Contise
There are words in the French kitchen which have a precarious existence in the dictionary, and this is one of them. Contiser means to inlay with truffles or tongue cut into nice shapes any kind of viands, but chiefly white meat, as the fillets of fowl. It comes from an old Provençal verb, cointir, to adorn. From this came a noun, cointise, adornment, which has budded forth into a second verb, cointiser, or as we have it now, contiser. The root of the word exists in English as quaint, nice and neat, with a prim sort of elegance. So that contiser is in English to make quaint or neat looking. Carême appears not to have liked the word, and fancying that it had something to do with conte, a tale, invented historier in place of it, which is very quaint indeed. A dish adorned with geometrical or other figures worked into or upon it by means of truffles, tongue, jelly, sugar, or anything else, was in his language-historied.
Cooк.-The truest alchymist and the best physician.
M. Henrion de Pensey, formerly President of the Court of Cassation, made an observation worthy of a great judge: he made it to Laplace, the great astronomer. “I regard the discovery of a new dish as a far more interesting event than the discovery of a star, for we have always Court-Bouillon stars enough. I shall not regard the sciences as sufficiently honoured nor appropriately represented among us, so long as I do not see a cook in the first class of the Institute."