ABSTRACT
The proverbial thirty-two chews recommended by Gladstone are hardly enough to consume the rough and contrasting stuffs - hard-crusted and claylike wholemeal bread, nuts, shredded vegetables, unhusked rice and so on - served in health-food restaurants and salad bars. Eating-places providing such a diet have multiplied in Anglo-Saxon countries particularly. The fastidious eaters who attend them have not usually rationalized their urge for the coarse food enough to consider why they have reversed a tendency in the preparation of food at least two centuries old. The climax of this tendency was reached about the time of Napoleon's First Empire, and was then maintained on a plateau of invention, without changing course until the middle of this century: this French haute cuisine, following the French language, became the staple of courts, of diplomacy and of the cosmopolitan world of hotels and restaurants.
