For a party of six.

Puree de lievre.

Pomfret a la Provencale.

Blanquette de volaille.

Longe de mouton farcie.

Turban de becassines.

Ma'is a l'Americaine.

Soupirs de nonne.

Fromage, hors d'oeuvres.

Dessert.

1. - In a previous Menu I gave you a recipe for a hare soup, simplified from Grouffe. There is, however, another and a richer kind of soup, with which the pounded meat of the hare is incorporated, which has many devoted admirers. It is composed in the following way: - Make your ordinary amount of stock from a shin and a half of beef. As the stock is being made, clean, and cut up the hare, saving the blood. Let the pieces soak for half an hour, or so, in cold water. When the beef gravy is ready, put the pieces of hare into a large stew-pan with a bacon, or ham bone, or a few lean slices of either, an anchovy, three Bombay onions cut into quarters, three carrots sliced, a bag containing a dessert-spoonful each of marjoram, thyme, and parsley, the rind of two limes, and a dozen pepper corns, and cover the whole with the stock. Let this simmer very gently for three hours, after it has once slowly attained boiling point. At the end of that time, strain the liquor from the meat, etc, and set it to get cool. Pick the meat out, and lay the pieces on a large dish. Choose the back fillets, pick the meat from the bones, and pound it to a paste in a mortar, moistening it with a little soup to assist the operation; as soon as you have got the meat satisfactorily pounded, work it through the sieve, and save the pulp that you get carefully. Now take another stew pan, place it on the fire, melt a couple of ounces of butter in it, and work into it a good table-spoonful of flour; when you have got a nice paste, add a little soup with which the blood has been mixed, continue stirring, and, with the aid of an assistant, go on adding soup, and pounded meat, till you have exhausted the whole, stirring without ceasing; now add half a pint of portwine, a table-spoonful of red currant jelly, and a table-spoonful of crystal vinegar, or lime juice. Let the soup come to the boil, so as to thicken properly, and become thoroughly blended. It can then be served.

Hare soup, (Puree.)

2. - Boil the fish, and serve it with this sauce: - Put into a sauce-pan a coffee-cupful of the best salad oil, an onion, a tomato, a clove of garlic, and a table-spoonful of mushrooms, all finely chopped up; when this has been on the fire a few minutes, add a table-spoonful of flour, stir it well, and pour in a glass of chablis, sauterne, or hock, with half a pint of gravy; add a dessert-spoonful of finely minced thyme, marjoram, parsley, and lime peel, all mixed together, a pinch of sugar, with salt and pepper to taste: let the sauce simmer slowly for half an hour, then strain and serve. This can be got ready early in the day, and kept hot in the bain-marie or re-heated when the time comes for its service.

Pomfret -with Pro-vencale sauce.

3. - This I would serve within a casserole of 'savoury rice' garnished with curls of crisply fried bacon, and bunches of curly parsley. For the blanquette : - slightly roast a well fed fowl, covering the breast with buttered paper to prevent its burning: when done, put it on a dish, and let it get cold. Then carve it neatly, cutting the white meat off in nice little round fillets, and saving the wings, merrythought, etc. Take the bones, skin, giblets, (previously saved) trimmings, and coarser meat of the drumsticks, and beat them well with your pestle. Next throw them into a sauce-pan, with as much clear stock as will cover them, a glass of sherry, and the usual proportion of vegetables, especially celery, a bag of savoury herbs, lime peel, and a pinch of sugar. Make with this an excellent fowl consomme, an essence as it were, adding six pounded sweet, and one bitter almond. When quite ready, strain it off, and thicken it as for veloute. Then having got a rich, creamy, delicately flavoured, white sauce, put into it all your pieces of fowl, with some pellets of tongue cut like gun wads rather thickly, some sweetbreads (if you can get them), some button mushrooms, a few oysters trimmed free from their beards, a few slices of truffle, the liver of the fowl minced, and some grated lean bacon or ham. Gently, - ever so gently mind, - heat up the blanquette, and let it simmer for half an hour over a low fire; the various flavours will thus be extracted, and your plat be ready to serve whenever you want it. A table-spoonful of cream, or the yolks of two raw eggs beaten in a cup with a little of the sauce should be added, and stirred well in as a finishing touch.

4. - Bone the loin, introduce a number of slices of bacon under the flap, fill the inside with a forcemeat made with the meat of the undercut chopped up small, with the Blanquette of fowl.

Boned loin of mutton, stuffed, kidney (scalded first), and some of the nicest fat, seasoned with herbs, spiced pepper, chopped bacon, a little onion, and any mushroom, or truffle parings you may have been able to spare from the blanquette. Bind the salpiccn with four eggs, and spread it thickly over the inside of the boned loin, then roll the joint up, and tie it firmly into shape, - do not skewer it. Now braise the loin in a gravy made from its own bones and trimmings, with a glass of Madeira, a clove of garlic, and scraps of vegetables of all kinds arranged round it. When done, and nicely browned, lift up the loin, remove the string, and dish it on a layer of boiled maccaroni. Strain off the gravy, throw away the garlic, and pass all the vegetables through the sieve ; thicken the gravy, add the vegetable pulp, and when thoroughly incorporated, pour it round the loin and serve.

5. - A snipe for each head. Begin by roasting the snipes lightly, thru cut off the meat of the breasts whole in fillets. Mash the rest, trails and all. and throw the debris into a large saucepan with a pint and a half of well made beef gravy, an onion cut up, a stick of celery, a carrot, sweet herbs in a bag, a clove of garlic, salt to taste, a tea-spoonful of sugar, and the peel of a lime. Simmer as soon as the contents of the sauce-pan have come to the boil, for an hour or more, and get the essence out of the snipe bones. When that has been done, strain off your gravy, and set it to get cool. Pick all the snipe meat from the bones of the thighs and back, with the livers, etc, and pound the whole with half its bulk of bread (soaked in stock) in a mortar, add the pounded meat of a lightly roasted chicken with its liver, and mix them thoroughly with two raw eggs; season the mixture with spiced pepper, and dilute it with some of the gravy ; when worked sufficiently, put it into a border mould, and steam it gently Turn it out when done, garnish the top of the turban with the snipe heads and beaks, and with a fillet (heated separately in the gravy,) between each head and serve piping hot. The centre of the mould may contain the contents of a tin of black Leicestershire mushrooms, also heated in the gravy. The gravy itself should be treated thus : - After it has cooled, and you have skimmed it, place a sauce-pan on the fire, with a table-spoonful of butter at the bottom of it; work into the melted butter a dessert-spoonful of flour, and then add your cool gravy, stirring all the time; get an assistant to pour in a glass of portwine, a dessert-spoonful of vinegar, or lime juice, and a dessert-spoonful of red currant jelly; amalgamate the whole thoroughly, heat up the fillets, and heads in it, and the mushrooms strained from their own gravy. Garnish the turban quickly, as above described, and put the mushrooms inside the mould, pour the gravy over the whole composition, and serve.

Turbau of snipes.

6. - Choose half a dozen tender cobs of Indian corn.

The cobs should be still greenish otherwise they will be too tough. Boil them, and then, with a silver fork, strip the corn from the cob. When wanted for the table, melt a large pat of fresh butter at the bottom of a sauce-pan, empty the corn into the pan, stir it about adding butter, pepper and salt, till it is smoking hot; then serve.

Gateau de pistache-

The weight of eight eggs in their shells of finelypowdered sugar, that of two eggs of potato flour, and the same weight of pistachio nuts blanched and skinned. Beat up the sugar and the yolks of eight eggs well together with an egg whisk or with a fork, until the mixture assumes a white creamy appearance. Sprinkle in (beating the mixture all the time) half the potato flour, and add the whites of four eggs whisked to a stiff froth. Then put in, in the same manner, the rest of the flour, the remaining four whites beaten to a froth, and lastly the pistachio nuts pounded to a paste in a mortar. Bake in a slow oven. Meanwhile put the whites of two eggs into a basin with a little lime juice and six ounces of sugar, well work the mixture with a wooden spoon, and as it gets thin, keep on adding more sugar until you get a smooth paste of the consistency of batter. Lay the icing evenly on the cake with a spatula, put it into the oven for a minute to set the icing, ornamen it quickly with strips of citron and preserved cherries, and put it aside to get cold.

Pistachio nut cake.

Chaud-froid a la belle alliance.

This is a slight departure from the ordinary school of chaud-froids. Take as many cold fonds d'artichauts as you have guests - either fresh fonds or those preserved in tins. Lightly roast a tender fowl, and cut from it when cold as many nice fillets as you have fonds, shaping them so as to fit the tops of the latter. Make a puree with the scraps of meat left after trimming the fillets, associating with it some pounded mushroom. From a cold boiled tongue cut as many round slices as you have fillets. Make a good veloute with the bones, skin, etc, assisted by a little fresh meat, and reduce as already explained for chaud-froid sauce. Now moisten the puree with a little sauce, and fill the cavities of the fonds; over that put the slices of tongue, some more puree, and then the fillets. Mask the whole with the thick chaud-froid sauce, let them get cold, trim them neatly, set them on a napkin, and garnish each with a piece of truffle. If carefully made, this makes a nice entree.