If you have the dressing for salad made before a dinner, put it into the bottom of the salad dish; then (having cut it up) lay the salad upon it, and let it rest till it is to be eaten, as stirring it will injure it.
You may decorate the top of the salad with slices of red beet, and with the hard white of the eggs cut into rings.
Scrape and wash it well, and let it lie in cold water till shortly before it goes to table; then dry it in a cloth, trim it, and split down the stalks almost to the bottom, leaving on a few green leaves. Send it to table in a celery glass, and eat it with salt only; or chop it fine, and make a salad dressing for it.
To prepare radishes for eating, wash them and lay them in clean cold water as soon as they are brought in. Shortly before they go to table, scrape off the thin outside skin, trim the sharp end, cut off the leaves at the top, leaving the stalks about an inch long, and put them on a small dish. Eat them with salt.
Radishes should not be eaten the day after they are pulled, as they are extremely unwholesome if not quite fresh.
The thick white radishes, after being scraped and trimmed, should be split or cleft in four, half way down from the top.
The large Spanish chestnuts are the best for roasting. Cut a slit in the shell of every one to prevent their bursting when hot. Put them into a pan, and set them over a charcoal furnace till they are thoroughly roasted; stirring them up frequently and taking care hot to let them burn. When they are done, peel off the shells, and send the chestnuts to table wrapped up in a napkin to keep them warm.
Chestnuts should always be roasted or boiled before they are eaten.
These nuts are never eaten raw. Put them, with their shells on, into an iron pan, and set them in an oven; or you may do them in a skillet on hot coals. A large quantity may be roasted in an iron pot over the fire. Stir them frequently, taking one out from time to time, and breaking it to try if they are done.
There is no infallible mode of ascertaining the freshness of an egg before you break it, but unless an egg is perfectly good, it is unfit for any purpose whatever, and will spoil whatever it is mixed with. You may judge with tolerable accuracy of the state of an egg by holding it against the sun or the candle, and if the yolk, as you see it through the shell, appears round, and the white thin and clear, it is most probably a good one; but if the yolk looks broken, and the white thick and cloudy, the egg is certainly bad. You may try the freshness of eggs by putting them into a pan of cold water. Those that sink the soonest are the freshest; those that are stale or addled will float on the surface.