currants through a cloth till you had a quart of pure
juice, which you then boiled with 4 oz. ground rice and sugar to
taste, stirring carefully lest it should burn, and stirring patiently
so that the rice should be well cooked. But where fruit is dear you
can make excellent _Rote Gruetze_ by stewing the fruit first with a
little water and straining off the juice. A quart of currants and a
pound of raspberries should give you a good quart mould. The Danes
make it of rhubarb and plum juice in the same way; and my German
cookery book gives a recipe for _Gruene Gruetze_ made with green
gooseberries, but I tried that once and found it quite inferior to our
own gooseberry fool.

Food is so much a matter of taste and custom, that it seems absurd to
make dogmatic remarks about the superiority of one kitchen to another.
If you like cold mutton, boiled potatoes and rice pudding, most days
in the week, you like them and there is an end of it. The one thing
you can say for certain is that to cook for you requires neither skill
nor pains, while to cook for a German family, even if it lives plainly
and poorly, takes time and trouble. In trying to compare the methods
of two nations, one must naturally be careful to compare households on
the same social plane; and an English household that lives on cold
mutton and rice pudding is certainly a plain and probably a poor one.
In well-to-do English households you get the best food in the world as
far as raw material goes, but it must be said that you often get poor
cooking. It passes quite unnoticed too. No one seems to mind thick
soups that are too thick and gravies that are tasteless, and melted
butter like Stickphast paste, and savouries quite acrid with over much
vinegar and anchovy. I once saw a whole company of English people
contentedly eat a dish of hot scones that had gone wrong. They tasted
of strong yellow soap. But I once saw a company of Germans eat bad
fish and apparently like it. They were sea soles handed round in a
Swiss hotel, and they should by rights have been buried the day
before. I thought of Ottilie von Schlippenschlopp and the oysters. But
the soles were carefully cooked, and served with an elaborate sauce.

* * * * *

GREEN CORN SOUP.--For six people take 7 oz. of green corn: wash it
well in hot water, and cook it until it is quite soft in stock or salt
water. Put it through a sieve, add boiling stock, and serve with fried
slice o