ver persuade your British household to
condescend to them.

Except in the coast towns, sea fish is scarce and dear all over
Germany. Salt fish and fresh-water fish are what you get, and except
the trout it is not interesting. A great deal of carp is eaten, cooked
with vinegar to turn it blue, and served with horseradish or wine
sauce. At a dinner party I have seen tench given, and they were
extremely pretty, like fish in old Italian pictures, but they were not
worth eating. At least a pound of fresh butter was put on each dish of
them, handed round, and you took some of it as well as a sort of
mustard sauce. Perch, pike, and eel are all eaten where nothing better
is to be had; but the standing fish-course of inland Germany is trout.
Most hotels have a tank where they keep it alive till it is wanted,
and in the Black Forest the peasants catch it and peddle it, walking
miles to make good sales. We went into the garden of our hotel in the
Wiesenthal one day, and found the basin of the fountain there crammed
with live trout. It was so full that you could take one in your hand
for a moment and look at its speckles, as lovely as the speckles on a
thrush's breast. The man who was carrying them on his back in a wooden
water-tight satchel was having a drink, and he had put out his fish
for a drink while he rested. I have never been within reach of fresh
herrings in Germany, and have never seen them there, but smoked ones
are eaten everywhere, often with salad, or together with smoked ham
and potatoes in their jackets. Neither the ham nor the herrings are
ever cooked when they have been smoked, and the ham is very tough in
consequence. The breast of a goose, too, is eaten smoked but not
cooked, and is considered a great delicacy. Poultry varies in quality
a good deal. Everyone knows the little chickens that come round at
hotel dinners, all legs and bones. A German family will sit down
contentedly to an old hen that the most economical of us would only
use for soup, and they will serve it roasted though it is as tough as
leather. I think it must be said that you get better fowls both in
France and England than in Germany. The German national bird is the
goose. In England, if you buy a goose your cook roasts it and sends it
up, and that is all you ever know of it. In Germany a goose is a
carnival, rather as a newly killed pig is in an English farmhouse.
You begin with a stew of the giblets, you perhaps continue with the
bird itsel