able. The aim of English cooking is so to deal with the raw
material of man's nourishment as to bring out, for the healthy palate,
all its natural juices and savours. And in this, when the cook has any
measure of natural or acquired skill, we most notably succeed. Our beef
is veritably beef; at its best, such beef as can be eaten in no other
country under the sun; our mutton is mutton in its purest essence--think
of a shoulder of Southdown at the moment when the first jet of gravy
starts under the carving knife! Each of our vegetables yields its
separate and characteristic sweetness. It never occurs to us to disguise
the genuine flavour of food; if such a process be necessary, then
something is wrong with the food itself. Some wiseacre scoffed at us as
the people with only one sauce. The fact is, we have as many sauces as
we have kinds of meat; each, in the process of cookery, yields its native
sap, and this is the best of all sauces conceivable. Only English folk
know what is meant by _gravy_; consequently, the English alone are
competent to speak on the question of sauce.

To be sure, this culinary principle presupposes food of the finest
quality. If your beef and your mutton have flavours scarcely
distinguishable, whilst both this and that might conceivably be veal, you
will go to work in quite a different way; your object must then be to
disguise, to counterfeit, to add an alien relish--in short, to do
anything _except_ insist upon the natural quality of the viand. Happily,
the English have never been driven to these expedients. Be it flesh,
fowl, or fish, each comes to table so distinctly and eminently itself
that by no possibility could it be confused with anything else. Give
your average cook a bit of cod, and tell her to dress it in her own way.
The good creature will carefully boil it, and there an end of the matter;
and by no exercise of art could she have so treated the fish as to make
more manifest and enjoyable that special savour which heaven has bestowed
upon cod. Think of our array of joints; how royal is each in its own
way, and how utterly unlike any of the others. Picture a boiled leg of
mutton. It is mutton, yes, and mutton of the best; nature has bestowed
upon man no sweeter morsel; but the same joint roasted is mutton too, and
how divinely different! The point is that these differences are natural;
that, in eliciting them, we obey the eternal law of things, and no human
caprice. You