Practical home cookery

It is always extravagant to use up any joint or poultry, when it can be helped, when bones are left on the plates. I succeeded some little time ago in persuading a shockingly bad housekeeper not to bring up the remains of a large turkey cold. It was treated instead as follows : — With the assistance of a small tin of mushrooms, part of it made some Russian Kromeskies ; another part made a dish of mince ; some nice slices cut off the remains of the breast were converted into a capital Mayonnaise ; while the two legs — for it was a fine bird, weighing twenty-one pounds — were devilled, and sent up with some devil sauce, which I may briefly describe as follows : — Cut up some young onions very fine, and moisten them with a very little French vinegar, and boil for about five or six minutes ; add some cayenne pepper, some good strong gravy, wine, and anchovy butter, which latter consists of filleted anchovies pounded very thoroughly in a mortar with some butter and cayenne. Any grilled meat, such as a chop, or drumsticks of fowls, is very much improved by a sauce of this kind. Of course, the cayenne must be suited in quantity to the tastes of the eaters. But to return to the turkey : by treating it in the manner I have described, there was no waste, all the bones being saved, and the result was that they made more than half a gallon of stock, which when cold was a hard jelly. Another common form of waste is home-made pastry. I recollect some oyster patties as they were called, but oyster pies as they really were, being very nearly as big as cheese-plates, in which the pastry was so out of proportion to the oyster that the dish was almost ludicrous, the impossibility of eating even a quarter of the pastry being self-evident the moment the pie was cut. I have seen lobster patties made on a similar principle, in which, when the top was taken off, the lobster part appeared beneath, something not merely in colour, but in size resembling a red wafer. Now these dishes are really very extravagant, for the reason that they cost both money and trouble, and in the end no one eats them. A somewhat eccentric form of the “ extravagance of ignorance ” to which I have alluded, is that of warming up joints that have been not only cooked before, but cut. In the first place, if the joint is cooked properly the first day, everyone possessing even the vestige of a palate would surely prefer it cold to being LITTLE EXTRAVAGANCES. warmed up and spoilt. The probable reason of warming up a joint a second day is that the cook knows of no other way of extricating herself from the difficulty of sending up cold meat. Such extreme ignorance is, however, I am pleased to say, rare. I once knew a case of a loin of mutton which went through the following awful processes ; — First it was roasted, fortunately being a trifle blue ; the second day it was- roasted again, the flavour being of course quite gone. The awful part remains behind — the rest was cut into chops, egged and bread-crumbed, and sent up as cutlets ; and I, alas ! ate one.