“Immediately two waiters and two girls, dressed in cloth of gold, and their hair tied up with ribbons, invited them to sit down to table with the landlord. They served four dishes of soup, each garnished with two young parrots; a boiled condor[19] which weighed two hundred pounds; two roasted monkeys, of excellent flavour; three hundred humming-birds in one dish, and six hundred fly-birds in another; exquisite ragouts; delicious pastries; the whole served up in dishes of a kind of rock-crystal. The waiters and girls poured out several liqueurs drawn from the sugar-cane.”
A cook of roughly the same moment, setting down the same dish.
Clean the root of a tongue very nicely, and half an ox head, with salt and water, and soak them afterwards in plain water; then stew them in five or six quarts of water till tolerably tender. Let the soup stand to be cold: take off the cake of fat, which will make good paste for hot meat pies, or serve to baste. Put to the soup a pint of split peas or a quart of whole, twelve carrots, six turnips, six potatoes, six large onions, a bunch of sweet herbs, and two heads of celery. Simmer them without the meat, till the vegetables are done enough to pulp with the peas through a sieve, when the soup will be about the consistence of cream. Season it with pepper, salt, mace, pimento, a clove or two, and a little Cayenne, all in the finest powder. If the peas are bad, the soup may not be thick enough; then boil in it a slice of roll, and put through the colander; or put a little rice flour, mixing it by degrees.
Sources: The passage is from Voltaire, Candide, free to read in full at Project Gutenberg. The recipe is from Rundell, New system of domestic cookery, formed upon principles of of 1806, also free in full. Both are in the public domain in the United States. The binding above is ours — plum cloth, amphora stamp.