Likewise the English cook has always gone in rather extensively for
boiling things. When in doubt she boiled. But it takes a lot of
retouching to restore to a piece of boiled meat the juicy essences
that have been simmered and drenched out of it. Since the English
people, with such admirable English thoroughness, cut down on fats and
oils and bacon garnishments, so that the greases might be conserved
for the fighting forces; and since they have so largely had to do
without imported spices and condiments, because the cargo spaces in
the ships coming in were needed for military essentials, the boiled
dishes of England appear to have lost most of their taste.

You can do a lot of browsing about at an English table these days and
come away ostensibly filled; but inside you there will be a persistent
unsatisfied feeling, all the same, which is partly due, no doubt, to
the lack of sweetening and partly due to the lack of fats, but due
most of all, I think, to a natural disappointment in the results. In
the old times a man didn't feel that he had dined well in England
unless for an hour or two afterward he had the comfortable gorged
sensation of a python full of pigeons.

I shall never forget the first meals I had on English soil, this
latest trip. At the port where we landed, in the early afternoon of a
raw day, you could get tea if you cared for tea, which I do not; but
there was no sugar--only saccharine--to sweeten it with, and no rich
cream, or even skim milk, available with which to dilute it. The
accompanying buns had a flat, dry, floury taste, and the portions of
butter served with them were very homoeopathic indeed as to size and
very oleomargarinish as to flavour.

Going up to London we rode in a train that was crowded and darkened.