The Gourmets Guide to Europe | Page 2

of the country--Antwerp--Spa--Bruges--Ostende 79
CHAPTER IV
BRUSSELS
The Savoy--The Epaule de Mouton--The Faille Déchirée--The
Lion

d'Or--The Regina--The Helder--The Filet de

Sole--Wiltcher's--Justine's--The Etoile--The
Belveder--The Café
Riche--Duranton's--The
Laiterie--Miscellaneous 90
CHAPTER V
HOLLAND
Restaurants at the Hague--Amsterdam--Scheveningen--

Rotterdam--The food of the people 105
CHAPTER VI
GERMAN TOWNS
The cookery of the country--Rathskeller and

beer-cellars--Dresden--Münich--Nüremburg--Hanover--

Leipsic--Frankfurt--Düsseldorf--The Rhine valley--"Cure"

places--Kiel--Hamburg 110
CHAPTER VII
BERLIN
Up-to-date restaurants--Supping-places--Military
cafés--Night
restaurants 144
CHAPTER VIII
SWITZERLAND
Lucerne--Basle--Bern--Geneva--Davos Platz 151
CHAPTER IX
ITALY
Italian cookery and wines--Turin--Milan--Genoa--


Venice--Bologna--Spezzia--Florence--Pisa--Leghorn--

Rome--Naples--Palermo 157
CHAPTER X
SPAIN AND PORTUGAL
Food and wines of the country--Barcelona--San

Sebastian--Bilbao--Madrid--Seville--Bobadilla--

Grenada--Jerez--Algeciras--Lisbon--Estoril 178
CHAPTER XI
AUSTRIA AND HUNGARY
Viennese restaurants and cafés--Baden--Carlsbad--

Marienbad--Prague--Bad Gastein--Budapesth 196
CHAPTER XII
ROUMANIA
The dishes of the country--The restaurants of Bucarest 207
CHAPTER XIII
SWEDEN. NORWAY. DENMARK
Stockholm restaurants--Malmö--Storvik--Gothenburg--

Christiana--Copenhagen--Elsinore 210
CHAPTER XIV
RUSSIA
Food of the country--Restaurants in Moscow--The
dining-places of St.
Petersburg--Odessa--Warsaw 217

CHAPTER XV
TURKEY
Turkish dishes--Constantinople restaurants 226
CHAPTER XVI
GREECE
Grecian dishes--Athens 230
INDEX 233
CHAPTER I
PARIS
The "Cuisine de Paris"--A little ancient history--Restaurants with a
"past"--The restaurants of to-day--Over the river--Open-air
restaurants--Supping-places--Miscellaneous.
Paris is the culinary centre of the world. All the great missionaries of
good cookery have gone forth from it, and its cuisine was, is, and ever
will be the supreme expression of one of the greatest arts in the world.
Most of the good cooks come from the south of France, most of the
good food comes from the north. They meet at Paris, and thus the Paris
cuisine, which is that of the nation and that of the civilised world, is
created.
When the Channel has been crossed you are in the country of good
soups, of good fowl, of good vegetables, of good sweets, of good wine.
The _hors-d'oeuvre_ are a Russian innovation; but since the days when
Henry IV. vowed that every peasant should have a fowl in his pot, soup
from the simplest _bouillon_ to the most lordly _consommés_ and
splendid _bisques_ has been better made in France than anywhere else
in the world. Every great cook of France has invented some particularly
delicate variety of the boiled fillet of sole, and Dugleré achieved a place
amongst the immortals, by his manipulation of the brill. The soles of

the north are as good as any that ever came out of British waters; and
Paris--sending tentacles west to the waters where the sardines swim,
and south to the home of the lamprey, and tapping a thousand streams
for trout and the tiny gudgeon and crayfish--can show as noble a list of
fishes as any city in the world. The _chef de cuisine_ who could not
enumerate an hundred and fifty entrées all distinctively French, would
be no proficient in his noble profession. The British beef stands against
all the world as the meat noblest for the spit, though the French ox
which has worked its time in the fields gives the best material for the
soup-pot; and though the Welsh lamb and the English sheep are the
perfection of mutton young and mutton old, the lamb nurtured on milk
till the hour of its death, and the sheep reared on the salt-marshes of the
north, make splendid contribution to the Paris kitchens. Veal is
practically an unknown meat in London; and the calf which has been
fed on milk and yolk of egg, and which has flesh as soft as a kiss and as
white as snow, is only to be found in the Parisian restaurants. Most of
the good restaurants in London import all their winged creatures,
except game, from France; and the Surrey fowl and the Aylesbury duck,
the representatives of Great Britain, make no great show against the
champions of Gaul, though the Norfolk turkey holds his own. A
vegetable dish, served by itself and not flung into the gravy of a joint,
forms part of every French dinner, large or small; and in the battle of
the kitchen gardens the foreigners beat us nearly all along the line,
though I think that English asparagus is better than the white monsters
of Argenteuil. A truffled partridge, or the homely _Perdrix au choux_,
or the splendid _Faisan à la Financière_ show that there are many more
ways of treating a game bird than plain roasting him; and the peasants
of the south of France had crushed the bones of their ducks for a
century before we in London ever heard of _Canard à la Presse_. The
Parisian eats a score of little birds we are too proud to mention in our
cookery books, and he knows the difference between a _mauviette_ and
an _alouette_. Perhaps the greatest abasement of the Briton, whose
ancestors called the French "Froggies" in scorn, comes when his first
morning in Paris he orders for breakfast with joyful expectation a dish
of the thighs of the little frogs from the vineyards. An Austrian
pastry-cook has a lighter hand than a French one, but the