Sometimes one has a few leeks, a half cauliflower, a handful each of peas and beans. Instead of currying these vegetables (which removes all distinctive flavor from them) cook them gently, and toss them when cold in a good salad dressing. If you can give the yolk of an egg to it, so much the better. Any cold meat is improved by a side dish of this sort. The vegetables that one can curry with advantage are large marrows, cut into cubes, turnips, potatoes, parsnips.
Take some fine firm tomatoes, not very ripe. Turn them with the stalk side up and cut a slice off the top with a sharp knife. Take out the inside with a teaspoon. Break into each tomato a pullet's egg, sprinkle with pepper and salt. The inside of the tomato you will pass through a fine wire sieve and it will be a thick liquor; mix it with bread-crumbs, salt, pepper, and some grated cheese till quite thick. Put this mixture on the top of each egg and place all in the oven for three or four minutes, so that the eggs are only just set and no more.
Take some good sized carrots, and after washing them well and cutting off the green tuft, cut each one across about two and a half inches from the leaves. Scoop out the inside yellow part, leaving a case of the redder part and a piece to form the bottom, at the smaller end. Then stew the cases very gently till a little tender, but not quite soft. Take them out of the water, drain them, and then placing each on its small end, fill up with hot chopped mushrooms, that have been tossed in butter. Arrange in a circle on a dish, and garnish with small sprigs of carrot leaves. The insides that you have scooped out are to be used for soup flavoring.
One should not let the tips of this vegetable touch the water. Take your bundle, dip the stalks in warm water to remove any dust, and the tips also, if it is necessary. Then tie the bundle round with tape, keeping the ends of stalks even so that it will stand upright. Place them in boiling water with the heads just sticking out, and keep them like that. In this way the heads, which are very tender, will be cooked in the steam and will not drop off.
Butter a pie-dish, preferably a fireproof china dish. Open a tin of tomatoes and remove as much skin as you can if they are the unpeeled kind. Put a handful of crumbled brown bread in the dish with lumps of butter, then pour on that some tomatoes, dust with pepper and salt, then more bread, and so on, finishing at the last with lumps of butter, and a thick sprinkling of grated cheese. Bake for twenty minutes.