which provides our servants is undeniably coarse and stupid, and its

handiwork of every kind too often bears the native stamp. For all
that, English victuals are, in quality, the best in the world, and

English cookery is the wholesomest and the most appetizing known to
any temperate clime.

As in so many other of our good points, we have achieved this thing
unconsciously. Your ordinary Englishwoman engaged in cooking

probably has no other thought than to make the food masticable; but
reflect on the results, when the thing is well done, and there

appears a culinary principle. Nothing could be simpler, yet nothing
more right and reasonable. The aim of English cooking is so to deal

with the raw material of man's nourishment as to bring out, for the
healthy palate, all its natural juices and savours. And in this,

when the cook has any measure of natural or acquired skill, we most
notably succeed. Our beef is veritably beef; at its best, such beef

as can be eaten in no other country under the sun; our mutton is
mutton in its purest essence--think of a shoulder of Southdown at

the moment when the first jet of gravy starts under the carving
knife! Each of our vegetables yields its separate and

characteristic sweetness. It never occurs to us to disguise the
genuine flavour of food; if such a process be necessary, then

something is wrong with the food itself. Some wiseacre scoffed at
us as the people with only one sauce. The fact is, we have as many

sauces as we have kinds of meat; each, in the process of cookery,
yields its native sap, and this is the best of all sauces

conceivable. Only English folk know what is meant by GRAVY;
consequently, the English alone are competent to speak on the

question of sauce.
To be sure, this culinary principle presupposes food of the finest

quality. If your beef and your mutton have flavours scarcely
distinguishable, whilst both this and that might conceivably be

veal, you will go to work in quite a different way; your object must
then be to disguise, to counterfeit, to add an alien relish--in

short, to do anything EXCEPT insist upon the natural quality of the
viand. Happily, the English have never been driven to these

expedients. Be it flesh, fowl, or fish, each comes to table so
distinctly and eminently itself that by no possibility could it be

confused with anything else. Give your average cook a bit of cod,
and tell her to dress it in her own way. The good creature will

carefully boil it, and there an end of the matter; and by no
exercise of art could she have so treated the fish as to make more

manifest and enjoyable that special savour which heaven has bestowed
upon cod. Think of our array of joints; how royal is each in its

own way, and how utterly unlike any of the others. Picture a boiled
leg of mutton. It is mutton, yes, and mutton of the best; nature

has bestowed upon man no sweeter morsel; but the same joint roasted
is mutton too, and how divinely different! The point is that these

differences are natural; that, in eliciting them, we obey the
eternal law of things, and no human caprice. Your artificialrelish

is here not only needless, but offensive.
In the case of veal, we demand "stuffing." Yes, for veal is a

somewhat insipid meat, and by experience we have discovered the best
method of throwing into relief such inherentgoodness as it has.

The stuffing does not disguise, nor seek to disguise; it
accentuates. Good veal stuffing--reflect!--is in itself a triumph

of culinary instinct; so bland it is, and yet so powerful upon the
gastric juices.

Did I call veal insipid? I must add that it is only so in
comparison with English beef and mutton. When I think of the

"brown" on the edge of a really fine cut of veal--!
VIII

As so often when my thought has gone forth in praise of things
English, I find myself tormented by an after-thought--the reflection

that I have praised a time gone by. Now, in this matter of English
meat. A newspaper tells me that English beef is non-existent; that

the best meat bearing that name has merely been fed up in England
for a short time before killing. Well, well; we can only be

thankful that the quality is still so good. Real English mutton
still exists, I suppose. It would surprise me if any other country

could produce the shoulder I had yesterday.
Who knows? Perhaps even our own cookery has seen its best days. It

is a lamentable fact that the multitude of English people nowadays
never taste roasted meat; what they call by that name is baked in

the oven--a totally different thing, though it may, I admit, be
inferior only to the right roast. Oh, the sirloin of old times, the

sirloin which I can remember, thirty or forty years ago! That was
English, and no mistake, and all the history of civilization could

show nothing on the table of mankind to equal it. To clap that
joint into a steamy oven would have been a crime unpardonable by

gods and man. Have I not with my own eyes seen it turning, turning
on the spit? The scent it diffused was in itself a cure for

dyspepsia.
It is very long since I tasted a slice of boiled beef; I have a

suspicion that the thing is becoming rare. In a household such as
mine, the "round" is impracticable; of necessity it must be large,

altogether too large for our requirements. But what exquisite
memories does my mind preserve! The very colouring of a round, how

rich it is, yet how delicate, and how subtly varied! The odour is
totallydistinct from that of roast beef, and yet it is beef

incontestable. Hot, of course with carrots, it is a dish for a
king; but cold it is nobler. Oh, the thin broad slice, with just

its fringe of consistent fat!
We are sparing of condiments, but such as we use are the best that

man has invented. And we know HOW to use them. I have heard an
impatient innovator scoff at the English law on the subject of

mustard, and demand why, in the nature of things, mustard should not
be eaten with mutton. The answer is very simple; this law has been

made by the English palate--which is impeccable. I maintain it is
impeccable! Your educated Englishman is an infallible guide in all

that relates to the table. "The man of superior intellect," said
Tennyson--justifying his love of boiled beef and new potatoes--

"knows what is good to eat"; and I would extend it to all civilized
natives of our country. We are content with nothing but the finest

savours, the truest combinations; our wealth, and happy natural
circumstances, have allowed us an education of the palate of which

our natural aptitude was worthy. Think, by the bye, of those new
potatoes, just mentioned. Our cook, when dressing them, puts into

the saucepan a sprig of mint. This is genius. No otherwise could
the flavour of the vegetable be so perfectly, yet so delicately,

emphasized. The mint is there, and we know it; yet our palate knows
only the young potato.

IX
There is to me an odd pathos in the literature of vegetarianism. I

remember the day when I read these periodicals and pamphlets with
all the zest of hunger and poverty, vigorously seeking to persuade

myself that flesh was an altogethersuperfluous, and even a
repulsive, food. If ever such things fall under my eyes nowadays, I

am touched with a half humorouscompassion for the people whose
necessity, not their will, consents to this chemical view of diet.

There comes before me a vision of certain vegetarian restaurants,
where, at a minim outlay, I have often enough made believe to

satisfy my cravingstomach; where I have swallowed "savoury cutlet,"
"vegetable steak," and I know not what windy insufficiencies tricked

up under specious names. One place do I recall where you had a
complete dinner for sixpence--I dare not try to remember the items.

But well indeed do I see the faces of the guests--poor clerks and
shopboys, bloodless girls and women of many sorts--all endeavouring

to find a relish in lentil soup and haricot something-or-other. It
was a grotesquely heart-breaking sight.

I hate with a bitter hatred the names of lentils and haricots--those
pretentious cheats of the appetite, those tabulated humbugs, those

certificated aridities calling themselves human food! An ounce of
either, we are told, is equivalent to--how many pounds?--of the best

rump-steak. There are not many ounces of common sense in the brain