Then let us tackle the subject of fish. Would you treat a salmon in the British way, or smother him with thick brown gravy, fried onions, garlic, mushrooms, inferior claret, oysters, sugar, pepper, salt, and nutmeg, _en Matelote_, or mince him fine to make a ridiculous _mousse_? Similarly with the honest, manly sole; would you fry or grill him plain, or bake him in a coat of rich white sauce, onion juice, mussel ditto, and white wine, or cider, _à la Normande_; or cover him with toasted cheese _à la Cardinal_? The fairy "_Ala_" is likewise responsible for the clothing of purely English food in French disguises. Thus a leg of mutton becomes a _gigot_, a pheasant (for its transgressions in eating the poor farmer's barley) a _faisan_, and is charged for at special rates in the bill; whilst the nearest to a beef-steak our lively neighbours can get is a portion of beef with the fibre smashed by a wooden mallet, surmounted by an exceedingly bilious-looking compound like axle-grease, and called a _Châteaubriand_; and curry becomes under the new _régime_, _kari_. Undoubtedly, the principal reason for serving food smothered in made-gravies lies in the inferiority of the food. Few judges will credit France with the possession of better butcher's-meat--with the exception of veal--than the perfidious island, which is so near in the matter of distance, and yet so far in the matter of custom. And it is an established fact that the fish of Paris is not as fresh as the fish of London. Hence the _sole Normande_, the _sole au gratin_, and the sole smothered in toasted cheese. But when we islanders are charged at least four times as much for the inferior article, in its foreign cloak, as for the home article in its native majesty, I think the time has come to protest. It is possible to get an excellent dinner at any of the "Gordon" hotels, at the "Savoy," the "Cecil," and at some other noted food-houses--more especially at Romano's--by paying a stiff price for it; but it is due to a shameful lack of enterprise on the part of English caterers that a well-cooked English dinner is becoming more difficult to procure, year after year. There be three purely British dishes which are always "hoff" before all others on the programme of club, hotel, or eating-house; and these are, Irish stew, liver-and-bacon, and tripe-and-onions. Yet hardly a week passes without a new _dîner Parisien_ making its appearance in the advertisement columns of the newspapers; whilst the cheap-and-nasty _table d'hôte_, with its six or seven courses and its Spanish claret, has simply throttled the Roast Beef of Old England. "Sir," said Dr. Johnson, after examining a French _menu_, "my brain is obfuscated after the perusal of this heterogeneous conglomeration of bastard English ill-spelt, and a foreign tongue. I prithee bid thy knaves bring me a dish of hog's puddings, a slice or two from the upper cut of a well-roasted sirloin, and two apple-dumplings."