HORS D’OEUVRES

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 86, 2 July 1927, Page 20

HORS D’OEUVRES

If you are a person of imagination you will enjoy serving hors d'oeuvres as your first course at luncheon or dinner, so great are the possibilities for interesting variety- And appetisers are also truly what their name indicates. They are often used as a main course for luncheon. In France indeed few luncheons are considered complete without hors d’oeuvres of which a fascinating array for your choice is usually presented in a restaurant. More and more the hors d’oeuvres habit is growing in this country among people of discriminating taste. Special things can be kept on hand in tins or jars and left-overs can often be appetisingly included. Pate de Foie Gras This is the choicest of all hors d’oeuvres It is the liver obtained from geese that have been fed one hundred pounds of partially cooked corn meal in six weeks. One liver may weigh onehalf to ljUbs. It is cooked with special spices and truffles and exported in sealed pots lined with force-meat. Chill it and serve from the jar or by teaspoonfuls on a heart leaf of lettuce or on toast as a first course. It may also be shaped in balls and served in paper cups, decorated with a design in truffle and covered with aspic, or on a serving dish surrounded with chopped aspic jelly and half slices of lemon. Egg in Ramekin With Pate de Foie Gras Put a thin slice of ham in the bottom of small ramekin dishes. In each dish place a French poached egg, cover with aspic jelly and chill. Serve with a spoonful of pate de foie gras on top of each one. Fish Hors d’Oeuvres Several kinds of small fish in tins and jars are obtainable. 1. Caviar, the roe of the sturgeon, comes from Russia and vies with pate de foie gras in its popularity with epicures. Chill the caviar and serve on toast with lemon and cress. 2. Serve sardines, anchovies, bloaters, herring fillets and “roll mops” as they come from the tin with sections of , lemon or very thin slices of onion. 3. Serve large sardines on strips of toast of the same size garnished with a fine border and tiny spots of creamed butter seasoned -with mustard, forced from a paper pastry bag with a fine hole in the end.

4. Serve tinned salmon on lettuce with sauce Tartare or mayonnaise dressing and dice of cucumber or bits of endive.

5. Serve any cooked white fish in flakes mixed with mayonnaise dressing- _

6. Shrimp, fresh, make attractive hors d’oeuvres. Cook fresh shrimps 15 minutes in boiling salted water, remove shells and intestinal veins. (a) Break in pieces, add an equal amount of cold cooked rice, moisten with mayonnaise dressing and serve in tiny cream puffs. (b) Break in pieces, mix with mayonnaise dressing and cucumber dice and serve in boats or small patty cases made from puff paste. 7. Lay a raw oyster in cocktail sauce until well seasoned. Drain, coat with Chaudfroid sauce, put in a cool place and when firm garnish with a mint leaf growing out of a truffle flower pot with a bit of red at the base. Glaze with aspic jelly and pipe with a border of paprika butter around the edge of the oyster. Hard-Boiled Egg Hors d’Oeuvres 1. On a bed of watercress arrange fluted slices cut from a very large cucumber. Put a slice of hard-cooked egg on top of the cucumber and two strips of olive or slice of stuffed olive on each slice of egg. 2. Cut a tomato in thick slices. On each slice put a thick slice of hardcooked egg and lay four strips of ham crosswise over the top. 3. Cut hai'd-cooked egg in half lengthwise. Place cut side down on shredded lettuce or on a slice of tomato on a serving dish, cover with mayonnaise dressing and sprinkle with truffle finely chopped or garnish with four very fine strips of anchovy laid crosswise on top. Tomato Hors d’Oeuvres 1. Stuff tiny tomatoes with cooked rice mixed with cooked chicken livers chopped, or hard-cooked egg chopped. Moisten with mayonnaise dressing. 2. Cut tomatoes in slices, cover with chopped beet and chopped onion mixed and moistened with mayonnaise dressing. 3. Cut tomatoes in slices, cover with mayonnaise and sprinkle with chopped onion. 4. Cut tomato and onion in very thin slices and then in halves, arrange alternating and overlapping on serving dish and sprinkle with chopped parsley. Pimiento cups may be used like any stuffed tomato. Fill with chicken salad, invert on nest -of lettuce leaves or shredded lettuce and garnish with a leaf made from green pepper. Surround i

leaf with a border of butter-coloured green and forced through a pastry bag and tube. Vegetable Salads Used as Hors cTOeuvres 1. Radishes, plain or cut to make radish roses, are simple to include. 2 Cut small cucumber in halves and shape like boats. Remove centre and nil with small bits of cooked vegetable mixed with mayonnaise dressing and flavoured with bits of anchovy. o Slice cucumber, remove centre, soak in salt water 30 minutes (it desired), drain, sprinkle with chopped parsley and serve with French dress--1! 1 p Serve flowerets of cold cooked cauliflower on shredded lettuce with French dressing. 5 Mix equal parts chopped pickled beet and shredded green pepper and serve on lettuce. . , 6. Mix cold cooked peas with an equal amount of cooked rice ana mayonnaise dressing. . 7. Colour cream cheese with cat. up to make it pink and use to stuff stalks “VusT'a vegetable salad composed of coid cooked string beans cut in tiny diamonds, small green_ peas ani «>■ rot balls moistened with mayonnaise dressing as an hors d oeu^io. 9. Another interesting salad combination that may be served as an hors d’oeuvre is potato salad t° vhich tint balls of sausage meat have been nddsid. 10 Various kinds of sausages cut in thin'slices are frequently served as an Olives, stuffed, plain and ripe, are always welcome. MEN FRIENDS By DORIS JAMES Many a girl will tell you that she prefers men friends, but how much friendship really exists? . It is one thing to be tak<Ai out by a man to dances, and another really to be a friend with him. There are very few girls who have the capacity to be “good pals” with a man, and very few mixed friendships that stand the test of time. „ Girls and boys who grow up together in the same town rarely remain mends when they go out into the world. One or other falls in love and the friendship ends because the fiancee is jealous. Also deep down in the human heart is the desire to flirt. Eve cannot help coquetting, even with a boy she has known from childhood. Adam, manlike falls to the enchantress and everything is spoilt. He becomes moody and irritable, threatens dark and terrible deeds. Eve gets annoyed and refuses to go out with him. That friendship is over.

NO REAL EQUALITY But the real drawback to a mixed friendship is that there is not and never can be, real equality of the sexes. A girl cannot ring up a man and say, “Come along to the pictures, or “Let’s go to a show,” because he is not content that each pays an equal Nor can a girl go about very much with one man without scandalous tongues wagging, and though one may not mind what people think, it is annoying to have the neighbourhood buzzing with untrue statements. And what girl is prepared to share a man friend with any other girl? She at once assumes proprietary airs if she sees him attracted elsewhere. EXPENSIVE FRIENDSHIP * Then there is the man’s point of view. Most men, if they are taking a girl out, want her to have a good time. A man cannot afford lavish entertainment very often, and one cannot make friends —male or female —sitting in the family circle. Besides, though a man usually comes to a girl for sympathy, for companionship and talking about things in general, he prefers one of his own sex. Though having a jolly good time is a part of friendship, the meeting of mind with mind plays just as important a part. TALKING THINGS OVER And one does need a friend of one's own sex to talk things over with. After a dance, for instance, a girl wants to talk about the other girls’ frocks, who danced with who, and how so-and-so danced. She can’t do it in the same way with a man—he isn’t interested and anyhow he’s busy talking to other men of how so-and-so was like a lump of lead, and how another girl trod on his toes. Married women sometimes _ enjoy quite a good friendship with their husband’s friends, but here, again, jealousy creeps in. A man never feels sure that there is nothing in it, and rather than have any ill-feeling the wife usually gives it up. Perhaps in 2000 A.D. we shall have progressed to such a lofty plane that we can have friendships irrespective of sex, but I doubt it. The girl who relies on “men friends” finds that they almost invariably let her down; that, in the end, she finds her own sex the better.