Soyer's Culinary Campaign: Being Historical Reminiscences of the Late War.: With The Plain Art of Cookery for Military and Civil Institutions

mackerel, salad, &c.; and with our roast beef, saddle-back of mutton, and haunch of venison, their sheep, lamb, or kid roasted whole, and the monster and delicious kebab; by our entrées of suprème de volaille, salmis, and vol-aux-vents, their doulmas kioftee, sis kebabs, haharram bouton, pilaff au cailles, &c.; with our vegetables, their Bahmia, fried leeks and celery, Partligan bastici, and sakath kabac bastici; with our macédoines, jellies, charlottes, &c., their lokounds, moukahalibi, Baclava gyneristi, ekmekataive. Their coffee, iced milk, and sherbet--in fact, all their principal dishes might, with the best advantage, be adopted and Frenchified and Anglicised. Not so their method of serving, in which they mix sweet and savoury dishes throughout the repast; and less likely still their method of eating with their fingers, though, after several trials, I must admit that it has some peculiar advantages; their sauces being of a thinnish nature, require to be absorbed with a piece of bread in order to partake of them, which could not be performed equally well with a knife or fork. Their custom of serving only one hot dish at a time is not new to us, we having borrowed it from the Russians, who probably took it from the Turks. No nation as yet has been able to boast of having introduced a single innovation in the way of living to this singularly incommunicative race, the cause of which I can only attribute to the immense distance placed between the relative social position of the two sexes: for while in Europe the “_beau sexe_” forms the soul of society and sociability, in Turkey they are kept in entire seclusion, and almost without any kind of education. My stay here has not only produced me the high honour of an interview with the Sultan, but also the advantage of becoming acquainted with one of the most useful and principal officers of his Sublime Majesty’s household, called the Hachji Bachji, or general-in-chief of the culinary department of his Sublime Majesty the Padischah, and he speaks with pride of having held that office five years with the late Sultan and