Dinners and diners at home and abroad : with piquant plates and choice cuts, comical, anatomical and gastronomical forming a comprehensive dining directory for all palates and all pockets / by E.L. Blanchard.

  • Blanchard, E. L. (Edward L.), 1820-1889.
Date:
1860
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Dinners and diners at home and abroad : with piquant plates and choice cuts, comical, anatomical and gastronomical forming a comprehensive dining directory for all palates and all pockets / by E.L. Blanchard. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    AT HOME AND ABROAD. who flung himself into the air and turned the first summersault; but he who first contrasted the savoury with the sweet, and united these two happy morsels in the bonds of indissoluble wed- lock, must take rank with the boldest. Now can we understand why Sir Hugh Evans, the utterer and appreciator of all good things—the Welsh judge of a rare-bit—should have so eagerly desired his return to dinner when there was “pippins and cheese to come” Man has been emphatically called a cooking ani- mal—one who alone purifies his food by fire; but with equal truth and sagacity it may be observed tnat man is the only animal that chats over his dinner, or takes wine over it— or makes the dinner the nucleus of a social solar system, around which a sparkling universe of bright stars may pleasantlv revolve. Many a brilliant idea has culminated behind a chop, or shot, meteor-like, across the horizon of a steak. The dinner-hour is, in fact, peculiarly the hour of mental as well as bodily digestion. What a volume of thought, for in- stance, lies condensed in the different tenses of the verb “ to dine.” Mark the impression made upon the ear by even the different pronouns used m its conjugation. What a succession of vivid pictures dilate upon the eye as we run through b 2 '