And cut out the cores if you'll take my advice;
Then dip them in butter and fry till they foam,
And you'll have in six minutes your beignet de pomme.
Pomme! Pomme! Beignet de pomme!
Of beignets there's nothing like beignet de pomme!"
In the Almanach de Gourmands there appeared a philosophical treatise on pastry and pastry cooks, probably by the learned Giedeaud de la Reynière himself. Pastry, he says, is to cooking what rhetorical metaphors are to oratory,—life and ornament. A speech without metaphors, a dinner without pastry, are alike insipid; but, in like manner, as few people are eloquent, so few can make perfect pastry. Good pastry-cooks are as rare as good orators.
This writer recommends the art of the rolling-pin to beautiful women as being at once an occupation, a pleasure, and a sure way of recovering embonpoint and freshness. He says: "This is an art which will chase ennui from the saddest. It offers varied amusement and sweet and salutary exercise for the whole body; it restores appetite, strength, and gayety; it gathers around us friends; it tends to advance an art known from the most remote antiquity. Woman! lovely and charming woman, leave the sofas where ennui and hypochondria prey upon the springtime of your life, unite in the varied moulds sugar, jasmine, and roses, and form those delicacies that will be more precious than gold when made by hands so dear to us." What woman could refuse to make a pudding and any number of pies after that?
There seems to be nothing left to eat after all this perilous sweet stuff but a devilled biscuit at ten o'clock.
"'A well devilled biscuit!' said Jenkins, enchanted,
'I'll have after dinner,—the thought is divine!'