Part 22

I have never tried the following recipe,--I have tried all the others,--but I have heard that it was very good:

Four tablespoonfuls of butter, one of flour, one tablespoonful of salt, one of sugar, one heaping teaspoonful of mustard, a speck of cayenne, one cupful of milk, half a cupful of vinegar, three eggs. Let the butter get hot in a saucepan. Add the flour and stir until smooth, being careful not to brown. Add the milk and boil up. Place the saucepan in another of hot water. Beat the eggs, salt, pepper, sugar, and mustard together, and add the vinegar. Stir this into the boiling mixture and stir until it thickens like soft custard, which will be about five minutes. Set away to cool, and when cold, bottle and place in the ice-chest. This will keep two weeks.

If one wishes to use prepared mayonnaise it is better to buy that which is sold at the grocers. It has not the charm of a fresh dressing, however, but is rather like those elaborated impromptus which some studied talkers get off.

A very pretty salad can be made of nasturtium-blossoms, buttercups, a head of lettuce, and a pint of water-cresses. It is to be covered with the French dressing and eaten immediately.

Asparagus is so good in itself that it seems a shame to dress it as a salad; yet it is very good eaten with oil, vinegar, and salt. Cauliflower, cold, is delicious as a salad, and can be made very ornamental with a garniture of beet root, which is a good ingredient for a salad of salt codfish, boiled.

Sardine salads are very appetizing for lunch. Arrange a cold salmon or codfish on a bed of lettuce. Split six sardines, remove the bones, and mix them into the dressing. Garnish the whole dish with sardines, and cover with the dressing.

All kinds of cooked fish can be served with salads. Lettuce is the best green salad to serve with them; but all cooked and cold vegetables go well with fish. Add capers to the mayonnaise.

A housekeeper who has conquered the salad question can always add to the plainest dinner a desirable dish. She can feed the hungry, and she can stimulate the most jaded fancy of the over-fastidious gourmet by these delicate and consummate luxuries.

Here is Sydney Smith's recipe for a salad:--

"To make this condiment your poet begs The pounded yellow of two hard-boiled eggs; Two boiled potatoes, passed through kitchen sieve, Smoothness and softness to the salad give. Let onion atoms wink within the bowl, And half suspected, animate the whole; Of mordant mustard, add a single spoon, (Distrust the condiment that bites too soon), But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault, To add a double quantity of salt. Four times the spoon with oil of Lucca crown, And twice with vinegar, procured from town; And lastly, o'er the favoured compound toss A magic soupçon of anchovy sauce. Oh, green and glorious! Oh, herbaceous treat! 'T would tempt the dying anchorite to eat! Back to the world would turn his fleeting soul, To plunge his fingers in a salad bowl! Serenely full, the epicure would say, 'Fate cannot harm me,--I have dined to-day.'"

LOBSTER SALAD.

"Take, take lobsters and lettuces, Mind that they send you the fish that you order; Take, take a decent sized salad bowl, One that's sufficiently deep in the border; Cut into many a slice, All of the fish that's nice; Place in the bowl with due neatness and order; Then hard-boiled eggs you may Add in a neat array, All toward the bowl, just by way of a border.

"Take from the cellar of salt a proportion, Take from the castors both pepper and oil, With vinegar too, but a moderate portion,-- Too much of acid your salad will spoil; Mix them together, You need not mind whether You blend them exactly in apple-pie order, But when you've stirred away, Mix up the whole you may, All but the eggs which are used as a border.

"Take, take plenty of seasoning; A teaspoonful of parsley that's chopped in small pieces Though, though, the point will bear reasoning, A small taste of onion the flavour increases As the sauce curdle may, Should it, the process stay. Patiently do it again in good order; For if you chance to spoil Vinegar, eggs, and oil, Still to proceed would on lunacy border."

A Spanish salad, gaspacho, is a favourite food of the Andalusian peasant. It is but bread soaked in oil and water, with a large Spanish onion peeled, and a fresh cucumber.

Slice three tomatoes, take out the grain and cut up the fruit. Arrange carefully all these materials in a shallow earthen pan, tier upon tier, salting and peppering each to taste, pouring in oil plentifully, and vinegar. Last of all, let the salad lie in some cool spot for an hour or two, then sprinkle over it two handfuls of bread-crumbs.

In Spanish peasant houses, the big wooden bowl hanging below the eaves to keep it cool is always ready for attack. The oil in Spain is not to our taste; but the salad made as above, with good oil, is delicious. It should have a sprinkling of red pepper.

DESSERTS.

There is not in the wide world so tempting a sweet As that trifle where custard and macaroons meet. Oh! the latest sweet tooth from my head must depart Ere the taste of that trifle shall not win my heart.

Yet it is not the sugar that's thrown in between, Nor the peel of the lemon so candied and green, 'T is not the rich cream that's whipped up by a mill, Oh, no; it is something more exquisite still!

The great meaning of dessert is to offer "something more exquisite still." And it is the province of the housekeeper, be she young or old, to study how this can be done.

Nothing in European dinners can compare with the American custards, puddings, and pies. We are accused as a nation of having eaten too many sweets, and of having ruined our teeth thereby; but who that has languished in England over the insipid desserts at hotels, and the tooth-sharpeners called "sweets," meaning tarts as sour as an east wind, has not sighed for an American pie? In Paris the cakes are pretty to look at, but oh, how they break their promise when you eat them! Nothing but sweetened white of egg. One thing they surpass us in,--omelette soufflé; and a gâteau St. Honoré is good, but with that word of praise we dismiss the great French nation.

Just look at our grand list of fruit desserts: apple charlotte, apricots with rice, banana charlotte, banana fritters, blackberry short-cake, strawberry short-cake, velvet cream with strawberries, fresh pine-apples in jelly, frozen bananas, frozen peaches in cream, orange cocoanut salad, orange salad, peach fritters, peach meringue, peach short-cake, plum salad, salad of mixed fruits, sliced pears with whipped cream, stewed pears, plain, and pumpkin pie! But oh! there is "something more exquisite still," and that is an apple pie.

"All new dishes fade, the newest oft the fleetest; Of all the pies ever made, the apple's still the sweetest. Cut and come again, the syrup upward springing, While life and taste remain, to thee my heart is clinging. Who a pie would make, first his apple slices, Then he ought to take some cloves and the best of spices, Grate some lemon rind, butter add discreetly, Then some sugar mix, but mind,--the pie not made too sweetly. If a cook of taste be competent to make it, In the finest paste will enclose and bake it."

During years of foreign travel I have never met a dish so perfect as the American apple pie can be, with cream.

Then look at our puddings; they are richer, sweeter, more varied than any in the world, the English plum-pudding excepted. That is a ponderous dainty, which few can eat. It looks well when dressed with holly and lighted up, but it is not to be eaten every day. Baked bread pudding, carrot pudding, exceedingly delicate, chocolate pudding, cold cabinet-pudding, boiled rice-pudding with custard sauce, poor man's rice-pudding, green-apple pudding, Indian pudding, minute pudding, tapioca pudding, and all the custards boiled and baked with infinite variety of flavour,--these are the every-day luxuries, and they are very great ones, of the American table.

One charming thing about dessert and American dishes is that ladies can make them. They do not flush the face or derange the white apron. They are pleasant things to dally with,--milk and eggs, and spice and sugar. A model kitchen is every lady's delight. In these days of tiles, and marble pastry-boards, and modern improvements, what pretty things kitchens are.

The model dairy, too, is a delight, with its upright milk-pans, in which the cream is marked off by a neat little thermometer, and its fire-brick floor. How cool and neat it is! Sometimes a stream of fresh water flows under the floor, as the river runs under the Château of Chenonceaux, where Diane de Poitiers dressed her golden hair.