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instead of putting it in the sauce. The Spanish sauce is not indispensable, for the hlcinc in which the cardoons have been cooked, if it be more highly flavoured and thickened with butter and flour, will do for a sauce, only the dish will not be, of course, so distingue.

With “ tinned” cardoons the mode of proceeding is as follows :

Take a tin, open it, drain off the liquor, and lay the cardoons in a stewpan with enough well-flavoured stock to cover them. Let this remain on the fire just long enough to warm the cardoons through. Procure some large pieces of marrow by getting the butcher to break the bones for you, and lay the marrow in a saucepan with cold water and salt for about an hour ; then pour off the water, replace it with fresh salted water, and put the saucepan on the fire. As soon as the water boils, take the saucepan off the fire, and let the marrow remain in the water till wanted. Fry in butter some well-shaped sippets of bread ; cut up the marrow, and place a piece of it on each sippet. Dispose these round a dish ; pour some brown sauce, reduced almost to a glaze, in the middle ; lay the cardoons on it, and serve.

Seakale and celery, likewise, can be cooked as are cardoons ; but the former is best plainly boiled, as described before. Some fine heads of celery, or cardoons, stewed in a Mane, as above, then served with a well- flavoured, clear gravy, constitute the dish called celeri, or Cardons au jus; and, if served with a well-made white sauce, you have celeri, or Cardons a la creme.

A simpler mode of dressing all these things is to let them simmer, after they have been duly parboiled, in any stock or broth there may be in the kitchen, and when they are cooked to thicken and flavour the liquor, which forms the sauce. Tomato sauce goes very well with them also, as

VEGETABLES.

it does with almost everything eatable ; but it must be proper tomato sauce, not an infusion of capsicum in vinegar with some tomato pulp floating in it. Lastly, they may be eaten with melted butter made with egg-yolks and lemon juice ; and this form more nearly approaches the English fashion of eating vegetables.

One of the prettiest dishes of vegetables I know of consists of a cauliflower of ivory whiteness resting upon a bed of well-made tomato sauce. To boil a cauliflower : after it has been trimmed and soaked in salted water for some time, it should be put in plenty of fast boiling water, with a due quantity of salt. Care should be taken not to overboil it. Try the stem with a thin iron skewer, and the moment it is soft remove the saucepan from the fire, and put the cauliflower to drain on a hair sieve. When two or more cauliflowers are used, they should be moulded into one for serving. To do this ; when they are boiled cut off the stalk, and dispose the pieces of cauli- flower head downwards in a basin ; press them gently together, turn them out dexterously on a dish, and two or three small cauliflowers will by this means present the appearance of one large one. Care must be taken to have the basin quite hot, and to operate quickly. This cannot very well be done with the small purple cauliflower or brocoli ; but all the formulae given for cauliflowers proper may be applied to brocoli likewise.

Instead of tomato sauce, the following sauces may be used : Caper sauce, gherkin sauce, sauce jqiquante, sauce blanche, Bechamel, or maitre d’hutel. The sauce should be put into the dish, and the cauliflowers laid upon it ; but if the moulding process has not been successful, or if the cauliflowers are not very nice-looking, then pour the sauce over them so as to hide their deformity.

The very best way, however, to treat cauliflowers is au