Part 9

This is for the sportsman who cooks his trout himself by a wood fire in the woods; and no other man ever arrives at just that perfect way of cooking a trout. When the trout has come down from cooling springs to the hot city, it requires a seasoning of salt, pepper, and lemon-juice.

Frogs--frogs as cooked in France, _grenouilles à la poulette_--are a most luxurious delicacy. They are very expensive and are to be bought at the _marché St. Honoré_. As only the hind legs are eaten, and the price is fifteen francs a dozen, they are not often seen. We might have them in this country for the catching. Of their tenderness, succulence, and delicacy of flavour there can be no question. They are clean feeders, and undoubtedly wholesome.

Sala, writing in "Breakfasts in Bed" does not praise _bouillabaisse_. He declares that the cooks plunge a rolling-pin in tallow and then with it stir that _pot pourri_ of red mullet, tomatoes, red pepper, red Burgundy, oil, and garlic to which Thackeray has written so delightful a lyric. "Against fish soups, turtle, terrapin, oyster, and bisque," he says, "I can offer no objection." The Italians again have their good _zuppa marinara_, which is not all like the _bouillabaisse_, and the Russians make a very appetizing fish pottage which is called _batwina_, the stock of which is composed of _kraus_, or half-brewed barley beer, and oil. Into this is put the fish known as the sterlet of the Volga, or the sassina of the Gulf of Finland, together with bay leaves, pepper, and lumps of ice. _Batwina_ is better than _bouillabaisse_.

THE SALAD.

"Epicurean cooks shall sharpen with cloyless sauce the appetite."

Of all the vegetables of which a salad can be made, lettuce is the greatest favourite. That lettuce which is _panachée_, says the _Almanach des Gourmands_, that is, when it has streaked or variegated leaves, is truly _une salade de distinction_. We prefer in this country the fine, crisp, solid little heads, of which the leaves are bright green. The milky juices of the lettuce are soporific, like opium seeds, and predispose the eater to sleep, or to repose of temper and to philosophic thought.

After, or before, lettuce comes the fragrant celery, always an appetizer. Then the tomato, a noble fruit as sweet in smell as Araby the blest, which makes an illustrious salad. Its medicinal virtue is as great as its gastronomical goodness. It is the friend of the well, for it keeps them well, and the friend of the sick, for it brings them back to the lost sheep-folds of hygeia.

There are water-cress and dandelion, common mustard, boiled asparagus, and beet root, potato salad, beloved of the Germans, the cucumber, most fragrant and delicate of salads, a salad of eggs, of lobsters, of chickens, sausages, herrings, and sardines. Anything that is edible can be made into a salad, and a vegetable mixture of cold French beans, boiled peas, carrots and potato, onion, green peppers, and cucumber, covered with fresh mayonnaise dressing, is served ice cold in France, to admiration.

To learn to make a salad is the most important of qualifications for one who would master the art of entertaining.

Here is a good recipe for the dressing:--

Two yolks of eggs, a teaspoonful of salt, and three of mustard,--it should have been mixed with hot water before using,--a little cayenne pepper, a spoonful of vinegar; pound the eggs and mix well. Common vinegar is preferred by many, but some like tarragon vinegar better. Stir this gently for a minute, then add two full spoonfuls of best oil of Lucca.

"A sage for the mustard, a miser for the vinegar, a spendthrift for the oil, and a madman to stir" is the old saw. Add a teaspoonful of brown sugar, half a dozen little spring onions cut fine, three or four slices of beet root, the white of the egg, not cut too small, and then the lettuce itself, which should be torn from the head stock by the fingers.

Some French salad dressers say _fatiguez la salade_, which means, shake it, mix it, and bruise it; but the modern arrangement is to delicately cover the leaves with the dressing, and not to bruise them. This is an old-fashioned salad.

An excellent salad of cold boiled potatoes cut into slices about an inch thick, may be made with thin slices of fresh beet root, and onions cut very thin, and very little of them, with the same dressing, minus the sugar.

Francatelli speaks of a Russian salad with lobster, a German salad with herrings, and an Italian salad with potatoes; but these come more under the head of the mayonnaises than of the simpler salads.

The cucumber comes next to lettuce, as a purely vegetable salad, and is most desirable with fish. Dr. Johnson declared that the best thing you could do with a cucumber, after you had prepared it with much care and thought, was to throw it out of the window; but Dr. Johnson, although he could write Rasselas and a dictionary, knew nothing about the art of entertaining. He was an eater, a glutton, a _gourmand_, not a _gourmet_. How should he dare to speak against a cucumber salad?

Endive and chiccory should be added to the list of vegetable salads. Neither of them is good, however.

An old-fashioned French salad is made thus: "Chop three anchovies, an onion, and some parsley small; put them in a bowl with two tablespoonfuls of vinegar, one of oil, a little mustard and salt. When well mixed, add some slices of cold roast beef not exceeding two or three inches long. Make three hours before eating. Garnish with parsley." This is by no means a bad way of serving up yesterday's roast beef.

The etymology of salad is said to be "sal," or something salted. Shakspeare mentions the salad five or six times. In Henry VI., Jack Cade, in his extremity of peril when hiding from his pursuers in Ida's garden, says he has climbed over the wall to see if he could eat grass, or pick a salad, which he says "will not come amiss to cool a man's stomach in the hot weather." In Antony and Cleopatra, the passionate queen speaks of her "salad days" when she was "green in judgment, cool in blood." This means, however, something raw or unripe. Hamlet uses the word with the more ancient orthography of "sallet," and says in his speech to the players, "I remember when there were no sallets in these times to make them savoury." By this he meant there was nothing piquant in them, no Attic salt. One author, not so illustrious, claims that the noblest prerogative of man is that he is a cooking animal, and a salad eater.

"The lion is generous as a hero, the rat artful as a lawyer, the dove gentle as a lover, the beaver is a good engineer, the monkey is a clever actor, but none of them can make a salad. The wisest sheep never thought of culling and testing his grasses, seasoning them with thyme or tarragon, softening them with oil, exasperating them with mustard, sharpening them with vinegar, spiritualizing them with a suspicion of onions, in that no sheep has made a salad. Their only sauce is hunger.

"Salads," says this pleasant writer, "were invented by Adam and Eve,--probably made of pomegranates as to-day in Spain."

Of all salads, lobster is the most picturesque and beautiful. Its very scarlet is a trumpet tone to appetite. It lies embedded in green leaves like a magnificent tropical cactus. A good dressing for lobster is essence of anchovy, mushroom ketchup, hard-boiled eggs, and a little cream.

Mashed potatoes, rubbed down with cream, or simply mixed with vinegar, are no bad substitute for eggs, and impart to the salad a new and not unpleasing flavour. French beans, the most delicate of vegetables, give the salad eater a new sensation. A dressing can be mixed in the following proportions: "Four mustard ladles of mustard, four salt ladles of salt. Three spoonfuls of best Italian oil, twelve of vinegar, three unboiled eggs. All are to be carefully rubbed together." This is for those who like sours and not sweets. An old French _émigré_, who had to make his living in England during the time of the Regency, a man of taste and refinement, an epicurean Marquis, carried to noblemen's houses his mahogany box full of essences, spices, and condiments, and made his salad in this way: he chopped up three anchovies with a little shallot and some parsley; these he threw into a bowl with a little mustard and salt, two tablespoonfuls of oil, and one brimming over with vinegar. When thoroughly merged he added his lettuce, or celery, or potato, extremely thin, short slices of best Westphalia ham, or the finest roast beef, which he had steeped in the vinegar. He garnished with parsley and a few layers of bacon. This man was called _Le Roi de la salade_.

A cod mayonnaise is a good dish:--

Boil a large cod in the morning. Let it cool; then remove the skin and bones. For sauce put some thick cream in a porcelain sauce-pan and thicken it with corn-flour which has been mixed with cold water. When it begins to boil stir in the beaten yolks of two eggs. As it cools beat it well to prevent it from being lumpy, and when nearly cold stir in the juice of two lemons, a little tarragon vinegar, a pinch of salt, and a _soupçon_ of cayenne pepper. Peel and slice some very ripe tomatoes or cold potatoes, steep them in vinegar with cayenne, pounded ginger, and plenty of salt. Lay these around the fish and cover with cream sauce. The tomatoes and potatoes should be carefully drained before they are placed around the fish.

A salmon covered with a green sauce is a famous dish for a ball supper; indeed, there are thirty or forty salads with a cold fish foundation.

This art of dressing cold vegetables with pepper, salt, oil, and vinegar, should be studied. In France they give you these salads to perfection at the _déjeuner à la fourchette_. Fillippini, of Delmonico's, in his admirable work, "The Table," adds Swedish salad, String Bean Salad, Russian Salad, Salad Macédoine, _Escarolle_, _Doucette_, _Dandelion à la coutoise_, _Baib de Capucine_, Cauliflower salad, and _Salad a l'Italian_. I advise any young housekeeper to buy this book of his, as suggestive. It is too elaborate and learned, however, for practical application to any household except one in which a French cook is kept.

A mayonnaise dressing is a triumph of art when well made:--

A tablespoonful of mustard, one teaspoonful of salt, the yolk of three uncooked eggs, the juice of half a lemon, a quarter of a cupful of butter, a pint of oil, and a cupful of whipped cream. Beat the yolks and dry ingredients until they are very light, with a wooden spoon or with a wire beater. The bowl in which the dressing is being made should be set in a pan of ice water. Add oil, a few drops at a time, until the dressing becomes thick and rather hard. After it has reached this stage the oil can be added more rapidly. When it gets so thick as to be difficult to beat add a little vinegar, then add the juice of the lemon and the whipped cream, and place on ice until desired to be used.

Another dressing can be made more quickly:--

The yolk of a raw egg, a tablespoonful of mixed mustard, one fourth of a teaspoonful of salt, six tablespoonfuls of oil. Stir the yolk, mustard, and salt together with a fork until they begin to thicken; add the oil gradually, stirring all the time.

An excellent salad dressing is also made by using the yolk of hard-boiled eggs, some cold mashed potatoes well pressed together with a fork, oil, vinegar, mustard, and salt rubbed in, in the proportions of two of oil to one of vinegar.

A salad must be fresh and freshly made, to be good. Never serve a salad the second day; and it is not well to cover a delicate salad with too much mayonnaise. The very heart of the celery or the delicate inner leaves of the lettuce are the best for dinners. The heavy chicken and lobster, cabbage and potato salads, are dishes for lunches and suppers.

The chief employment of a kitchen maid, in France, where a man cook is kept, is to wash the vegetables; and you see her swinging the salad in a wire safe after washing it delicately in fresh water. The care bestowed on these minor morals of cookery, so often wholly neglected, adds the finishing touch to the excellence of a French dinner.

For a green mayonnaise dressing, so much admired on salmon, use a little chopped spinach and finely chopped parsley. The juice from boiled beets can be used to make a fine red dressing. Two of these dishes will make a plain, country lunch-table very nice, and will have an appetizing effect, as has anything that betokens care, forethought, neatness, and taste.

Some people cannot eat oil. Often the best oil cannot be bought in a retired and rural neighbourhood. But an excellent substitute is fresh butter or clarified chicken-fat, very carefully prepared, and icy cold. The yolks of four raw eggs, one tablespoonful of salt, one of mustard, the juice of a lemon, and a speck of cayenne pepper should be used.

Two drops of onion juice, or a bit of onion sliced, will add great piquancy to salad dressing, if every one likes onion.

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.

In the model kitchen is the exquisite range, with its polished _batterie de cuisine_. Every brilliant saucepan seems to say, "Come and cook in me;" every porcelain-lined pan urges upon one the necessity of stewing nectarines in white sugar; every bright can suggests the word "conserve," which always makes the mouth water; every clatter of the skewers says, "Dainty dishes, come and make me." All this is quite fascinating to an amateur.

No pretty woman, if she did but know it, is ever so pretty as when she is playing cook, and doing it well. The clean white apron, the short, clean, cambric gown, the little cap, the white, bare arms,--the glorified creams and jellies, pies and Charlotte Russe, cakes and puddings, which fall from such fingers are ambrosial food.