In foreign kitchens

boarding-houses the story is the same; while if one knows private life in England and vists in country houses, he finds that the French order prevails, and real English dishes remain in the background. English meats are of a quality unknown even to the highest order of American butcher, since we have, as yet, no system of feeding expressly for market such as prevails in England. It is true that one finds much American meat, and even more from Australia; but it is labelled so, and brings far less price than the native meat. Nowhere but in England can one find such mighty chops, an inch and a half thick, firm and fine in grain, tender as chicken, and served spluttering hot from the gridiron, with their accompaniment of mealy potatoes in demi-toilette, since the skin is cut from each side only. The English cook has mastered a potato, a thing the French cook has never learned ; but his power stops at a potato in its jacket. For mashed potato in its perfection, as well as for baked, America has the palm, meaning always by America the land of good housekeepers. The bad ones are ignored. For London, or for any great English town or city, the story is much the same; and for really English dishes, aside from their fine-flavored bacon and chops, which are everywhere alike, one must go into the heart of the country. Devonshire cream and junkets and Devonshire biscuits are found in perfection only on their own soil ; and so is it with Yorkshire ham, and pie, and many another Yorkshire dainty, always of huge proportions, since Yorkshire men are also huge and sweep everything before them. A Yorkshire tea-cake is on a scale for a giant's tea-party, and words fail before the Yorkshire ham, which has even found its way to Paris, and holds its own majestically amid galantines and pâtés unmindful of the frivolous paper lacework in which it is embedded. Each county glories in certain immemorial dishes, which must be eaten just there, and there are towns whose chief association is always with some special dainty. Bath buns, Shrewsbury pancakes, Banbury cakes and all the long list, — who does not think of them instantly as the names are men- tioned ? They are all a little disappointing ; but this is said quite under one's breath, since they are historical and venerable, and part of the established order of things, and at any hint of change or betterment the foundations of society would shake. Privately, the American avows to himself that they are heavy and sticky, and, on the whole, peculiar; but they are historic, and that is enough. The Englishman wants fullest consciousness of every ingredient in his cake. No melting in the mouth for him. There must be substance; and substance he gets, since flour seems to have been kneaded in till no more could be absorbed, and the cake or bun, after the first day, is bullet-proof. So is it with English pastry, till the lighter hand of the French cook has taught them what flakiness means. Dripping is the favorite shortening for all ordinary cakes and pies, and suet for dumplings, and thus comes a solidity of structure which, to the Englishman, means a substantial money's worth. His bread is of the same order. Not once in the length and breadth of Eng-