Let boars of Umbrian game replete with mast,
If game delights you, crown the rich repast.
Satires of Horace.
Italian cookery is excellent at its best. The same drift of talent, the same due sense of proportion which showed itself in all their art, which built St. Mark's and the Duomo, the Ducal Palace, the Rialto, and the churches of Palladio, comes out in their cookery. Their cooks are Michel Angelo and Leonardo da Vinci in a humbler sphere.
They mingle cheese in cookery, with great effect; nothing can be better than their cauliflower covered with Parmesan cheese, and baked. Macaroni in all its forms is of course admirable. They have mastered the use of sweet oil, which in their cookery never tastes oily; it is simply a lambent richness.
The great dish, wild boar, treated with a sweet and a sour sauce, with pine cones, is an excellent dish. Wild boar is a lean pork with a game flavour. All sorts of birds, especially becafico, are well cooked, they lose no juice or flavour over the fire.
They make a dozen preparations of Indian meal, which are very good for breakfast. One little round cake, like a muffin, tastes almost of cocoanut; this is fried in oil, and is most delicious.
The frittala is another well-known dish, and is composed of liver, bacon, and birds, all pinned on a long stick, or iron pin.
In an Italian palace, if you have the good luck to be asked, the dinner is handsome. It is served in twelve courses in the Russian manner, and if national dishes are offered they are disguised as inelegant. But at an ordinary farmhouse in the hills near Florence, or at the ordinary hotels, there will be a good soup, trout fresh from the brooks, fresh butter, macaroni with cheese, a fat capon, and a delicious omelette, enriched with morsels of kidney or fat bacon, a frittala, a bunch of grapes, a bottle of Pogio secco, or the sweet Italian straw wine.
The Italians are very frugal, and would consider the luxurious overflow of American munificent hospitality as vulgar. At parties in Rome, Naples, and Florence it is not considered proper to offer much refreshment. At Mr. Story's delightful receptions American hospitality reigned at afternoon tea, as it did in all houses where the hostess was American, but at the houses of the Princes nothing was offered but weak wine and water and little cakes.