Welcome pleasant April! Thou bringest
asparagus. The largest and best in Paris comes
from Vendôme. We eat them with melted
butter, the French often with oil. They are
by no means bad, when small, cut up to
resemble green peas. They can be eaten with
cream or gravy, and even in omelets; and they
are used as garnishing to many sorts of ragoût.
Asparagus is the very essence of beatified green
buds, and conveys a foretaste of spring to the
sensitive palate of the gourmand. Hail, too,
gentle May! because, with songs of birds and
wandering perfume of flowers, thou givest us
green peas, the best, the most inviting, and
the most delicate of vegetables. An old
French proverb says, " Eat green peas with
rich men, and cherries with poor," because
peas are best very small and young, and should
be gathered on the morning they are to be
eaten. It would take a folio volume to
describe all the French ways of cooking peas.
They make sweet little green beds for cutlets
and pigeons; they mix with fricassees, palattes
of beef, and calves' ears; in fact, there is no
animal, as the Almanach des Gourmands
eloquently says, which does not feel honoured by
their alliance.

French beans (O that some genius would
teach us how to preserve them for winter!)
are delicious when small and young; but when
your fruiterer calls them peculiarly fine, and
sells them at so much a hundred, they are only
fit to throw on the dust heap. At Lyons, they
cook them with chopped onions. They are not
bad with sauce poulette—a sauce thickened
with yolks of eggs, a little butter, pepper, and
salt, and the juice of half a lemon. The
Provençal way is with oil and garlic.

When the leaves begin to turn, and autumn
scorches the beech leaves a pie-crust colour, we
have our consolation in the savoury artichoke.
Amiable vegetable! But let us observe that a
good artichoke must be young and tender, and
one proof of youth is that the stalks must break
without being thready. (By-the-by, useful
fibrous thread could surely be extracted from
this plant when old.) For the fry à la
Provençal and à l`Italienne, sprouts of the artichoke
are used. An eminent French cook says, " a
hedge of artichokes fried of a fine colour and
garnished with fried parsley, is one of the most
ravishing coups d'Å“il nature or art can offer as
an entremet; to guests who have already eaten
too largely, this gentle cousin of the ill-tempered
and boorish thistle is wholesome,
nourishing, stomachic, and astringent. It is
especially suitable for the ordinarily strong
brain and weak stomach of men of letters when
cooked, but when raw, and eaten à la poivrade,
it is a simple poison acid cruelly astringent,
and is only fit for the " dura ilia " of navigators,
coal whippers, bricklayers, and stokers.
The most delicate artichokes in Paris come
from Laon; you may know them by their pine-
apple sort of leaves looking tired and flaccid with
the journey. The bigger artichokes are best
plain with melted butter or oil, but the small are
chameleons capable of many changes, and are all
the better for the encouragement of sauce.
They are excellent in the Spanish way or with
gravy and verjuice. They are useful in fricassees.
They make a good basis for white soup. They
fry well. The Provençal way is to eat them
with lemon juice or Spanish sauce. Ude
recommends saving up artichoke bottoms
en canapés, to be served cold for entremets.
You first pour on the centre of each white
saucer of the cul d'artichaux, some anchovy or
Montpelier butter, and decorate these cheese
cakes of vegetable with capers, slices of beet-
root, and pickled cucumbers, and then pour
over all some creamy salad sauce garnished with
cresses. If a man of taste and sentiment, you
will add slips of anchovy, and the whites
and yolks of hard boiled eggs. Artichoke
bottoms keep for a long time, if properly dried,
and are excellent for meat pie, or for garnishing
ragoûts.

A certain French genius who never emerged
from the kitchen, and there perished in his
prime from an unrestrained fondness for green
Chartreuse; after describing the five hundred
and forty-three ways in which eggs can be
cooked in France, writes thus:

"Eggs are the most gracious presents that
Divine Providence ever bestowed on man."

What the lover of the liqueur that so much
resembles green hair oil, asserts of eggs, we
would rather he had applied to vegetables.
The French ridicule us for being savagely
carnivorous and not diluting our meat with
more bread, vegetables, and other anti-
putrescents. We laugh at the French for indulging
in washy soups and trivial messes. Both
nations may be right, and we are inclined to
think they are. Our climate requires food to
supply muscle and to warm the central furnace
of the heart; their climate gives our gay neighbours
less appetite for heavy joints. The French
are indubitably right in their love of vegetables,
which supply valuable properties to the
blood, and not only cool but enrich it.

The custom of preserving vegetables in sealed
bottles full of vinegar, is very old on the
Continent. It was a desperate and clumsy effort to
carry the gifts of summer through the snows
and rains of winter. They proved man's pluck,
but they were for a long time a dreadful failure.
The Dutch began with the finest and most
delicate vegetables, such as French beans and
Windsor beans. Petits Pois for cutlets were
common in the Paris Halle about 1802,
but were generally half fermented, or dry,
withered, and sapless. When the war with
England came, or in the language of a French
culinary writer of eminence, when " English
tyranny took possession of the seas and declared
war against the commerce of all nations," these
luxuries became more necessary. It was at this
crisis that a great man arose. M. Appert, of
the Rue de la Verrerie, took large gardens at
Massey, near Antony, four leagues from Paris,
and there devoted his large mind and busy
hands to gathering vegetables and potting them