Culinary jottings

For a la Provençale, proceed as above, adding a little finely pared lime-peel, some chopped parsley, an atom of garlic, salt, pepper, and a dust of grated nutmeg. When serving, sprinkle a little lime juice over the potatoes. Potatoes a V Americaine : — Cut up your boiled potatoes into thick slices : flavour a little milk with onion, spice, pepper, and salt ; strain and thicken it, as laid down for melted butter, with butter and flour, till you have a nice * Or the slices may be tossed in maitre d'hutel butter, with a few spoonfuls of broth. — W. [illustration: OUR VEGETABLES.] sauce blanche ; place your slices of potato in this, and heat them up to boiling point : take the sauce-pan off the fire, stir in the yolk of an egg, add a large spoonful of chopped parsley, with a pat of butter the size of a rupee, and serve. Potatoes a la Farisienne are slices of potato gently heated up in sauce soubise. Waxy potatoes, pressed through the sieve, and served like vermicelli, — a favorite dish of Ramasamy's, — ought to be most strenuously interdicted. There is perhaps no nicer way of serving potatoes with chops, steaks, grilled chicken, roast pigeons, &c., than in the form of "chips," i.e., Pommes de terre frites. An invalid, as a rule, takes a fancy to a potato thus plainly cooked, and it is a quicker way of doing it than by any of the other recipes. In the first place, after washing the potatoes vrell, peel them, and slice them carefully a uniform thickness — about half that of a rupee say — and spread them on a clean cloth to get rid of the moisture. Wipe them thoroughly, and spread a sheet of blotting paper ready for draining the chips hereafter. Now, dissolve a goodly allowance of beef dripping (or Avhatever you use for your frying medium) in your friture-pan, or a shallow stew-pan; when quite boiling, drop in your potato slices — there should be enough fat to completely cover them — and let them, as it were, boil therein : watch them as they are cooking narrowly, turning and moving them about continually, and as soon as they assume the golden tint you want, — a nice rich yellow, mind, — lift them quickly from the fat, and let them drain on the blotting paper for a minute or two. When quite dry, turn them into a very hot silver dish (or garnish the dish, with which they are to go, with them) and serve. The main points to note here are, first the equal thickness of the slices, for if cut both thick and thin, the latter U will be done more quickly than the former, and it is no easy thing to fish out the pieces that have taken colour from those that have not. Drying the chips well is essential number two, plenty of fat the third, and careful drainage when done the fourth. Poinmes de terre f rites may be trimmed into various shapes, — filberts, dominoes, long narrow strips, &c., and cooked exactly as " chips." Uniformity in size is again necessary, and careful wiping before cooking. The cook must be a bit of an artist too in designing his patterns, or there will be sad waste in the cutting. A set of French vegetable cutters will be found most useful and economical for trimming purposes.