Practical gastronomy and culinary dictionary

Parmentier planted the field with potatoes, and when the tuber was ripe and fit for digging he had the place guarded by gendarmes, who ostensibly withdrew at dusk. As he anticipated, the field was plundered during the night by the people, tempted by the charm of forbidden fruit. The taste, thus acquired, spread with amazing rapidity amongst all classes. There was then a potato mania, and it is said that at a ball given at the palace of Versailles the queen and all the ladies were adorned with potato blossoms, whilst the king and all the gentlemen of the court wore the fiower as "button-holes." The scientific and medical notabilities of France were invited to a potato banquet, at which the favoured tuber was served cooked in thirty-three different ways. It is an amazing fact that France, the culinary nation j!;«?* excellence, ignored the existence of the potato until the year 1787, whilst it was generally known and appreciated as art 868 PBACTICAL GASTRONOMY article of diet in England and in Spain long before Parmentier was born. Sir Walter Kaleigh introduced it into Ireland from Virginia one hundred and fifty years before the tuber made its appearance in France. But it made slow progress as an edible, and was grown as a curiosity for some time before it attracted the attention of the English cultivator and consumer. Parmentier died in 1813 at the age of seventy-six, and was interred at P^re La Chaise Cemetery. Pound the monument erected to his memory is formed a small garden, planted with the vegetable he loved and laboured for so much. Here is the receipt for Parmentier Potato Soup, or Potage Parmentier. Peel a dozen potatoes, slice and put them in cold water. Slice two onions, a head of celery, and the white part of two leeks. Put these ingredients in a stewpan with four ounces of butter, and add the potatoes. Fry the whole for ten minutes, and then moisten with two quarts of veal broth. Add three cloves, a little salt, a bunch of parsley, and let simmer until the vegetables are done ; then rub all through a fine sieve. Keturn the pur^e into a stewpan ; set it on the fire to boil slowly ; if the soup is found too thick, add a little broth. Let it simmer for twenty minutes, taking off the scum as it rises. When ready to serve, bind it with three yolks of eggs, diluted with a little cream, and two ounces of butter divided into small pieces. Throw into the soup a little finely-chopped and blanched chervil, and serve with some small fried bread croutons. The Potato in Prance. The Paris correspondent of the Daily News wrote in February 1887 : — " The potato is not in France that homely esculent that it is in the British Islands. There are as many ways of pre- paring it here as there were in Goldsmith's time of cooking a nettle top. Potatoes are only admitted en robe de chamhre — that is to say, in their jackets — to the midday meal, and then on unceremonious occasions. They chiefly figure at dejeuners intijues, or dejeuners taken at restaurants, where the hifteck aux jjommes and la cotelette a la puree de i)oinme de terre are in great favour. At popular banquets, where each one who sits down to table pays from four to six francs a head, the rosb if is sure to be a la Parmentier. The centenary of the adoption of the potato as an article of food is to be celebrated next month at Mont- didier.