Strassburg is one of the many cities that were made famous by a special food. Goose liver was already relished as a great delicacy by the ancient Romans; Horace refers in one of his poems to the joys of eating the liver of the white goose fattened with juicy figs. In Strassburg, unfortunately, the geese are not fattened with figs, but are locked up in cages and stuffed for a number of days with shelled corn or noodles till their overworked livers become abnormally enlarged, after which they are made into what is known the world over as pâté de foie gras. This mixture of liver, meat and truffles is now prepared on a large scale also in Toulouse and other French places, but the headquarters for it is Alsace, where it is made in many places, though it is said that there is a growing opposition to it on account of the cruelty inseparable from the stuffing process. It's a great pity that such cruelty should be necessary, for not a few epicures feel like the Rev. Sydney Smith, who exclaimed: "My idea of heaven is eating foies gras to the sound of trumpets."
IN A BERLIN MARKET.
That the goose is the food of the day and every day is made manifest in the markets of Berlin, of which there are more than a dozen. All the poultry stalls are filled with them, so much so that other meat, even the ever-present veal, shrinks timidly into the background.
Wherever one stops, the displays are most attractive. There are unfrozen, fresh-killed meats of all kinds, tempting even the sightseer who has no intention of buying. Autumn flowers, and large boxes of deep red Preisselbeeren—a berry very similar to the mountain cranberry found on Maine's highest peaks, and growing everywhere in Germany (it ought to be acclimated in our fields)—give rich autumnal hues to many of the market stalls, while the fragrance of Gravenstein apples fills the air near the fruit stalls.
As in Paris, the sea fish are fresh-caught, with ice about them, but never frozen, while fresh-water fish are carried to the buyer's house in a tank and selected alive. The German krebs, or crawfish, is almost as much in evidence as the French écrevisses, and like these, it is kept in tanks of cold, running water, except for a few boxfuls, the probable supply of the day, which are sorted out by sizes for convenience. "Solo-krebs" is one of the items on a Berlin menu, and means one huge fellow, almost as big as a small lobster.
This Berlin market, unlike the Halles of Paris, does not encroach on and beautify the surrounding streets. It is orderly and law-abiding, and fills up its allotted space of two covered squares to the limit, but with no overflow. However, the shops nearby are generally for foods, with appetizing windows of sausages, smoked meats and fish, or cheeses.
An oddity of this market is that the upper floor space is divided about equally between fruits and household furnishings. There is an exhaustless supply of step-ladders, and besides these, every need of the kitchen is provided for.
Meat prices, which soar in Berlin, are much lower in the big markets than elsewhere.