der, whence, after a copious effusion, the
master-cook extracted the entrails, washed them with wine, and hanging
the animal by the feet, he crammed down the throat the stuffings already
prepared. Then covering the half of the pig with a paste of barley,
thickened with wine and oil, he put it in a small oven, or on a heated
table of brass, where it was gently roasted with all due care: when the
skin was browned, he boiled the other side; and then, taking away the
barley paste, the pig was served up, at once boiled and roasted. These
cooks, with a vegetable, could counterfeit the shape and the taste of
fish and flesh. The king of Bithynia, in some expedition against the
Scythians, in the winter, and at a great distance from the sea, had a
violent longing for a small fish called _aphy_--a pilchard, a herring,
or an anchovy. His cook cut a turnip to the perfect imitation of its
shape; then fried in oil, salted, and well powdered with the grains of a
dozen black poppies, his majesty's taste was so exquisitely deceived,
that he praised the root to his guests as an excellent fish. This
transmutation of vegetables into meat or fish is a province of the
culinary art which we appear to have lost; yet these are _cibi
innocentes_, compared with the things themselves. No people are such
gorgers of mere animal food as our own; the art of preparing vegetables,
pulse, and roots, is scarcely known in this country. This cheaper and
healthful food should be introduced among the common people, who neglect
them from not knowing how to dress them. The peasant, for want of this
skill, treads under foot the best meat in the world; and sometimes the
best way of dressing it is least costly.

The gastric art must have reached to its last perfection, when we find
that it had its history; and that they knew how to ascertain the aera of
a dish with a sort of chronological exactness. The philosophers of
Athenaeus at table dissert on every dish, and tell us of one called
_maati_, that there was a treatise composed on it; that it was first
introduced at Athens, at the epocha of the Macedonian empire, but that
it was undoubtedly a Thessalian invention; the most sumptuous people of
all the Greeks. The _maati_ was a term at length applied to any dainty
of excessive delicacy, always served the last.

But as no art has ever attained perfection without numerous admirers,
and as it is the public which only can make such exquisite cooks, our
curiosity may be