Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/365

Charles Dickens] good I as if made with gravy meat." This might be followed by the oyster sausages, described above, or by "pulled fish," a prodigious composition of fish with "all the bones taken out, mixed with cream, and flavoured with ketchup and anchovy sauce, stewed with bread-crumbs, basted with butter, and salamandered "just before you serve it up." The pulled fish disposed of, a shift might be made to sustain nature on the lobster pudding, with which we have already made acquaintance, or some other of the "made dishes" of which there is, as we have seen, a choice of twenty-seven. Then there are the twenty-one egg preparations to fall back upon; the "curried eggs," the "eggs with forcemeat balls," the "cheese, shrimp, and oyster omelettes," or the omelette prepared with macaroni, a very pleasing composition indeed, as described in the Manual. A course of vegetables—twenty modes to choose from—would come next. A potato pie made with potatoes sliced very thin, with chopped onions between each layer, with two ounces of fresh butter cut into little bits, with the yolks of four eggs boiled hard, covered close with puff-paste, a table-spoonful of mushroom ketchup being "poured in through a funnel," and the whole baked for an hour and a half, might follow. This, or the dish known to "externs" as cauliflower "au gratin," and infinitely savoury, would do for a vegetable course, and would naturally be succeeded by a selection from the forty-three sweet dishes to which the concluding pages of the Manual are devoted, and among which are included almond pudding; apricot soufflé; Genevoise paste; Italian cream; solid syllabub; and a host more of puddings and pies, and creams, and jellies, and cakes, and biscuits, each more ravishingly delicious than the other. Nor must it be forgotten, that to render all the different preparations of which this "maigre" dinner is composed more attractive than they are already made by the savoury nature of their integral parts, there is that remaining list of thirty-four sauces at the disposal of the group of ascetics who are punishing themselves around their imaginary board—Dutch sauce for fish, piquant sauces for the entrées, white sauces for vegetables, orange sauce or cream sauce for the sweets, and some besides which seem suited to anything or everything, and nice enough to render water-gruel itself a joyous compound. This "Lenten entertainment" would conclude with an anchovy toast, or a plate of devilled biscuits, for the preparation of each of which stimulating condiments, the Manual gives directions; the whole to be followed by any amount of good wine; it being expressly stated at the commencement of this curiously anomalous compilation that "no fluids, unless such as by their quality or substance have the character of animal food," are to be looked upon as breaking a fast.

It is difficult to conceive, that people with ordinarily constructed palates can by possibility look forward with any thing short of absolute satisfaction, to the approach of those particular seasons to which these good things are considered appropriate. One cannot help picturing to oneself the delight of the younger members of a family especially, when the maigre days are coming round. No more coarse, veiny shoulders of mutton, or greasy loins. No more suet puddings with thinly scattered raiins. "Now," one can imagine these youngsters exclaiming, "now for the oyster sausages and the lobster puddings, the scollop macaroni and the shrimp omelette, the potato pie and the marmalade pudding. Now for the savoury sauce with the fish, and the orange sauce with the sweets." To say truth, it seems as if the author of the Manual himself were not always able to suppress some feeling of this kind. We have already observed his touching anxiety for the serving of everything in a comfortable condition of heat, in order that it may reach the ascetics for whom he is providing, while at its best; and a very cursory examination of the collection, will show that our author is quite as anxious that his dishes should lose no particle of flavour that can be imparted to them, as that they should come to table piping hot, or icy cold, as the case may be. He speaks openly of a certain composition made of pounded cheese as "excellent," and in treating of the best way of preparing anchovy toast, he says, of the last method suggested, that "it is still better" when fried in a particular manner which he mentions. Of one especial treatment of Jerusalem artichokes, too, he asserts that it is "much admired," which one would say was a reason for not partaking of it on a fast day. This is a "nice" dish for breakfast, is his candid—and, let us add, perfectly truthful—estimate of buttered eggs: while of another composition he opines that it "is a tasty dish for collation on fasting days," which sentence, with its close juxtaposition of the words "tasty" and "fasting" may be taken as a thoroughly good specimen of the volume.

The word collation, mentioned above, may, perhaps, need a word of explanation for the benefit of the uninitiated. It is a dodgy, evasive sort of expression, and seems to be used to indicate a dodgy and evasive kind of repast. "Besides the principal meal," says our Manual, "usually taken at noon, a collation is allowed in the evening. At the former, the quantity is not limited; at the latter, the quantity (except on Christmas-eve, when it may be doubled) should not exceed eight ounces." And then comes the following clause—a postscript not without significance. "For any reasonable cause, the collation may be taken at noon, and the principal meal in the evening." In other words, you may have an eight-ounce luncheon (a good-sized egg weighs only two ounces and a half) in the middle of the day, and a dinner of unlimited quantity, and consisting of any of he good things enumerated in the pages of the Manual, at your usual dinner hour in the evening; and all this, by the exercise of a very moderate amount of dodging and evasion.

Dodging and evasion everywhere. Let your hair shirt be made with the down from a kitten's