COOKERY 267 



regretted that we had merely trifled with the club 

 turkey. 



As to cookery of the European birds, if we 

 look to the foreign schools we get little help Brillat 

 Savarin, I believe, has absolutely nothing to say 

 about the wild duck. It is eminently unsuited to the 

 light wines of the Rhine or Moselle, and I have never 

 come across it at a German dinner table. But when 

 I have bagged my own ducks in the Ardennes and 

 had them cooked in the comfortable little hostelries 

 of the country of St. Hubert, I have revelled over 

 them as the dish of the evening, with a cobwebbed 

 flask of burgundy. And at the Hotel of Avranches, 

 overlooking the Bay of St. Michael, they had a 

 notable speciality of wild duck, larded with bacon and 

 stuffed with olives. Which reminds me of another 

 delectable dish at Bordeaux, which was generally sent 

 up without any ordering at the Hotel de France, 

 where the landlord was a connoisseur and the chef an 

 artist. It was foie de canard either tame or wild 

 aux olives^ the only drawback being that it savoured 

 somewhat too strongly of the bourgeois cuisine for the 

 delicate bouquet of the best growths of the Gironde. 

 It even did injustice to Leoville or Pontet Canet. 

 At Avranches and Granville, by the way, the ordinary 

 domestic ducks were delicious. Both towns in the 



