Culinary jottings

This, I think, accounts for an opinion I once heard expressed by a friend of undoubted ability in culinary criticism, to the effect that he always found curries of a certain kind better when warned up and served as a rechauffe than when presented for the first time. If a gravy curry be kept during the night in a china curry dish, and be resuscitated the next morning with some fresh butter, onions and a little gravy, it ought, if anything, to be found better than on the previous night, since the meat has become thoroughly flavoured by the curry gravy, while the latter has become reduced and so strengthened by the second simmering. These directions will be found practicable with most ordinary meat curries. Those made of fresh fish, prawns, and shellfish, require a somewhat different process while those of minced cooked meat, tinned or cooked fish, dressed vegetables, and hard-boiled eggs, merely require to be gently heated up in a carefully made curry gravy. The Malay or " Ceylon curry" as it is sometimes called, is, of course, a spScialite and there are kabobs, quoormas, ^x., §x., that need separate consideration. Curries— continued, and Mulligatunny. THE outward bound passenger to India is generally 'hjty very favourably struck by the curry presented to him at a Ceylon hostelry. Heartily weary of the cuisine on boardship, at that period of his voyage, he Avould probably welcome any change with thankfulness. The prospect of a little meal ashore, " be it ever so humble," is therefore especially enjoyable to him. It may, of course, be said that in such circumstances the traveller is predisposed to deliver a kindly verdict ; and that if the dish that pleased him so much in the hour of his emancipation from cuddy barbarisms were placed before him after a proper course of civilized diet, it would, by no means produce such an agreeable impression. It would, at all events, lack the charm of contrast, which, in the particular instance before us, could hardly fail to excite the warmest feelings of gratitude and satisfaction. The nautical curry is not, as a rule, a plat to dream of, — a triumph to look back upon pleasurably, that is to say, with the half -closed eye of a connoisseur. A sea-faring friend with whom I once made a very cheery voyage, graphically described the composition as " yellow Irish stew." Those whose memory is retentive of trifles will no doubt call to mind without difficulty a bright saffrontinted swill, covering sundry knotty lumps of potato and a few bony atoms of mutton, with its surface bedecked, if I may so describe it, with glossy discs of molten grease. Not exactly the sort of dish to tempt a lady, still slightly affected by mal-de-vier, who has been urged by her stewardess to rouse herself, " poor dear," and try and eat something. Having had this mess thrust before him day after day for three weeks, no wonder that the " vacuus viator finds something in the curry of Ceylon to delight him. " Good ! said I to myself, cheered at the sight" (a plump, freshly-roasted leveret), wrote Brillat Savarin concerning his experiences of a journey ; "I am not entirely abandoned by Providence : a traveller may gather a floiver hy the way-side.'"