"When all around the wind doth blow," draw close the curtains, build up a roaring fire, light lamp and candles, and begin your dinner with a good—good, mind you—dish of soup. Words of wisdom are these, to be pondered over by the woman who would make her evening dinner a joyful anticipation, a cherished memory.

Soup, with so much else good and great, is misunderstood in an England merrier than dainty in her feasting. Better is this matter ordered across the Border. For the healthy-minded, Scotch mists have their compensation in Scotch broth; odoriferous and appetising is its very name. But in England, soup long since became synonymous with turtle, and the guzzling alderman of legend. Richness is held its one essential quality—richness, not strength. Too often, a thick, greasy mess, that could appeal but to the coarsest hunger, will be set before you, instead of the dish that can be comforting and sustaining both, and yet meddles not with the appetite. It should be but a prelude to the meal—the prologue, as it were, to the play—its excellence, a welcome forecast of delights to follow, a welcome stimulus to light talk and lighter laughter. Over Julienne or bisque frowns are smoothed away, and guests who sat down to table in monosyllabic gloom will plunge boldly into epigrammatic or anecdotic gaiety ere ever the fish be served.

Magical, indeed, is the spell good soup can cast. Of its services as medicine or tonic, why speak? Beef tea gives courage to battle with pain and suffering; consommÉ cheers the hours of convalescence. Let all honour be done to it for its virtues in the sick-room; but with so cheerful a subject, it is pleasanter to dwell on its more cheerful aspects.

More legitimate is it to consider the happy part it plays in the traveller's programme. And for this—it must be repeated, as for all the best things in the gourmand's life—one journeys to France. But first remember—that contrast may add piquancy to the French menu—the fare that awaits the weary, disconsolate traveller at English railway station: the stodgy bun, Bath and penny varieties both, and the triangular sandwich; the tea drawn overnight, and the lukewarm bovril, hopelessly inadequate substitute for soup freshly made from beef or stock. At a luncheon bar thus wickedly equipped, eating becomes what it never should be!—a sad, terrible necessity, a pleasureless safeguard against pangs of hunger, a mere animal function, and therefore a degradation to the human being educated to look upon food and drink—even so might the painter regard his colours, the sculptor his clay and marble—as means only to a perfect artistic end.

Or, consider also, to make the contrast stronger, the choicest banquet American railways, for all the famed American enterprise, provide. To journey by the "Pullman vestibuled train" from New York to Chicago is luxury, if you will. Upon your point of view depends the exact amount of enjoyment yielded by meals eaten while you dash through the world at the rate of eighty miles an hour, more or less, and generally less. There is charm in the coloured waiters, each with gay flower in his buttonhole, and gayer smile on his jolly, black face; there is pretence in the cheap, heavy, clumsy Limoges off which you eat, out of which you drink, in the sham silver case in which your Champagne bottle is brought, if for Champagne you are foolish enough to call. But bitterness is in your wine cup, for the wine is flat; heaviness is in your breakfast or dinner, for bread is underdone and sodden, and butter is bad, and the endless array of little plates discourages with its suggestion of vulgar plenty and artless selection; and all is vanity and vexation, save the corn bread—the beautiful golden corn bread, which deserves a chapter to itself—and the fruit: the bananas and grapes, and peaches and oranges, luscious and ravishing as they seldom are on any but American soil. Nor will you mend matters by bestowing your patronage upon the railway restaurants of the big towns where you stop: the dirty, fly-bitten lunch counters. Pretentious, gorgeous, magnificent, they maybe; but good, no! All, even the privilege of journeying at the rate of eighty miles an hour, would you give for one bowl of good soup at the Amiens buffet.

For, when everything is said, it is the soup which makes travelling so easy and luxurious in France. A breakfast, or a dinner, of courses, well-cooked, and well-served into the bargain, you may eat at many a wayside station. Wine, ordinary as its name, perhaps, but still good and honest, is to be had for a paltry sum whenever the train may stop. Crisp rolls, light brioches tempt you to unwise excesses. Not a province, scarce a town, but has its own special dainty; nougat at MontÉlimart, sausages at Arles, pÂtÉ de foie gras at PÈrigueux; and so you might go on mapping out the country according to, not its departments, but its dishes. These, however, the experienced traveller would gladly sacrifice for the delicate, strong, refreshing, inspiriting bouillon, served at every buffet. This it is which helps one to forget fatigue and dust and cinders, and the odious Frenchman who will have all the windows shut. Bouillon, and not wine, gives one new heart to face the long night and the longer miles. With it the day's journey is well begun and well ended. It sustains and nourishes; and, better still, it has its own Æsthetic value; perfect in itself, it is the one perfect dish for the place and purpose. No wonder, then, that it has kindled even Mr Henry James into at least a show of enthusiasm; his bowls of bouillon ever remain in the reader's memory, the most prominent pleasures of his "Little Tour in France."

Equally desirable in illness and in health, during one's journeys abroad and one's days at home, why is it then that soup has never yet been praised and glorified as it should? How is it that its greatness has inspired neither ode nor epic; that it has been left to a parody—clever, to be sure, but cleverness alone is not tribute sufficient—in a child's book to sing its perfections. It should be extolled, and it has been vilified; insults have been heaped upon it; ingratitude from man has been its portion. The soup tureen is as poetic as the loving cup; why should it suggest but the baldest prose to its most ardent worshippers?

"Thick or clear?" whispers the restaurant waiter in your ear, as he points to the soups on the bill of fare. "Thick or clear,"—there you have the two all-important divisions. In that simple phrase is expressed the whole science of soupmaking; face to face with first principles it brings you. But whether you elect for the one or the other, this great fundamental truth there is, ever to be borne in mind: let fresh meat be the basis of your consommÉ as of your bisque, of your gumbo as of your pÂtes d'Italie. True, in an emergency, Liebig, and all its many offshoots, may serve you—and serve you well. But if you be a woman of feeling, of fancy, of imagination, for this emergency alone will you reserve your Liebig. Who would eat tinned pineapple when the fresh fruit is to be had? Would you give bottled tomatoes preference when the gay pommes d'amour, just picked, ornament every stall in the market? Beef extract in skilful hands may work wonders; the soup made from it may deceive the connoisseur of great repute. But what then? Have you no conscience, no respect for your art, that you would thus deceive?

Tinned soups also there be in infinite variety, ox-tail, and mock-turtle, and Julienne, and gravy, and chicken broth, and many more than one likes to think of. But dire indeed must be your need before you have recourse to them. They, too, will answer in the hour of want. But at the best, they prove but make-shifts, but paltry make-believes to be avoided, even as you steer clear of the soup vegetables and herbs—bits of carrot and onion and turnip and who knows what?—bottled ingeniously, pretty to the eye, without flavour to the palate. One does not eat to please the sense of sight alone!

When, heroically, you have forsworn the ensnaring tin and the insinuating bottle, the horizon widens before you. "Thick and clear": the phrase suggests but narrow compass; broad beyond measure is the sphere it really opens.

Of all the Doges of Bobbio, but one—if tradition be true—sickened of his hundred soups. Three hundred and sixty-five might have been their number with results no more disastrous. Given a cook of good instincts and gay imagination, and from one year's end to the other never need the same soup be served a second time.

A word, first, as to its proper place on the menu. The conservative Briton might think this a subject upon which the last word long since had been spoken. If soup at all, then must it appear between hors d'oeuvre and fish: as well for Catholic to question the doctrine of infallibility as for self-respecting man to doubt the propriety of this arrangement. But they don't know everything down in Great Britain, and other men there be of other minds. Order a dinner in the American West, and a procession of smiling, white-robed blacks—talking, alas! no more the good old darkey, but pure American—swoop down upon you, bringing at once, in disheartening medley, your blue-points, your gumbo, your terrapin, your reed birds, and your apple pie. What sacrilege! In the pleasantest little restaurant in all Rome, close to the Piazza Colonna, within sound of the Corso, was once to be seen any evening in the week—may be still, for that matter—a bemedalled major finishing his dinner with his minestra instead of his dolce. But if a fat, little grey-haired man once consent to wear a coat scarce longer than an Eton jacket, may not, in reason, worse enormities be expected of him? Truth to tell, the British convention, borrowed from France, is the best. If, in good earnest, you would profit by your potage, give it place of honour at the top of the menu. Leave light and frivolous sweets to lighter, more frivolous moments, when, hunger appeased, man may unbend to trifles.

What the great Alexandre calls the grand consommÉ is the basis of all soup—and sauce making. Study his very word with reverence; carry out his every suggestion with devotion. Among the ingredients of this consummate bouillon his mighty mind runs riot. Not even the adventures of the immortal Musketeers stimulated his fancy to wilder flights. His directions, large and lavish as himself, would the economical housewife read with awe and something of terror. Veal and beef and fowl—a venerable cock will answer—and rabbit and partridges of yester-year; these be no more than the foundation. Thrown into the marmite in fair and fitting proportions, then must they be watched, anxiously and intelligently, as they boil; spoonfuls of the common bouillon should be poured upon them from time to time; there must be added onions and carrots, and celery and parsley, and whatever aromatic herbs may be handy, and oil, if you have it; and after four hours of boiling slowly and demurely over a gentle fire, and, next, straining through coarse linen, you may really begin to prepare your soup.

If to these heights the ordinary man—or woman—may not soar, then will the good, substantial, everyday bouillon, or pot-au-feu—made of beef alone, but ever flavoured with vegetables—fulfil the same purpose, not so deliciously, but still fairly well. In households where soup is, as it should be, a daily necessity, stock may be made and kept for convenience. But if you would have your pot-au-feu in perfection, let the saucepan, or marmite—the English word is commonplace, the French term charms—be not of iron, but of earthenware: rich tawny brown or golden green in colour, as you see it in many a French market-place, if the least feeling for artistic fitness dwells within your soul. Seven hours are needed pour faire sourire le pot-au-feu—the expression is not to be translated. Where soups are concerned the English language is poor, and cold, and halting; the speech of France alone can honour them aright.

With good bouillon there is naught the genius may not do. Into it the French chef puts a few small slices of bread, and, as you eat, you wonder if terrapin or turtle ever tasted better. With the addition of neatly-chopped carrots and onions, and turnips and celery, you have Julienne; or, with dainty asparagus tops, sweet fresh peas, tiny stinging radishes, delicate young onions, printanier, with its suggestions of spring and blossoms in every mouthful. This last, surely, is the lyric among soups. Decide upon cheese instead, and you will set a Daudet singing you a poem in prose: "Oh! la bonne odeur de soupe au fromage!" PÂtes d'Italie, vermicelli, macaroni, each will prove a separate ecstasy, if you but remember the grated Parmesan that must be sprinkled over it without stint—as in Italy. Days there be when nothing seems so in keeping as rice: others, when cabbage hath charm, that is, if first in your simmering bouillon a piece of ham—whether of York, of Strasbourg, or of Virginia—be left for three hours or more; again, to thicken the golden liquid with tapioca may seem of all devices the most adorable. And so may you ring the changes day after day, week after week, month after month.

If of these lighter soups you tire, then turn with new hope and longing to the stimulating list of purÉes and crÈmes. Let tomatoes, or peas, or beans, or lentils, as you will, be the keynote, always you may count upon a harmony inspiriting and divine; a rapture tenfold greater if it be enjoyed in some favourite corner at Marguery's or Voisin's, where the masterpiece awaits the chosen few. Or if, when London fogs are heavy and life proves burdensome, comfort is in the very name of broth, then put it to the test in its mutton, Scotch, chicken, or dozen and more varieties, and may it give you new courage to face the worst!

But if for pleasure solely you eat your soup, as you should, unless illness or the blue devils have you firm in their grasp, a few varieties there be which to all the rest are even as is the rose to lesser flowers, as is the onion to vegetables of more prosaic virtue. Clams are a joy if you add to them but salt and pepper—cayenne by preference—and a dash of lemon juice: as a chowder, they are a substantial dream to linger over; but made into soup they reach the very topmost bent of their being: it is the end for which they were created. Of oysters this is no less true. Veal stock or mutton broth may pass as prosaic basis of the delicacy; but better depend upon milk and cream, and of the latter be not sparing. Mace, in discreet measure, left flowing in the liquid will give the finishing, the indispensable touch. Oh, the inexhaustible resources of the sea! With these delights rank bisque, that priceless purÉe, made of crayfish—in this case a pinch of allspice instead of mace—and if in its fullest glory you would know it, go eat it at the LapÉrouse on the Quai des Grands Augustins; eat it, as from the window of the low room in the entresol, you look over toward the towers of Notre Dame.

Be a good Catholic on Fridays, that, with potages maigres—their name, too, is legion—your soups may be increased and multiplied, and thus infinity become your portion.