An afterthought: dress livers with mushroom sauce, and this is the manner in which it should be done. "Take some pickled or fresh mushrooms, cut small—both if you have them—and let the livers be bruised fine, with a good deal of parsley chopped small, a spoonful or two of catchup, a glass of white wine, and as much good gravy as will make sauce enough; thicken it with a piece of butter rolled in flour. This does for either roast or boiled."
For the rest, how count the innumerable ways in which the mushroom adds to the gaiety of the gourmand? What would the vol-au-vent be without it? What the "Fine Pye," made otherwise of carps and artichokes and crayfishes' feet and lobster claws and nutmeg and cloves alone? What, according to the "Complete Court Cook," so proper for the second course as the patty all of mushrooms? What garniture fairer for "ragoo" or fricassée, according to the same authority, than mushroom farcis? But, however they may be served and eaten, mushrooms you must make yours at any cost. To say that you do not like them is confession of your own philistinism. Learn to like them; will to like them, or else your sojourn on this earth will be a wretched waste. You will have lived your life in vain if, at its close, you have missed one of its finest emotions.
THE INCOMPARABLE ONION
Too often the poet sees but the tears that live in an onion; not the smiles. And yet the smiles are there, broad and genial, or subtle and tender. "Rose among roots," its very name revives memories of pleasant feasting; its fragrance is rich forecast of delights to come. Without it, there would be no gastronomic art. Banish it from the kitchen, and all pleasure of eating flies with it. Its presence lends colour and enchantment to the most modest dish; its absence reduces the rarest dainty to hopeless insipidity, and the diner to despair.
The secret of good cooking lies in the discreet and sympathetic treatment of the onion. For what culinary masterpiece is there that may not be improved by it? It gives vivacity to soup, life to sauce; it is the "poetic soul" of the salad bowl; the touch of romance in the well-cooked vegetable. To it, sturdiest joint and lightest stew, crisp rissole and stimulating stuffing look for inspiration and charm—and never are they disappointed! But woe betide the unwary woman who would approach it for sacrilegious ends. If life holds nothing better than the onion in the right hand, it offers nothing sadder and more degrading than the onion brutalised. Wide is the gulf fixed between the delicate sauce of a Prince de Soubise, and the coarse, unsavoury sausage and onion mess of the Strand. Let the perfection of the first be your ideal; the horrid coarseness of the latter shun as you would the devil.
The fragrance of this "wine-scented" esculent not only whets the appetite; it abounds in associations glad and picturesque. All Italy is in the fine, penetrating smell; and all Provence; and all Spain. An onion or garlic-scented atmosphere hovers alike over the narrow calli of Venice, the cool courts of Cordova, and the thronged amphitheatre of Arles. It is only the atmosphere breathed by the Latin peoples of the South, so that ever must it suggest blue skies and endless sunshine, cypress groves and olive orchards. For the traveller it is interwoven with memories of the golden canvases of Titian, the song of Dante, the music of Mascagni. The violet may not work a sweeter spell, nor the carnation yield a more intoxicating perfume.
And some men there have been in the past to rank the onion as a root sacred to Aphrodite: food for lovers. To the poetry of it none but the dull and brutal can long remain indifferent.
Needless, then, to dwell upon its more prosaic side: upon its power as a tonic, its value as a medicine. Medicinal properties it has, as the drunkard knows full well. But why consider the drunkard? Leave him to the tender mercies of the doctor. Gourmandise, or the love of good eating, here the one and only concern, is opposed to excess. "Every man who eats to indigestion, or makes himself drunk, runs the risk of being erased from the list of its votaries."