"Then our English cold meat again. What can equal it? Such stuff as they give in a good country inn, a huge joint of beef--you cut from it yourself, you know as much as you like--with mustard, pickles, celery, a tankard of stout, let us say. Pressed beef, such as they'll give you at the Reform, too, that's good eating for a man. With chutney, and then old cheese to follow. And boiled beef, with little carrots and turnips and a dumpling or so. Eh?" "Of course," said Marjorie, "one must do justice to a well-chosen turkey, a _fat_ turkey." "Or a good goose, for the matter of that--with honest, well-thought-out stuffing. I like the little sausages round the dish of a turkey, too; like cherubs they are, round the feet of a Madonna.... There's much to be said for sausage, Marjorie. It concentrates." Sausage led to Germany. "I'm not one of those patriots," he was saying presently, "who run down other countries by way of glorifying their own. While I was in Germany I tasted many good things. There's their Leberwurst; it's never bad, and, at its best, it's splendid. It's only a fool would reproach Germany with sausage. Devonshire black-pudding, of course, is the master of any Blutwurst, but there's all those others on the German side, Frankfurter, big reddish sausage stuff again with great crystalline lumps of white fat. And how well they cook their rich hashes, and the thick gravies they make. Curious, how much better the cooking of Teutonic peoples is than the cooking of the South Europeans! It's as if one needed a colder climate to brace a cook to his business. The Frenchman and the Italian trifle and stimulate. It's as if they'd never met a hungry man. No German would have thought of _soufflé_. Ugh! it's vicious eating. There's much that's fine, though, in Austria and Hungary. I wish I had travelled in Hungary. Do you remember how once or twice we've lunched at that Viennese place in Regent Street, and how they've given us stuffed Paprika, eh?" "That was a good place. I remember there was stewed beef once with a lot of barley--such _good_ barley!" "Every country has its glories. One talks of the cookery of northern countries and then suddenly one thinks of curry, with lots of rice." "And lots of chicken!" "And lots of hot curry powder, _very_ hot. And look at America! Here's a people who haven't any of them been out of Europe for centuries, and yet they have as different a table as you could well imagine. There's a kind of fish, planked shad, that they cook on resinous wood--roast it, I suppose. It's substantial, like nothing else in the world. And how good, too, with turkey are sweet potatoes. Then they have such a multitude of cereal things; stuff like their buckwheat cakes, all swimming in golden syrup. And Indian corn, again!" "Of course, corn is being anglicized. I've often given you corn--latterly, before we came away."