THE MATERIALS FOR DINING.

“All flesh is grass;” and grass has been the foundation of all feasts, in a double sense. It was not only a part of the early repast, in some shape or another, by derivation rather than immediately, but it formed the most ancient seats occupied by primitive and pastoral guests in very remote times. Dr. Johnson approved of asparagus being called “grass.” Romulus thought grass a sacred emblem, or he would not have suddenly converted his twelve lay foster-brothers into a priesthood to look after it. When Baber had defeated the Afghans of Kohat, they approached him in despair, and, according to their custom when in extremities, with grass between their teeth, to signify, as the imperial autobiographer says, “We are your oxen.” Baber treated them worse than oxen; for the amiable savage says, “All that were taken alive were beheaded by my order, and at the next halting-place we erected a minaret of their skulls.” And the conqueror dined pleasantly in front of the monument.

My friend, Captain Lionel da Costa, tells me, that on accompanying (en amateur) a French force on a razzia against an Arab tribe in Algeria, he witnessed the employment of grass as an emblem of defiance rather than of submission. The French officers had assembled the Arab Chiefs, and, telling them that the foreigners had filled up their wells, carried off their cattle, and burned their dwellings, exhorted them to submission, asking themwhat they would do further against a country so powerful as France? The Arabs, as if impelled simultaneously, stooped to the earth, plucked some scant blades of grass there growing, and began chewing the same in angry silence: this was all their reply, and by it they intimated that they would eat what the earth gave, like the beasts that are upon it, rather than surrender. Their enemies could not refrain from admiring and feeding such adversaries; their mute eloquence was worth more than any thing uttered to tyrants by Power’s statue of the Greek Slave, which, according to Mrs. Elizabeth Browning, “thunders white silence,”—a silence that must have been akin to that in the French Tragedy, “silence qui se fit entendre!”

Soup, as I have remarked, is not a bad preparation for the stomach. Some one calls it the “preface of a dinner,” adding, however, that a good work needs no preface. Soup is of very ancient date. Rebecca and Jacob ate of a pottage, in which the meat was cut into small bitsbeforethe muscular fibres had cooled and become hardened, and stewed in milk, thickened with meal and herbs. The famous French gastronomist, the Marquis de Cussy, was orthodox in his gastronomy, fed well, but heeded the church. His favourite soup in Lent was an onion soup, composed of a score of small bulbs, well cleaned, sliced, and put into a stew-pan, with a lump of fresh butter and a little sugar. They were turned over the fire till they became of a fine golden colour, when they were moistened with broth, and the necessary quantity of bread added. Before the soup was served, its excellence was perfected by the addition of two small glasses of very old Cognac brandy. This Lent fare was, however, only the preface to salmon and asparagus, with which the orthodox epicure mortified his appetite.

The famous Carême did with the soups he discovered,what the most famous navigators have done with the new territories on which they were the first to land; namely, give them the names of the most illustrious contemporaries then existing. Royalty was honoured in the “Potage Condé;” music in that of “Boieldieu;” and the medical faculty, which Carême generally despised, in the “Soupes à la Broussais,Roques, andSegalas;” poetry was illustrated in the “Lamartine;” history in the “Dumesnil;” and philosophy in the “Potage Buffon.” The last name he thus bestowed, was to his last culinary inspiration just before death, when he conferred on a vegetable soup the name of “Victor Hugo.” It was after reading the “Messéniennes,” that he created the “Matelotte à la Delavigne;” and he paid the doctor who had cured him of an indigestion, by inventing the dish of fish which he called “Perche à la Gaubert.” And with this record we will put the fish on our own table.

“It is only the Arabs of the desert that affect to despise fish.” This eastern proverb is tantamount to the more homely one of, “The grapes are sour;” for the Arabs only affect to despise that which they cannot readily obtain. The Jews were prohibited from eating fishes without scales or fins. The Egyptian Priests cared not for fish of any sort, but they generally allowed the people to eat with what appetite they chose, of what the priesthood declined to taste. It is said in the legend, that St. Kevin lived by the fish he caught in the Lake of Glendaloch; and that when the celebrated beauty tempted him, she did it by flattery and suggestion:—

“‘You’re a rare hand at fishing,’ says Kate,‘It’s yourself, dear, that knows how to hook them;But, when you have caught them, agrah!Don’t you want a young woman to cook them?’”

“‘You’re a rare hand at fishing,’ says Kate,

‘It’s yourself, dear, that knows how to hook them;

But, when you have caught them, agrah!

Don’t you want a young woman to cook them?’”

Gatis, Queen of Spain, was something like Mr. Lover’s “Kate;” for, if her subjects caught fish well, she it waswho first taught them how to cook what they caught, and how to enjoy what they cooked.

When philosophers were occupied with inquiries touching the soul of an oyster, fish was probably not a popular diet. It certainly was not so in Greece, until a comparatively late period. Then fish became fashionable: the legislature secured their freshness by decreeing that no seller should sit down until he had sold his entire stock; sages discussed their qualities, and tragic writers introduced heroes holding dialogues on the qualities of fish-sauce. There was a Greek society at that day “against cruelty to fish,” by devouring what also, allegedly, made the devourer ferocious and inhuman; but general society did not allow its appetite to be influenced thereby.

The Romans were enthusiastic for the mullet. It was for themthefish,par excellence. It was sometimes served up six pounds in weight, and such a fish was worth £60 sterling. It was cooked on the table, for the benefit and pleasure of the guests. In a glass vessel filled with brine made from water, the blood of the mackerel, and salt, the live mullet, stripped of its scales, was enclosed; and as its fine pink colour passed through its dying gradations, until paleness and death ensued, theconviveslooked on admiringly, and lauded the spectacle.

The turbot was next in estimation; but as, occasionally, offending slaves were flung into the turbot preserves for the fish to feed upon, some gastronomists have affected to be horror-stricken at the idea of eating aturbot à la Romaine; quite forgetting that so many of our sea-fish, in their own domain, feed largely on the human bodies which accident, or what men call by that name, casts into the deep. Our own early ancestors in Britain were said to have entirely abstained from fish. In later days, however, here as in France, the finny tribes were protected by royal decrees; and certain fish were named—thesturgeon was one—as to be caught for the royal table alone. In the same days porpoises and seals were devoured by the commonalty, and the latter knew not the art of the cooks of Louis XIV., who could so dress fish as to give it the taste of any flesh they pleased to fix on as an object of imitation. By this means, the King in Lent, while he obeyed the church, enjoyed the gratification of feeling as though he were cheating Heaven,—and with impunity, too!

The most curious fish of which I have ever read, were those of a lake attached to a Burgundian convent, and which were always of the same number as the monks. If one of these sickened and died, the same circumstance occurred with the fish; and if a new brother appeared in the refectory, there was also sure to be found a new denizen in the pond. These fish were, of course, piously inclined; but they did not come up, in that respect, to the parrot of Cardinal Ascanius, which could not only repeat the Creed, but could maintain a thesis! I believe that the Burgundian fish were principally perch; and theyarean eccentric fish. Arthur Young says, that “about the year 1760, perch first appeared in all the lakes of Ireland and in the Shannon at the same time.”

As a singularity with respect to the cooking of fish, I may mention that observed by the Romans with thesepia, or “cuttle-fish.” They invariably took out the eyes before boiling it. It is in allusion to this custom that Trachalion says, in theRudens,—

“Age nunc jam,Jube oculos elidere, itidem ut sepiis faciunt coqui.”

“Age nunc jam,

Jube oculos elidere, itidem ut sepiis faciunt coqui.”

I think I have read somewhere, that the cuttle-fish was esteemed a fitting sacrifice to the gods; but I do not know if pious people had their petsepiæ, as they had their pet lambs and pigs, (“Sunt domi agni et porcisacres,” says the orthodox husband in theRudens,) reared for the purpose of being offered at the altars.

The sturgeon is at this day, in China, reserved for the imperial table. At those of Greece it was introduced by sound of trumpet, and it was almost as esteemed a subject at those of Rome, until Vespasian condescended not to care for it, and to bring other fish into fashion. “It iscaviareto the general,” is a proverb which Shakspeare has popularized. Thecaviareis the roe of the sturgeon dried; that of the larger sturgeon, which produces hundredweights of eggs, and tons of oil, iscaviarefor the general, and is not worth eating. The delicate whitecaviareis the produce of the smaller sturgeon, and it is highly esteemed by gastronomists. It forms a great portion of the food taken by the Greeks during their long Lent.

We have heard of an American who tried to tame an oyster. The Romans were more successful with their sea-eels, which would come when called, and feed from the hands of men, who occasionally fattened them upon live slaves. Vedius Pollio would have grown sick and disgusted, if he had been asked to eat one of these slaves; but he was particularly fond of the fish that had been fed upon such fare; and so he only ate his slaves at second-hand; fortheirflesh was declared by him to have greatly improved the taste of the eel. Epicures with less ferocious appetites preferred the fish that had been fattened upon veal steeped in blood. Vitellius put the fish altogether out of fashion by only eating the roes, which were procured for him at a great expense; and Heliogabalus caused even the roes to cease to be modish, by forcing them upon the Mediterranean peasants, who got as sick of their repasts as English servants in the Scottish Highlands grow weary of the everlasting sameness of their dinners consisting of venison and salmon. The Egyptians placed the sea-eel in their Pantheon; and even theunorthodox cannot deny that he was as good a deity as any to be found there; and we are told that among the Sybarites, the fishers and vendors of the eel were exempt from taxation! The origin of these honours is, however, unknown. Nearly as great were offered, even in Rome, to the fish known as the sea-wolf, which abounded in the most filthy parts of the Tiber, and which some epicures distinguished by the appellation of “child of the gods.” The Romans paid high prices for it, as they did for the regicide lamprey,—a fish which killed our first Henry, and which Italian cooks used to kill, as the murderers did maudlin Clarence, in his Malmsey butt, by plunging the victim, decked for the sacrifice with a nutmeg in his mouth, and a clove in either gill, into a pan of Candian wine; after which, covered with almonds, bread crumbs, and spices, he was exposed to a slow fire, and then to the jaws that impatiently awaited him. It was once as popular as the tunny,—a fish, by the way, which once so enriched the city of Sinope, that the coin minted there bore the figure of the fish. Where they are found at all, it is generally in shoals; but these are never to the extent which Pliny speaks of, when he says that they so obstructed the fleet of Alexander, that the pilots of the Macedonian madman were compelled to shape a different course; and though they are to be found in something like abundance in the Mediterranean, yet tourists who resort thither must not expect to see realized the gay picture of Vernet. It does not appear, however, that the tunny was ever in such favour at ancient tables as the eel, which was greedily eaten where it was not devoutly worshipped, or where medical ordinances had not been directed against it, as unfavourable to the weak of digestion, and perilous to those affected by pulmonary diseases. The pike, emblem of fecundity and example of lengthened years, was still less popular. The carp, whicheven surpasses the pike in fecundity, and is a long liver to boot, was, on the other hand, an especial favourite, but it was served up with sauces that would certainly not tempt a modern gastronomist to eat a fish which is seldom worth eating, and which is almost defiant of digestion. Carp, reduced to a pulp, and served up with sows’ paps, and yolk of egg, must have been as nasty as gold fish with carrots and myrtle leaves,—the delight of the Roman loungers at their “Blackwall,” on the Tiber. So the Greeks spoiled good cod by eating it with grated cheese and vinegar; and the Romans made perch more indigestible than it was before, by swallowing Damascus plums with it. But the ancients had strangely accommodating stomachs; a sauce of honey could induce them to eat cuttle-fish. Garlic and cheese made the swordfish delicacies; the rhombus floated into Greek stomachs on a sauce of wine and brine; the ladies of Rome ate onions with the muzil, and pine-nuts with the pilchard. The more refined Greeks, on the other hand, would not touch the pilchard; and the same difference of taste existed with regard to the loach; while, again, both Rome and Greece united in admiration of the gudgeon. To neither of these countries was the herring known. The Scots found the fish, and the Dutch bought, pickled, and sold, or ate them; and it is said that Charles V., in 1536, ate a herring upon the tomb of Beuckels, the first salter of that fish, and therewith friend of the poor, and enricher of the State. The profit realized by Holland exceeded two millions and a half sterling, annually. But neither Greece nor Rome felt the want of the herring while there was an abundant supply of the favourite oyster. This shell-fish was easily procured by the Greeks from Pelorus, Abydos, and Polarea; by the Romans, from Brindés, the Lake of Lucrinus, Armorica, and even from Britain. The Romans were hardly worthy of the delicacy, seeing that theyabused it by mincing oysters, mussels, and sea hedgehogs together, stewed the whole with pine-almonds and hot condiments, and devoured the mixture scalding! Others, however, ate them raw, when they were opened at table by a slave; and the larger the fish, the more the Roman epicures liked them. They were not only eaten before a feast to stimulate the appetite, but during a banquet, when the appetite began to be palled. They excited to fresh exertion, and it was a cleaner custom (perhaps) than that imperial one of exonerating the stomach by tickling the throat with a peacock’s feather. The Bourdeaux oyster was the favourite fish of most of the Emperors. It is very inferior to the Whitstable oyster, however, and also to that which goes by the name of “Colchester,” and which is not caught there. The passion for the savoury fish is well illustrated in the epitaph which says,—

“Tom ——Lies buried in these cloisters;If, at the last trump,He does not quickly jump,Only cry ‘Oysters!’”

“Tom ——

Lies buried in these cloisters;

If, at the last trump,

He does not quickly jump,

Only cry ‘Oysters!’”

If the Emperors affected oysters, the gods themselves patronized mussels, a dish of which was contributed by Jupiter to the wedding banquet of Hebe. The mythological sanction has, however, failed to render the mussel popular, and for good reasons. It is often extremely poisonous, and in certain conditions of the stomach they who eat mussels may reckon upon being attacked by violent cutaneous disorders, painfully participated in by the oppressed intestines.

It was otherwise with the tortoise, the blood of which was reckoned good in cases of ophthalmia, and the flesh of which was eagerly devoured. The natural history of the products of those early times seems to have been writtenby philosophers with very poetical imaginations. We read of shells of tortoises being converted into roofs of cottages, as we are told by Pliny of crawfish measuring four cubits in length. It was then that men ate lobstersau naturel, and crabs converted into sausages. But this latter dish was a more dainty one than that afforded by the frog,—the abhorrence of early gastronomists, but the delight of many French and German epicures, who first find delight in angling for these unclean beasts with a bait of yellow soap, and then swallowing, with delight more intense, the hind-quarters of the animal they have caught. But if the moderns swallow frogs, the ancients ate the polypus,—and which were the nastiest even I could not tell! The Romans were especially fond of fish; and some “fast” epicures among them not only had preserve ponds of fish on the roofs of their houses, but little rivulets stocked therewith around the dinner-table, whence the guests selected their fish, and delivered them to be cooked.

It was once thought that the prawn, or shrimp, was somehow necessary to the production of soles, acting, it was believed, as a sort of nurse, or foster-parent, to the spawn. But this I suppose to be about as true as that soles always swim in pairs, with three-pennyworth of shrimps behind them, ready for sauce.

I remember two anecdotes connected with fish at table, which a guest may retail when he is next at that period of the repast. Talleyrand was dining, in the year 1805, with the Minister of Finance, who did the honours of his house in the very best style. A very fine carp was on the table opposite to Talleyrand, but the fish was already cold. “That is a magnificent carp,” said the financier: “how do you like it? It came from my estate of Vir-sur-Aisne.” “Did it?” said Talleyrand, “but why did you not have it cookedhere?” This reply was not as fatal tothe utterer of it, as a remark once made by Poodle Byng at Belvoir Castle. “Ah, ah!” he exclaimed, as he saw the fish uncovered at the Duke of Rutland’s board, “my old friend Haddock! I have not seen a haddock, at a gentleman’s table, since I was a boy.” The implication shut the gates of Belvoir on the unlucky Poodle from that day forward. He was never again the Duke’s guest.

Some French writers have asserted, after tracing the “vestiges of creation” according to a fashion of their own, that man originally sprang from the ocean; and that his present condition is one of development, the consequence of life ashore, and exposure to atmospheric air! According to this theory, I suppose, Venus Anadyomene was the Eve of our fishy generation, and mermaids show the transition state, when our ancestors were of both land and sea, and yet properly of neither!

As judges of fish, the moderns are inferior to the ancients. A Greek or Roman epicure could, at first sight, tell in what waters the fish before him had been caught. This sort of wisdom is, however, not uncommon to oyster-eaters, who swallow so greedily what contains little nourishment, but what may be easily digested. It was not unusual, some years ago, in France, for a gourmand to prepare for dinner by swallowing a gross, or a dozen dozen, of oysters! Twelve of them, including the liquor, will weigh four ounces; and the gross, four pounds (Troy)!—a pretty amount of ballast whereupon to take in freight. The skin of such a feeder had need be in a good condition; but so, indeed, ought that of every one who cares for his digestion. When we remember that a person in health, who takes eight pounds of aliment during twenty-four hours of his wakefulness, discharges five of the eight pounds solely through the pores by perspiration, it will at once be seen that to hold the skin clean, andkeep the pores unobstructed, is of first-rate necessity for the sake of digestion and comfort.

There are sea-board populations who live almost exclusively on fish. They feed their domestic animals upon it, and with it manure their ground; so that the pork they may occasionally indulge in, acquires a fish-like flavour, and their bread is but a consequence of the plentiful rottenness of sprats. Such populations are usually lean and sallow, but they are strong-muscled and active-limbed; and altogether they afford good testimony in favour of the efficacy of a fish diet, when no better is to be had. As a diet, fish is only so far stimulating that it augments the lymph rather than renews the blood. It is a puzzle to many gastronomic philosophers that fish was so constant a diet of the monkish orders. Its heating quality hardly suited men who were required to be ever coolly contemplative. But this matter I leave to the philosophers to determine. One of them,—that is, a gastronomic philosopher,—M. Fayot, says, that “if you would have a dinner composed altogether of fish,” the meal should consist of “a turbot, a large salmon done in acourt-bouillon, flanked with aromatic herbs, and covered with a fresh winding-sheet of delicate seasoning. In such dinners, sea-fish have, undoubtedly, the first rank; and among them the Cherbourg lobster, the shrimp of Honfleur, the cray-fish of the Seine, and the smelts of that river’s mouth, and numerous fresh-water fish mingle agreeably. Salmon and turbot should be done briskly; drink afterwards a glass of those old wines which give a digestive action to the stomach.” With M. Fayot, the turbot is “the king of fish, especially in Lent, as it is then of most majestic size. You may serve up salmon with as much ornament as you will, but a turbot asks for nothing but aristocratic simplicity. On the day after he makes his first appearance, it is quite another affair. Itmay be then disguised; and the best manner of effecting this is, to dress himà la Béchamel,—a preparation thus called from the Marquis de Béchamel, who, in the reign of Louis XIV., for ever immortalized himself by this oneragoût.”

TheAlmanach des Gourmandsspeaks of a Lorraine carp which was fed on bread and wine, and which was twice sent to the Paris market, in the care of a courier who travelled by the mail. It returned to its native waters in default of a purchaser willing to give thirtylouis-d’orsfor the monstrous delicacy. This was when fish dinners were much in vogue in Paris. There was then atable d’hôtefor a fish repast only, held at a house profanely called, “The Name of Jesus.” This house stood in the “Cloître St. Jacques de l’Hôpital,” and every Wednesday and Friday it was crowded by the Clergy, who dined magnificently onmaigrefare, for about 2s.a head. It is of one of these that Fayot recounts a pleasant story, the locality, however, of which was theRocher de Cancale. A certain Abbé dined there so copiously off salmon, that a fit of indigestion was the consequence. Some days afterwards, when celebrating Mass, the savoury memories of the fish flocked into his mind; and he was heard to murmur, not themeâ culpâof the “Confiteor,” but, as he quietly beat his breast, “Ah! that capital salmon! that capital salmon!”

Of the more nutritive species of fish, turbot, cod, whiting, haddock, flounder, and sole, are the least heating. Of these, the cod is the least easy of digestion, though turbot is quite as difficult of digestion when much lobster sauce is taken with it. The crimping of cod facilitates the digesting of the fish. Sole and whiting are easily digested. Salmon is nutritive, but it is oily, heating, and not very digestible; far less so than salmon trout. The favourite parts of most of these fishare the least fit for weak stomachs, and the most trying to strong ones. Salmon, caught after the spawning season has commenced, is almost poisonous; and eels are objectionable at all seasons, from their excessive oiliness. Shell-fish generally may be put down as “indigestible,” particularly the under-boiled lobsters of the London market. The mussel is especially so; and these are not rendered innocuous by the removal of the beard, which is not more hurtful than any other part. Shell-fish, and, indeed, fish generally, affects the skin, by sympathy with the stomach. The effect is, sometimes, as if a poison had been generated: at others it very sensibly affects the odour of the cutaneous secretions. This effect was thoroughly understood when the Levitical Priests, like those of Egypt, were prohibited from eating fish. The prohibition was based upon a just principle.

The Egyptian and Levitical Priests were more obedient to such prohibitions than St. Patrick, who once, overcome by hunger, helped himself to pork chops on a fast-day. An angel met him with the forbidden cutlets in his hand; but the saint popped them into a pail of water, pattered an Ave-Mary over them, and our indulgent Lady heeded the appeal by turning them into a couple of respectable and orthodox-looking trout. The angel looked perplexed, and went away, with his index finger on the side of his nose. And see what came of it! In Ireland, meat dipped into water, and christened by the name of “St. Patrick’s Fish,” is commonly eaten there even on fast-days, and to the great regret of all those who eat greedily enough to acquire an indigestion.

St. Patrick’s fish ought to have fetched as high a price as the four cod which formed the sole supply in Billingsgate-market on one of the great frost-days in January, 1809; they were sold to one dealer for fourteen guineas. During the same month, salmon was sold at a guinea apound! When fish is so high-priced, it is time to have done with it. So,enlevez! and let us to the succeeding courses of viands more substantial. While the fish is being removed, I will merely relate that it was the practice of Sir Joshua Reynolds, who gave plentiful dinners to admirable men, in his house in Leicester Square, always to choose his own fish, of which he was a capital judge. He was, on those occasions, ever the first visitor to the fish-shop still existing, in its primitive simplicity, in Coventry-street. He selected the best; and later in the day, his niece, Miss Palmer, used to call, dispute the price, and pay for the fish. Sir Joshua’s table is said to have been too crowded, both as to guests and dishes, while there was scant attendance, and a difficulty of getting served; but the hilarity compensated for all. The guests enjoyed themselves with a vulgar delight that would have very much ruffled the dignity of such a pompous president at repasts as the bewigged, bepatched, and bepowdered Sir Peter Lely.

With the introduction of animal food is dated the era of professional cooks; and that era itself is set down by M. Soyer, a competent authority, as having commenced in the year of the world 1656. Other authorities give 2412 as the proper date, when Prometheus, or Forethought, as his name implies, taught men the use of fire, and cooked an ox. But I think that both dates and mythology are somewhat loose here, and that the period is easier of conjecture than of determination. Ceres killed the pig that devoured her corn, Bacchus the goat that nibbled at the tendrils of the vine, and Jupiter the ox that swallowed his sacred cakes; and the animals slain by deities were roasted and eaten by men. Another tradition is, that roast meat originally smoked only on the altars of the gods, and that the Priests lived on the pretended sacrifices, until some lean and greedy heretic,having wickedly pilfered the sacred viands, so improved under the diet, that his example was promptly followed, and men took to animal food, in spite of the thunder of gods and the anathemas of Priests. I need not say where there is better authority than all these pretty tales for man’s subduing to his use and service the beasts of the earth, the birds of the air, and the fishes of the sea.

A rearer of cattle was, in the olden time, an aristocrat in his way. The gods looked after his herds, and the law gave its protection where Olympian divinity so often proved worthless. Bubona sat the watchful goddess of their fattening; and it was she who blessed the cabbages steeped in vinegar, the straw and wheat-bran, and the bruised barley, wherewith the oxen were prepared for the cattle-show or the market. In the latter, the office of the Roman Prefect fixed the selling price: the breeder could neither ask more nor take less than according to the official tariff. There was a singular custom at one time in Rome, which proves, however, that the seller had a voice in declaring the value of his stock. Purchaser and vendor simultaneously closed, and then suddenly opened, one of their hands, or some of the fingers. If the number of fingers on both sides was even, the vendor obtained the price which he had previously asked for his meat; but if the number was uneven, the buyer received the viands for the sum he had just before tendered. This was as singular a custom as, and a more honest one than, that adopted by the first Dutch settlers in America. In their trading with the Indians a Dutchman’s fist was established as the standard of weight, with this understanding, that when a Dutchman was selling to an Indian his fist weighed a pound, but that it should only be half that weight when the Hollander was a purchaser!

The Roman markets were well supplied, and the pig seems to have been the national favourite. The Emperors usedto distribute thousands of pounds of pork to the poor, as on festive occasions we, less magnificently, divide among the needy our time-honoured English roast beef. There was even an edict against making sausages of any thingbutpork,—an edict which is much needed in some of our suburbs, where “pork sausages” are made of any thing but pig;—and, after all, they could not be made of a dirtier animal. But the grave Romans strangely reverenced this unclean beast. Pliny places him only one degree below humanity; and certainly the porcine and human stomachs are very much alike! In the East, our ancient friend was a Pariah, and his position among the unclean was fixed by a Jewish doctor, who said, that if ten measures of leprosy were flung into the world, nine of them would naturally fall to the execrated pig. There is no doubt that the eating of the flesh of the pig in hot climates would bring on diseases in the human system akin to leprosy; and this fact may have tended to establish the unpopularity of the animal throughout the East, and to account also for the prohibition. Galen, however, prescribed it as good food for people who worked hard; and there are modern practitioners who maintain that it is the most easily digested of all meats. It is certainly more easy of digestion than that respectable impostor, the boiled chicken, which used so cruelly to test, and defy, the feeble powers of invalids.

Pigs were fatted, both in Greece and Rome, until they had attained nearly the bulk of the elephant. These fetched prices of the most “fancy” description; and they were served up whole, with an entire Noah’s-ark collection of smaller animals inside, by way of stuffing. A clever cook could so dress this meat as to make it have the flavour of any other viand; and the first culinaryartistesof the day prided themselves on the preparation of aragoûtcomposed of young pigs stifled before theywere littered. The mother would have had no difficulty in performing this feat herself for her own young, if sows generally had been as huge as the one mentioned by Varro, and which he says was so fat as to be incapable of movement, and to be unconscious that a mouse, with a young family, had settled in the folds of her fat, where they lived like mites in cheese.

In another page, I have spoken of what were called “the sacred pigs and lambs.” Menæchmus, in Plautus, asks the price of the “porci sacres, sinceri.” “Sacres” was applied to all animals intended for immolation. Thesinceri porciwere the white and spotless pigs offered to the Lares on behalf of the insane. The merchant who gives instruction, in thePseudolus, to his servant, as to the splendid repast that is to be served up on his birthday, is very particular on the subject of pork; and he shows us what parts formed a dish that might tempt princes,—the ham, and the head: “Pernam, callum, glandium, sumen, facito in aquâ jaceant.”

If men were not, anciently, fonder of beef than of pork, the reason, perhaps, was, that the ox was religiously reverenced, because of his use to man, whereas the pig was really of no value at all but for consumption. The excellence of the ox as food was, nevertheless, very early ascertained, and acted on by some primitive people. The Jews were permitted to eat of that of which Abraham had offered a portion to angels; and calf and ox were alike an enjoined food. The Greeks, too, devoured both with much complacency, as they also did tripe, which was deemed a dainty fit for heroes. Indeed, for tripe there was an ancient and long-standing propensity among the early nations. It formed the chief dish at the banquets of men who met to celebrate the victory of mortals and gods over the sacrilegious Titans.

The lamb and the kid have smoked upon divine altarsand humble tables. The Greeks were especially fond of both, and the Romans were like them in this respect; but the Egyptians religiously abstained from the kid; and more than one Eastern nation held, as of faith, that the lamb was more fitting as an offering to the gods than as a dish for men. On the other hand, there were people who preferred the flesh of the ass, which was not an uncommon dish at Roman tables, where dogs, too, were served as a dainty; for Hippocrates had recommended them as a refined food; and the Greeks swallowed the diet thus authoritatively described. The Romans, however, are said to have eaten the dog out of vengeance. The curs of the Capitol were sleeping, when the sacred and watchful geese saved it by their cackling; and thence arose, it is believed, the avenging appetite with which puppies, dressed like hares, were tossed into the stomachs of the unforgiving Romans. They were also sacrificed to the Dog-star.

It is worthy of remark, that Mexico was partly conquered by aid of the pig. Cortez was in need of supplies of fresh meat on his march, and he took with him a large herd of swine,—sows as well as pigs,—“these animals being very suitable for a long journey, on account of their endurance of fatigue, and because they multiply greatly.” The Indians, on most occasions, however, appear to have been able to have supplied him plentifully: for we read, that at Campeche, for instance, in return for his presents, they placed before him partridges, turtle-doves, goslings, cocks, hares, stags, and other animals which were good to eat, and bread made from Indian corn, and fruits. It was, for all the world, like meeting a burglar at your dining-room door, and asking him to stay and take breakfast, before he went off with the plate!

When the uncle of Job entertained his heavenlyvisitors, the dish he placed before them was “roasted veal,” of a freshly killed calf. It was tender, because the muscular fibres had not had time to become stiff; and its pleasant accompaniments were melted butter, milk, and meal-cakes. Veal is the national dish of Germany, where mutton is scarce, and calves abundant. It is poor food at any time; but the German veal is the most tasteless of meats. There, indeed, is applicable the smart saying of that ardent young experimentalist, who declared that eating veal was as insipid an enjoyment as kissing one’s sister! Cardinal Zinzendorf used to denounce pork quite as strongly. He deemed pigs to have been of no use but for their blood, of which he himself used to make a bath for his legs, whenever he had the gout. Quixote Bowles, on the other hand, held pig, in any form, to be the divinest of meats, and the animal the happiest of all created things. With true Apician fervour, he would travel any distance to feast on the sight of a fatted porker; and a view of that prize pig of Prince Albert’s, which was so uniformly huge that, at first sight, it was difficult to distinguish the head from the tail, would have made him swoon with gentle ecstasy. Bowles was an epicure in bacon; and, whenever he went out to dinner, he took a piece of it, of his own curing, in his pocket, and requested the cook to dress it. The people of the Society Islands carry respect for pigs even beyond the compass of Bowles. They believe that there is a distinct heaven for the porcine souls; and this paradise of pigs is called by them “Ofatuna.” The Polynesian pig is certainly a more highly favoured animal than his cousin in Ireland; for, in a Polynesian farm household, every pig has his proper name, as regularly as every member of the family. Perhaps, the strangest cross of pigs ever heard of, was that of Mr. Tinney’s famous breed for porkers,—Chinese, crossed by a half-African boar; themeat was said to be delicious. Finally, with respect to pigs, they are connected with a popular expletive, with which they have, in reality, nothing to do. “Please the pigs!” is shown, I think by Southey in his “Espriella,” to be a corruption of “Please the pyx!” The pyx is the receptacle which contains the consecrated wafer on Romish altars; and the exclamation is equal to “Please God!” The corruption is as curious a one as that of “tawdry,” from “’t Audrey,” or St. Audrey’s fair, famous for the sale of frippery,—showy, cheap, and worthless.

They who are half as particular about mutton as Quixote Bowles was about pork, would do well to remember, that sheep continue improving as long as their teeth remain sound, which is usually six years; and that, at all events up to this time, the older the mutton, the finer the flavour. A spayed ewe, kept five years before she is fattened, is superior to any wether mutton. Dr. Paris, however, states that wedder mutton is in perfection at five years old, and ewe mutton at two years old; but he acknowledges that the older is the more digestible. It is the glory of one locality, famous for its sheep, that the rot was never known to be caught upon the South Downs. It is further said, that a marsh, occasionally overflowed with salt water, was never known to rot sheep. A curious fact is stated by Young, in his “Survey of Sussex;” namely, that Lord Egremont had, in his park, three large flocks of the Hereford, South-Down, and Dishley breeds; and that these three flocks kept themselves perfectly distinct, although each had as much opportunity of mixing with the others as they had with themselves.

I have alluded, in another page, to a circumstance first noticed, I believe, by Madame Dacier,—that there is no mention of boiled meat, as food, throughout Homer’s Iliad. The fair commentator is right; but “boiling” is,nevertheless, used by the poet as a simile. When (in the twenty-first book) Neptune applies his flames to check the swelling fury of Scamander,—

“The bubbling waters yield a hissing sound,As when the flames beneath a caldron rise,To melt the fat of some rich sacrifice.Amid the fierce embrace of circling firesThe waters foam, the heavy smoke aspires:So boils th’ imprison’d flood, forbid to flow,And, choked with vapours, feels his bottom glow!”

“The bubbling waters yield a hissing sound,

As when the flames beneath a caldron rise,

To melt the fat of some rich sacrifice.

Amid the fierce embrace of circling fires

The waters foam, the heavy smoke aspires:

So boils th’ imprison’d flood, forbid to flow,

And, choked with vapours, feels his bottom glow!”

This is not a very elegant version of the original, it must be confessed, albeit the translation is Pope’s. It is, however, the only reference to boiling to be found in Homer, and here the fat of the sacrifice boiled down is that of a pig.

Κνίσσῃ κελδόμενος ἁπαλοτρεφέος σιάλοιο.

I do not know that I can take leave of mutton and the meats by doing them greater honour than by mentioning that Napoleon ate hastily of mutton before he entered on the contest at Leipsic, and he lost the triumph of the bloody day through a fit of indigestion.

Before the era of kitchen gardens, scurvy was one of the processes by which the English population was kept down. Cabbages were not known here until the period of Henry VIII.; and turnips are so comparatively new to some parts of England, that their introduction into the northern counties is hardly a century old. A diet exclusively of animal food is too highly stimulant for such a climate as ours; and an exclusively vegetable diet is far less injurious in its effects. No meat is so digestible as tender mutton. It has just that degree of consistency which the stomach requires. Beef is not less nutritious, but it is rather less easy of digestion, than mutton: much, however, depends upon the cooking, which process may,really not inaptly, be called the first stage of digestion. The comparative indigestibility of lamb and veal arises from the meat being of a more stringy and indivisible nature. Old laws ordained that butchers should expose no beef for sale, but of an animal that had been baited. The nature of the death rendered the flesh more tender. A coursed hare is thus more delicious eating than one that has been shot; and pigs whipped till they die, may be eaten with relish, even by young ladies who pronounce life intolerable. A little vinegar, administered to animals about to be killed, is said, also, to render the flesh less tough; and it is not unusual to give a spoonful of this acid to poultry, whose life is required for the immediate benefit of the consumer. Some carnivorous animals have been very expert at furnishing their own larder. Thus we read, that the eagles in Norway exhibit as much cunning in procuring their beef as can well be imagined; and more, perhaps, than can well be believed. They dive into the sea, we are told, then roll in the sand, and afterwards destroy an ox by shaking the sand in his eyes, while they attack him. I think the French eagle tried a similar plan with the English bull, during the wars of the Empire, and very ineffectually. It dived into the sea, and rolled itself in the sand at Boulogne, and shook abundance of it across the Channel; but the English bull more quietly shook it off again from his mane, and the eagle turned to an easier quarry in Austria. Animals not carnivorous have sometimes been as expert. There have been horses, for instance, who have had their peculiar appetite also for meat. Some twenty years ago, we heard of one at Brussels, which, fond of flesh generally, was particularly so of raw mutton, which it would greedily devour whenever it could get, as it sometimes did, to a butcher’s shop.

The Jews, it is said, never ate poultry under their old dispensation; and French gastronomists assert that thisspecies of food was expressly reserved to enrich the banquets of a more deserving people. About the merits of the people the poultry, and winged animals generally, would perhaps have an opinion of their own, were they capable of entertaining one; for nowhere, as in France, have those unfortunate races been so tortured, and merely in order to extract out of their anguish a little more exquisite enjoyment for the palled appetites of epicures. The turkey has, perhaps, the least suffered at the hands of the Gallic experimentalists, thoughhehas not altogether escaped. The goose has been the most cruelly treated, especially in the case of his being kept caged before a huge fire, and fed to repletion until he dies, the Daniel Lambert of his species, of a diseased liver, which is the most delicious thing possible in a pie. But it is ignoble treatment for the only bird which is said to be prescient of approaching earthquakes. The goose saved Rome, and was eaten in spite of his patriotism. He is skilled in natural philosophy, and his science does not save him from death and sage-and-onions. Nay, even a female Sovereign of England could not hear of the defeat of the Spanish Armada without decreeing “death to the geese,” until the time comes when Mr. Macaulay’s Huron friend shall be standing on a fragment of Blackfriars’ Bridge, sketching the ruins of St. Paul’s.

It must be allowed, however, that the scientific ladies of farm-yards have improved upon the knowledge of their ancestresses. Formerly, of turkeys alone, full one-half that pierced the shell perished; but now we rear more than fifteen out of twenty. I do not know, however, that that fact is at all consolatory to the turkey destined to be dined upon.

Themistocles ordered his victory over Xerxes to be yearly commemorated by a cock-fight; and the bird itself was eaten out of honour, as dogs in Rome were for reasonsof vengeance. At Rome, the hen was the favourite bird; but hens were consumed in such quantities, that Fannius, the Consul, issued a decree, prohibiting their being slain for food, during a certain period; and, in the mean time, the Romans “invented the capon.” The duck was devoured medicinally, that is, on medical assurance that it was good diet for weak stomachs; and there were great sages who not only taught that duck, as a food, would maintain men in health, but that, if they were ill, the ample feeding thereon would soon restore them again. Mithridates, it is alleged, ate it as a counter-poison; other people, of other times and places, simply because they liked it. The goose was in as much favour as the duck with the digestion-gifted stomachs of the older races. It wastheroyal diet in Egypt, where the Monarch did not, like Queen Elizabeth, recommend it to the people, but selfishly decreed that it was only to be served at his own table. Gigantic geese, with ultra-gigantic livers, were as much the delight of epicures in Rome, as the livers, if not the geese, are now thevoluptas supremaof the epicure of France, and of countries subject to the French code of diet. A liver weighing as much as the rest of the animal without it, was amorceau, in Rome, to make a philosopher’s mouth water. This was not proof of a more depraved taste than that exhibited by a Christian Queen of France, who spent sixteen hundred francs in fattening three geese, the delicate livers of which alone Her Majesty intended to dine upon. The pigeon and guinea-hen never attained to such popularity as the goose and duck; while the turkey, and especially the truffled turkey-hen, has its value sufficiently pointed out by the saying of the gastronome, that there must be two at the eating of a truffled turkey,—the eater and the turkey! The turkey, originally from the East, was slowly propagated in Europe, and the breed appears tohave gradually passed away, like the bustard in England. It was brought hither again from America, and its first re-appearance is said to have been at the wedding-dinner of Charles IX. of France.

The turkey was not protected, as the peacock was by Alexander, by a decree denouncing death against whomsoever should kill this divine bird, with its devilish note. The decree did not affect Quintus Hortensius, who had one served up at the dinner which celebrated his accession to the office of Augur. Tiberius, however, preserved the peacock with great jealousy, and it was only rich breeders that could exhibit this bird at their banquets.

A man who passes through Essex may see whole “herds” of geese and ducks in the fields there, fattening without thought of the future, and supremely happy in their want of reflection. These birds are “foreigners;” at least, nearly all of them are so. They are Irish by birth, but they are brought over by steam, in order to be perfected by an English education; and when the due state of perfection has been attained, they are, like many other young people partaking of the “duck” or the “goose,” transferred to London, and “done for.”

Some gastronomic enthusiasts, unable to wait for their favourite birds, have gone in search of them. This was the case with the oily Jesuit, Fabi, who so loved beccaficoes. “As soon as the cry of the bird was heard in the fields around Belley,” says the author of the “Physiologie du Goût,” “the general cry was, ‘The beccaficoes are come, we shall soon have Father Fabi among us.’ And never did he fail to arrive, with a friend, on the 1st of September. They came for the express purpose of regaling themselves on beccaficoes, during the period of the passage of the bird across the district. To every house they were invited in town, and they took their departure again about the 23rd.” This good Father died in our “gloriousmemory” year of 1688; and one of his choice bits of delirium was, that he had discovered the circulation of the blood before Harvey!

And now do I not hear that gentleman-like person at the lower end of the table remark, that the circulation of the blood was a conceived idea long before Harvey? You are quite right, my dear Sir; and your remark is a very appropriate one, both as to time and theme, for the circulation of the blood is one of the results of cooking. As for preconception of the idea, it is sufficient for Harvey, that he demonstrated the fact. The Doctors of ancient Roman days supposed that the blood came from the liver; and that, in passing through thevena cavaand its branches, a considerable quantity of it turned about, and entered into the right cavity of the heart. What Harvey demonstrated was, that the blood flows from the heart into all parts of the body, by the arteries, from whence it is brought back to the heart again, by the veins. Well, Sir, I know what you are about to remark,—that Paolo Sarpi, that pleasantest of table-companions, claimed to have made the demonstration before Harvey. True, Sarpi used to say, that he did not dare publish his discovery, for dread of the Inquisition; but that he confided it to brother Fabi da Aqua-pendente, who kept it close for the same reason, but told it in confidence to Harvey, who published it as his own. Well, Sir, Sir George Ent exploded all that, by proving that Sarpi himself had first learned the fact from Harvey’s lips. The Italians have the same right in this case, as they have to their boast of having produced what old Ritson used to style, “that thing you choose to call a poem, ‘Paradise Lost.’” It was an invention or discovery at second-hand.

What conceits Cowley has in his verses on Harvey! He makes the philosophical Doctor pursue coy Nature through sap, and catch her at last in the human blood.He speaks, too, of the heart beating tuneful marches to its vital heat; a conceit which Longfellow twisted into prettiness, when he said, that our “muffled hearts were beating funeral marches to the grave.” You will remember, Sir, that Shakspeare makes Brutus say, that Portia was to him “dear as the drops that visit this sad heart.” Brutus himself would, perhaps, have said “liver;” and, by the way, how very much to the same tune is the line in Gray’s “Bard,” wherein we find,—

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