pt at anything which deserves the name of
cookery. Great monopolists control the supplies, and contract to
deliver to these hotels, even in out-of-the-way localities, so much
ice-stored, "mousey" fish, "mousey" quails, stringy meat, impossible
vegetables and fruits, gathered from the cheapest markets of Europe
and of a quality just not bad enough to cause a revolt among the hotel
visitors. The heating of the food is done by patent machinery in ovens
and by the use of boiling fat. No cook is in these circumstances
possible, with his artistic feeling for the production of a perfect
result of skill and taste. A kind of bottled meat-flavoured sauce,
manufactured from spent yeast, is used to make the soups, and is
poured, with an equally nauseating result, over the hard veal, the
tough chicken, the "mousey" quails, and the tasteless beef and mutton,
which are never roasted, but are baked or stewed in boiling
fat--though shamelessly described as "rotis" in the pretentious and
mendacious "menu" placed on the dinner-table. The consequence is that
the tourist, who has been overfed at home, eats very little, and his
health benefits. But in such an hotel the man who lives carefully when
at home, and desires a simple but properly cooked meal, is reduced to
a state of indigestion, semi-starvation and misery.

The Englishman who is disgusted by the new mechanical methods of
cookery in the great hotels of Continental "resorts," returns to
London, and finds the same atrocious system at work--not only in the
public restaurants, but in his club. Nowhere in London can you rely on
being served with really fresh fish, however highly you may pay for
it. Rarely it is fresh, usually it is not. The ice storage people take
good care that you shall not obtain fresh fish, and so retain your
taste for it. Nowhere at club or restaurant, with rare exceptions, can
you obtain meat roasted in the old-fashioned way on a roasting-jack,
carefully "basted" during the process, and served when exactly cooked
to a turn. There were, only a few years ago, one or two such places
surviving--both clubs and restaurants--where proper roasting was done,
but, like the rest, they have now adopted lazy, economical,
money-saving methods. Their managers calculate that what they do will
serve. It is good enough for the crowd! So at last you abandon the
efforts to obtain decent simple food, in club or hotel, and dine with
your friend _en famille_. The same thing confronts yo