A potato-salad ought not to be made with cold boiled potatoes, as the cook-books generally state, even the best of them. A potato-salad ought not to be made with potatoes that have remained over from a previous meal. The potatoes must be boiled in salt water expressly for the salad ; allowed to cool, sliced into the salad-bowl, and seasoned in the French style with oil and vinegar, served and eaten while still almost tepid. A potato-salad should be abundantly garnished with finely chopped herbs, chervil, chives, and a suspicion of tarragon ; furthermore, as the floury nature of the potatoes absorbs the vinegar rapidly, in order to make up the quantity of acid liquid needful for success, throw in a little white wine, say three or four times as much white wine as you have used of vinegar or lemon-juice.

The Japanese salad invented by the younger Dumas, and celebrated in his play of "Francillon," is a potato-salad as above described, with the addition of some mussels cooked in a court-bouillon flavored with celery. This salad is served with a layer of sliced truffles on the top, and the truffles ought to have been cooked in champagne rather than in Madeira.

Another potato-salad worthy of respectful attention consists of potatoes thinly sliced, a pound of truffles cooked in white wine and thinly sliced, two red herrings boned and broken up into small flakes. The dressing is a good white mayonnaise, with a dash of mustard. This salad requires to be seasoned and mixed some six hours before it is served.

For a salad of cooked vegetables, or, as it is also called, a macedoine, you need freshly and expressly cooked vegetables: potatoes, string-beans, lima or haricot beans, pease, cauliflower, carrots, turnips, parsnips, beetroot, hearts of artichokes, asparagus tops, or as many of these ingredients as you can command. These different vegetables must, of course, have been cooked, each separately, in salt water; then plunged into cold water in order to prevent them from turning yellow; and then carefully drained before being arranged ornamentally in the salad-bowl. (N.B. - Drain carefully, for any residue of water impairs the success of the salad.) Certain of the above vegetables may be cut into dice or lozenges before being put into boiling water to cook.

A macedoine may be seasoned either with oil and vinegar, with a white mayonnaise, or with a green mayonnaise a la ravigote.

For fish and meat salads, for which recipes abound, the mayonnaise dressing is to be used. In America, the mayonnaise dressing seems to be used for all kinds of salad; in England, too, there is a ready-made white abomination sold in bottles under the name of salad-dressing. I call attention to these facts only to disapprove. The gourmet will make a distinction between salads proper and mixed salads containing flesh and strong elements, and the former he will prepare with oil and vinegar, while he will season the more heavy and substantial compounds with a heavier and more strongly spiced dressing.

The making of mayonnaise sauce has been frequently described in American, cook-books, and yet in two that I have before me, one dated 1886, and the other 1887, the recipes are either incomplete or wanting in clearness, so that I repeat the directions, seriatim.

Take a soup-plate or shallow bowl, a wooden or a silver fork, fine olive oil, vinegar, salt, pepper, mustard already mixed, fresh eggs, and some one to help you at the critical moment. You will fix the number of eggs according to the quantity of sauce you desire, the proportion being a quarter of a pound of oil to each egg. In your soup-plate put the yolk of one or more eggs, taking care to remove the germ and all the white ; beat your yolk well for nearly a minute by stirring it always in the same direction ; then add oil, drop by drop, about a teaspoonful at a time, and never adding more oil until the preceding quantity has become thoroughly amalgamated with the egg; remember that the.stirring must go on absolutely without interruption, and always in the same direction ; at every eighth spoonful of oil add a few drops of vinegar, a pinch of salt, a pinch of pepper, a spot of mustard. The person who is helping you will drop these ingredients into the sauce at the word of command, while you keep on turning assiduously. You continue this process, adding vinegar, condiments, and oil until you have exhausted your quantity of oil; then you taste and heighten the seasoning or the piquancy, as occasion may dictate.

Some people whose palates are jaded add cayenne pepper to the seasoning. In some American books I have seen the addition of sugar recommended. To this latter addition I am absolutely opposed; it is ridiculous and useless.

If, by ill-luck, the mayonnaise curdles while you are making it, stop at once; start another egg in a clean plate, and add your curdled sauce by degrees to the new sauce, and the whole will come out good, yellow, and with the consistency of very rich, thick cream. Provided the oil and the eggs used are in normal conditions of freshness, the curdling or decomposition of the amalgam can only be due to sudden excess of oil or of vinegar, so that in remixing you must moderate the one or the other accordingly.

Green mayonnaise is the above sauce with the addition of three tablespoonfuls of ra-vigote for each quarter of a pound of oil. Ravigote is chervil, tarragon, common garden-cress, and pimpernel, cooked for two minutes in boiling salt-water, then plunged in cold water, drained, pounded in a mortar, and strained.

A less perfect green mayonnaise may be made by simply adding to the sauce a handful of very finely chopped chervil mixed in a spoonful of tarragon vinegar.

To color mayonnaise green, do not use boiled and mashed green pease, as I have seen recommended in a cook-book which I need not mention. The reason is, that in a creamy sauce of the nature of mayonnaise, we should be offended if we felt the roughness of any farinaceous matter intruding itself upon the palate. Spinach would be a less objectionable coloring matter. But unless you can do the thing properly, by means of a ravigote which has its special flavor and season, why attempt to color your mayonnaise ? Mere coloring, by make-shift means, will impair your sauce, instead of improving it. To the eye, a yellow mayonnaise is just as pleasing as a green one.

Some one may object that we have a red mayonnaise. True, but red mayonnaise is not a decorative fancy, it is a quintessential compound made by pounding the coral of a lobster, and mixing the red puree thus obtained with ordinary white mayonnaise. This 6 red mayonnaise is intended to make the serving of the lobster more complete, and not for show or table decoration.

In good cooking everything has a reason.