e canvas-backed duck has been praised as
highly as the "swopping, swopping mallard" of a comfortable college in
Oxford. As to the wild turkey, the poet has not yet risen in America who
can do justice to the charms of that admirable bird. Mr. Whitman, who
has much to say about "bob-a-links" and "whip-poor-wills," and some other
fowl which sing "when lilacs bloom in the garden yard," has neglected, we
fear, the wild turkey, simply because the Muse has not given this bird
melody, and made it, like the robin-redbreast, which goes so well with
bread-crumbs, "an amiable songster." American genius neglects the
turkey, and positively takes more interest in the migrations of the
transatlantic sparrow. If the nobler fowl can cross the water as safely
as the beef and mutton of everyday life, he will receive the honour he
deserves in this country. Some students with the deathless thirst of
scientific men for acclimatization, speak well of the Bohemian pheasant,
which, unlike some other denizens of Bohemia, is fat. But there are
probably less familiar birds in America that rival the duck and the wild
turkey, and excel the Bohemian pheasant. The existence of maize,
however, on the Western Continent has been a snare to American cooks, who
have yielded to an absorbing passion for hot corn-cakes.

France is, of course, the land in which the Muse of cooking is native.
"If we turn north towards Belgium," says a modern author, "we shall find
much that is good in cooking and eating known, if not universally
practised." He has also made the discovery that the Belgian air and
climate are admirably suited to develop the best qualities of Burgundy.
It is from these favoured and ingenious people that England ought to
learn a lesson, or rather a good many lessons. To begin at the
beginning, with soup, does not every one know that all domestic soups in
England, which bear French names, are really the same soup, just as
almost all puddings are, or may be, called cabinet pudding? The one word
"Julienne" covers all the watery, chill and tasteless, or terribly salt,
decoctions, in which a few shreds of vegetables appear drifting through
the illimitable inane. Other names are given at will by the help of a
cookery-book and a French dictionary; but all these soups, at bottom, are
attempts to be Julienne soup. The idea of looking on soup "as a vehicle
for applying to the palate certain herbal flavours," is remote indeed
from the Plain Cook's m