The Gastronomic Regenerator: A Simplified and Entirely New System of Cookery: With Nearly Two Thousand Practical Receipts Suited to the Income of All Classes

objection to be found fault with; or else they say, this capon, pheasant, or poularde is not young, and consequently not of the best quality. You may sometimes be right, but it certainly often happens that the greatest gourmet is the worst carver, and complains sadly during that very long process, saying to himself, “I am last to be served; my dinner will be cold.” Reproaches of this kind are daily addressed to the culinary artiste, who remembers perfectly well having burned his fingers whilst sending up those important removes. To illustrate this just question I will relate a curious and historic anecdote:--having one day served a _petit diner_, _très recherché_, for five persons, in which was a poularde à l’ambassadrice, a new and rather voluminous dish of mine, after the first course a message was sent to me that the gentlemen had found _that_ dish so good they regretted I had not sent two poulardes instead of one; at first I took this message for a _pleasantry_, but a short time after three parts of the poularde came down in a state that if exposed over a laundry door would have served for a sign, without having recourse to those popular words, “mangling done here;” the sight of a dish so greatly disfigured made me collect a few of my little culinary ideas. Nature, says I to myself, compels us to dine more or less once a day; each of those days you are, honorable reader, subject to meet _en tête-à-tête_ with a fowl, poularde, duck, pheasant, or other volatile species; is it not bad enough to have sacrificed the lives of those _animaux bienfaisans_ to satisfy our indefatigable appetites, without pulling and tearing to atoms the remains of our benefactors? It is high time for the credit of humanity and the comfort of quiet families, to put an end to the massacre of those innocents. Amongst other tribulations of carving I shall relate a most _boufonne_ anecdote. “If you should, unhappily, be forced to carve at table,” says Launcelot Sturgeon, in his Essays, Moral, Philosophical, and Stomachic, “neither