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CHAPTER I

PARIS

The "Cuisine de Paris"--A little ancient history--Restaurants with
a "past"--The restaurants of to-day--Over the river--Open-air
restaurants--Supping-places--Miscellaneous.

Paris is the culinary centre of the world. All the great missionaries of
good cookery have gone forth from it, and its cuisine was, is, and ever
will be the supreme expression of one of the greatest arts in the world.
Most of the good cooks come from the south of France, most of the good
food comes from the north. They meet at Paris, and thus the Paris
cuisine, which is that of the nation and that of the civilised world, is
created.

When the Channel has been crossed you are in the country of good soups,
of good fowl, of good vegetables, of good sweets, of good wine. The
_hors-d'oeuvre_ are a Russian innovation; but since the days when
Henry IV. vowed that every peasant should have a fowl in his pot, soup
from the simplest _bouillon_ to the most lordly _consommes_ and splendid
_bisques_ has been better made in France than anywhere else in the
world. Every great cook of France has invented some particularly
delicate variety of the boiled fillet of sole, and Duglere achieved a
place amongst the immortals, by his manipulation of the brill. The soles
of the north are as good as any that ever came out of British waters;
and Paris--sending tentacles west to the waters where the sardines swim,
and south to the home of the lamprey, and tapping a thousand streams for
trout and the tiny gudgeon and crayfish--can show as noble a list of
fishes as any city in the world. The _chef de cuisine_ who could not
enumerate an hundred and fifty entrees all distinctively French, would
be no proficient in his noble profession. The British beef stands
against all the world as the meat noblest for the spit, though the
French ox which has worked its time in the fields gives the best
material for the soup-pot; and though the Welsh lamb and the English
sheep are the perfection of mutton young and mutton old, the lamb
nurtured on milk till the hour of its death, and the sheep reared on the
salt-marshes of the north, make splendid contribution to the Paris
kitchens. Veal is practically an unknown meat in London; and the calf
which has been fed on milk and yolk of egg, and which has flesh as soft
as a kiss and as white as snow, is only to be found in the Parisian
restaurants. Most of the good restaurants in London import al