"In this late age, the human home has one universal season and one universal climate. The produce of every zone and month is for the board where toil is compensated and industry refreshed. For man alone, the universal animal, can wield the powers of fire, the universal element, whereby seasons, latitudes, and altitudes are levelled into one genial temperature. Man alone, that is to say, the social man alone, can want and duly conceive and invent that which is digestion going forth into nature as a creative art, namely, cookery, which by recondite processes of division and combination,--by cunning varieties of shape,--by the insinuation of subtle flavors,--by tincturings with precious spice, as with vegetable flames,--by fluids extracted, and added again, absorbed, dissolving, and surrounding,--by the discovery and cementing of new amities between different substances, provinces, and kingdoms of nature,--by the old truth of wine and the reasonable order of service,--in short, by the superior unity which it produces in the eatable world,--also by a new birth of feelings, properly termed _convivial_, which run between food and friendship, and make eating festive,--all through the conjunction of our Promethean with our culinary fire raises up new powers and species of food to the human frame, and indeed performs by machinery a part of the work of assimilation, enriching the sense of taste with a world of profound objects, and making it the refined participator, percipient, and stimulus of the most exquisite operations of digestion. Man, then, as the universal eater, enters from his own faculties into the natural viands, and gives them a social form, and thereby a thousand new aromas, answering to as many possible tastes in his wonderful constitution, and therefore his food is as different from that of animals in quality as it is plainly different in quantity and resource. How wise should not reason become, in order to our making a wise use of so vast an apparatus of nutrition!...