Culinary jottings

(a) — Take four ordinary kidneys, and blanch them first of all in scalding water (as recommended in Menu N'o. 23) then lift them out, and dry them in a cloth. Make a strong broth or gravy out of any bones or scraps you may have, and stew the kidneys therein till they are nice and tender, then take them out, drain them, and pour the gravy in which they were cooked into a bowl. Now, cut up and pound the kidneys to a paste in your mortar with some butter, and pass it through your sieve. When ready, skim any grease that may have risen to the top of your gravy, and take a medium-sized sauce-pan, working as follows : — Melt a dessert-spoonful of butter at the bottom of the sauce-pan, stir into it a dessert-spoonful of flour, when creamy, add by degrees a breakfast-cupful of the gravy and lastly, kidney-paste until all is expended : flavour the puree, with one table-spoonful port wine, one tea-spoonful red currant jelly, one dessert-spoonful anchovy vinegar, and a few drops of chilli vinegar. Let the contents of your sauce-pan thicken properly by coming to the boil, and then pour the puree over four squares of hot fried toast. Let there be no delay in serving. If made exactly in this way, this toast will be found an excellent one. (h) — Cut the kidneys out of the cold saddle, together with all the fat belonging to them ; chop up as much fat as there is of kidney meat for the toast, and throw the fat, freed from all burnt skin, &c., into your frying-pan : now, fry in the melted fat a large round of bread till it turns a golden yellow, and has sucked up a good deal of the fat. Take it out, place it on a flat silver dish, cover its surface with the chopped pieces of kidney and the fat that you saved, pour the remaining melted fat over it, divide it into portions, and put it in the oven. When quite crisp, and * short,' serve straightway without fear. Mustard, Nepaul pepper, and salt, should accompany, and hot plates should be placed before each guest. Savoury toast made of the remains of cold roast game are delicious. Teal, wild-duck, snipe, quails, and florican ; young pea-fowl, spur-fowl, jungle-fowl, and even partridges, may be thus presented a second time, forming a kind of rechauffe which rarely fails to be appreciated. The method of preparing a game-toast is somewhat similar to that I have described for "kidney toast" (a). The cold meat should be picked from the bones, and pounded with a little butter to a paste : the skin and bones (well mashed) should be set to make a good, strong, game-flavoured gravy wherewith to form a thick puree in conjunction with the pounded meat, the process of blending which is precisely the same as that mentioned in the recipe previously alluded to. Pour the puree over hot fried toasts, and serve without hesitation. All purees of game composed for toasts should be mixed rather thickly so as to rest upon the toast, and not spread all over the dish. Nepaul pepper, and quarters of limes, should be handed round with them. I have already said that spinach, and other delicate greens — worked up in the form of purees — were very nice if served upon anchovy toast. They make capital toasts alone. A well made puree of spinach laid upon a crisply fried, and well buttered toast, is decidedly good ; a poached