the lobster for sauce?" Norway helps you to a
lobster handier than the fatted fowl in a
hen-coop. It is of little use, however, to discover
the existence of unknown alimentary materials,
unless the knowledge is also acquired how to
make them presentable and palatable.
Therefore, steep cods' tongues thirty-six hours,
changing the water once; boil ten minutes, throwing
them into boiling water; serve covered with
egg-sauce and garnished with toast. Or, boil
and let cool, and then fry to a nice brown with
egg and bread-crumbs. Or, with them instead
of sounds, execute Dr. Kitchener's recipe for
cod-sound pie. Or, use them instead of calf's
head to make mock-turtle, helping out the
thickening with fish-flour, and adding the
indispensable seasonings and glass of Madeira.

The Lofoten fish-flour does not need unsalting,
but only a steeping in milk for a couple of
hours. In a dry place, it will keep a year. In
fish soups it is excellent— I speak from
experience— as well as in others, hare soup for
instance, which many cooks heighten with a dash
of anchovy. The Christiania Society's recipe
for a pudding for eight or ten persons is: a pint
and a half of fish-flour, half a pint of potato
arrowroot, half a pint of pounded biscuit, six
or seven eggs, half a pint of sweet cream, and
two ounces of butter. The fish-flour should
be put into cold water in the afternoon of the
day before, and then carefully strained away.
The eggs and the cream to be well beaten
separately. But this cook's oracle, with consistent
ambiguity, omits to say whether the pudding
should be boiled or baked. Try baking first.

Of stock fish and their fellows, there is no end.
Dried ling, of eel-like proportions, might serve
for edible walking-sticks. Other ling, white
and semi-transparent, are spread out, like butterflies.
Dried skate retain as posthumous
ornaments their long tail and their double jaws.
Lapland dries even fresh-water fish: as pike.
Sweden's salt haddock, Scotland's salt herring,
Holland's dried flat-fish, and Norlandske
flyndrer (dried Northland flounders), emit each their
peculiar perfume. France shows magnificent
salted mackerel: a preparation worth attention:
and little known in England. They are also
smoked, imitating kipper salmon.

More complicated and highly-finished articles
are the Boulogne small herring preserved in
oil; potted sprats, smelling savoury, and calling
to mind a story in Mrs. Opie's White Lies;
the Prima Delikatess-Anjoris, from A. M.
Rybergs, of Stockholm; pickled mussels of golden
hue; and essence of crab. Besides fresh salmon
and rodfisk (Sebastus norvegicus), Mr. Thame,
of Drontheim (pronounce Throndhjem), sends
snow-hen, or ptarmigan, roast or boiled, at the
moderate price of two francs each per box,
besides Norsk kaviar. And then there are
from Heimerdinger's, of Hamburg, fresh-water
crawfish tails, sturgeon's flesh, smoked salmon
in oil, pickled eel, potted lamprey, and a host
of other dainties not for the million.

But before we can enjoy these delicate delights
— and the sturgeon-roe caviare alone would
suffice to inspire a gastronomic lyric— we must
catch our fish. For which purpose, we are
treated to nets and engines of such ingenuity,
power, sweep, and destructiveness, that the
wonder is, that, with all these appliances, any
fish, scaly or shelly, escape and survive to
continue their species. There are rakes, like
extra-strong garden-rakes, with receptacles
appended, to hold whatever their teeth displace.
There are wire and wicker drums, or traps,
for the inveigling of lobsters, crabs, and eels.
There are purse-nets big enough to catch a
Patagonian family; bag-nets, trawl-nets, casting-nets,
seine-nets; single, double, and multiple nets,
nets of cotton, hemp, and flax, besides enormous
labyrinthine nets vast enough to entrap a
wandering shark.

These nets are variously floated and weighted,
according to the opportunities enjoyed by their
owners; floated with pine-wood, cork, inflated
skins, and blown-glass buoys; ballasted with
weights of burnt clay, of stone wrapped in
birch-bark, and of metal, the local material
predominating. Thus, Norway has wooden rings
to her sails. To fabricate the nets we have
fibres, threads, twines, cords, yards, ropes, of all
colours, sizes, and consistencies, tanned and
untanned, tight and lax, fine-spun, loose-twisted.
The effigy of a woman spins them at a wheel
like that used by our grandmothers; and
Jouannin and Co.'s netting-machine (sold to an
English purchaser) nets ever so many bobbins
at once, making its meshes with the very same
knot as that executed by human fingers.

Fish are also caught by lines, horizontal,
perpendicular, and at every angle between the two.
There are even automaton fishing-lines, acting
by clockwork. The hooks to garnish these
vary in size from hooks that might hold a
half-grown minnow to such as would land a
hippopotamus; besides mechanical hooks, shining
flat hooks baited with red cloth, silver-fish
hooks, hooks with chains, spinning-hooks, hooks
crosswise, star-grouped hooks, centipede hooks,
hooks like Prince of Wales's feathers, and hooks
arranged on hooks by thousands. Add to these,
eel-spears, harpoons, light-holders for flambeau
fishing, blubber-knives, razors for shaving
whales to the quick — and there is enough to
make the fish of the sea quake and tremble in
their scales.

To catch fish, people go in boats; so we have
numerous and beautiful models of boats,
slipper-shaped, shuttle-shaped, scuttle-shaped, sharp at
both ends, blunt at one end, blunt at both ends;
long-boats, jolly-boats, luggers, yawls, row-boats,
sailing-boats, life-boats, boats for Lapland
lakes, skin boats for Greenland seas, wicker
boats or coracles for Welsh trout-treams.

When the fish are caught, they have to be
cured, preserved, packed, and disposed of; so
there are barrels holding from a quart to many
multiples of quarts; boats and boxes for
keeping fish alive; machines for salting herring;
fireplaces and cooking-stoves for boats;
fish-caldrons big enough to boil Falstaff in, or
make a stew of Daniel Lambert. Artistic
models show us how fish are cured in quantity,
and how they are preserved in ice. The