“There is a peculiar etiquette relating to every course in a dinner. The soup is eaten with a bowl-like spoon, and it is the grossest breach to place this in your mouth, or approach it, endwise. You approach the side and suck the soup from it. To make a noise would attract attention. The etiquette of the fish is to eat it with a fork; to use the knife even to cut the fish would be unpardonable, or to touch it to take out the bones; the fork alone must be used. The punch course is often an embarrassment to the previous wines, and is followed by what the French call the _entree_. In fact, while the Americans boast that everything American is the best, French customs are followed at banquets invariably, this being one of the strange inconsistencies of the Americans. Their clothes are copied from the English, though they will claim in the same breath that their tailors are the best in the world. For wines they claim to be unsurpassed, producing the finest; yet the wines on their tables are French or bear French labels. Game is served--a grouse or perhaps a hare, and then a vast roast, possibly venison, or beef, and there are vegetables, followed by a salad of some kind. Then comes the dessert--an iced cream, cakes, nuts, raisins, cheese, and coffee with brandy, and then cigars and vermuth or some cordial. After such a dinner of three hours a Southern gentleman clapped me on the back and said, "Great dinner, that; but let's go and get a drink of something solid," and I saw him take what he termed "two fingers" of Kentucky Bourbon whisky--a very stiff drink. I often wondered how the guests could stand so much.”
A cook of roughly the same moment, setting down the same dish.
Make this in the same way as chicken soup, with the addition of one tablespoonful of rice, a slight grating of nutmeg, a tiny bit of mace, and a piece of stick cinnamon about an inch long, and the omission of the parsley. When the time required for the cooking has expired, take out the spice and pour the soup into a fine sieve. Rub all the rice through, using a wooden vegetable masher. Put the strained mixture in a clean saucepan with a pint of milk, and let it boil up once. If you have cream in plenty, use half cream and half milk. The soup will be much smoother if it is strained a second time, after the milk has been boiled with it.
Sources: The passage is from Unknown, As A Chinaman Saw Us: Passages from His Letters to a Friend at Home, free to read in full at Project Gutenberg. The recipe is from Parloa, Miss Parloa's Young Housekeeper of 1893, also free in full. Both are in the public domain in the United States. The binding above is ours — oxblood cloth, cheese stamp.