| PAGE | ||
| I. | —Uses and Abuses of a Frying-Pan | [9] |
| II. | —Kitchen Economy | [22] |
| III. | —Little Extravagancies of the Table | [32] |
| IV. | —Cold Leg of Mutton | [43] |
| V. | —How to make Dishes look nice | [56] |
| VI. | —Breakfast Dishes | [68] |
| VII. | —How to give a nice little Dinner | [79] |
| VIII. | —How to give a nice little Supper | [93] |
| IX. | —Spring Dishes | [104] |
| X. | —Savoury Summer Dishes | [114] |
| XI. | —Salads, and how to make them | [127] |
| XII. | —Picnic Dainties | [138] |
| XIII. | —Cooling Drinks | [149] |
| XIV. | —Game and Gravy (including How to Cook Hare) | [160] |
| XV. | —Food for Cold Weather | [182] |
| XVI. | —Christmas Dinners (including Christmas Cheer) | [191] |
| XVII. | —Turtle Soup | [209] |
| XVIII. | —Fish Dinners | [221] |
| XIX. | —Wedding Breakfasts | [233] |
| XX. | —Food for Invalids | [241] |
COMMON-SENSE PAPERS ON COOKERY.
I.—THE USES AND ABUSES OF A FRYING-PAN.
“We had such an awful time of it with Mary Ann!” Probably, never have the domestic trials and difficulties of young housekeepers been summed up in fewer or more expressive words. However, the more we look into the world, the more we find it to be the case that we make our Mary Anns, and not our Mary Anns us.
It is a good old saying that the master makes the man; equally true is it that the mistress makes the maid. Let each of our readers pause for an instant, and look round mentally among his relations and friends with whom he is in the habit of dining. Each one, probably, has had many changes of servants, yet there are some houses where the dinner is invariably good, others where it is equally invariably bad. Who has not, on entering a house where he expects to dine, been greeted at the door with a whiff of the smell of the cooking, from which whiff he could pretty well determine in his own mind the style of dinner he may expect?
No cooking is so good as the French, none so bad as a certain style of English. Compare the smell of a good French restaurant, or outside the kitchen of a first-class hotel, like the “Pavilion” at Folkestone, an hour before the table d’hôte, with the smell of an ordinary cook-shop, with its steam-pipes keeping warm large flabby joints and greasy Yorkshire pudding, the whole being impregnated with that peculiar smell of greens in which one can almost fancy he detects the flavour of caterpillars.
I think it may be laid down as a rule that if, on entering a house, you smell greens, you may make up your mind for a bad dinner. On the other hand, a gamey smell, with perhaps just a dash of garlic in it, is favourable, especially if mingled with the smell of rich pastry.