Rialto, where on market mornings I have seen it driving a prodigious
business with peasants, gondoliers, and laborers. Its more limited
resources consist chiefly of fried eels, fish, polenta, and
_sguassetto_. The latter is a true _roba veneziana_, and is a
loud-flavored broth, made of those desperate scraps of meat which are
found impracticable even by the sausage-makers. Another, but more delicate
dish, peculiar to the place, is the clotted blood of poultry, fried in
slices with onions. A great number of the families of the poor breakfast
at these shops very abundantly, for three soldi each person.

In Venice every holiday has its appropriate viand. During carnival all the
butter and cheese shop-windows are whitened with the snow of beaten
cream--_panamontata_. At San Martino the bakers parade troops of
gingerbread warriors. Later, for Christmas, comes _mandorlato_, which
is a candy made of honey and enriched with almonds. In its season only can
any of these devotional delicacies be had; but there is a species of
cruller, fried in oil, which has all seasons for its own. On the occasion
of every _festa_, and of every _sagra_ (which is the holiday of
one parish only), stalls are erected in the squares for the cooking and
sale of these crullers, between which and the religious sentiment proper
to the whole year there seems to be some occult relation.

In the winter, the whole city appears to abandon herself to cooking for
the public, till she threatens to hopelessly disorder the law of demand
and supply. There are, to begin with, the caffe and restaurants of every
class. Then there are the cook-shops, and the poulterers', and the
sausage-makers'. Then, also, every fruit-stall is misty and odorous with
roast apples, boiled beans, cabbage, and potatoes. The chestnut-roasters
infest every corner, and men women, and children cry roast pumpkin at
every turn--till, at last, hunger seems an absurd and foolish vice, and