54 THE BOOK OF ASPARAGUS 



more sensible than formerly still are composed of such 

 quantities of foods and such numbers of courses as to 

 make artistic feeding an impracticability. A tasteful 

 frugality rather than a wasteful, tasteless and ridiculous 

 excess is the aim of those with any claim to the title of 

 artists in practical life. Instead of eating, as the Duchess 

 of Orleans, writing in 1718, said she had often seen the 

 king eat, "four plates of different kinds of soups, a 

 whole pheasant, a partridge, a dish of salad, two thick 

 slices of ham, mutton flavoured with garlic, a plateful of 

 pastry, and finish his repast with fruit and hard boiled 

 eggs," a man of taste will select from one to three 

 dishes, and on the proper preparation of them will cause 

 to be expended the energy and intelligence which would 

 in the alternative have provided the ponderous and ill- 

 composed meal of the inartistic. 



But in the arrangement of meals and the cookery of 

 food things move slowly, and writer after writer has 

 copied his predecessors, with only such rare exceptions 

 as that great original cook La Varenne, who wrote in 

 1653, and perhaps a dozen others who have studied 

 things for themselves. Thanks to America, thanks to 

 France, and thanks also to certain reforming spirits in 

 England, we are at last on the way to a revolution 

 in dietetics. Meat is losing its all-pervading power, and 

 the value even the sufficiency of a vegetable diet is 

 becoming a matter of common belief. The vegetables 

 with which we are now concerned are not among those 

 which can in any sense replace meat as an article of food, 

 but their importance both from a hygienic point of view 

 and also from the standpoint of pleasure in eating cannot 

 be over-estimated. 



In a very interesting little book called " A Treatise 

 of all Sorts of Foods, both Animal and Vegetable : also 

 of Drinkables," " written originally in French by the 

 learned M. L. Lemery, Physician to the King," published 



