery is to be practised, it cannot be too firmly impressed on the cook that every scrap must be saved, and, moreover, saved tidily. Never stint your cook in the matter of larder plates ; these can be cheaply purchased at any cheap china warehouse, and well repay their first cost. Scraps of vegetables, each on a separate saucer, neatly freed from grease and sauce, can be com- fortably used again ; but if huddled all on one plate, piled one on the other, they look, and indeed are, fit for nothing but that last refuge of the bad cook, the pig-trough. I can assert from experience that honest, respectable cooks can soon be taught this neatness, and are very quick in learning to utilise scraps daintily, especially when commendation is freely bestowed on their successful efforts. CHAPTER VIII. RECHAUFFES ( continued ).