The
_hors-d'oeuvre_ are a Russian innovation; but since the days when
Henry IV. vowed that every peasant should have a fowl in his pot, soup
from the simplest _bouillon_ to the most lordly _consommes_ and splendid
_bisques_ has been better made in France than anywhere else in the
world. Every great cook of France has invented some particularly
delicate variety of the boiled fillet of sole, and Duglere achieved a
place amongst the immortals, by his manipulation of the brill. The soles
of the north are as good as any that ever came out of British waters;
and Paris--sending tentacles west to the waters where the sardines swim,
and south to the home of the lamprey, and tapping a thousand streams for
trout and the tiny gudgeon and crayfish--can show as noble a list of
fishes as any city in the world. The _chef de cuisine_ who could not
enumerate an hundred and fifty entrees all distinctively French, would
be no proficient in his noble profession. The British beef stands
against all the world as the meat noblest for the spit, though the
French ox which has worked its time in the fields gives the best
material for the soup-pot; and though the Welsh lamb and the English
sheep are the perfection of mutton young and mutton old, the lamb
nurtured on milk till the hour of its death, and the sheep reared on the
salt-marshes of the north, make splendid contribution to the Paris
kitchens.
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