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Pig's Head Galantine
Take the head of a large butcher's porker cut off with a good part of the neck attached. Sings off any remaining hairs and trim it clean. Commence at the throat and bone it carefully, then put it in pickle for 3 or 4 days. Stuff it with sausage meat (or, any forcemeat used for boned turkeys will do) and strips of red tongue and fat bacon, and season with aromatic spiced salt. Form it in its natural shape, sew the cuts with cotton twine, roll up tightly in a cloth and boil 5 or 6 hours in stock seasoned well with soup vegetables, salt, pepper and sage, and, if so required, with a bottle of white wine. But with the wine stock use thyme instead of sage. When done let it cool in the liquor till it can be handled with ease, then take off the cloth and bind the head again with bands of cloth, drawing it into the shape it is to have when cold.
Set the ears up, and if curled by boiling flatten them with split pieces of wood. When quite cold unwind the bandage, draw out the sewing twine, trim the head and glaze it in the ways directed for roast hams. "'I had hoped,' said Glaucus, in a melancholy tone, 'to have procured you some oysters from Britain; but the winds that were so cruel to Caesar have forbid us the oysters. * * * They want the richness of the Brundusium oyster, but at Rome no supper is complete without them.'" --Last Days of Pompeii. "And glittering blocks of colored ice." "Ices and gentle drinks such as the fancy of America could alone devise." --Lothair.
In the entire list of foreign royal minus, some four score in number, previously ins ancestor these columns, only one has huitres auz citrons, or raw oysters at all, and this is at the ducal palace of Hesse Darmstadt, in 1868, and the oysters preceded the meal.
However, the fashion cannot be very new, for they tell us the emperor Heliogabalus used to eat 400 Brundusium Blue Points every morning, to give himself an appetite for his breakfast.
According to a writer in Leslie's Monthly, speaking for New York, the rule which declares oysters good only in the months spelled with "r" is but little regarded now, and the trade is becoming curiously systematized so that there is a different crop of oysters for different seasons and different purposes. The Prince's Bay's ru'e almost exclusively in the summer months, succeeded by Sounds and Mill Ponds. The winter months bring the Rockaways and East Rivers, and the Blue Points, most esteemed, predominate through the spring. There are long Saddle Rocks for roasts and broils; East Rivers and Virginias for stews, while for a raw dish the round, fat, large Blue Points and Shrewsburys are preferred.
The effort at luxury now is to serve raw oysters in hollowed blocks of ice, and they might as well be in clear colored ices, sea green and ocean blue, frozen in form with shells and pebbles-much easier to freeze than sweet ices and mousses glacees. "`What will your worship please to take for sup-supper?' inquired the host. 'I have a cold capon, and a cold ham, and a famous cold pasty; and I can fry you some noble crimson trout from the Darent, or silver eels, as you may like best, and I can add a dish of rare crayfish from the Cray.' `Give me the trout and the capon,' replied Chaucer. 'And, hark ye, while you are preparing supper, bring me a flask of red Gascoigne wine and a manchet.'" --James' Merry England.