One of the every-day English dishes that is often so bad, and can be so excellent, is the old, much-abused hashed mutton. What I am going to say about it applies equally well to every kind of meat that is warmed up. Make the sauce early in the day with stock, gravy, onions, and other vegetables, or, failing this, a few drops of two or three of the bought sauces, and one or two drops of essence of garlic. Garlic, which is excellent as a flavouring to most sauces, is such a dangerous thing to use in a kitchen that the way I manage it is this:-Put five or six cloves of garlic into a wide-necked bottle and cover them with good spirits of wine. When wanted, stick a skewer or fork into the spirit and use a drop or two. The spirit evaporates and the flavour of the garlic remains. But even in this way it must be used carefully for English palates. To return to the sauce for the hash: avoid flour, or, if it must be a little thickened, let it only be with what is called 'brown roux' in 'Dainty Dishes.' The really essential point is to make your sauce first and let it get cold, and then warm up the meat and the sauce together. If you throw meat of any kind into hot sauce, you are certain to make it hard; it contracts the fibre of the meat, and spoils it.

One of the very few ways in which wild duck can be warmed up is to mince it fine and then curry it with some well-cooked curry sauce. This is made on the same principle as the curry mentioned before; that is to say, the onion and apple (if you cannot get apples, gooseberries, or rhubarb, or any fruit will do) must be fried together, and the stock and curry powder added, well cooked, and rubbed through a fine sieve, allowed to get cool, and the mince and sauce just warmed up together before serving. For currying fish or vegetables a little milk or cream softens the sauce.

Stewed meats are seldom really good in England. The following is a good way of cooking haricot of mutton:-Set a stew-pan on the fire (an earthenware one is the best) with a little butter in it; put in some pieces of raw mutton, neatly jointed and cut up small; fry till a nice brown colour. Take out the meat, place it on a dish, add some carrots, turnips, onions, celery, and a very little sugar, and fry in the butter. When brown, replace the meat, and pour in some cold water or weak stock-enough to cover all the ingredients. Stew gently for three hours. The stewing can be done in the oven or on the hot-plate. If cooked in an earthenware pot, this stew, as well as many others done in the same way, can be sent to table in the pot with a clean napkin pinned round it.

When vegetables are scarce in winter, and you have cooked carrots, turnips, onions, celery, etc, strained from the soup the night before, it is a good plan to chop them up and warm them in a little butter with a small lump of sugar, some pepper and salt, and serve them for luncheon. If the quantity is insufficient, you can easily add some cold potatoes and cabbage.

Potatoes, now so often forbidden by doctors, seem to me excellent, wholesome food for people who do not eat meat. They can be cooked in such an endless variety of ways, though most English cooks confine themselves, as a rule, to only two or three. The secret of good mashed potatoes is to boil them dry, and beat them up with boiling milk, adding a little butter or cream. Cold milk makes them heavy, and spoils them. Another way is to put in a stew-pan some potatoes and two or three sliced onions, to boil, with only enough water to cover them. When they are done, beat them well with a fork, have ready some boiling milk and a piece of butter, stir these in by degrees as you beat, till the potatoes are like a thick puree. 'Dainty Dishes' has several recipes for cooking potatoes.

A seaweed called Laver is a delicious, wholesome, and uncommon vegetable in London in November and December. It is to be bought at any of the really good grocers', not greengrocers'. The London supply, I believe, comes from Devonshire, prepared and cooked, and requires nothing beyond a little stock and butter to moisten it when it is warmed up. It should be served in a small copper saucepan with a lamp under it, as it is not good unless very hot indeed. For helping it a small wooden spoon is better than a silver one; at least, so it used to be served in old days in the North, when I remember it as a child. Half a lemon is sent up with it. A good many people do not like it, I am bound to confess; but those who do, find it a treat they look forward to-and it is good either by itself or with any roast meat, especially mutton.

The same little copper saucepan is useful for a wild duck sauce which I always make on the table. The saucepan, on a spirit-lamp, comes up with some gravy in it; I then squeeze in half or all of a lemon, according to quantity required, and add a little red wine-Port is the best-and some Cayenne pepper. When warm, I pour it over the slices of wild duck on each plate. Wild duck should be very lightly roasted.

Rice plays a large part in our cooking all the year round; Patna is nearly always the best. Risotto a la Milanese is an original Italian recipe:-Cut up four onions very fine, and fry a nice brown. Throw into the stew-pan 1 lb. of rice, and let it slightly colour; then moisten with good stock, and cook it for 35 minutes. Season with pepper and salt, a little nutmeg, and Parmesan cheese. Serve very hot. Chopped truffles or mushrooms may be added.

An excellent winter salad for serving with wild duck and many other birds is watercress, carefully picked and washed, pieces of orange (cut as described below for the compote), all the juice of the oranges, and a few drops of good salad oil added just before serving.

Orange compote depends almost entirely on the goodness of the oranges, and on the way they are cut. The best plan is to stick them on a fork, and with a sharp-pointed kitchen knife remove, at one cutting, all the peel and all the white. Then, with the sharp point of a knife, cut out all the pieces of orange between the white lines, leaving the white in the middle. Save all the juice, and cut small shreds of the peel without any white, put them into some water with sugar and the juice, and, if the oranges are very sweet, add a little lemon juice. Boil up this syrup, pour it over the pieces of orange, and allow it to cool. This is a good foundation for any winter compote. Apricots, bananas, or pineapple, all can be added, separately or together; and a few dried cherries stewed improve the appearance. Another excellent winter compote is made by cutting up a ripe pineapple (often so cheap), stewing the peel in a syrup, to which is added the juice that runs out of the pineapple, and a little ginger. Strain, and pour it boiling over the pieces of pineapple. A few bananas cut up and added to the pineapple improve it.

Two excellent ways of serving cold chicken for small parties or suppers are the following:-Order the day before from a good baker some extra small dinner-rolls, cut off the tops, and take out the crumb. Mince a little chicken and ham or tongue; it takes a very small quantity of either. Mix with well-made Mayonnaise sauce, a little chopped parsley, and a very little onion. Put this into the rolls, and replace the small round top on each. Finger rolls, cut in half and the crumb taken out, can be done in the same way.

The other way is to make some little open sandwiches-we call them Barrington sandwiches-in the following manner:-Butter some moderately thick slices of a good tin loaf, and cut them into medium-sized rounds. Lay across them, in pieces cut quite narrow, some breast of cold chicken, a quarter of an anchovy, and a thin shred of green gherkin. These form narrow bars of green, white, and red across the slices of bread. Trim the edges, and serve on a plate one laid partly over the other, like cutlets.

I particularly want to say a last word to housekeepers who are anxious to indulge in hospitality. Hospitality should mean, to my mind, not altering our whole way of living, but giving the best of our habitual food. For this nothing is so telling, whether the dinner be large or small, as the procuring of some special seasonable luxury. It is well worth taking the trouble to get any such luxuries, not from the usual shop in your neighbourhood, but from the very best shop you know of for each speciality, whether fish, game, vegetable, Italian goods more especially, fruit (fresh or bottled), dessert, biscuits, or cake. The really good housekeeper is alert to learn where the best things come from, and to take hints wherever she goes. One should never through idleness give up getting the best things. If you go to the expense of entertaining at all, it makes little difference in the way of money whether you deal at a specially good shop or a second-rate one, and the results at your table are very different indeed.

London shops are now full of sun-dried American fruits, principally apples and apricots. These appear to me to be safer and wholesomer, particularly for children, than tinned or bottled fruit. If carefully carried out, the following recipe makes them excellent:-Select the fruit you intend to use, and rinse it thoroughly in clear, fresh water; then place it in a dish with sufficient water to cover it, and allow it to soak for ten or fifteen hours before it is required for use. After this, put it in the vessel in which it is to be cooked (which ought, of course, to be earthenware), simmer it slowly, letting it come just once in a way to the boil, until it is thoroughly cooked. If the water in which the fruit was soaked is thrown away, and fresh water substituted, much of the flavour and nutriment of the fruit will be lost. Sufficient sugar should be added, when the fruit is nearly done, to make it palatable. Dried fruit cooked in this way can be served either hot or cold, as may be desired. As a rule, when allowed to cool, it will be fully as palatable as if eaten warm. By cooking dried fruit according to this method, there will be secured a wholesome and palatable dish, full flavoured, and resembling as near as possible, in appearance, size, and taste, the original fresh product.

This also is good:-Bavarois of fruit, bottled or fresh. Warm the fruit and rub it through a hair sieve, and add just enough isinglass, previously melted in a little water, to set the fruit when cold. Add some cream, and pour into a mould, keeping back a little fruit to make a syrup, which should be poured round before serving. Icing improves the dish.