of everything. Many other materials of
food are also cast aside altogether, or
comparatively but very little used. Thus
macaroni, of which a pound at fivepence gives
four pounds of food when boiled, is almost
unknown among our poor. Yet, seasoned
with pepper and salt, and flavoured with
grated cheese (which the poor can buy very
cheap) or sweetened with sugar and butter,
it makes a dish not to be despised, even
by epicures. Indian meal, also, mixed with
treacle and boiled hard as a pudding, is a
delicious dish; as also when made into a kind
of porridge or stirabout, and then eaten with
butter and sugar, or treacle, or with red
herrings and fine herbs, if it is to be made
very good. These are modes of preparation in
high repute in America; but here, although
Indian meal is cheap and plentiful— and were
there the demand, it, would be more plentiful
still— we doubt if the poorest person in the
kingdom would touch them.

We laugh at the old Pythagorean prejudice
which thought it a crime to eat eggs; because
an egg was a microcosm, or universe in little:
the shell being the earth; the white, water;
fire, the yolk; and the air found between the
shell and the white. But we are positively
no more rational, if less religious, in many of
our eating superstitions. The Chinese are
the only people who make use of everything
that can by any possibility be masticated and
digested. They understand cookery better
than any other people in the world. Their
disguises and transformations are very clever.
For instance, they make real cheese out of
dried peas— the whole tribe of leguminosæ
yield vegetable caseine, or cheese— not to
speak of their edible birds'-nests, their strings
of savoury slugs and caterpillars, their plump
puppies, and kittens innocent of mouse-flesh,
daily sold in their streets. Every herb of the
field, the Chinese press into the service of their
stewing-pans. They eat foxes in Italy, where
they are sold very dear, and thought fit for
the table of a cardinal.

But the grand article of all whose claims we
wish most to press, and whose claims we
English most neglect, is soup. A man might really
grow quite eloquent on the wonderful
properties of soup. It is nourishing, even
when made of vegetables only— of course
more nourishing when made of meat. It
distends the stomach, which is as necessary
for digestion as nourishment itself. Those
same bullocks' livers we were speaking
about make capital soup; so do coarse
joints, usually sold at very low prices;
and ox-cheeks, which are generally from
twopence-halfpenny to threepence the pound;
as well as other odds and ends of the
butcher's stall. And here let us give the
primary law of all soups. They must be
made with cold water, suffered to boil only
for a few minutes, and then kept at almost
the boiling point— simmering, in fact— for
many hours. The secret is to make them of
cold water, and let them simmer gently for a
long time. The theory is this. Hot water
sets the albuminous constituents of meat
hard, as the white of egg is set, and prevents
the juices from escaping; but cold water
softens the fibres, and extracts the albumen
and the nourishing juices. But for boiled
meat, the reverse. The meat should be
put into boiling water to set the juices; and
then kept under the boiling point, (which is
two hundred and twelve degrees,) until quite
cooked. To continue it at a boil hardens and
spoils it. Finely chopped meat put into cold
water gradually warmed, then strained and
pressed, makes the best soup for invalids.
Bacon, dried beef, red herrings, suet
dumplings, and fish of all kinds, make
good soups, as well as rice, sago, semolina,
and other grain. Peas and barley, with
slices of wheaten bread, make a strong and
nourishing soup, well seasoned with fine
herbs, pepper, and salt. Count Romford fed
his beggars on this at Munich, at the cost of
two and a half farthings a day! This,
including the expense of firewood and wages,
and at a time, when firewood was much
dearer than coal is now in England. By his
own contrivances (we use the Romford
stove to this day), he reduced the daily cost
of fuel for the dinners of a thousand, and
twelve, sometimes fifteen hundred people,
to four-pence halfpenny a day. This could
be done again. Without dreaming of
interfering with the domestic meal— the snug
family circle, which has such a good moral
effect— and recommending, instead,
communistic feeding, we would simply suggest
that cooking on a large scale might be
advantageous and economical to the people.
In model lodging-houses, for example, certain
standard dishes— soup the principal— might
be made wholesale at much less cost to
each family, than if made separately in the
family rooms. Public cooking would require
skilful handling, like all things affecting
the internal conditions of domestic life; but
certainly it would be much cheaper than
the present mode of separate cooking,
and it might well be so managed as not to
interfere with the most private manner of
living.

Volumes might be written on soup. The
orator, the physiologist, the philanthropist,
or even the poet, might advantageously
expend his genius on the subject of soup. "No
one estimates its value," says Liebig , "more
highly than the hospital physician, for whose
patients soup, as a means of restoring the
exhausted strength, cannot be replaced by
any other article in the pharmacopœia. Its
vivifying and restoring action on the appetite,
on the digestive organs, the colour, and
the general appearance of the sick, is most
striking." Extract of meat, or concentrated
soup, is thus spoken of by Parmentier, and
is especially applicable to our brethren in the
Crimea; whose ignorance of cooking brought