An excellent winter salad is made with beetroot and celery, cut in thin slices, and served--with or without onions--either with a mayonnaise sauce, or with a plain cream sauce: to every tablespoonful of cream add a teaspoonful of tarragon vinegar, a little sugar, and a suspicion of cayenne. This salad looks best served in alternate slices of beet and celery, on a flat silver dish, around the sauce. _A Gentleman Salad Maker._ Although in the metropolis it is still customary, in middle-class households, to hire "outside help" on the occasion of a dinner-party, we have not heard for some time of a salad-dresser who makes house-to-house visitations in the exercise of his profession. But, at the end of the 18th century, the Chevalier d'Allignac, who had escaped from Paris to London in the evil days of the Revolution, made a fortune in this way. He was paid at the rate of £5 a salad, and naturally, soon started his own carriage, "in order that he might pass quickly from house to house, during the dining hours of the aristocracy." High as the fee may appear to be, it is impossible to measure the width of the gulf which lies between the salad as made by a lover of the art, and the kitchen-wench; and a perfect salad is, like a perfect curry, "far above rubies." _A Memorable Salad_ was once served in my own mansion. The _chef_, who understood these matters well, when her hair was free from vine leaves, had been celebrating her birthday or some other festival; and had mixed the dressing with Colza oil. Her funeral was largely attended. CHAPTER XIV SALADS AND CONDIMENTS "Epicurean cooks Sharpen with cloyless sauce his appetite." Roman salad--Italian ditto--Various other salads--Sauce for cold mutton--Chutnine--Raw chutnee--Horse-radish sauce--Christopher North's sauce--How to serve a mackerel--_Sauce Tartare_--Ditto for sucking pig--Delights of making _Sambal_--A new language. It has, I hope, been made sufficiently clear that neither water-cress nor radishes should figure in a dressed salad; from the which I would also exclude such "small deer" as mustard and cress. There is, however, no black mark against the narrow-leaved CORN SALAD plant, or "lamb's lettuce"; and its great advantage is that it can be grown almost anywhere during the winter months, when lettuces have to be "coddled," and thereby robbed of most of their flavour.