"The bird is first to be carefully larded with the best and firmest lard. Then bone two woodcocks, put their flesh aside, and keep the livers and trails of the two birds separate. Take this meat and mince it, add some beef marrow, steamed, a little scraped bacon, pepper, salt, herbs, and enough good truffles to stuff the inner cavity of the pheasant. Be careful not to let the stuffing spread to the outside, which is sometimes a little difficult when the bird is rather high. Nevertheless, it can be done in various ways, and amongst others by fastening a crust of bread with a piece of thread on the stomach, which prevents its bursting. Cut a slice of bread longer and wider by two inches than the whole pheasant is; then take the livers and trails of the woodcocks, and pound them with two large truffles, one anchovy, a little scraped bacon, and a goodly lump of the best fresh butter. Spread this paste on the slice of bread, and put it under the pheasant stuffed as above, so that it may receive all the gravy dripping from it while roasting. When the pheasant is cooked, serve it up lying gracefully on its toast, put some bitter oranges round it, and await the result without any uneasiness. This high-flavoured dish ought to be washed down, in preference, with some of the best wine of Upper Burgundy. Treated according to the preceding prescription, the pheasant, already distinguished itself, is permeated from its outside with the savoury fat of the bacon which is browned and in its inside it is impregnated with the odoriferous gases from the woodcocks and the truffles. The toast, already so richly prepared, receives again the gravies of the triple combination which flow from the bird while roasting." Has gastronomy progressed since the time of Brillat-Savarin? Replying to this question, Charles Monselet, writing in 1879, states that he "looks in vain for the tables that are praised or the hosts that are renowned. Where are the great cooks? What names have we now to oppose to those of Carême and Robert? Shall I speak of official cookery, of ministerial dinners? These are not the dinners to which people go to eat. There especially the cook is more proud of a Chinese kiosk on a rock in coloured and spun sugar, which no person dare touch, than of a carp _à la Chambord_ treated in a masterly way. Since the days of Cambacérès official cookery has ceased to exist." The similarity of dinners complained of by Walker and Thackeray during a previous era he refers to as existing in Paris: "That which you eat yesterday in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, you will eat to-morrow in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. At the end of the week you recognise that you have merely changed your knife and fork. This poverty of imagination, this absence of research are unworthy of a country such as ours."