Common-Sense Papers on Cookery

a few lightly on the white egg-froth. Contrast this dish with the pippins as they were before. The change is marvellous, and yet costs almost nothing. Yet many persons would think, casting their eyes over the table, “Ah! that dish came from the pastrycook’s.” One or even two piled-up dishes of almonds and raisins, being, if there are not too many almonds, dark dishes, form a favourable contrast with the light ones. A supper-table, to look really nice, must not have too many white dishes. If you have a large centre-dish of trifle, with whipped cream on the top, a few hundreds and thousands sprinkled over it set it off. Now good whipped cream is rather beyond the powers of an ordinary cook, so if you happen to live near a really good pastrycook’s, you will find it a good plan to have a man come round just before supper and supply the whipped cream, but make the rest of the trifle at home. It is an exceedingly expensive dish to order, and, owing to wine, brandy, and liqueurs being requisite in its composition, one of the very last dishes desirable to order. Even pastrycooks will often spoil the ship for the sake of a ha’p’orth of tar, in respect of wine. To wit, mock-turtle soup. Order a glass of sherry at a pastrycook’s with your mock-turtle, and throw half of it into the soup, and see what a difference it makes. In fact, as a rule, if you give a cook wine for cooking purposes, they drink the wine themselves, and manage the cooking without. As a few last words of advice, in ornamenting your table, as well as in amusing the children, don’t forget the crackers. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ IX.—SPRING DISHES. Perhaps no season in the year is more eagerly welcomed than that of spring—earth’s great annual resurrection from death unto life! How beautiful the first really spring morning! A warm, balmy air, a deep blue sky without a cloud, and bright sun lighting up like diamonds the water-drops on the fresh green grass, o’er which the feathery cobwebs drift