Part 13

The lamb and the kid have smoked upon divine altars and 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 heavenly visitors, 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; the meat 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 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 this species 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, though _he_ has 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 reasons of 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 was _the_ royal 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 the _voluptas suprema_ of 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 a _morceau_, 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 to have 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 “glorious memory” 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 the _vena cava_ and 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,--

“Dear as the light that visits these sad eyes.”

But there is in tuneful Edmund, in our ever-glorious friend Spenser, a stanza which contains something that may pass for the circulation theory. You remember, in the first canto of the Second Book, where the bleeding lady is found by the good Sir Guyon:--

“Out of her goréd wound the cruel steel He lightly snatch’d, and did the flood-gates stop With his faire garment; then ’gan softly feel Her feeble pulse, to prove if any drop Of living blood yet in her veynes did hop; Which when he felt to move, he hopéd faire To call back life to her forsaken shop. So well he did her deadly wounds repaire, That at the last shee ’gan to breathe out living aire.”

And now, Sir, I shall be happy to take a glass of wine with you, obsolete as that once honoured custom has become. And allow me to send you a slice of this venison. A little more of the fat? Certainly; but, if you _will_ take currant jelly with it, the sin be upon your own head. It has always been the approved plan, you say. Ah, my dear Sir! think what the approved plan was, for years, in the treatment of small-pox. That was not a gastronomic matter, you say? I am not so sure of that; for the patient, swathed in scarlet cloth, had to drink mulled port wine. But, on a question of diet, time and numbers, you think, may be taken for authority. Alas, my dear Sir! did you ever try the once popular receipt of Apicius for a thick sauce to roasted chicken? Never! of course you have not; for, in such case, your young widow would already have touched that pretty life-assurance we wot of. English tastes, you urge? Ah! in that case, if old rule be good rule, you must camp in Kensington Gardens, and eat acorns. In Germany, where venison is a national dish, the idea of currant jelly would ruin the digestion of a whole company. But I see you are incorrigible, and William is at your elbow with the doubtful sauce.

Galen could not appreciate venison as the early Patriarchs and the Jewish people did, and as the Roman ladies did, who ate of it as a preserver of youth, as well as a lengthener of life. A roebuck of Melos would have brought tears of delight into the eyes of Diogenes. The deer was preferred to the roebuck at Rome; but the wild boar was also a favourite; and the Sicilian slave, _chef_ to Servilius Rullus, cooked not less than three of different sizes in one. The largest had baskets of dates suspended to its tusks, and a litter of young ones in pastry lying in the same dish. Within the first was a second, within the second a third, and within the third some small birds. Cicero, who was _the_ guest for whom the dinner was got up, was as delighted with the culinary slave, as Lucullus had been a few days before, when he had eaten a dish of sows’ paps prepared by the same artist; and the enraptured gastronome thought that all Olympus was dissolving in his mouth!

A wild boar was at marriage feasts what our wedding cakes are at those dreadful destroyers of time and digestion,--wedding breakfasts,--an indispensable accompaniment. Caranus, the Macedonian, has the reputation of having exceeded all others in his nuptial magnificence; for, instead of one boar at his banquet, he had twenty. But I have seen more than that at many a breakfast in Britain.

The ancient Britons abstained from the hare, like the Jews. Hippocrates held that, as a food, it thickened the blood, and kept people from sleep; but Galen--and such instances among the faculty are not uncommon--differed from his professional brother. People followed the advice of Galen; and though few, like Alexander Severus, could eat a whole hare at every repast, yet many ate as plentifully as they well could, accounting such diet profitable both to health and good looks.

Hares were nearly as injuriously abundant in Greece as rabbits were in Spain, where the latter animals are said to have once destroyed Tarragona, by undermining it in burrowing! Nay, more: the Balearic Isles were so overrun with them, that the inhabitants, afraid of being devoured, sent an embassy to Rome; and Augustus dispatched a military force, which not only slaughtered the enemy, but ate the half of them! The more refined gluttons of Rome did not dine on the rabbit after this fashion. They only picked a little of the young taken alive from the slaughtered mother, or killed soon after birth. They were preferable to the rabbits of the Parisian _gargottes_, where _fricassée de lapins_ is invariably made of cats. And these, perhaps, are as dainty eating as the hunch of the camel, or the feet of the elephant,--pettitoes for Brobdignagian lovers to sup upon.

But we _almost_ as villanously disguise our poultry. The latter, if not _now_, used--according to Darwin--to be fed for the London market, by mixing gin, and even opium, with their food, and keeping them in the dark; but “they must be killed as soon as they are fattened, or they become weak and emaciated, like human drunkards.”

Game was almost as sacred to the Egyptian Priests, as eggs to the sacerdotal gentlemen of some of the modern tribes of Africa. Under the head of “game,” we no longer admit the birds which, according to Belon, figured at the gastronomic tables of France in the sixteenth century. These were the crane, the crow, and the cormorant, the heron, the swan, the stork, and the bittern. The last-named bird was in high estimation, although the taste for it was confessedly an “acquired” one. The larger birds of prey were not then altogether despised by epicures, some of whom could sit down with an appetite to roast vulture, while they turned with loathing from the plump pheasant.

This eastern bird, however, has, with this exception, enjoyed a deserved reputation from the earliest ages. The Egyptian Kings kept large numbers of them to grace their aviaries and their triumphs. The Greeks reared them for the less sentimental gratification of the stomach; and a simple Athenian republican, when giving a banquet, prided himself on having on his board as many pheasants as there were guests invited.