“But the happiest regulation in French railway government is--thirty minutes to dinner! No five-minute boltings of flabby rolls, muddy coffee, questionable eggs, gutta-percha beef, and pies whose conception and execution are a dark and bloody mystery to all save the cook that created them! No, we sat calmly down--it was in old Dijon, which is so easy to spell and so impossible to pronounce except when you civilize it and call it Demijohn--and poured out rich Burgundian wines and munched calmly through a long table d'hote bill of fare, snail patties, delicious fruits and all, then paid the trifle it cost and stepped happily aboard the train again, without once cursing the railroad company. A rare experience and one to be treasured forever.”
A cook of roughly the same moment, setting down the same dish.
Four pound boild beef, chopped fine; and salted; six pound of raw apple chopped also, one pound beef suet, one quart of Wine or rich sweet cyder, one ounce mace, and cinnamon, a nutmeg, two pounds raisins, bake in paste No. 3, three fourths of an hour.
Sources: The passage is from Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, free to read in full at Project Gutenberg. The recipe is from Simmons, American Cookery of 1796, also free in full. Both are in the public domain in the United States. The binding above is ours — forest cloth, pudding stamp.