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Salads (Alec highly esteemed)

"alec," highly esteemed by the epicures of those days. Amphoræ of the former have been exhumed at Pompeii, the contents thereof being now voted "darksome, saltish, biting, and beastly"; though this condiment, prepared from the intestines of fish allowed to putrefy, and then spiced to a degree, was the popular Roman Sauce, as proverbially as melted butter is now that of the English. Sydney Smith writing (June, 1844) to M. Eugene Robin, said: "I am living among the best society in the Metropolis, and at ease in my circumstances; I dine with the rich in London, and physic the poor in the country ;passing from the Sauces of Dives to the sores of Lazarus." "Fames optimum condimentum est,”—“ Hunger is the poor man's best Sauce." Some wiseacre has scoffed at us English as "a people with only one Sauce." The fact is we have as many Sauces as we have kinds of meat; each in the process of cooking yields its native sap, and this is the best of all sauces conceivable. Only English folk know what is meant by gravy: consequently the English alone are competent to speak on the question of Sauce. Gravy is a watery solution of meat extract, which is browned by the action of heat whilst nearly dry, the change from broth to gravy being analogous to that which sugar undergoes when it becomes caramel. Broth, however highly concentrated, has never the stirring effect of gravy (not too brown). Such broth still requires the addition of flavouring vegetables, and condiments. When the extractive matters of meat turn in cooking to reddish-brown gravy, the alkaloids, and peptonoids of the previously pale soup undergo a change, like that of starch, and sugar, when heated to a high degree of temperature; they lose water, become doubled, or trebled in chemical structure, and assume new properties, the brown products being caramels, and exercising powerful effects on the nervous system.

Charles Lamb, in Elia's Table-talk, has humorously said : "It is a desideratum in works that treat "de re culinaria" that we have no rationale of Sauces, or theory of mixed flavours, so as to show why cabbage is reprehensible with roast beef, whilst laudable with brawn; why the haunch of mutton seeks the alliance of currant jelly, but the shoulder civilly declineth it; why loin of veal (a pretty problem!), being itself unctuous, seeketh the adventitious lubricity of melted butter; and why the same part in pork, not more oleaginous, abhorreth from it; why the French bean sympathizes with the flesh of deer; why salt fish points to parsnip; why brawn makes a dead set at mustard; why cats prefer valerian to heartsease, old ladies vice versâ (though this is rather travelling out of the road of the dietetics, and may be thought a question more curious than relevant); why salmon, a strong sapor per se, fortifieth its condition with the mighty lobster Sauce, whose embraces are fatal to the delicate relish of the turbot; why oysters in death rise up against the contamination of brown sugar, while the sweet yam by turns court, and are accepted by the compliable mutton-hash, she not yet decidedly declaring for either! We are as yet but in the empirical stage of cookery: we want to be able to give a reason of the relish that is in us."