At every meal except breakfast--when they do not give you
anything at all--the French give you veal and poulet roti. If at
lunch you had the poulet roti first and afterward the veal, why,
then at dinner they provide a pleasing variety by bringing on the
veal first and the poulet roti afterward.
The veal is invariably stringy and coated over with weird sauces,
and the poulet never appears at the table in her recognizable
members--such as wings and drumsticks--but is chopped up with a
cleaver into cross sections, and strange-looking chunks of the
wreckage are sent to you. Moreover they cook the chicken in such
a way as to destroy its original taste, and the veal in such a way
as to preserve its original taste, both being inexcusable errors.
Nowhere in the larger Italian cities, except by the exercise of a
most tremendous determination, can you get any real Italian cooking
or any real Italian dishes. At the hotels they feed you on a pale,
sad table-d'hote imitation of French cooking, invariably buttressed
with the everlasting veal and the eternal poulet roti. At the
finish of a meal the waiter brings you, on one plate, two small
withered apples and a bunch of fly-specked sour grapes; and, on
another plate, the mortal remains of some excessively deceased
cheese wearing a tinfoil shroud and appropriately laid out in a
small, white, coffin-shaped box.
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