mpted in the ordinary cuisine. The thousand and one ornamental
dishes that adorn the tables of the wealthy should be purchased from the
confectioner: they cannot profitably be made at home. Apart from these,
cakes, biscuits, and tarts, &c., the class of sweetmeats called
confections may be thus classified:--1. Liquid confects, or fruits
either whole or in pieces, preserved by being immersed in a fluid
transparent syrup; as the liquid confects of apricots, green citrons,
and many foreign fruits. 2. Dry confects are those which, after having
been boiled in the syrup, are taken out and put to dry in an oven, as
citron and orange-peel, &c. 3. Marmalade, jams, and pastes, a kind of
soft compounds made of the pulp of fruits or other vegetable substances,
beat up with sugar or honey; such as oranges, apricots, pears, &c. 4.
Jellies are the juices of fruits boiled with sugar to a pretty thick
consistency, so as, upon cooling, to form a trembling jelly; as currant,
gooseberry, apple jelly, &c. 5. Conserves are a kind of dry confects,
made by beating up flowers, fruits, &c., with sugar, not dissolved. 6.
Candies are fruits candied over with sugar after having been boiled in
the syrup.

DESSERT DISHES.

1509. With moderns the dessert is not so profuse, nor does it hold the
same relationship to the dinner that it held with the ancients,--the
Romans more especially. On ivory tables they would spread hundreds of
different kinds of raw, cooked, and preserved fruits, tarts and cakes,
as substitutes for the more substantial comestibles with which the
guests were satiated. However, as late as the reigns of our two last
Georges, fabulous sums were often expended upon fanciful desserts. The
dessert certainly repays, in its general effect, the expenditure upon it
of much pains; and it may be said, that if there be any poetry at all in
meals, or the process of feeding, there is poetry in the dessert, the
materials for which should be selected with taste, and, of course, must
depend, in a great measure, upon the season. Pines, melons, grapes,
peaches, nectarines, plums, strawberries, apples, pears, oranges,
almonds, raisins, figs, walnuts, filberts, medlars, cherries, &c. &c.,
all kinds of dried fruits, and choice and delicately-flavoured cakes and
biscuits, make up the dessert, together with the most costly and
_recherche_ wines. The shape of the dishes varies at different periods,
the prevailing fashion at present being oval and circular