Dr Watson on French cuisine

We then spent the next three hours consuming a meal of grotesque opulence. Despite my service under General Cathgart, I had never before borne the full weight of haute cuisine. Each dish was more fantastical than the last. One can only conclude that it is the special purpose of French cookery to dissolve the entire substance of a dish into polish, so that no trace of the primeval beef, pork, or chicken remains, converting the whole into a sort of puree raisonne that can then be shaped and reshaped by an abstract and extravagant fancy far closer to architecture than cookery, a fancy whose sole intent is to remove from its creations all taint of the hearth and kitchen, not to mention pasture and field.

Dr Watson in Alan Vanneman (2005). Sherlock Holmes and the Hapsburg Tiara. Carroll & Graf: New York City.