Home › The Dining-Room And Its Service › A Piece Of Salmon

A Piece Of Salmon

Salmon. In carving a piece of salmon, take thin slices, as shown from A to B, and serve with each piece some of the belly taken in the direction from C to D. The best part is the upper or thick flesh.

VII. The Service of the Table.

BREAKFAST is and should be one of the pleasantest meals of the day. Here the family assemble, if not before, and courtesies and pleasant chat are interchanged over the fragrant coffee, chops and rolls. The linen should be of the cleanest, the silver bright, and the china dry and polished. The plates should be hot in winter; rolls should be hot, unless cold bread is preferred, and the dry toast just from the fire. Buttered toast should be served as soon as it is made. Let there be flowers to adorn the table at each meal, if possible. If you have an urn for hot water, place the coffee-pot and the tea-pot in front of it, the coffee cups and saucers at your right and the tea-cups at the left; the cream and hot milk at the right, the slop-basin and milk-pitcher at the left, and the sugar-bowl handy. There should be a fruit-plate and breakfast-plate for each person.

Tea is a more simple meal, but none the less pleasant, since it closes the labors of the day. Luncheon also is a pleasant meal, because simple and lively with chat. Dinner is the stately meal of the day, unless simply a family meal. It is then, one of the most pleasant. In fact, why should not every meal be pleasant, and without ceremony? Pleasant conversation and plenty of time at meals make digestion easy. There is no reason why a meal should be bolted because of the labors of a hurrying season. It is bad for digestion, and that is bad both for the temper and the health. The farmer, of all the laboring classes, deserves that his table should be pleasant to look at, and adorned with flowers and green things. He has it all within himself to make it so.

VIII. Some Dishes for Epicures.

We have it from the most ancient authorities that their meals were not dull. The household of Job, for instance, would seem to have been hospitable and merry, for we read: "His sons went and feasted in their houses, every one their day (birthday); and sent and called for their three sisters to eat and drink with them." The tables, however, probably were not provided with cooked peacock, feathers, tail and all. That was a whim of later and more degenerate days, even if of a higher civilization. The Romans-who were fond of the dish just spoken of and many others still more curious, as for instance a pig baked on one side and boiled on the otherfed the thrushes destined for their gourmand tables, with figs, wheat and aromatic grains. A French epicure has said that small song-birds should be eaten the last of November, for then the feeding on juniper berries gives their flesh the much-admired bitter flavor. So with us, the grouse of Pennsylvania-our "prairie hen" - is supposed to be much finer than anywhere else, from the mountain berries they feed upon. All wild birds are supposed to be more nutritious and digestible than domesticated ones, probably because they contain more fibrine and less fat. The same may be said of venison. It produces "highly stimulating chyle," hence the digestion is easy and rapid.

IX. Queer Facts about Vegetables.

HERE again, it seems curious that the tables of farmers are not better supplied with what they may so easily and cheaply raise. Three great Roman names came from their vegetables. Fabius, the great general, we should call General Bean; the great orator, Cicero, was Vice-Chancellor Pea, and the house of Lentilus got the name from the lentil. Gray peas were said to have formed the principal refreshment at the circus and theater. This refreshment would rather surprise the average circus audience nowadays. Instead, we have the familiar circus lemonade, made without lemons, peanut and prize-package bawlers. With the fall of the Roman Empire vegetables went out of fashion, and with them went pretty much all civilization. The Romans are said to have raised asparagus stems which weighed three pounds each. To match this the Jews raised radishes of a hundred pounds weight, and so hollow that a "fox and cubs might burrow therein."

B The history of cabbage is curious. The Egyptians deified it, but then they had many curious gods. They took cabbage first at their feasts. The Greeks and Romans took it as a tonic after drunkenness.

Cato thought it a panacea for all the ills of man. was thought to be a specific for paralysis. Hippocrates prescribed it boiled, with salt, for the colic, and in Athens it was thought a most excellent thing for young nursing mothers. Yet it is comparatively a short time only since cabbage became common in England. It is hardly fashionable in the United States except raw, and with oysters.

It