however, on the Western Continent has been a snare to American cooks, who
have yielded to an absorbing passion for hot corn-cakes.

France is, of course, the land in which the Muse of cooking is native.
"If we turn north towards Belgium," says a modern author, "we shall find
much that is good in cooking and eating known, if not universally
practised." He has also made the discovery that the Belgian air and
climate are admirably suited to develop the best qualities of Burgundy.
It is from these favoured and ingenious people that England ought to
learn a lesson, or rather a good many lessons. To begin at the
beginning, with soup, does not every one know that all domestic soups in
England, which bear French names, are really the same soup, just as
almost all puddings are, or may be, called cabinet pudding? The one word
"Julienne" covers all the watery, chill and tasteless, or terribly salt,
decoctions, in which a few shreds of vegetables appear drifting through
the illimitable inane. Other names are given at will by the help of a
cookery-book and a French dictionary; but all these soups, at bottom, are
attempts to be Julienne soup. The idea of looking on soup "as a vehicle
for applying to the palate certain herbal flavours," is remote indeed
from the Plain Cook's mind. There is a deeply rooted conviction in her
inmost soul that all vegetables, which are not potatoes or cabbages,
partake of the nature of evil. As to eating vegetables apart from meat,
it was once as hard to get English domestics to let you do that, as to
get a Cretan cook to serve woodcock with the trail. "_Kopros_ is not a
thing to be eaten," says the Cretan, according to a traveller; and the
natural heart of the English race regards vegetables, when eaten as a
_plat_ apart, with equal disfavour. Probably the market gardener's
ignorance and conservatism are partly in fault. Cabbage he knows, and
potatoes he knows, but what are pennyroyal and chervil? He has
cauliflower for you, but never says, "Here is rue for you, and rosemary