is thoroughly understood in New York City. On this side, the dish does not meet with any particular favour, although no supper-table is properly furnished without it.
Open two dozen oysters, and take the beards off. Put the oysters into a basin and squeeze over them the juice of half a lemon. Put the beards and the strained liquor into a saucepan with half a blade of mace, half a dozen peppercorns ground, a little grated lemon rind, and a pinch of cayenne. Simmer gently for a quarter of an hour, strain the liquid, thicken it with a little butter and flour, add a quarter of a pint (or a teacupful) of cream, and stir over the fire till quite smooth. Then put in the oysters, and let them warm through—they must not boil. Serve in a soup tureen, and little cubes of bread fried in bacon grease may be served with the stew, as with pea-soup.
Be very careful to whose care you entrust your barrel, or bag, of oysters, after you have got them home. A consignment of the writer’s were, on one memorable and bitter cold Christmas Eve, consigned to the back dairy, by Matilda Anne. Result—frostbite, gapes, dissolution, disappointment, disagreeable language.
Ball Suppers.
More hard cash is wasted on these than even on ball dresses, which is saying a great deal. The alien caterer, or charcutier, is chiefly to blame for this; for he it is who has taught the British matron to wrap up wholesome food in coats of grease, inlaid with foreign substances, to destroy its flavour, and to bestow upon it an outward semblance other than its own. There was handed unto me, only the other evening, what I at first imagined to be a small section of the celebrated Taj Mahal at Agra, the magnificent mausoleum of the Emperor Shah Jehan. Reference to the bill-of-fare established the fact that I was merely sampling a galantine of turkey, smothered in some white glazy grease, inlaid with chopped carrot, green peas, truffles, and other things. And the marble column (also inlaid) which might have belonged to King Solomon’s Temple, at the top of the table, turned out to be a Tay salmon, decorated à la mode de charcutier, and tasting principally of garlic. A shriek from a fair neighbour caused me to turn my head in her direction; and it took some little time to discover, and to convince her, that the item on her plate was not a mouse, too frightened to move, but some preparation of the liver of a goose, in “aspic.”
This said Aspic—which has no connection with the asp which the fair Cleopatra kept on the premises, although a great French lexicographer says that aspic is so called because it is as cold as a snake—is invaluable in the numerous “schools of cookery” in the which British females are educated according to the teaching of the bad fairy Ala. The cold chicken and ham which delighted our ancestors at the supper-table—what has become of them? Yonder, my dear sir, is the fowl, in neat portions, minced, and made to represent fragments of the almond rock which delighted us whilst in the nursery. The ham has become a ridiculous mousse, placed in little accordion-pleated receptacles of snow-white paper; and those are not poached eggs atop, either, but dabs of whipped cream with a preserved apricot in the centre.
It was only the other day that I read in a journal written by ladies for ladies, of a dainty dish for luncheon or supper: croûtons smeared with bloater paste and surmounted with whipped cream; and in the same paper was a recipe for stuffing a fresh herring with mushrooms, parsley, yolk of egg, onion, and its own soft roe. I am of opinion that it was a bad day for the male Briton when the gudewife, with her gude-daughter, and her gude cook, abandoned the gude roast and boiled, in favour of the works of the all-powerful Ala.
And now let us proceed to discuss the most homely supper of all, and when I mention the magic word