f
gradations of perfection in the eyes and ears of painters and musicians.
After all the pains which the editor has taken to explain the harmony of
subtle relishes, unless nature has given the organ of taste in a due
degree, this book will, alas! no more make an OSBORNE,[52-*] than it
can a REYNOLDS, or an ARNE, or a SHIELD.

Where nature has been most bountiful of this faculty, its sensibility is
so easily blunted by a variety of unavoidable circumstances, that the
tongue is very seldom in the highest condition for appreciating delicate
flavours, or accurately estimating the relative force of the various
materials the cook employs in the composition of an harmonious relish.
Cooks express this refinement of combination by saying, a well-finished
_ragout_ "tastes of every thing, and tastes of nothing:" (this is
"_kitchen gibberish_" for a sauce in which the component parts are well
proportioned.)

However delicately sensitive nature may have formed the organs of taste,
it is only during those few happy moments that they are perfectly awake,
and in perfect good humour, (alas! how very seldom they are,) that the
most accomplished and experienced cook has a chance of working with any
degree of certainty without the auxiliary tests of the balance and the
measure: by the help of these, when you are once right, it is your own
fault if you are ever otherwise.

The sense of taste depends much on the health of the individual, and is
hardly ever for a single hour in the same state: such is the extremely
intimate sympathy between the stomach and the tongue, that in proportion
as the former is empty, the latter is acute and sensitive. This is the
cause that "good appetite is the best sauce," and that the dish we find
savoury at _luncheon_, is insipid at _dinner_, and at _supper_ quite
tasteless.

To taste any thing in perfection, the tongue must be moistened, or the
substance applied to it contain moisture; the nervous papillae which
constitute this sense are roused to still more lively sensibility by
salt, sugar, aromatics, &c.

If the palate becomes dull by repeated tasting, one of the best ways of
refreshing it, is to masticate an apple, or to wash your mouth well with
milk.

The incessant exercise of tasting, which a cook is obliged to submit to
during the education of her tongue, frequently impairs the very faculty
she is trying to improve. "'Tis true 'tis pity and pity 'tis," (says a
_grand gourmand_) "'tis true, her t