CANVAS-BACK AND TERRAPIN 



By W. MACKAY LAFFAN. 



THE Chesapeake has conferred upon Baltimore the title of the 

 "gastronomic capital" of the country. The fish, the game, 

 and the reptiles of its generous waters, and the traditions of 

 the Maryland kitchen, have made Baltimore a Mecca toward which 

 the eyes of all American bon-vivants are turned with a veneration 

 that dyspepsia cannot impair. Places have their dishes and exult in 

 them. New England points with pride to an unsullied record of 

 pumpkin-pies. New Orleans has its pompano, and boasts it much 

 as Greenwich does its white-bait. In San Francisco, you win the 

 confidence of the Californian by praising his little coppery oysters 

 and saying that they remind you of "Ostend penn'orths" or Dublin's 

 Burton-Bindins, and that, after all, the true taste of the "natives" is 

 only acquired in waters where there is an excess of copper in sus- 

 pension. At Norfolk, the sacred dish that is offered upon the altar 

 of hospitality is the hog-fish. The modest New Yorker, in the 

 acerbity of the lenten season, asks his foreign friend if he ever saw 

 anything like "our shad." In Albany, you partake of "beef" sliced 

 from a Hudson River sturgeon, — a fish of which cutlets from the 

 shoulders are served in San Francisco to excellent purpose as filets 

 de sole. Chicago has been heard to speak of white-fish. In Cal- 

 cutta one inwardly consumes with curry. Bird's-nest soup, made 

 from the gelatinous and insipid secretion of the sea-swallow, is the 

 dish of honor at Shanghai. But Baltimore rests not its reputation 

 upon the precarious tenure of a single dish ; it sits in complacent 

 contemplation of the unrivaled variety of its local market and calmly 

 forbids comparison. While the Chesapeake continues to give it its 



