SOUPS, 647 
Colonel Newnham Davis, a true gastronome, has recently 
given it as his dictum, “I would not counsel anyone ever to eat 
a Snail.” He made two attempts in the cause of gastronomy, 
and under the best possible conditions; “‘ yet,” he says, “ they 
are distinctly unappetizing: their appearance is greatly against 
them, and they taste like gravel cooked in mock turtle soup.” 
SORREL. (See Hxrns). 
SOUPS. (See Brorus). 
Tue title “ Restaurant,” which is now applied to a high-class 
eating-house, was originally the name of a soup, as invented by 
a Frenchman, M. Palissy, in 1557. This soup consisted of fowl 
(finely minced), with broth (highly spiced), and containing 
cinnamon, coriander, etc. In 1765 a Tavern was opened in 
Paris under the above title “ Restaurant” for the purpose of 
supplying the said famous soup of that designation ; and hence 
the name has become handed down to an eating-house ever since. 
“* Gerarde, the young Monk-student”’ (The Cloister and the Hearth, 
1860), “when going to Rotterdam on his start in life, rescued 
by the wayside an exhausted old scholar with some soup which 
had been provided for himself by his thoughtful mother before 
he left home. ‘ Hippocrates, and Galen!’ cried the resuscitated 
old man, ‘’tis a Soupe au vin, the restorative of restoratives ! 
blessed be the nation that invented it, and the woman that 
made it, and the young man that brings it to fainting folk. 
Now this divine elixir gives in one moment force to the limbs, 
and ardour to the spirits ; and if it had been taken into Hector’s 
body at the nick of time it would, by the aid of Phebus, Venus, 
and the blessed Saints, have most likely procured the Greeks 
a defeat. For, note how faint, and weary, and heartsick I was 
& minute ago! Well, I suck this celestial cordial, through a 
straw, and now behold me brave as Achilles, and strong as an 
eagle.’ ” 
It is quite a rational thing to begin dinner with soup, since 
the meat-extractives, and gelatin of a clear soup, are well 
calculated to promote a flow of gastric juice in the stomach, 
so as to further the complete digestion of the solid food which 
follows. As a French writer has said, “Soup should be to a 
dinner what the overture is to an orchestra, or what the porch 
is to a house.” If a solid meal is intended, a light soup should 
