Hares are eaten and most carefully prepared in Germany. They are skinned in a way that an English poulterer has been known to learn from his German customers and pronounce very troublesome, and the back is usually served separately, larded and basted with sour cream. Vegetables are cooked less simply than in England, and you will find the two countries disagree heatedly about them. The Englishman does not want his peas messed up with grease and vinegar, and though he will be too polite to say so, he will silently agree with his plain cook who says that peas served in the pod is a dish only fit for pigs and what she has never been accustomed to; while the German will get quite dejected over the everlasting plain boiled cabbage and potatoes he is offered week after week in his English boarding-house. At home, he says, he is used to mountains of fat asparagus all the spring, and he thinks slightly of your skinny green ones or of the wooden stuff you import and pay less for because it is "foreign." He likes potatoes cooked in twenty various ways, and when mashed he is of opinion that they should not be black or lumpy. He wants a dozen different vegetables dished up round one joint of beef, and in summer salads of various kinds on various occasions, and not your savage mixed salad with a horrible sauce poured out of a bottle; furniture polish he believes it to be from its colour. In the autumn he expects chestnuts cooked with gravy and vegetables, or made into light puddings; and apple sauce, he assures you, should be a creamy white, and as smooth as a well made purée. If he is of the South he would like a _Mehlspeise_ after his meat, _Spetzerle_ if he comes from Würtemberg; one of a hundred different dishes if he is a Bavarian. He will not allow that your national milk puddings take their place. If he is a North German his _Leibgericht_ may be _Rote Grütze_. This is eaten enormously all over Denmark and North Germany in summer, and is nothing in the world but a ground rice or sago mould made with fruit juice instead of milk. The old-fashioned way was to squeeze raspberries and currants through a cloth till you had a quart of pure juice, which you then boiled with 4 oz. ground rice and sugar to taste, stirring carefully lest it should burn, and stirring patiently so that the rice should be well cooked. But where fruit is dear you can make excellent _Rote Grütze_ by stewing the fruit first with a little water and straining off the juice. A quart of currants and a pound of raspberries should give you a good quart mould. The Danes make it of rhubarb and plum juice in the same way; and my German cookery book gives a recipe for _Grüne Grütze_ made with green gooseberries, but I tried that once and found it quite inferior to our own gooseberry fool.