The following is a typical Escoffier menu. It is for a little supper after the Opera, and was published in _Le Carnet d'Epicure_, a magazine, to the pages of which M. Escoffier is a prolific contributor. Gelée de Poulet aux Nids d'Hirondelles. Soufflé d'Ecrevisses Florentine. Côtelettes d'Agneau de Lait Favorite. Petits Pois Frais. Ortolans au Champagne. Salade d'Oranges. Asperges de Serre. Pêches à la Fraisette des Bois. Baisers de Vierge. Mignardises. The menu reads as delicately as the dishes would taste. The _baisers de Vierge_ are twin meringues, the cream perfumed with vanilla and holding crystallised white rose leaves and white violets. Over each pair of meringues is a veil of spun sugar. This is worthy of the man who conceived the _bombe Nero_, a flaming ice, who gave all London a new _entremet_ in _fraises à la Sarah Bernhardt_, and who added a new glory to a great singer by creating the _pêche Melba_. M. Escoffier is a little below the middle height, grey haired, and grey of moustache. His face is the face of an artist, or a statesman, and the quick eyes tell of his capacity for command. The quiet little man who, amidst all the clangour of the great white-tiled kitchen below the restaurant of the Carlton, seems to have nothing to do except to occasionally glance at the dishes before they leave his realm or to give a word of counsel when some very delicate _entremet_ is in the making, to taste a sauce or give a final touch to the arrangement of some elaborate cold entrée, has organised his brigade of vociferous cooks of all nations as thoroughly as Crawford organised the Light Division of Peninsular fame. There is never any difficulty, for every difficulty has been foreseen. Only a man who has climbed the ladder from its lowest rung possesses such knowledge and such authority. M. Escoffier began his career as a boy in the kitchen of his uncle's restaurant in Nice. He went to Russia to the kitchen of one of the Grand Dukes, he served in the Franco-Prussian War as the Chef de Cuisine to the General Staff of the Army of the Rhine, and he knows the bitterness of captivity in the hands of an enemy. He was with Maréchal MacMahon at the Elysée and left the Grand Hotel at Rome when Ritz and he and Echenard came to London to make history at the Savoy. He writes with a very pretty wit on subjects connected with his profession, and he is married to a lady who, under her maiden name of Delphine Daffis, is well known in France as a poetess, and who has recently been decorated with the violet ribbon as Officier d'Académie.