They butter’d currants on fat veal bestow’d,

And rumps of beef with virgin honey strew’d.”

Sir John Hill, M.D., followed Dr. King, with “Mrs. Glasse’s Cookery Book,” in which are some few receipts for French dishes. The great Lord Chesterfield, however, was the first nobleman who made the most strenuous efforts to introduce French cookery. He engaged as his cook La Chapelle, a descendant of the famous cook of Louis XIV. La Chapelle published a treatise on cookery in three volumes, which is now very rarely met with. It is entitled “The Modern Cook,” by Vincent La Chapelle, chief cook to the Earl of Chesterfield, and was printed for the author in 1733, and sold by Nicholas Prevost, a Frenchman, over against Southampton Street, in the Strand.

About the period of the publication of this book, Lord Chesterfield was lord steward of the household to George II., and undoubtedly was the most renowned and fashionable host in London. His dinners and suppers were then deemed perfection; and these entertainments were one of the few items in which his expenditure was liberal. Lord Chesterfield lived till 1773, and I more than once heard the late Earl of Essex say, more than thirty years ago, at Brookes’s Club, that he remembered as a boy of fourteen or fifteen seeing the Earl seated on a rustic seat, inhaling the air outside the court-yard of his house in May Fair. Chesterfield House was ninety-one years ago at the very extremity of London, and all beyond it was an expanse of green fields.

The table of twenty or twenty-five covers was one of the noble earl’s official dinners, but the supper was for a party of intimate friends:—

A Table of Twenty or Twenty-five Covers, served with Twenty-nine Dishes.

FIRST COURSE.

The middle of the table.

A surtout in the middle.