Potato Salad

Slice up some cold potatoes - new potatoes make the best salad - into slices about a quarter of an inch thick. Rub a salad bowl with a bead of garlic or a slice of onion. Sprinkle some chopped parsley over the cold potatoes, and dress them like an ordinary salad, being careful not to add any vinegar till they are well mixed in the oil. Mix one saltspoonful of salt and one of pepper in a tablespoon with some oil, and pour it over the potatoes, and toss them lightly together. Add another tablespoonful of oil and mix thoroughly; last of all, add one dessertspoonful of vinegar.

Slice up, small, a few gherkins out of a bottle of pickle, and add to the salad. A few fresh mint-leaves, or fresh tarragon leaves chopped fine, are an improvement. Other cold boiled vegetables can be added.

Potato Soup

Potato soup is best made from the remains of cold boiled potatoes. Boil the potatoes with one large onion in a quart of No. 3 stock (See No. 10), till the Stock is reduced to half a pint, then rub all through a wire sieve (see No. 21), and add to it a pint of milk, boiled separately. Boil a couple of bay-leaves in the milk.

Add to each quart a teaspoonful of chopped parsley, pepper, salt, and just a " suspicion " of nutmeg. Sufficient cold potatoes should be added to the soup to make it of the consistency of double cream. Serve fried bread (see No 7) with the soup.

Stewed Prunes

Let the prunes, after being washed, soak all night in cold water. Take them out, and let the liquid settle; then pour it off, and stew the prunes in this gently for an hour, adding a small piece of cinnamon, a small piece of lemon-peel, and sufficient sugar to make the juice a syrup. Add, when cold, a glass of port wine.

Fruit Pudding

A fruit pudding, like a meat one, can be either boiled in a basin or in a cloth without a basin. Proceed in every respect as for making a meat pudding. (See Pudding, Meat.) The paste may be rolled out a little thinner.

Of course, the only ingredients for the inside are fruit, sugar, and water. The proportions of these for nearly every kind of fruit is to every quart of strung currants, gooseberries, damsons, greengages, apples, peeled, cored and quartered, rhubarb cut into inch pieces, cherries, plums, raspberries, blackberries, etc., etc., etc., three tablespoonfuls of brown sugar and three tablespoonfuls of water.

Various Meat Puddings

In the above pudding I recommended two pounds of beef-steak (a quarter of a pound of which should be fat), one teaspoonful of pepper, one of salt, and one of equal parts of chopped onion and parsley, also some stock No. 3. Of course, as the gravy of a meat pudding forms a most important part of it, the better the stock the better the pudding; still, a great deal of the goodness of the meat will add to the richness of the gravy in boiling. To the above may be added for better puddings one or two sheep's kidneys cut up, or some bullock's kidney, but sheep's are far better; also a dozen oysters, with their liquor, and one or two fresh mushrooms. Also larks or snipe, the former whole, the latter cut in halves. In this case, always try and add half a salt-spoonful of the mixed spices used in making liver force-meat (see Liver Force-meat), also a little liver force-meat can be put inside each lark and each snipe.