sweetbread, and the faintest and most ethereal
seasoning of salt, pepper, and mace, is a dish for
the gods, painful to dwell upon when not on
hand to refer to. Eel pie needs no
eulogium. To us the eel pie is like the May bough
and the cowslips. It recals the brightest
scenes of youth.

And now, by due sequence, we come to the
emperor of pies, the Roi des Rois, le brave des
braves, the Perigord pie. If Montepulciano be
the king of Italian wines, as Redi has laid down
in his jovial bacchanalian poem, the glorious
pie of Perigord, the treasure-house of good
things, is the potentate of all possible pies, as
the haggis, according to Burns, is "the great
chieftain of the pudding race." Into it are
crowded all the choicest things of the sky,
earth, and ocean. The very making of it is a
pleasure. We revel over every item of the
recipe. What an amusement for a wet day in
the country!

You make a minced forcemeat of green
truffles, and a little delicate cutting of basil,
thyme, and knotted marjoram—rarest herbs of
the garden. To these you add woodcocks'
liver, a little fat bacon, a few currants, the
flesh of a wild fowl, some pepper, and some
salt. Then lard, with spikes of bacon, the
breasts of two pheasants, two partridges, two
woodcocks, and some moor game, divide the
backs, sever the legs and wings, and place
a whole pheasant, boned, in the centre. These
are to be seasoned with white pepper, a little
Jamaica pepper, salt, and mace. To receive
these spoils of earth and air, construct a
sarcophagus of classic form and of thick raised crust.
Line this soft chest with slices of fine fat bacon.
Pave it with stuffing, and on this pleasant bed
lay the game with a light and loving hand,
intermingled with whole green truffles fresh from
the cool earth and lately routed out by the
sagacious truffle-hunter's dog. If you crowd
and squeeze them, too greedy for mere quantity,
remember Perigord will boast one good pie
the less. Spread over all soft carpets of white
unctuous bacon, and inurn the whole under a
thick crust. It must be baked with calmness
and deliberation, for it takes a long time
ripening in the oven.

The venison pasty of Mrs. Rundell and Soyer
is, no doubt, to the pasty of Robin Hood and
his wild men what the potato is to the peach,
or the man who does the mackerel on the
pavement to the divine Raphael of Urbino. That
muscular creature the deer, not having natural
fat enough about him, has to be supplemented
by the fat of a loin of mutton soaked a whole
day in port wine and vinegar in which rape
seed has been steeped. The meat (previously
rubbed with sugar, to give it shortness and
flavour), has to be so cut up and distributed
with its postscript of fat, so that the carver may
find it without breaking up the pavement of
the whole pie, or crushing in the roof. The dish
must be strewn with pepper, salt, and butter,
and inundated with half a pint of good gravy.
And ladies, ye at least who love your lords,
remember the golden rule, that, as in our paté
de Perigord, too close packing makes the meat
under do; so, in this venison pasty, too loose
packing makes the meat hard at the edges. It
would be pleasant to eat such a pasty, with
more hot gravy added through a funnel on its
arrival steaming sweetly from the oven, under
the feathery boughs of forest beech-trees in
May time, got up in buff boots and green tunic,
and to toss off malvoisie, and sing about the
"merry greenwood," and the throstle, and
the mavis, and merry men are we, and all
the rest of it; but then the crust would
probably be as heavy as lead under such
circumstances, and the thing would never
answer.

Let us turn to pies of a more feminine
character—the pies of the orchard and of the garden.
Our first recollection of fruit tarts is
associated with our first visit to the country, when
as boys we were pressed into the housekeeper's
service and sent out into a long green thicket of
a garden. There, first seeing fruit alive upon the
tree, blooming and glowing with the life blood
in its veins, we remember fancying ourselves in
the garden of Eden, the housekeeper's very
little daughter (ætat. twelve) our incomparable
Eve. There, forgetful of the hours and careless
of the hot widening sunshine, singing like twin
wrens on the same bough of apple blossom;
flowers at our feet, flowers around us, flowers
above our heads, we sat on three-legged stools
under the currant trees and stripped off the
little beads of ruby and garnet, of white coral
and of black blood colour, chattering all sorts of
nonsense from fairy books. How white and
vapouring the clouds when they every moment
changed their shapes. How green and tender
the grass on the lawn with the daisies and gold
cups floating up to the surface like the
fragments of gold leaf in Dantzic water. We
remember with the keenness of yesterday our first
impressions of the various flavours, the soft
negative white currant, the sharp or more acid
red, and that indescribable quality of the black,
the dry stems and leaves of which are impregnated
with the smell of the fruit. Then we
had again (under supervision) to divest the
fruit of their barren stalks, and our crowning
delight was to see them piled round the
tea-cup and roofed in from our gaze under a
dome of paste. The blended flavour of the
red currant and the velvetty raspberry struck
our boyish fancy as superlatively happy, the
warm raspberry striking perfume through the
juicier currants, while a libation of mellow
cream over the whole made a dish fit for
Olympus. The black currant tart, too, had a
rougher charm of its own. The fruit, swollen
in the baking, yielded so generous a flood of
crimson black juice that we children dyed
ourselves with it, lips and hands, into the semblance
of ensanguined blackamoors.

Cherry picking was another delight, increased
by the danger of falling from steps and ladders.
What pleasure to reach up to the large shining
jewels! Blackhearts or bigaroons, some bitten