As for the strawberry, so fragrant and delicious when fresh, but so deadly to the uric-acid diathesis, how safely it may be partaken of when, through madame's deft manipulations, it attains the form of shortcake or preserves! Served with sugar and cream, after baking, as a prelude to the winter breakfast, even the flatulence of the apple is dissipated and the fruit which tempted Eve becomes innocuous. Through sugar and stewing, the currant loses its verjuice, the raspberry under similar treatment is transformed, the acrid quince acquires new virtues, the puckery crab-apple diffuses a silken softness. Cooked with sugar and brandy, the peach may appeal to the most hardened total abstainer, and the fruit of the Psidium, through the magic touch of saccharine, attain a magnificent triumph as guava jelly. To remove sugar from the kitchen were to deprive alimentation of many of its benefits and pleasures, as well as to rob woman of much of her allurement. She would become lean and scrawny, her rounded outlines would gradually disappear, the contours of her tailor-made gown would end by becoming rectilinear, and for her habiliment a strait-jacket would usurp the place of her proud corsage and bouffant petticoat. There would then be no more love-poetry, for there would exist no incentive for the poet, nor could a pretty heroine figure in a novel, or the bust of woman prove the most convincing illustration that the line of beauty is a curve. One should never lose sight of that excellent sentiment of Blaze de Bury, which will apply to desserts as well, _Qui ne veut point vieillir doit aimer les femmes, et, pour bien les aimer, il faut les aimer toutes_. What a wave of grateful coolness the ice and its yet more seductive sister, ice-cream, contribute when the dog-star reigns and cicadas have begun to shrill! Who among the calumniators of sweets could wish them banished in support of a fallacious theory that sweetmeats render woman more capricious, and are injurious to the roses and lilies of her skin? For the plainer form of these refreshing entremets we are indebted to Catherine de' Medici and her cooks who accompanied her to France from Italy, where ices were already much esteemed. The discoverer of ice-cream is said to be a French chef in the employ of the Duc de Chartres, who exultingly set the dish before him on a hot day in 1774. This was subsequent to the discovery of the pâté de Chartres, which, according to Anatole France, is of itself sufficient to make one revere the country of its origin.