A Spanish Cook--Philosophy of Spanish Cuisine--Sauce--Difficulty of Commissariat--The Provend--Spanish Hares and Rabbits--The Olla--Garbanzo--Spanish Pigs--Bacon and Hams--Omelette--Salad and Gazpacho. It would exhaust a couple of Colonial numbers at least to discuss properly the merits and digest Spanish cookery. All that can be now done is to skim the subject, which is indeed fat and unctuous. Those meats and drinks will be briefly noticed which are daily occurrence, and those dishes described which we have often helped to make, and oftener helped to eat, in the most larderless _ventas_ and hungriest districts of the Peninsula, and which provident wayfarers may make and eat again, and, as we pray, with no worse appetite. [Sidenote: THE NATIONAL COOKERY.] To be a good cook, which few Spaniards are, a man must not only understand his master’s taste, but be able to make something out of nothing; just as a clever French _artiste_ converts an old shoe into an épigramme d’agneau, or a Parisian milliner dresses up two deal boards into a fine live _Madame_, whose only fault is the appearance of too much embonpoint. Genuine and legitimate Spanish dishes are excellent in their way, for no man nor man-cook ever is ridiculous when he does not attempt to be what he is not. The _au naturel_ may occasionally be somewhat plain, but seldom makes one sick; at all events it would be as hopeless to make a Spaniard understand real French cookery as to endeavour to explain to a député the meaning of our constitution or parliament. The ruin of Spanish cooks is their futile attempts to imitate foreign ones: just as their silly grandees murder the glorious Castilian tongue, by substituting what they fancy is pure Parisian, which they speak _comme des vaches Espagnoles_. _Dis moi ce que tu manges et je te dirai ce que tu es_ is “un mot profond” of the great equity judge, Brillat Savarin, who also discovered that “_Les destinées des nations dépendent de la manière dont elles se nourrissent_;” since which General Foy has attributed all the _accidental_ victories of the British to rum and beef. And this great fact much enhances our serious respect for punch, and our true love for the _ros-bif_ of old England, of which, by the way, very little will be got in the Peninsula, where bulls are bred for baiting, and oxen for the plough, not the spit. [Sidenote: SCARCITY OF PROVISIONS.]