For a Luncheon

Barely a recipe by modern standards — it is an assembly note from an era when hostesses were expected to fill in the rest. The useful details are in what it leaves out.

• What a French roll wasA small crusty white roll, generally closer to a modern petit pain or a cut length of baguette than to a soft dinner roll, though the term covered a range of breads in period cookbooks. A soft roll collapses once hollowed; you want a firm crust that holds its shape as a shell.
• Hollowing it outSplit lengthwise and pull the crumb out with your fingers, leaving a wall about a quarter inch thick all round. Save the crumb for breadcrumbs. Toasting the hollowed halves briefly and letting them cool gives a dry inner surface that resists the dressing.
• The hinge: fill at the last minuteMayonnaise-dressed salad in a bread shell turns the crust to paste within the hour. Prepare shells and salad separately, keep both cold, and fill just before the plates go out.
• The saladNeither salad is specified because both were standard: cooked chicken breast or cooked lobster meat cut in neat dice, bound with mayonnaise, often with celery. Use well-chilled cooked meat and keep the filled rolls under refrigeration if there is any delay.
• "Conelike receptacles"A quirk of the original — a split roll is a boat, not a cone. The writer seems to mean the pointed ends of the roll halves. Read it as "the hollowed shells" and do not try to make anything conical.
• Grape leavesUsed here purely as a plate liner, in the Victorian habit of setting cold food on foliage. If you want that look, use fresh unsprayed leaves rinsed and dried, or brined vine leaves rinsed of their salt; ordinary garden leaves of unknown provenance are best left out.
• YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. Reckon one roll per person as a luncheon course, or two if it is the whole of the meal, filling each with as much salad as the shell will hold.