ROUND THE TABLE

Olives should be well washed before using them, and the stone should be neatly removed, so as not to spoil the shape of the fruit. There is a kind of olives, which are sold ready stoned, with a small piece of anchovy inserted in each of them in place of the stone; these are not so good for dessert as the plain olives, but for salad purposes they are capital.

Anchovies require even more washing than olives, and if they be not first-rate, and neatly filleted and cleaned, they will assuredly spoil your salad. Sardines, herrings, other fish and Crustacea, should be very carefully picked, and cut up in neat fillets or pieces. Meat should be cut up in fillets, and all “ outside ” parts — i.e., those browned by the operation of roasting — removed. In the case of fowls and game, the most economical way is, of course, to cut them up in small neat “joints”; but the most artistic way is to cut out “ fillets ” of the meat only, so as to have no bones in the salad.

Although all kinds of greenmeat are used in these compound salads, lettuce with a few aromatic herbs is preferable to any other. The proper sort of dressing is a mayonnaise, a tartare, or a ravigotte. In cookery books these salads are usually called mayonnaise of fowls or fish, as the case may be, and they include that well-known British institution, the lobster salad of ball suppers aud picnics.

To prepare one of these salads in an artistic way, the lettuce and what fines herbes you may wish to use should be dressed with a plain salad sauce without eggs, and the fish, flesh, or fowl fillets should be steeped for an hour or so in a similar sauce. You then dispose your materials neatly on a dish, and cover up the whole with a well- made mayonnaise, tartare, or ravigotte, finishing by ornamenting your dish as will be explained farther on.

Endive and mixed salads are not so well fitted for a lobster or a meat salad, but small and judicious propor- tions of pickles, ancbovies, olives, bam, Bologna sausage (minced small), add considerably to the merit of a salad of endive or of celery and water-cress. Of course when Bologna sausage is used there is no need of a piece of bread rubbed with garlic.

These compound salads are a capital way — especially in summer — of disposing of the remains of meat, fowls, &c. ; and, as there is no end to the combinations which can be produced, I will not attempt to give a list of them.

The ornamentation of salads is the next thing to consider. On supper tables more particularly, very pretty effects are produced by tastefully-ornamented salads, and to do this properly no small amount of taste and trouble is required.

The readiest mode of ornamenting a salad is by dis- posing, on the top of it, all or a portion of the following things, in some sort of pattern — viz., hard-boiled eggs, cut into rounds or quarters ; slices of beetroot, truffles, and cucumber, cut into shapes ; radishes, pickled gherkins, cut in some fanciful way, fillets of anchovies, &c. The flowers of borage, nasturtium, &c., can also be used ; and in large dishes, according to the nature of the salad, crayfish, and prawns can be introduced — whole as ornaments, and likewise pieces of aspic jelly.

Another way, which may be called the geometrical form, well repays by its effect the trouble it entails.

Begin by preparing your colours, so to speak, each in a separate saucer. These are (black) truffles minced very small, also caviar; (two dark greens) watercress or parsley, minced fine ; (three lighter greens) capers, gherkins, garden cress, all finely minced; (purple)