FoodNet

Practical home cookery

1906

Page 41 · 1 recipe record on this page

Presented as published in 1906. Historical recipes may not meet modern food-safety standards. Cook from the modern interpretation, not the original instructions.
But we must not forget the grown-up people, and under the circumstances they enjoy a good lobster salad mayonnaise. I have given directions before how to prepare this king of cold sauces. As, however, you are making a mayonnaise salad, it is almost as easy to make two as one. Have a lobster salad and a smoked-salmon salad. This smoked salmon must be cut into very thin slices, and simply placed round or mixed up in the salad just as it is — raw. If you possibly can, have these two mayonnaises placed in silver dishes, and get a few little crayfish or a few good prawns to add to the usual garnish of capers, anchovies, olives, cut hard-boiled eggsLobster Salad Mayonnaise, etc., which I described in a preceding chapter. In making mayonnaise sauce you will use two, or perhaps three, raw yolks of eggs. Now what are you going to do with the whites ? Why not whip them up into a stiff froth, and use that for ornamental purposes ? For instance, suppose you have that nice simple dish, stewed pippins, on the table. Take a dessert-spoonful of foam shaped like an egg, and place it on the top of each pippin. Have also in readiness a few of those tiny, pretty httle sweets called hundreds and thousands, and sprinkle a few lightly on the white egg-froth. Con- HOW TO GIVE A SUPPER. 79 trast this dish with the pippins as they were before. The change is marvellous, and yet costs almost nothing. Yet many persons would think, casting their eyes over the table, “ Ah ! that dish came from the pastry- cook’s.” One or even two piled-up dishes of almonds and raisins, being, if there are not too many almonds, dark dishes, form a favourable contrast with the light ones. A supper-table, to look really nice, must not have too many white dishes. If you have a large centre-dish of trifle, with whipped cream on the top, a few hundreds and thousands sprinkled over it set it off. Now good whipped creani is rather beyond the powers of an ordinary cook, so if you happen to live near a really good pastrycook’s, you will find it a good plan to have a man come round just before supper and supply the whipped cream ; but make the rest of the trifle at home. It is an exceedingly expensive dish to order, and, owing to wine, brandy, and liqueurs being requisite in its composition, one of the very last dishes desirable to order. Even pastrycooks will often spoil the ship for the sake of a ha’porth of tar, in respect of wine. To wit, mock-turtle soup. Order a glass of sherry at a pastrycook’s with your mock-turtle, and throw half of it into the soup, and see what a difference it makes. In fact, as a rule, if you give a cook wine for cooking purposes, they drink the wine themselves, and manage the cooking without. As a few last words of advice, in ornamenting your table, as well as in amusing the children, don’t forget the crackers. CHAPTER IX. SPRING DISHES. Perhaps no season in the year is more eagerly wel- comed than that of spring — earth’s great annual resurrection from death unto life ! How beautiful the first really spring morning ! A warm, balmy air, a deep blue sky without a cloud, and bright sun lighting up like diamonds the water-drops on the fresh green grass, o’er which the feathery cobwebs drift for the first time in the year, the very spiders, in their wondrous instinct, preparing to set their houses in order, to welcome to their hearts the new-born fly.