Practical home cookery

with bright green parsley and snow-white curly horseradish ; the dish resting on an equally snow-white cloth ; its companions consisting of as temptinglooking a York ham, and some bright silver flagons, the latter enabling the looker-on almost to realise the “ nut-brown ale ” talked about of old, though what it was like we have not the least idea. There is a common saying, “ It makes one hungry to look at it ” ; or “ It makes one’s mouth water.” Yet contrast this same piece of cold beef with a joint I recollect being once brought up for supper at some lodgings, where Mary Ann was, to say the least, inartistic. She brought it up just as it was in the dish in which it had got cold — the dish smeary round the rim with Mary Ann’s thumbmarks. The gravy had of course settled, and was thickly studded over with hard white wafers of fat. Some of the fat, too, had of course settled on the meat itself. Yet the meat was in every respect equal to the decorated joint, and many a poor hungry man would see no difference between the two, any more than a hungry bull-dog would. At least, some might even prefer the latter, in order to lap up the cold gravy with the blade of their knives. A poached egg nicely done, the yellow yolk surrounded with an equal rim of clear white, in contradistinction to one badly done, in which the yolk has broken and run and got mixed up with the white, is another instance of how much depends upon appearances, for both eggs would be equally wholesome. Now, there are few nicer and at the same time prettier-looking dishes than a salad mayonnaise. Yet too often when directions are given, in books or otherwise, how to make mayonnaise sauce, the latter point — ^that is, appearance — is altogether left out of the question. Making mayonnaise sauce, and simply mixing it up with some lettuce, and lobster, and hard- boiled egg, is certainly making a very nice lobster salad. Just in the same way the most beautiful clear jelly might be handed round in white pudding-basins, or even in the saucepan in which it was boiled ; but how different from a handsome mould, with a few preserved fruits inside it, placed in the centre of a bright cut-glass dish, and a little cut lemon by way of garnish ! But we have been long enough on the subject, “ How not to do it,” and must begin at once. First the ingredients : — A lobster ; and if there is any coral in it, take it out, and make some lobster butter with it, as it will do no good to the salad. This lobster butter will keep, and enable you at a future period to make lobster sauce in a hurry out of a preserved tin of lobster ; and this cannot be done without lobster butter. Next, some fresh lettuces (French are by far the best for mayonnaise salads), two fresh eggs — as we are only going to describe how to make enough for about four persons — some oil, and a little parsley. We will also suppose the house to contain some vinegar, a bottle of capers, a bottle of anchovies, and a bottle of olives, at the same time reminding timid housekeepers that these latter will do over and over again, and that probably a shilhng bottle of each will last a twelvemonth. We will now describe how a cook ought to proceed in order to make a good lobster salad.