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Home  »  The World’s Wit and Humor  »  Recipes

The World’s Wit and Humor: An Encyclopedia in 15 Volumes. 1906.

Yuan Mei (1715–1797)

Recipes

From “Cookery Book”

BIRDS’ nests and water-slugs have no particular flavor of their own, and are therefore not worth eating.

The best cook cannot prepare artistically more than five or six different dishes in one day. A host of mine once had forty courses served at a meal, and as soon as I got home I called for a bowl of rice to still my hunger.

In order to enjoy the pleasures of the palate to the fullest degree, you must be sober. If you are drunk, you cannot tell one flavor from another.

The ingredients of a dish should always harmonize with one another—like two people in marriage.

Some cooks use the flesh of chickens and pigs for one soup, and as chickens and pigs have souls, they will hold those cooks to account, in the next world, for their treatment of them in this.

Bamboo-shoots ought never to be cut with a knife which has just been used on onions.

While cooking, do not allow ashes from your pipe, perspiration from your face, soot from the fuel, or beetles from the ceiling to drop into the saucepan: the guests would be likely to pass the dish by.