It has been repeatedly urged in favour of French cookery that it is so economical. But economy in the preparation of food is by no means an unmixed blessing. I do not believe that much sole-leather is used up in the ordinary _ragoût_, or _salmi_; but many of us who can afford more expensive joints have a prejudice against "scrags"; whilst the tails of mutton chops frequently have a tainted flavour, and the drumsticks and backs of fowls are only fit to grill, or boil down into gravy. And it is not only the alien who is economical in his preparation of the banquet. Many of the dwellers in the highways and bye-ways of our great metropolis will boil down the outer skin of a ham, and place a portion thereof, together with such scraps as may also be purchased, at a penny or twopence the plateful, at the ham and beef emporium, with maybe a "block ornament" or two from the butcher's, in a pie dish, with a superstructure of potatoes, and have the "scrap pie" cooked at the baker's for the Sunday dinner. Poor wretches! Not much "waste" goes on in such households. But I have known the "gal" who tortured the food in a cheap lodging-house throw away the water in which a joint had just been boiled, but whether this was from sheer ignorance, or "cussedness," or the desire to save herself any future labour in the concoction of soup, deponent sayeth not. By the way, it is in the matter of soup that the tastes of the British and French peasantry differ so materially. Unless he or she be absolutely starving, it is next to impossible to get one of the groundlings of old England to attempt a basin of soup. And when they do attempt the same, it has been already made for them. The Scotch, who are born cooks, know much better than this; but do not, O reader, if at all thin of skin, or refined of ear, listen too attentively to the thanks which a denizen of the "disthressful counthry" will bestow upon you for a "dhirty bowl o' bone-juice." How many modern diners, we wonder, know the original object of placing frills around the shank of a leg or shoulder of mutton, a ham, the shins of a fowl, or the bone of a cutlet? Fingers were made before--and a long time before--forks. In the seventeenth century--prior to which epoch not much nicety was observed in carving, or eating--we read that "English gentlewomen were instructed by schoolmistresses and professors of etiquette as to the ways in which it behoved them to carve joints. That she might be able to grasp a roasted chicken without greasing her left hand, the gentle housewife was careful to trim its foot and the lower part of its legs with cut paper. The paper frill which may still be seen round the bony point and small end of a leg of mutton, is a memorial of the fashion in which joints were _dressed_ for the dainty hands of lady-carvers, in time prior to the introduction of the carving-fork, an implement that was not in universal use so late as the Commonwealth."