Little French dinners

Purée de Laitues (Puree of Lettuces). — Take a dozen lettuces, pick and wash them well, and cook them in boiling salted water for twenty minutes. Then drain them thoroughly, and pass them through a hair 38 Little French Dinners. sieve. Melt in a clean saucepan two ounces of butter, add an ounce of flour, and stir together for five minutes without letting it get brown. Then add the lettuce puree, and stir over the fire for five or ten minutes. When fairly stiff, moisten with two tablespoonfuls of cream, add pepper and salt to taste, and serve as hot as possible, garnished with croutons of fried bread cut in the shape of diamonds. Darioles aux Cerises (Darioles with Cherries). — Make a syrup with half a pint of water and six ounces of loaf sugar. Stone three-quarters of a pound of cherries and cook them in the boiling syrup for four or five minutes, drain them and put them on one side. Meanwhile beat up four ounces of butter to a cream, and add the same quantity of caster sugar ; when smooth incorporate one by one three eggs, beating the mixture vigorously the whole time, then sprinkle in four ounces of flour, add a pinch of baking-powder, and pour the paste into small dariole moulds previously buttered, leaving plenty of room for the cakes to rise. Bake them in a moderate oven ; when they are done turn them out on a. sieve and leave them to get cold. Then scoop out the middle from each to the depth of an inch and a half, and having trimmed them neatly, brush them all over with some red plum jam that has been dissolved over the fire with a little water and passed through a hair sieve. Colour some pearl sugar pink with cochineal, mix it with an equal quantity of white, and roll the cakes in the mixed sugar till they are covered all over with it. Then proceed to fill them with the stoned cherries and ornament the top of each alternately with a teaspoonful of pink and white whipped cream, N.B. — When preparing the soup in this menu, use Maggi's Consomme, concentrated in gelatine tubes, procurable at Messrs. Cosenza and Co. It can be highly recommended, and is a great saving of labour to the cook. Little French Dinners. 39 MENU.-XIV. SOUPE PAYSANNE. EGLEFINS A LA MA!TRE D'HOTEL. SELLS D'AGNEATJ AUX PETITS Pois. SPAGHETTI 1 LA NAPOLITAINE. SOUFFLE AU CHOCOLAT. Soupe Faysanne (Paysanne Soup). — Cut some carrots and turnips in slices about a quarter of an inch thick, and from these cut out some small rounds with a cutter about a third of an inch in diameter; trim also some leeks into similar rounds, and fry them all in butter, with pepper and salt, till they begin to take colour, beginning with the carrots, then the leeks, and lastly, the turnips. Next take similar quantities of asparagus points (using as much of the green part of the stalks as is tender), and some green peas, and half cook them both in salted water. Put all the vegetables in a saucepan, add as much consomme as is wanted, bring to the boil, and then let the soup simmer till all the vegetables are quite tender ; add a sprinkling of chervil, and serve.