"After cutting the fish in handsome pieces, place them in a stewpan with as much water as will cover them, with some parsley or parsley roots sliced, an onion minced fine, and a little pepper and salt, to which sometimes scraped horseradish and a bay-leaf are added. Skim carefully when boiling, and when the fish is sufficiently done send it up in a deep dish lined with bread sippets, and some slices of bread and butter on a plate. Some cooks thicken the liquor the fish has been stewing in with flour and butter, and flavour it with white wine, lemon juice, essence of anchovy, and catsup, and boil down two or three flounders to make a fish broth to boil the other fish in, observing that the broth cannot be good unless the fish are boiled too much." This does not sound as palatable as a sole _au gratin_ or _en matelote Normande_, or even whitebait--that "little means of obtaining a great deal of pleasure"; but one can scarcely forget Thackeray's sentence, even if his appreciation may have been heightened by the surroundings of the Ship Tavern and congenial companionship. Nearly ten years after Walker's day we find Thackeray also condemning many similar evils: "I would have" [he urges, and the advice is still pertinent]--"a great deal more hospitality and less show. Everybody has the same dinner in London, and the same soup, and the same saddle of mutton, boiled fowls and tongue, entrées, champagne, and so forth. Who does not know those made dishes with the universal sauce to each: fricandeau, sweetbreads, damp dumpy cutlets, etc., seasoned with the compound of grease, onions, bad port wine, cayenne pepper, and curry-powder, the poor wiry Moselle and sparkling Burgundy in the ice-coolers, and the old story of white and brown soup, turbot, little smelts, boiled turkey, and saddle of mutton?... What I would recommend with all my power is that dinners should be more simple, more frequent, and should contain fewer persons. Ten is the utmost number that a man of moderate means should ever invite to his table; although in a great house managed by a great establishment the case may be different. A man and a woman may look as if they were glad to see ten people; but in a great dinner they abdicate their position as host and hostess,--are mere creatures in the hands of the sham butlers, sham footmen, and tall confectioners' emissaries who crowd the room,--and are guests at their own table, where they are helped last, and of which they occupy the top and bottom." Thackeray has written frequently on the pleasures of the table, and his name may well figure in the annals of gastronomy as one of its shining lights, if only for his delicious essays "Memorials of Gormandising" and "On Some Dinners at Paris," to which in their entirety the reader is referred.