If you want to cook Italian pastes in milk or stock, whichever you use should be boiling : parboil the paste in boiling water for five minutes to clean it, drain it carefully, and turn it into the stock or milk also boiling as the case may be to finish cooking.

The accepted form of serving maccaroni with Englishmen is either swimming in white sauce round a boiled fowl, or turkey, or in a pie-dish "au gratin." In the former fashion it is generally presented in such a flabby, tasteless manner, that the general unpopularity of Italian pastes may be easily accounted for. The "au gratin" is better understood perhaps, but even there, there is room for improvement.

"Maccaroni au gratin:" - First boil the maccaroni as I have laid down, if in milk or stock, so much the better. Well butter a pie-dish, arrange the maccaroni therein neatly, give it a dusting with black pepper and salt, pour round it a large cupful of good sauce blonde (q. v., page 82) in which you have mixed two ounces of grated cheese : let this run well in amongst the bed of maccaroni, and shake over the surface a liberal coating of grated cheese. Make this thoroughly hot, in the oven, brown the surface of the cheese by passing a hot iron about half an inch above it, and send it up.

Maccaroni "au gratin" should be nice and moist: you can use cream instead of sauce blonde if you like, and tomato puree may be introduced in its composition. A little minced fish such as herring, prawns, lobster, or anchovy, may be dotted about amongst the maccaroni, and with minced ham and chicken, or tongue and chicken, you can make a capital home-dinner entree, following in other respects the ordinary recipe.

"Maccaroni a l' Italienne" will be found in Chapter XIX (On Luncheons), (page 189).

"Maccaroni a la Milanaise" another excellent method.

may be described as follows :- Boil two ounces of macca-roni, and keep it hot in its own pan after draining. Make a breakfast-cupful of good chicken broth flavoured with an onion, sweet herbs, and black pepper corns. With that make a nice "veloute au frontage" in this way:- Melt an ounce of butter in a sauce-pan, stir into it a dessert-spoonful of flour, mix them to a paste, and by degrees pour in the hot chicken broth; as this is thickening, add to it two ounces of grated cheese, or Parmesan from the bottle, a tea-spoonful of powdered mustard, salt, and "spiced pepper," at discretion; continue to stir the sauce until it reaches a creamy thickness, when you can finish it off the fire by a table-spoonful of cream, or the yolks of two raw eggs beaten separately. Now, stir the sauce into the hot boiled maccaroni, and serve immediately.

The association of tomatoes with maccaroni seems to be as happy as that of green peas with a duckling, egg sauce with saltfish, or red currant jelly with a well hung saddle. These vegetables are generally applied in the form of puree, to achieve which you must cut them into quarters, trim them from stalk, etc., and put them into a sauce-pan with an ounce of butter, and one onion sliced in rings, a few pepper corns, three cloves of garlic, a tea-spoonful of dried basil, and a little salt; boil till the quarters are quite soft, and then turn the contents of the sauce-pan out upon a hair sieve. Let the watery part escape, you do not want it, and when thus drained, pick out the garlic, and pepper corns, and rub the vegetable through the sieve with a wooden spoon : the pulp that comes through, - well peppered with black pepper, - must be heated again with a lump of butter and a little flour before it is mixed with the maccaroni.

Maccaroni with "conserva di pomi d'oro" is an Italian delicacy. The conserva is, as may readily be supposed, a regular jam made by reducing a good quantity of the puree aforesaid in a sauce-pan over the fire, stirring it without ceasing until it attains the consistency of thin paste, This well seasoned with salt and pepper may be preserved in bottles, and if securely corked, and waxed, will keep well. During their season, tomatoes absolutely rot in the ground in many a private garden in this Presidency : why permit such waste? the trouble of making a few bottles of this conserve would be amply repaid in the hot weather when the plants have died down. A spoonful or two of the preserve, thinned with a very little stock, and with a pat of butter worked into it, would, at all times, be handy for dressing maccaroni. A dusting of finely grated cheese should, of course, accompany it.

Here is a 'foreign composition' which I commend to the attention of those who like Italian cookery:- Mince a couple of cloves of garlic, a shallot, three anchovies, boned and well wiped from the tin oil, and four olives, put the mince into a small sauce-pan with three table-spoonfuls of the best salad oil, boil till the bits of garlic and onion begin to brown, and then turn the mixture into a sauce-pan containing a large dish of hot-boiled macca-roni, stir it well, and serve. An Italian cook would probably put in half a dozen, or more, cloves of garlic : in the proportions I have given, however, I do not think the taste of the bulb will be considered more prononce than it is in chutneys, and numerous dishes made in India which we eat without murmuring.

Several dishes will be found in my menus in which mac-caroni figures, for I have the highest opinion of its merits in savoury cookery. The rules I have given will, I think, be found reliable with respect to all kinds of Italian paste, Lasagne, Cannelli, Mostacciuoli, etc., and I sincerely hope that what I have said may be the means of drawing my readers' attention to a comestible which deserves far greater consideration than Englishmen, as a rule, bestow upon it. An inexpensive article of food which, with a little study, may be made a luxury, is surely a thing that the banished lover of good things can ill afford to despise.

I think I am right in saying that there are very few establishments in India in which a day passes without the preparation of rice for the table. It is, as a rule, served plainly boiled, and in that form can rarely be found fault with. Friend Ramasamy commits, as I have endeavoured on several occasions to point out, mistakes of divers kinds, and of various degrees in the scale of culinary atrocities, but failure in the cooking of rice is certainly not one of them. Having at our command, then, a species of farinaceous food, cheap, nutritive, of excellent quality, and which our cooks can dress to perfection, do we take full advantage of the many opportunities we possess of develop-ing its resources? I am inclined to think that we do not. I have therefore introduced the subject in close connection with maccaroni advisedly, for it will be seen that in the better treatment of rice, the laws that govern the cookery of Italian pastes are often similar.