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Breakfast and Luncheon

The first meal of the day is, of course, breakfast. I believe a substantial breakfast to be most conducive to good health, yet too often we find this meal the most neglected of the day. A good breakfast and a light lunch are far better than a light breakfast and a heavy lunch. The cook should always send up to the breakfast-table any cold joint of meat that is in the house; the cold joint must be placed on a good-sized clean dish, all wafers of fat that have settled from the gravy being first removed, and the whole joint nicely ornamented with fresh parsley. The parsley that has decorated a cold joint will always do to use for cooking purposes, so there is no need to ornament the meat with a stingy hand. One of the most common of breakfast dishes is fried bacon. Here, again, let the cook be careful to have the dish thoroughly hot, or else the fat from the bacon will settle and get cold in the dish, and make it look far from tempting. Fried bacon is a very good proof of a cook for one reason--viz. it tests that elementary principle of cooking, cleanliness. Next time you have a dish of hot fried bacon, observe the fat, and see if it is streaked with black; if so, it shows the cook does not properly clean her frying-pans, and no good cooking can ever proceed from dirty cooking utensils. Bloaters should always be split open like a haddock, and cooked on a gridiron kept for the purpose. The gridiron should be rubbed with a piece of mutton fat to prevent the bloater from sticking. After the bloater is cooked, rub a little piece of butter over the inside, which makes it look rich and moist, and improves the flavour. One great advantage of cooking bloaters this way is, you avoid that dreadful gush of offensive steam that issues forth on opening them when they are cooked without first being treated as described above. Indeed, the great drawback to this fish is the unpleasant odour. In poaching eggs, it will be found that they assume a white appearance when a little drop of vinegar is mixed with the boiling water in which they are poached. Great care should be taken, however, to drain off the water from the flat strainer used for taking out the eggs, as they will otherwise taste acid. In frying eggs, be sure to trim them so as to have the yolk in the centre, surrounded by a neat rim of white. Too much fat in the frying-pan is conducive to increasing the large bubbles, and results sometimes even in breaking the yolks of the eggs. Take care also that the fire is not too fierce, as then the under surface of the eggs will get burnt and taste disagreeable. Sausages are always best home-made, for the most convincing of reasons--viz. that you then, and only then, know what is in them. Every house should have a small sausage machine, which, in addition to making simply sausages, will make rissoles, forcemeats of all kinds, as well as croquettes. Indeed, a small hand sausage machine repays itself quicker than almost any other kind of kitchen utensil. Sausages are best served up on toast; then the fat that runs from them can be poured over them and soaked up and eaten, and not emptied to help to swell that household disgrace--the cook's grease-box. Kidneys should be cooked so that they retain the red gravy: they are nicest done on the gridiron. After they are taken off, a little piece of butter should be placed in the inside of each, and a tiny pinch of chopped parsley dropped on the butter.

In many houses it will be found that the staple breakfast dish is cold bacon and boiled eggs. Now, although new-laid eggs are very nice boiled, yet they are often difficult to get, and when bought are, especially in the neighbourhoods of large towns, very expensive. Shop eggs are only eaten boiled by persons whose palates are, to say the least, not very keen. Why not, however, make the eggs you boil and the butter you spread on your bread into a savoury omelet? Take, say, three eggs, two ounces of butter, a little pepper and salt, a tea-spoonful of chopped parsley, and a piece of onion or shallot the size of the top of the first finger, and chop that finely with the parsley, and you have a far more palatable method of serving the eggs. The omelet, being eaten with plain bread, is quite as economical, and far nicer. Luncheon is generally a make-up meal, at which it is lawful to serve up half fowls and cut tarts, and is so comprised in the details of that greater meal, dinner, that, simply observing that what is left from dinner can generally be utilised at lunch, we will at once proceed to discuss that great event of the day, and will run briefly through the general principles to be observed in serving a dinner for, say, ten or more persons.