Culinary jottings

Cucumber, olives farcies, oat biscuit. Pilchards in oil, maitre d'hotel butter, pulled bread. The best cheese you can get, cut into dice, should accompany the above if served a VAnglaise at that period of the dinner. The garnishing of the compartments of the hors d'oeuvres dish should be tastefully done with knots of curled parsley, curled cress, a little bunches of fresh water-cress. A single cold canape, if very carefully composed, may be placed upon each guest's plate as a prelude to the dinner when oysters are out of season. Cut some thin slices of stale brown or white bread, butter them as for sandwiches, and cut out of them a number of oblong pieces two inches long, and one and a half broad. Make sandwiches as follows : — Upon one of the pieces put a fillet of anchovy cut into strips, with a thin slice of olive here and there to fill interstices ; smooth the combination over with some pounded hard-boiled yolk of egg, dust over with yellow pepper, and cover with one of the pieces of bread. Garnish each sandwich thus made with a turned olive, or a sprig of water-cress. Or sprinkle over each a canopy of grated ham, granulated hard-boiled yolk of egg, or cod's roe. In like manner you can with a little forethought compose divers canapes, using caviare, sardines, fish-roe, green Vjutter, strips of green capsicum, or of cucumber, and garnishing with tongue cut tastefully with a cutter, grated ham, or powdered hard-boiled yolk of egg. In making canapes, for service before dinner, care should be taken to keep them small. The dimensions I have ijiven should not be exceeded and the bread should be cut thin. Home-made cream cheeses are not seen as often as they ought to be, and yet a child could make one, following any domestic cookery book recipe. There are few things more appreciated at the end of a dinner party than this most dainty little dish. A breakfast-cupful of pure cream will yield a pretty little cheese for a party of six. The method is simple enough. Mix a tea-spoonful of salt with a large breakfast-cupful of rich cream, stir it well, and then pour the cream into a slop basin in which a clean piece of soft linen has been laid. When the cream has been thus turned into the cloth, draw the ends of the cloth together, holding the cream as it were in a bag, tie it tightly with string, and hang the bag in a cool place to drip ; when the dripping of moisture from the bag ceases, the cheese is ready : take the bag down, turn the contents out into a clean cloth, mould it into a circular form, or shape it in a neat square, and serve it on a dish garnished with green leaves. Let it stand in the ice-box till wanted. A day will be found sufiBcient for the making of this kind of cheese in warm weather and about forty-eight hours on the Hills. Use a porous sort of cloth for the operation, so as to encourage the escape of the whey from the cheese. It is sometimes advisable to change the cloth during the draining process.