Ordering eggs à la Nordenskjol, what may one expect to find in the plate when the velvet-footed waiter totes it in? What is the exact composition of sauce financiére, of cocky-leeky soup, of chicken portugaise, of brook trout argenteuil, of a bomb westphalienne? No doubt every true lover of fine victuals is constantly pestered by such problems. The bill of fare is a perpetual mystery. It is useless to seek to master it by sitting up nights with a French dictionary, for the nouns and adjectives upon it have esoteric and unearthly meanings, entirely unconnected with the meanings attached to them in ordinary French prose. One learns, perhaps from Cassell, that chiffon means a rag, a scrap, a trinket, a frippery; but that knowledge gives one no clue to the fact that eggs chiffonade are eggs heaved into the frying pan, or pot, or broiler or oven, or whatever it is they use to cook eggs in company with a handful of chopped herbs, including sorrel. Sorrel seems to be the essential ingredient, but sorrel, in French, is oseille. And so the inquirer is baffled.

It is to relieve the world of this burden that M. Joseph Gancel, the eminent chef of the Hotel Belleclaire, has composed and published his Ready Reference of Menu Terms, an exhaustive and excellent encyclopedia of the whole subject, and the fruit, as M. Gancel says with all due modesty, of thirty-five years of hard service in the most artistic kitchens of Europe and America and of intimate association with the most learned chefs of the age. M. Gancel dedicates his work to twenty-nine of these artists, mentioning them by name in alphabetical order - from M. Anjard of the Waldorf-Astoria to M. Vautrin of the Pavilion d'Armenonville in Paris, and including that serene highness among cooks, M. Letors, chief of the culinary studios of M. le Baron de Rothschild of Vienna. It is a book of overwhelming merits, a book fairly bulging with information. It gives the formulae of 150 separate and distinct sauces, of 400 omelettes, of no less than 600 soups! What is to be said of such a one-volume library, of such a bottomless pit of learning? The reviewer stands flabbergasted, paralyzed, silent.

But let us peep within. At once we penetrate the secret of cocky-leeky soup. It is a strong aqueous solution of the juices of chicken and leeks, and celery - a savory and tasty mess, you may bet your bottom dollar. I should like to tackle a hogshead of cocky-leeky soup on a brisk and windy day - a day of the tingling, appetizing sort. It would also delight me to encounter, on any old day, a platter covered by an omelette havanaise, with its dice of chicken livers boiled in milk, its fragments of sweet pepper and its rich, red tomato sauce. Yet again, who could resist a ration of lamb impératrice, with its stuffing of pulverized chicken and forcemeat, its sprinkling of truffles, its foliage of celery and its sauce suprême - or a plate of veal Metternich, with its decorations of red cabbage and chestnuts, and its soubise sauce, with paprika and rice? M. Gancel is not only accurate, but also eloquent. His terse epigrammatic style touches the heart.

Did I say "accurate"? Alas, even the most accurate man sometimes goes astray! Here is M. Gancel, a veritable Voltaire of cookery, telling us that crab à la créole is merely a dish of crab meat drenched in creole sauce! Far from it, indeed! The essential thing in concocting crab à la créole is to mix the crab meat and the à la créole thoroughly and to cook them together, pouring out the mixture, when it has begun to steam, upon thin slices of dry toast. That is the way crab à la créole is made down in Baltimore, where the art of cooking crabs reaches its highest perfection. A dish of crab meat, with creole sauce poured over it, is called there, not crab à la créole, but "crab meat with creole sauce." In a true crab à la créole the mixture is infinitely intimate. Every last flake of crab meat is surrounded by its own fragments of onion, green pepper, mushroom and tomato, and the juices of these exquisite herbs go straight through it. A dish of that sublime invention drives dull care away. It is, perhaps, the most magnificent victual yet devised by mortal man - and it costs but forty cents. One may have a gallon of it, with a half a dozen twelve-and-a-half cent cigars and a case of beer, for $2.85.

M. Gancel is wrong again when he says that soft crabs, before being fried, should be dipped in a mixture of milk and flour, or breaded in the English fashion. The English know nothing whatever about frying soft crabs, and neither do the cooks of New York. If a waiter should set before a Baltimore epicure a plate of soft crabs fried in flour or bread crumbs, there would be at once the bloodcurdling sound of a waiter's skull cracking beneath the impact of a chair leg. Such pollutions of the heavenly soft crabs are regarded along the Chesapeake with an aversion approaching acute dementia. Every Ethiopian cook of both shores is well aware that there is but one way to cook the soft crab, which way consists of pinning the live reptile, by means of a large sauerkraut fork, to a slice of breakfast bacon, and of holding the two, with the bacon up, over a quick fire. The bacon melts and its aromatic juices flood the Mediterranean of the crab and run down its legs, and it promptly dies of joy. Then the epicure engulfs it - before it has a chance to grow cold. Painful to the crab? Perhaps. But it's art!

Maybe, however, I am unjust to the excellent M. Gancel. After all, he tries to tell us in his book, not how crabs should be cooked, but how they are cooked. He is not responsible for the crimes of culinary anarchists, the blunders of ignoramuses. His aim is to give the public a sort of new Rosetta Stone for the interpretation of menu card Egyptian, and that aim he achieves in a comprehensive and masterly manner.

[The Smart Set, November 1910]