most savoury, of all cooked food ? SOUP,
of course.

Blessings on the man who invented soup!
For it rejoices the tired stomach, disposes it
to placidly digest, encourages the noble organ,
and comes as a promise of future good things.
It is a gentle experiment to test if the
stomach be in sound working order. It contains
the greatest amount of nourishment that
can be taken with the least exertion. Chemically
it is a wonder (the cooks of the future will
all be taught the elements of chemistry), for
Broth, which is the humble father of soup, is
literally an extract of all the soluble parts of
meat. The ozmazome melts first; then the
albumen. To make good soup, it is chemically
necessary that the water boil slowly, so that the
albumen may not coagulate in the centre of
the meat before being extracted. And the
ebullition must be slow, so that the different
ingredients of the extract may unite with each
other easily and thoroughly.

A French epicurean writer of eminence
asserts that ten solid volumes would not contain
the recipes of all the soups which have been
invented in those grand schools of good eating,
the kitchens of Paris. The soup is to a dinner
what the portico is to a mansion; it is not
merely the first thing to which you come, but
it also serves to give an idea of what the
architect intends to do afterwards; much as the
overture of an opera conveys foreshadowing,
and glimpses of what is to follow. A simple
dinner should have the prelude of a simple
soup; which, however, requires to be perfect, and
demands a care, patience, and waiting watchfulness
which good housewives are more likely
to bestow than a professed cook. It has been
often noticed by epicureans that thoroughly
good soups are rare in great men's houses. The
reason is, that the kitchenmaids keep taking the
soup for their ragout and side dishes, and filling
it up with water, till the crude adulteration has
infected the whole. In small houses the soup
is a principal object, and receives the most
religious care. The chief fault in England is,
that soups are over spiced and under vegetabled.
They are also too hurried. By quick violent
boiling all the soluble and finest parts of the
ingredients pass off in puffs of indignant steam,
while the coarser parts only are retained in the
solution. The process of soup making is a slow
chemical process, and nature will not be hurried
without having her revenge.

French cooks, in their versatile invention and
restless desire to please, and delight, give
strange and striking names to their new dishes.
They have "The Soup of the Good Woman,"
and above all, " The Potage à la Jambe du Bois
(The Soup of the Wooden Leg").

But the wooden leg is an after ingredient.
Like most receipts of the first class, this one is
horribly expensive; but, like most other expensive
recipes, it is just as good made more
economically.

Take a wooden leg—no, that is afterwards.
Procure a shin of beef and put it in a pot, with
three dozen carrots, a dozen onions, two dozen
pieces of celery, twelve turnips, a fowl, and two
partridges. It must simmer six hours. Then
get two pounds of fillet of veal, stew it, and
pour the soup over the meat. Add more celery;
then mix bread, and eventually serve up the
soup with the shin bone (the real wooden leg)
emerging like the bowsprit of a wreck from
the sea of vegetables.

There used to be a simple dish made in
Paris (originally at Plombières) which was
called cherry soup. It was made with black-heart
cherries, butter, sugar, and the crumbs of
toasted bread. When well prepared, it was said
to be delicious.

That glorious old coxcomb, Louis Eustache
Ude, who had been cook to two French kings,
and who found it hard to please his noble
patrons at Crockford's, never forgave the world
for not permitting him to call himself an artist.
"Scrapers of catgut," he says "call themselves
artists, and fellows who jump like kangaroos
claim the same title; yet the man who had under
his sole direction the great feasts given by the
nobility of England to the Allied Sovereigns,
and who superintended the grand banquet at
Crockford's on the occasion of the coronation
of our amiable and beloved sovereign, Victoria,
was denied the title prodigally showered on
singers, dancers, and comedians, whose only
quality," says the indignant chef " not requiring
the aid of a microscope to discover is pride."

One of the most delicious, but least known
French soups is the potage à la Camerani. It
was introduced early in the century by M.
Camerani, a famous Scapin (or knavish tricky
servant) in the Italian Comedy. This erudite
gourmand was celebrated for several sorts of
ragouts, and more especially for a mode of
cooking snails which made them even preferable
to ortolans. The Camerani soup, however, cost
more than four pounds a tureen full.

You took first, Neapolitan maccaroni and
Parmesan cheese. Then, Gournay butter, two
dozen livers of fat fowls, celery, cabbage,
carrots, parsnips, leeks, and turnips, all of which
were minced and mixed with the chopped livers,
and placed in the stew-pan with some butter.
The pot with the soup was then prepared, and
the different ingredients scientifically placed in
layers. First the maccaroni, then the mince,
next the Parmesan. The pot was then placed on
a slow fire, and the whole was allowed to soak till
a perfect interfusion of tastes and flavours had
taken place, and the potage à la Camerani could
be poured into the plate of the delighted gourmand.

Eccentric Dr. Kitchener, after giving a recipe
for a West Indian soup made with craw-fish, and
mixed with spices and vegetables, says quietly,
"One of my predecessors recommends cray-fish
pounded alive as an ingredient in the broth to
sweeten the sharpness of the blood." The
energetic doctor makes no moral reflection on
this suggestion, but his footnote reminds us of
the cruelty of cooks, and of Charles Lamb's
humourous doubts as to whether whipping pigs to