Remoulade
This is in fact, as near as possible, the ordinary English salad dressing. Or it may be otherwise described as a Mayonnaise made with hard-boiled yolks of eggs. Some of the French receipts give directions for making it with raw yolks; but this is a mistake, as the Remoulade would then become identical with a Mayon- Restaurant naise. The name comes from the verb remoudre, to grind-- and refers to grinding to a fine flour the hard yolk. By carefully and gradually grinding together the yolks of two hard-boiled eggs, with five tablespoonfuls of oil, one or one and a half of tarragon vinegar, a little salt and white pepper, it is possible to produce a Remoulade as smooth as a Mayonnaise, and differing in no respect from a good English salad dressing.
The Remoulade is thus far complete, and requires no addition to justify its name. But some people choose to add mustard to it; others, a chopped ravigote; and others, again, both mustard and a ravigote. It then becomes a Tartar sauce.
RESTAURANT-the Soup. Restaurant was originally the name of a soup with a strange history. One of the earliest accounts of it is to be found in a little book published at Lyons in 1557, and supposed to be the first work of Bernard Palissy, the potter. It is an attack upon the ignorance and blunders of doctors-" Déclaration des Abus des Médecins "; and the name of the author is given, not as Bernard Palissy, but as Pierre Braillier. Whoever be the author, he showed for the first time the absurdity of the fashionable soup.
He opens his attack upon it by ridiculing a detail which is not essential, but is curious, and of interest to this day. The physicians of those days recommended an old hen or capon to make a good soup for invalids. The tradition of this remains not only in the cock-a-leekie of the Scotch, which is always supposed to be made of an old cock (and they are in this respect only following rules which they learned from the cooks patronised by Mary Stuart and Mary of Guise), but also in the French kitchen to this day. Nearly all the great French cooks recommend an old hen for soups. Now here is something curious. In the year 1557 Braillier, be he Palissy or another, laughed Restaurant to scorn the old fowl, and insisted that a young one is much better-fuller of nourishment and of flavour. For three hundred years his advice has been set aside, and the old fowl has been imperative in French kitchens for a good soup. At the end of these three hundred years Gouffé produces his book on cookery-the best that has appeared in France since the death of Carême. He has come to the conclusion that the tradition of the French kitchen-the old fowl is a mistake; and he insists on the superiority of a fowl in its prime. It is difficult to decide between the two, and impossible to lay down a fixed rule to which no exception can be taken. There is no rule more certain than this that four-year-old mutton is better than the twoyear-old meat which comes to market, and that full-grown animals are better than the very young. But exceptions crowd upon us. If the older meat is so good, why do we take to lamb and to veal, and pay high prices for them? Our affections are divided between the old and the young, and we shall never probably be constant to either. We get tired of the old because it is apt to be strong, and of the young because it is apt to be insipid. The Marquis de Cussy laid down the following rule:- "Voyez-vous, les meilleures viandes sont celles qui sont le moins viandes, comme les poissons exquis sont ceux qui sont le moins poissons: soyez convainçu de ce principe." In plain English, good fish ought not to taste fishy, nor should meat be meaty, nor should fowls taste of the henhouse. And these faults are more liable to the old than to the young. The great and almost incredible fault of the Restaurant, however, was not in the substance it used, but in the manner of using it. A fowl was to be minced small with butchers' meat, and was to be distilled in an alembic with barley, roses, cinnamon, corianders, and currants. The dew thus distilled, which was nothing but water without substance and without flavour, was declared by the physicians of the sixteenth century to have a wonderful restora- Restaurant tive virtue; nor did the soup lose its good name even after Bernard Palissy exposed the fallacy of its pretensions. A hundred years later, however to fix our ideas, say 1660, when Louis the Great was in all his glory in Paris, and Charles II. was coming to London-it would appear that some doubts had sprung up in the minds of those who consumed the Restaurant; for in nearly all the French cookery books there are two receipts for it. One was the old orthodox receipt for distillation: the other may be described as a stultification of the distillery. The dregs from which the juice had been distilled were made into a sort of purée, and then the distilled water was put back into it. This farce amused the French imagination with a makebelieve of science; and the soup held its ground for another hundred years, more or less, till in 1765 a tavern was established with the name of Restaurant, to supply the wonderful soup and other aliments prepared in the like grand style.
RESTAURANT-the Tavern. "Sir," said Dr. Johnson to Boswell, "there is nothing which has been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern;" and on the same occasion-the date is 1776expatiating " on the felicity of England in its taverns and inns, he triumphed over the French for not having in any perfection the tavern life." The French, however, were soon to change; and adopting the English idea, they so improved upon it that we have consented to adopt their name for it, and to forget the absurdities of the soup with which it was at first connected.
The first establishment of the kind in Paris was started by a humourist named Boulanger, who put a rather profane motto-Venite ad me, omnes qui stomacho laboratis, et ego vos restaurabo-over his door in the Rue des Poulies. He set up a place with little marble tables. He was not allowed table-cloths, and he was not allowed to interfere with the Rice ragouts which were to be had from the traiteur. He provided his customers with soups-and especially the restaurant divin; also with fowls and fresh eggs. He was soon followed by others; but it was not till 1782 that a restaurant was established such as we have it now, fit to rival and outdo the English tavern, and perfect in all its arrangements. This was set up by Beauvilliers, who, in his standard work on cookery, takes credit to himself for having introduced the English style of food into Paris. He soon made his fortune; and the fashion which he started spread till it became quite a feature of Parisian life. Grimod de la Reynière attributes to three chief causes the rise and wonderful progress of the Restaurant in Paris. First of all, to the rage for English fashions which marked the latter years of Louis XVI.-"for the English, it is well known, almost always take their meals in taverns." Next, to the sudden influx into the capital of legislators under the new order of Government--popular deputies without homes, who made the vogue, and drew all Paris to the taverns and coffee-rooms. Lastly, to the break-up of the great houses in the Revolution. The artists to whom they gave employment were thrown out of work, and turned their talents to catering for the public. Whatever were the causes at work, the French cooks bent all their efforts to perfect the system of the restaurant; with their rare skill and taste they could not fail of success; and they produced a model which has been imitated all over the globe. RICE is not too often seen at our tables. It can be made very pleasant; it contains as much nourishment as the potato; and it is digested in an hour-which can be said of very few articles of food. It combines, like the macaronis, with broth to form a variety of soups, with milk and egg to form puddings, and with butter alone, or butter and grated cheese, to form an entremet which is light without being sweet. There is no sweet entremet Roasting more simple, and at the same time more effective, than the combination of plain boiled rice with preserved or stewed fruit and cream. It is not easy, however, to get rice properly boiled. This is not because there is any difficulty in it, but because there are many people who think rice insipid, and not worth the trouble of cooking. They cannot understand how other people should be almost fanatical in their enjoyment of rice, should regard a curry as nothing without it, and should insist on having the rice perfectly dry-every grain apart.
Boiled Rice. - Wash the rice - Carolina is the best-in water. Throw it into plenty of boiling water. The proportion is six pounds (that is, pints) of water to one of rice; therefore, three pints of water to half a pound of rice. Boil it for five minutes, and skim it. Add a wineglassful of milk for half a pound of rice, and continue the boiling for five minutes more. Then strain the rice, and return it dry into the pot upon the corner of the stove or a slow fire; but at the same time pour into it an ounce of butter melted into a spoonful of the hot milk and water in which the rice was boiled, and add salt. In five minutes the rice, which should now and again be stirred, to swell, steam and dry it, should be ready. Fifteen minutes in all.