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houses, old and new”; for in no other part of our social system has such a real and rapid advance been made in the right direction during the last fifty years. In the earlier part of this century English cookery, both in middle-class households and in public places of entertainment, was a byword among the nations for its coarseness and insipidity; and we were still open to Voltaire’s reproach of having fifty religions and only one sauce—that sauce apparently being melted butter, as the bread sauce, on which our English cook so justly prides herself, is regarded by our French neighbours as an unwholesome form of poultice. The taverns and coffee-houses, which bad been such an agreeable feature of London life in the preceding century, had degenerated into dingy cook-shops and forlorn dining-rooms, resembling that in which Mr Pickwick and his friends waited for the Bath coach, and which is described as “the last resource of human dejection, divided into boxes for the solitary confinement of travellers, and furnished with a clock, a looking-glass, and a live waiter, the latter article being kept in a small kennel for washing glasses in a corner of the apartment.” Few of the modern clubs were then in existence; and though a rich man could then, as now, dine off turtle and venison at the Albion, or eat fish-dinners at Greenwich, there were few places where a man of moderate means—the clerk from the public offices, the lawyer, or the country visitor—could get a tolerable meal at a reasonable price. There was a cluster of old-fashioned houses near Temple Bar—the Cock, the Mitre, the Rainbow, and the Cheshire Cheese; there was Simpson’s in the Strand, there were the Blue Posts in Cook Street, and later on the Wellington, built on the site of Crockford’s and now the Devonshire Club; and there were some French houses of indifferent repute in the neighbourhood of Soho Square; but the modern restaurant with its table d’hôte dinner and luxurious appointments was almost unknown.

At present there are probably over a hundred establishments where you can dine cheaply and with comfort—in fact, il n'y a qu'un embarras de choix. There are dinners off the joint, dinners from the grill and dinners of five courses at a fixed price; and there are also diners Français and diners Parisiens, as to which it can only be said that you get a great deal for your money, and that the quantity is more remarkable than the quality. Again, if you prefer dining à la carte, there are at least three restaurants (let us select Kettner’s, the Café Royale, and Romano’s, though there are probably several others) where the wine and the cooking are equally good, and where, if you make a judicious selection from the menu, aided by the head waiter’s counsel and experience, you can get almost as good a dinner for your money as at the Café Anglais itself.

After all that has been said on the shortcomings and demerits of English cookery, it is at least curious that two of the most famous chefs of modern times—Ude, who was at one time head cook at Windsor, and Urbain Dubois, chef to the Emperor of Austria—should have expressed their deliberate opinion that English cookery, when well done, was better than that of any other country in the world. The material, they maintained, and quite rightly, was far superior—the English beef and mutton having