from the kitchen (where Shrove Tuesday is
regarded as a sort of harmless Carnival) to
devour a large hat-full.

Desaugiers, in one of his early songs,
imitating Master Adam, the cabinet-maker of
Nevers, writes with the true gusto of a gourmand:

      Je veux que la mort me frappe
      Au milieu d'un grand repas,
      Qu'on m'enterre sous la nappe
      Entre quatre larges plats;
      Et que sur ma tombe on mette,
      Cette courte inscription:
      "Ci git le premier poète,
      Mort d'une indigestion."

The same gay precursor of Béranger represents
Pleasure with full mouth, and slightly inebriated,
seated on the débris of a pâté de foie gras.
In this same number of the Almanach des
Gourmands, 1805, so pleasantly brightened by the
gay song, Aussitôt que la lumière, there
appears a very philosophical treatise on pastry and
pastrycooks, probably by the learned Grimaud
de la Reynière himself. Pastry, he says,
eloquently, is to cooking what rhetorical metaphor
figures are to oratory—life and ornament. A
speech without metaphors, a dinner without
pastry, are equally insipid, but in like manner
as few people are eloquent, so few can make
perfect pastry. Good pastrycooks are as rare as
good orators. As it is difficult in all history to
name more than five or six great speakers, so in
the history of the kitchen it is difficult to find
more than six or seven great artists. There
was Demosthenes, there was Rouget, there was
Cicero, and there was La Forge. Pericles spoke
well, and the Gendrons baked well. Toulouse
and Strasbourg produced great men in foie gras
pies. Perigord excelled in partridge pies, Nérac
in terrines. The writer then goes on to recommend
the art to the notice of beautiful women,
it being at once an occupation, a pleasure, and
a sure means to preserve or to recover embonpoint
and freshness. Another French writer on
food is also eloquent on the rolling-pin, and says:
"This is an art that will chase ennui from the
saddest. It offers varied amusement and sweet
and salutary exercise for the whole body. It
dissipates obstructions, which are the sources of
all disease, and restores us appetite, strength, and
gaiety, it gathers round us friends, and tends to
advance an art known and revered from the most
distant antiquity. Woman, lovely and charming
woman, leave the destructive sofas where
ennui and hypochondria prey upon the spring
time of your life, unite in the varied moulds,
sugar, jasmine, and roses, and form those
delicacies that will be more precious even than gold,
when made by hands so dear to us."

The fact was the author was not half such
a fool as he seemed, for French pastry about
1805 had really made some advances, thanks
to the skill of Rouget, Lesage, La Forge, and
the Gendrons, Before 1800, or so, pastry had
been mediævally massive, lumpy, gross, and
indigestible. Quantity, not quality, had been
regarded. Health had been forgotten. Now
chemistry and medicine had stepped in to help
the artist to more varied forms, and lighter
and more wholesome ingredients and proportions.
The stomach and eye were both gratified.
Savoury biscuits were found by one
stupendous mind to be better when made with
potato flour. Spun sugar assumed a European
importance. Meringues stuffed with fruit and red
and yellow ice creams grew into public favour.
Central mountains of sugar grew more common
at desserts. Philosophers in 1805 went so far
as to assert that the consumption of pastry in
Paris had doubled within twelve years. The
new habits of the Revolution led to discarding
heavy suppers, and taking to light but
very expensive teas—teas that someiimes ran
up to three hundred francs. A fashionable tea
required at least a dozen dishes of pastry. At
dinners, too, pastry was indispensable.
Frangipane tarts, Fanchonnettes, Genoises,
Ramequins de Bourgogne, and flan de pommes à
l'Anglaise. These, alternating with entremets,
gave a relief to the table, an éclat, a ravishing
coup d'Å“il; and then came the dessert in
moulded sugar; rocks and temples, in which
architecture, painting, and sculpture combined
their labours, while gay fireworks fizzed over all.

AN ENTREMET OF GREAT MERIT.

(The English sailor à la maître d'hôtel, and the
                Sea captain au gratin.)

A cookery book, the property of the last
chef of the King of the Sandwich Islands, has
lately fallen into our hands. It is a work of
great research, and eminently practical. The
first recipe struck us as cynically written, but
yet showing degrees of scientific thought hardly
to be expected from a cannibal. It is entitled
The English Sailor à la Maître d'Hotel. It
begins thus: "Take a shipwrecked sailor, not
under three-and-forty, flour him and pepper him.
Open him down the back, first carefully removing
his head, then baste him——"

But here unfortunately the rest of the page is
missing, and the rest of the book, being in the New
Zealand ancient Golly-Golly character, has not yet
been satisfactorily translated by Dreikopf, who
hopes, however, in the course of a year or two, to
give the world further secrets of cannibal cooking.
He has, however, found out that the natives
prefer the soles of the feet and the fleshier part
of the legs and back of young subjects, not by
any means preferring the male. Tarry old boat-
swains are generally boiled down for soup.
Captains, if under sixty, are treated with bread-
crumbs, plum sauce, and lemon juice. Ship-boys
are much relished scolloped, and a baby
à la Metternich is said to require only legality
to carry its fame to both the North and South
Poles.

Dreikopf, in the course of these researches,
discovered in some old book of travels in
Sumatra, long before the time of Sir Stamford
Raffles, a curious custom obtaining among a
cannibal tribe there. The tribe in question
never let a man live beyond seventy-two without
eating him. The way they do it is this: