glish inn, or the artistic little circle
of lamb-chop fried in bread-crumbs coiled around a tempting centre of
spinach which can always be found in France, can recognize any family
resemblance to these dapper civilized preparations in those coarse,
roughly hacked strips of bone, gristle, and meat which are commonly
called mutton-chop in America? There seems to be a large dish of
something resembling meat, in which each fragment has about two or
three edible morsels, the rest being composed of dry and burnt skin,
fat, and ragged bone.

Is it not time that civilization should learn to demand somewhat
more care and nicety in the modes of preparing what is to be cooked
and eaten? Might not some of the refinement and trimness which
characterize the preparations of the European market be with
advantage introduced into our own? The housekeeper who wishes to
garnish her table with some of those nice things is stopped in the
outset by the butcher. Except in our large cities, where some
foreign travel may have created the demand, it seems impossible to
get much in this line that is properly prepared.

I am aware that, if this is urged on the score of aesthetics, the ready
reply will be, "Oh, we can't give time here in America to go into
niceties and French whim-whams!" But the French mode of doing almost
all practical things is based on that true philosophy and utilitarian
good sense which characterize that seemingly thoughtless people.
Nowhere is economy a more careful study, and their market is
artistically arranged to this end. The rule is so to cut their meats
that no portion designed to be cooked in a certain manner shall have
wasteful appendages which that mode of cooking will spoil. The French
soup kettle stands ever ready to receive the bones, the thin fibrous
flaps, the sinewy and gristly portions, which are so often included in
our roasts or broilings, which fill our plates with unsightly debris,
and finally make an amount of blank waste for which we pay our butcher
the same price that we pay for what we have eaten.

The dead waste of our clumsy, coarse way of cutting meats is immense.
For example, at the beginning of the present season, the part of a
lamb denominated leg and loin, or hind-quarter, sold for thirty cents
a pound. Now this includes, besides the thick, fleshy portions, a
quantity of bone, sinew, and thin fibrous substance, constituting
full one third of the whole weight. If we put it into the oven entir