Oranges

May be put on whole in fruit-baskets, or the skin be cut in eighths half way down, separated from the fruit and curled inward, showing half the orange white, the other yellow. Or, pass a sharp knife lightly around the fruit, midway between the stem and blossom end, cutting through the rind only. Slip the smooth curved handle of a teaspoon carefully between the peel and body of the orange, and gently work it all around until both upper and lower halves are free, except at stem and blossom. Turn the rind, without tearing it, inside out, making a white cup at each end - the round white fruit between them.

Salade D'Orange

Pare and slice large sweet oranges; sprinkle powdered sugar thickly over each slice, and pour a couple of glasses of wine on the top. Sprinkle powdered sugar over all, and serve at once, or the fruit will lose its freshness.

You may omit the wine if you like.

Do not let any fruit intended to be eaten fresh for dessert lie in the sugar longer than is absolutely necessary. It extracts the flavor and withers the pulp.

Ambrosia

8 fine sweet oranges, peeled and sliced. 1/2 grated cocoanut. 1/2 cup powdered sugar.

Arrange the orange in a glass dish, scatter the grated cocoanut thickly over it, sprinkle this lightly with sugar, and cover with another layer of orange. Fill up the dish in this order, having cocoanut and sugar for the top layer. Serve at once.

Apples

Wash and polish with a clean towel, and pile in a china fruit-basket, with an eye to agreeable variety of color.

Peaches And Pears

Pick out the finest, handling as little as may be, and pile upon a salver or flat dish, with bits of ice between them, and ornament with peach leaves or fennel sprigs.

One of the prettiest dishes of fruit I ever saw upon a dessert-table was an open silver basket, wide at the top, heaped with rich red peaches and yellow Bartlett pears, interspersed with feathery bunches of green, which few of those who admired it knew for carrot-tops. Wild white clematis wreathed the handle and showed here and there among the fruit, while scarlet and white verbenas nestled amid the green.

Send around powdered sugar with the fruit, as many like to dip peaches and pears in it after paring and quartering them.

Strawberries, Raspberries, And Blackberries

Never wash strawberries or raspberries that are intended to be eaten as fresh fruit. If they are so gritty as to require this process, keep them off the table. You will certainly ruin the flavor beyond repair if you wash them, and as certainly induce instant fermentation and endanger the coats of the eaters' stomachs, if, after profaning the exquisite delicacy of the fruit to this extent, you complete the evil work by covering them with sugar, and leaving them to leak their lives sourly away for one or two hours.

Put them on the table in glass dishes, pilfng them high and lightly, send around powdered sugar with them and cream, that the guests may help themselves. It is not economical perhaps, but it is a healthful and pleasant style of serving them - I had almost said the only decent one.

"But I don't know who picked them!" cries Mrs. Fussy.

No, my dear madam! nor do you know who makes the baker's bread, or confectioner's cakes, creams, jellies, salads, etc. Nor, for that matter, how the flour is manufactured out of which you conjure your dainty biscuit and pies. I was so foolish as to go into a flour-mill once, and having seen a burly negro, naked to the waist, with his trousers rolled up to his knees, stand in a bank of " fine family flour," a foot deep in the lowest part, on a July day, shovelling it into barrels for the market, I rushed into the outer air a sicker and a wiser woman.

I know God made strawberries. "Doubtless," says

Bishop Butler, "He could have made a better berry, but He never did!" The picker's light touch cannot mar flavor or beauty, nor, were her fingers filthy as a chimneysweep's, could the delicate fruit suffer from them as from your barbarous baptism. You would like to know who picked them. I should inquire instead, "Who washed them, and in what?" I recollect seeing a housekeeper, who was afflicted with your inquiring turn of mind, wash strawberries in a wash-hand basin !

Currants And Raspberries

Pick the currants from the stems, and mix with an equal quantity of raspberries. Put into a glass bowl, and eat with powdered sugar.

Frosted Currants

Pick fine even bunches, and dip them, one at a time, into a mixture of frothed white of egg, and a very little cold water. Drain them until nearly dry, and roll in pulverized sugar Repeat the dip in the sugar once or twice, and lay them upon white paper to dry. They make a beautiful garnish for jellies or charlottes, and look well heaped in a dish by themselves or with other fruit.

Plums and grapes are very nice frosted in the same way.