Culinary jottings

D'Uxelles or fines herhes, is composed as follows : — Cho]) up six ounces of fresh mushrooms, six ounces of fresh parsley, and two ounces of shallot, put the mince into a stew-pan with two ounces of fresh butter and a seasoning of salt and black pepper ; fry on a brisk fire for five minutes, and put the mixture in a jar for use as required. D'Uxelles sauce is made by adding a table-spoonful of this preparation to half a pint of Espagnole sauce. This should be made when mushrooms are procurable during the rains, it will be found most useful as a flavoring and finishing agent. Let us suppose that you have made a sauce in every way satisfactorily, but find that it is scarcely thick enough. You must then employ a liaison or thickening to correct the error. Liaison for a white sauce may be made of flour, and a little milk and water, or white stock, like sauce hlanche, or sauce blonde only a little thicker. For a brown SA UCES—CONCL UDED. sauce the same, with brown gravy. In either case the liaison mixed separately is stirred through a strainer into the sauce off the fire : when this has been done, the saucepan is replaced on the fire and stirred until the desired thickness is obtained. Yolks of eggs are also used for liaison : they must be beaten up with a little hot- water, or stock, and added to the sauce off the fire, the thickening being very carefully conducted afterwards over a low fire as in custard-making. The sauce must be allowed to cool for two or three minutes before the egg thickening is put into it. This thickening is used in poulette sauce iov fricassees and certain soups. I have now, I think, given you a sketch of sauce-making in its various stages. Details for nearly every standard sauce not at present described, will be found in my menus. [illustration: chapter heading]. Roasting and braising. IVE me," says the Englishman, " a good cut of a well-cooked joint, with a nicely boiled potato, and a fresh vegetable, and I will ask for nothing more." Now, it must be admitted, that honest slices of meat constitute the favorite dinner of a Briton. Go into a Club dining-room, or into any large London tavern sucli as " Simpson's," " The Rainbow," &c., &c., and you will find two-thirds of the men assembled there dining " off the joint." And verily the well roasted haunch or saddle of mutton, the sirloin or round of beef, the fillet of veal, and the loin or leg of pork, are dishes peculiar to England, of which we may well boast. Our artistic neighbours across the channel are wont to sneer at our love of great joints, which they fail to cook as well as we do, for although in deference to the insular taste " ross biff" frequently figures in a Parisian menu, I think that men are unanimous in saying that it never comes up to the home-fed, home-served sirloin. Our penchant for solid food follows us withersoever we wander away from home, and we find John Bull in India as fond of his beef and mutton, as he was when " a humble cottager in Britain." He sighs for a Southdown saddle or a Scotch sirloin, and is apt to turn away sorrowfully from the meagre travesty of a joint, which, after much trouble, the sharer of his joys and sorrows contrives to place before him.