[92-‖] If you have not fresh orange or lemon-juice, or Coxwell’s crystallized lemon acid, the artificial lemon juice ([No. 407]) is a good substitute for it.
[92-¶] The juice of the SEVILLE ORANGE is to be preferred to that of the LEMON, the flavour is finer, and the acid milder.
[93-*] The erudite editor of the “Almanach des Gourmands,” vol. ii. p. 30, tells us, that ten folio volumes would not contain the receipts of all the soups that have been invented in that grand school of good eating,—the Parisian kitchen.
[93-†] “Point de Légumes, point de Cuisinière,” is a favourite culinary adage of the French kitchen, and deserves to be so: a better soup may be made with a couple of pounds of meat and plenty of vegetables, than our common cooks will make you with four times that quantity of meat; all for want of knowing the uses of soup roots, and sweet and savoury herbs.
[93-‡] Many a good dish is spoiled, by the cook not knowing the proper use of this, which is to give a flavour, and not to be predominant over the other ingredients: a morsel mashed with the point of a knife, and stirred in, is enough. See [No. 402].
[93-§] Foreigners have strange notions of English taste, on which one of their culinary professors has made the following comment: “the organ of taste in these ISLANDERS is very different from our delicate palates; and sauce that would excoriate the palate of a Frenchman, would be hardly piquante enough to make any impression on that of an Englishman; thus they prefer port to claret,” &c. As far as concerns our drinking, we wish there was not quite so much truth in Monsieur’s remarks, but the characteristic of the French and English kitchen is sauce without substance, and substance without sauce.
To make Cayenne of English chillies, of infinitely finer flavour than the Indian, see [No. 404].
[95-*] We tried to make catchup of these by treating them like mushrooms ([No. 439]), but did not succeed.
[96-*] “A poor man, being very hungry, staid so long in a cook’s shop, who was dishing up meat, that his stomach was satisfied with only the smell thereof. The choleric cook demanded of him to pay for his breakfast; the poor man denied having had any, and the controversy was referred to the deciding of the next man that should pass by, who chanced to be the most notorious idiot in the whole city: he, on the relation of the matter, determined that the poor man’s money should be put between two empty dishes, and the cook should be recompensed with the jingling of the poor man’s money, as he was satisfied with the smell of the cook’s meat.” This is affirmed by credible writers as no fable, but an undoubted truth.—Fuller’s Holy State, lib. iii. c. 12, p. 20.
[98-*] If the gravy be not completely drained from it, the article potted will very soon turn sour.