The nicest of all salads is plain French lettuce-leaves, young, crisp, and dry. Old lettuces that have got bitter are worse than useless. Take a salad bowl, and rub the bottom of it with a bead of garlic or a slice of onion. Add the leaves of three French lettuces, quite dry. If possible avoid washing the leaves, but simply wipe them on a clean cloth. Next, if possible, add three fresh tarragon leaves, and a very little parsley, chopped very fine; sprinkle these over the salad. Boil an egg hard and cut it into quarters, and place round the edge of the dish. Do not dress the salad till it is wanted, and then proceed as follows for the above quantity: - Take a tablespoon, and place in it a saltspoonful of salt and another of black pepper, fill the spoon with oil, holding the spoon in the left hand. Stir up the salt, oil, and pepper, with a fork, and pour over the salad, and mix it together for a minute, tossing the leaves round and round very lightly. Then add another tablespoon-ful of oil, and again mix thoroughly, so that every part of every leaf is thoroughly oiled before the vinegar is added. Then add about half a table-spoonful of vinegar, and again mix thoroughly.

There is an admirable Spanish proverb about dressing salads. It says it requires four persons to mix a salad: - a spendthrift to throw in the oil, a miser to drop in the vinegar, a lawyer to add the seasoning, and a madman to stir it together.

Salad Dressed With Meat, Etc

Salads mayon-naise can be made exactly as lobster salad is made, by substituting for lobster cold boiled salmon, cold boiled sole, smoked salmon, cut very thin (raw), cold chicken, roast or boiled, cold turkey, crayfish, picked prawns (very expensive), picked shrimps - this last is the most delicious salad there is. The shrimps must be fresh. A pint when picked will do for three lettuces. Two quarts of fresh-boiled shrimps will make a pint of picked. Act in every respect as in making lobster salad. (See Lobster Salad Mayonnaise.) "When raw herrings or sardines are added to salad, mayonnaise sauce is not suitable.

English Old-Fashioned Salad

The old-fashioned English salad is composed of a mixture in which lettuce is the chief part, but to which is added mustard-and-cress, beetroot, celery, cut up fine, spring onions, etc. The salad-dressing for this varies according to the tradition in the family. It is a compound of milk or cream, hard-boiled yolks of eggs powdered, made mustard, pepper and salt, vinegar used rather freely, anchovy sauce, sugar, etc. Oil, which ought to form the chief part of salad-dressing, used to be dropped carefully as if it were some dangerous poison. Indeed, to a certain extent this was requisite, as the oil too often was green and rancid from having been kept too long. Perfectly pure oil, like perfectly pure butter, is almost if not absolutely tasteless.