Omelette au thon.

Take for six persons the roe of four cash [Footnote:  the translator has followed this recipe with shad, pike, pickerel, etc., and can recommend it with a quiet conscience.  Any fish is a substitute for tunny] and steep them for a few minutes in salt water just below boiling point.

Put in also a fresh tunny about as large as an egg, to which you must add a charlotte minced.

Mix the tunny and the roes together, and put the whole in a kettle with a portion of good butter, and keep it on the fire until the butter has melted.  This is the peculiarity of the omelette.

Take then another piece of butter and mix it with parsely and sage.  Put it in the dish intended to receive the omelette, cover it with lemon juice and put it on hot coals.

Then beat twelve eggs, (fresh as possible), pour in the fish and roe so that all may be perfectly mixed.

Then cook the omelette as usual, making it thin and firm.  Serve it up hot.

This dish should be reserved for breakfasts, where all the guests are connoisseurs.  It is caviare to the vulgar.

Observations.

1.  The roes and fish should be warmed, not boiled.  They will thus mingle more easily with the eggs.

2.  The plate should be deep.

3.  It should be warm, for a cold porcelain plate would extract the caloric of the omelette and make it insipid.

II.  A national Victory.

When I lived in New York I used every once in a while to pass the evening in a kind of tavern kept by a man named Little, (the old lank coffee house) where one could always get turtle soup and all the dishes common in the United States.

I often went thither with the Vicomte de la Massue and M. Fehr, an old broker of Marsailles; all three of us were emigrants, and we used to drink ale and cider, and pass the evening very pleasantly together.

There I became acquainted with a Mr. Wilkinson, who was a native of Jamaica, and a person he was very intimate with, for he never left him.  The latter, the name of whom I do not remember was one of the most extraordinary men I ever met.  He had a square face, keen eyes, and appeared to look attentively at everything, though his features were motionless as those of a blind man.  When he laughed it was with what the English call a horse-laugh, and immediately resumed his habitual taciturnity.  Mr. Wilkinson seemed about forty, and, in manner and appearance, seemed to be a gentleman.

The Englishman seemed to like our company, and more than once shared the frugal entertainment I offered my friends, when Mr. Wilkinson took me one evening aside and said he intended to ask us all to dine with him.

I accepted the invitation for three o’clock on the third day after.

The evening passed quietly enough, but when I was about to leave, a waiter came to me and said that the West Indian had ordered a magnificent dinner, thinking their invitation a challenge.  The man with the horse-laugh had undertaken to drink us Frenchmen drunk.