Argus (Melbourne, Vic. : 1848 - 1957), Thursday 5 November 1891, page 6


FRENCH LEGENDS OF THE

TABLE.

-.- I

(From the St. James's Budget.)

The delights of the table exercise a greater influence than ever upon the mind of the French gourmet at this season of the year, when the plump partridge and the dainty grouse form one of the chief attractions of the menu. The Parisian papers are, conse-quently, bristling with culinary matters, and endless recipes are thrust upon the bewil-dered render concerning the manner in which the gibier is best converted into a bonne bouche. Among this host of cookery book literature some curious legends of the table have crept in, some of which, at all events, show that not a few of the great men whose names are household words all over the world have occasionally exerted their ingenuity or genius in order to "create" some new and fanciful dainty of the dinner table

QUAIL A LA TALLEYRAND

The following, for instance, is Talleyrand's fanciful and somewhat roundabout way of roasting a quail. On a day of " inspiration gourmande" at his hotel in the Rue Saint-Florentin, he composed the following recipe:

-Take a plump quail, seasoned with truffles, and made tender by having been put into champagne. You put it carefully inside a young Bresse chicken , then sew up the open-ing, and put dabs of butter all over the chicken. Again, you put the chicken inside a fine Berri turkey, and roast the turkey very carefully before a bright fire. What will be the result? All the juice of the turkey is ab-sorbed by the fowl, and all the juice of the fowl in its turn by the quail. After two hours' roasting, the fowl, which in reality is composed of three fowls, is ready, and you place the steaming trinity upon a dish of line porcelain or chiselled silver. Then you pull the chicken out of the turkey, and the quail out of the chicken. The quail? Is it correct to talk of the quail, when this delicious, per fumed dish is indeed too good for any name? You take the quail as you would take some sacred relic and serve it hot, steaming, with its aroma of truffles, after having rousted it to a golden yellow by basting it diligently with

the best Gournay butter

Rossini and the Macaroni

Macaroni a la Pesaro, Rossini culled the dish which ho himself invented on the fol-lowing occasion. In a mortar of Italian marble an exquisite sauce was kept, made of game extracts and aromatic truffles, carefully mingled and diluted in an old liqueur. It was a delectable concoction, faintly flavoured with nutmeg and the juice of oranges. Carefully placed in a silver dish, and on a white serviette, were some long macaroni tubes. Rossini came in and with his deli-

cate artist's hand he took up a tiny enamelled syringe, filled it with tho truffle sauce, and injected some of it into each Neapolitan tube. Then the macaroni was carefully put back into a saucepan, like a child is put into its cradle, and the dainty was cooked to per-fection among intoxicatingly delicious odours. And there Rossini remained, mo-tionless and bewitched, superintending the cooking of his favourite dish, listening to the soft murmur of his macaroni as if he had lent his ear to the captivating sounds of an air from the "Divine Comedy."

A Strange Family Chronicle

Among other peculiarities connected with the culinary department is mentioned the fact that in one of the Swiss cantons a curious custom has been in vogue tor cen-turies past. Whenever there is a wedding among the villagers the friends of the bride and bridegroom present the newly-married couple with an enormous Gruyere cheese, made specially for the occasion. This cheese becomes an heirloom, and goes down from generation to generation, with all the family events cut into its rind A simple incision is made for every birth and baptism, and a cross for every death. The straight cuts are the cradles, the crosses the tombstones of

the family.