This point was sufficiently dwelt on in the paragraphs relating to the making of savory soups and stews. It illustrates Gallic skill in culinary orchestration. But the French know that at a dinner, as at a concert, a solo piece is desirable, and therefore they always serve one choice vegetable as a separate course.
As a matter of course the vegetable selected for this distinction—be it peas, beans, spinach, cauliflower, asparagus, artichoke, carrots, or whatnot—must be particularly fresh and succulent. It must also, like the singer's solo number, have an accompaniment, that is to say an appropriate sauce.
No French cook would spoil the delicate natural flavor of green peas with mint, as the English do. I once asked a waiter in a London restaurant why mint was put with the peas. He promptly replied: "Peas 'ave no flavor, sir!"
In France, butter (French butter) is used as the best accompaniment to a solo vegetable. It makes the string beans and whatever else it goes with more savory, without obliterating their individual flavor, as the mint does in the case of peas.
PARIS RESTAURANTS.
The French have reason to boast that the gastronomic center of the world is in Paris, within a circle intersected by a line drawn from the Place de l'Opéra to the Place Vendôme. In this region there are scores of restaurants of the first rank in which one eats the best soups and stews, the best veal, the best poultry, the best salads and sauces, the best vegetables, the best entrées, the best bread and butter, the best cheeses, to be found anywhere on this big planet of ours. Some persons, for sufficient reasons, prefer English roast meats or German, Swiss, or Austrian pastry, but in the preparation of the foods just named French supremacy is unquestionable.
It takes months—and a big purse—to get an adequate idea of the good things offered at the Paris restaurants. Each has its special dishes and sauces, handed down in some cases from generation to generation. Not to have a unique sauce for sole, or a monopoly in a special kind of soup, would subject an establishment to the danger of being classed as second-rate.
Paris is full of professional epicures—prominent among them are authors and journalists—who frequent certain places for special famous dishes and who quickly resent any deterioration or carelessness on the part of the chef. It is these connoisseurs who are served best; they are willing to give the cook time to prepare a dish scientifically, and they take time to eat it hygienically, that is, with lingering enjoyment of its appetizing flavors.
These gourmets appreciate epicurean subtleties like that practiced by the late Frédéric of the Tour d'Argent, who held that "different kinds of fuel should be used for the roasting of different kinds of meat, believing that the spiced scents of some woods transmitted in the cooking add to the pleasure of eating all kinds of game";—a notion which was acted on by the ancient Romans as well as by Japanese gourmets, and which is also justified by the fact that in the smoking of ham and bacon it makes a decided difference what kind of wood is burned.
