Part 2

A writer in _Household Words_ thus alludes to our national weakness.--‘Next to the Habeas Corpus and the Freedom of the Press, there are few things that the English people have a greater respect for and a livelier faith in than beef. They bear, year after year, with the same interminable, unvarying series of woodcuts of fat oxen in the columns of the illustrated newspapers; they are never tired of crowding to the Smithfield Club cattle-show; and I am inclined to think that it is their honest reverence for beef that has induced them to support so long the obstruction and endangerment of the thoroughfares of the metropolis by oxen driven to slaughter. Beef is a great connecting link and bond of better feeling between the great classes of the commonwealth. Do not Dukes hob and nob with top-booted farmers over the respective merits of short-horns and Alderneys? Does not the noble Marquis of Argentfork give an ox to be roasted whole on the village green when his son, the noble Viscount Silvercoral, comes of age? Beef makes boys into men. Beef nerves our navvies. The bowmen who won Cressy and Agincourt were beef-fed, and had there been more and better beef in the Crimea a year or two ago, our soldiers would have borne up better under the horrors of a Chersonesean winter. We feast on beef at the great Christian festival. A baron of beef at the same time is enthroned in St. George’s Hall, in Windsor’s ancient castle, and is borne in by lacqueys in scarlet and gold. Charles the Second knighted a loin of beef, and I have a shrewd suspicion that the famous Sir Bevis of Southampton was but an ardent admirer and doughty knight-errant in the cause of beef. And who does not know the tradition that even as the first words of the new-born Gargantua were ‘A boyre, à boyre,’ signifying that he desired a draught of Burgundy wine--so the first intelligible sounds that the infant Guy of Warwick ever spake were ‘Beef, beef!’ When the weary pilgrim reaches the beloved shores of England after a long absence, what first does he remark--after the incivility of the custom-house officers--but the great tankard of stout and the noble round of cold beef in the coffee-room of the hotel? He does not cry ‘Io Bacche! Evöe Bacche!’ because beef is not Bacchus. He does not fall down and kiss his native soil, because the hotel carpet is somewhat dusty, and the action would be, besides, egregious; but he looks at the beef, and his eyes filling with tears, a corresponding humidity takes place in his mouth; he kisses the beef; he is so fond of it that he could eat it all up; and he does ordinarily devour so much of it to his breakfast, that the thoughtful waiter gazes at him, and murmurs to his napkin, ‘This man is either a cannibal or a pilgrim grey who has not seen Albion for many years.’

It has been well observed, that there are few things in which the public have so great and general an interest, and concerning which they possess so little real knowledge, as of the provision trade and the wholesale traffic in animals live and dead, in their own and other countries. When, where, and how raised, and what processes meat passes through before it reaches their tables, are questions which, though highly important, are very seldom asked by the consumers--all that they usually trouble themselves with is, the current retail price, and the nature of the supply.

Few of us think as we sit down to our rump steak or pork chop, our sirloin or leg of mutton, of the awful havoc of quadrupeds necessary to furnish the daily meals of the millions. I will not weary the reader with statistics, although I have a long array of figures before me, bearing upon the slaughter of animals for food in different countries. It will be sufficient to generalize.

If the hecatomb of animals we have each consumed in the years we have lived, were marshalled in array before us, we should stand aghast at the possibility of our ever having devoured the quantity of animal food, and sacrificed for our daily meals the goodly number of well-fed quadrupeds of the ovine, bovine, and porcine races, or the fish, fowl, reptiles, and insects, which would be thus re-embodied.

The average quantity of animal food of all kinds consumed in France is stated on good authority--that of M. Payen--to be as low as one-sixth of a pound per diem to each person. Even in the cities and large towns, especially Paris, the amount of food upon which a Frenchman lives is astonishingly small. An Englishman or an American would starve upon such fare.

In proportion to its population, New York consumes as nearly as possible the same quantity of meat as London, about half-a-pound a day to each person; more beef, however, is consumed there and less mutton, and the latter fact may be accounted for by the comparative inferiority of quality.

It is curious to notice the various parts of animals that are eaten, or selected as choice morsels by different persons or classes. Sheep’s head, pig’s head, calf’s head and brains, ox head, the heads of ducks and geese, ox tongue, reindeer tongue, walrus tongue, crane’s tongue, &c. Fowls and ducks’ tongues are esteemed an exquisite Chinese dainty. The pettitoes of the sucking pig, or the mature feet and hocks of the elder hog, sheep’s trotters, calf’s feet, cow heel, bear’s paws, elephant’s feet, the feet of ducks and geese, and their giblets; ox tail, pig’s tail, sheep’s tail, kangaroo tail, beaver’s tail. And the entrails again are not despised, whether it be bullock’s heart or sheep’s heart, liver and lights, lamb’s fry or pig’s fry, tripe and chitterlings, goose liver and gizzard, the cleaned gut for our sausages, the fish maws, cod liver, and so on. The moufle, or loose covering of the nose, of the great moose deer or elk is considered by New Brunswick epicures a great dainty. The hump of the buffalo, the trunk of the elephant, are other delicacies. Deer’s sinews, and the muscle of the ox, the buffalo, and the wild hog, jerked or dried in the sun, and then termed, ‘dendeng,’ is a delicacy of the Chinese, imported at a high price from Siam and the eastern islands.

The eggs of different animals, again, form choice articles of food, whether they be those of the ordinary domestic poultry, the eggs of sea fowl, of the plover, and of game birds, of the ostrich and emu, of the tortoises and other reptilia, as alligator’s eggs, snake’s eggs, and those of the iguana, or the eggs of insects, and of fishes.

Amid all the multiplicity of special dainties, appreciated by different peoples, the prejudices of the stomach are, perhaps, more unconquerable than any other that tyrannize over the human mind. It is almost impossible to get people to adventure, or experimentalize upon a _new_ kind of food. There is a great want of courage and enterprise on this head among Englishmen. John Bull is resolved to eat, drink, and do only what he has been accustomed to. He wants none of your foreign kickshaws, frogs, and snails in fricassées, or sea slug, or bird’s nest soup, or horse flesh steak. It is true he has gradually adventured upon, and now appreciates, a few select foreign delicacies. Real lively turtle and caviar, reindeer tongue, an imitation Indian curry, and such like, have become luxuries; and, probably, under the mysterious manipulations of Gunter, Soyer, and other distinguished _chefs de cuisine_, some other foreign delicacies have found, or may yet find, their way upon English tables.

They will probably displace ere long the four standard Scotch dishes, a haggis, a sheep’s head, tripe, and black puddings, or the common dishes of the Devonshire peasant and Cornish fisherman, parsley and squab pies, in which fish, apples, onions, and pork are incongruously blended.

Queen Elizabeth and her ladies breakfasted on meat, bread, and strong ale. Our modern ladies take tea or coffee, and thin slices of toast or bread. The Esquimaux drink train oil, and the Cossacks koumis, an ardent spirit made from mares’ milk. The inhabitants of France and Germany eat much more largely than we do of vegetable diet; and drink, at all times of the day, their acid wines. In Devonshire and Herefordshire, cyder is the common beverage, and in the Highlands of Scotland, oatmeal porridge is, in a great measure, the food, and whiskey the drink of the inhabitants. The Irish peasant lives, or used to do, chiefly on potatoes, and most of the Hindoos of the maritime provinces on rice.

Yet all this variety, and much more, is digested, yields nutriment, and promotes growth; affording undeniable evidence that man is really omnivorous, that he can be supported by great varieties of food.

A recent writer speaking of human diet says, ‘it is a remarkable circumstance, that man alone is provided with a case of instruments adapted to the mastication of all substances,--teeth to cut, and pierce, and champ, and grind; a gastric solvent too, capable of contending with any thing and every thing, raw substances and cooked, ripe and rotten,--nothing comes amiss to him.’

If animals could speak, as Æsop and other fabulists make them seem to do, they would declare man to be the most voracious animal in existence. There is scarcely any living thing that flies in the air, swims in the sea, or moves on the land, that is not made to minister to his appetite in some region or other.

Other creatures are, generally, restricted to one sort of provender at most. They are carnivorous or graminivorous, piscivorous, or something ivorous; but man is the universal eater. He pounces with the tiger upon the kid, with the hawk upon the dove, with the cormorant upon the herring, and with the small bird upon the insect and grub. He goes halves with the bee in the honey cell, but turns upon his partner and cheats him out of his share of the produce. He grubs up the root with the sow, devours the fruit with the earwig, and demolishes the leaves with the caterpillar; for all these several parts of different vegetables furnish him with food.

Life itself will not hinder his appetite, nor decay nauseate his palate; for he will as soon devour a lively young oyster as demolish the fungous produce of a humid field. This propensity is, indeed, easily abused. Viands of such incongruous nature and heterogeneous substance, are sometimes collected, as to make an outrageous amalgamation, so that an alderman at a city feast might make one shudder; but this is too curious an investigation, it is the abuse of abundance too, and we know that abuse is the origin of all evil. The fact should lead us to another point of appreciation of goodness and beneficence. The adaptation of external nature to man has often been insisted on; the adaptation of man to all circumstances, states, and conditions, is carrying out the idea. The inferior animals are tied down, even by the narrowness of their animal necessities, to a small range of existence; but man can seldom be placed in any circumstance in which his universal appetite cannot be appeased. From the naked savage snatching a berry from the thorn, to the well-clad, highly civilized denizen of the court, surrounded by every comfort, every luxury; from the tired traveller, who opens his wallet and produces his oaten cake beside the welling lymph which is to slake his thirst, to the pursy justice, ‘in fair round belly with capon lined,’ who spreads the damask napkin on his knees, tucks his toes under the table, and revels in calapash and calapee,--what an infinite diversity of circumstances!

Man, with all his natural and artificial necessities, all his social and domestic dependencies,--more dependent, indeed, upon his fellows than the fowls of the air, from the grand exuberance of nature, and his remarkable adaptation to it in the point alluded to, finds subsistence under circumstances in which other animals might starve.

Perhaps we might properly urge the advice of a recent writer.--‘Make use of every material possible for food, remembering that there are chemical affinities and properties by which nutriment may be extracted from almost every organic substance, the greatest art being in proper cooking. Make soup of every kind of flesh, fish, and leguminosæ.--Every thing adds to its strength and flavour.’

Man eats to satisfy his hunger, and to supply warmth to the body; but the lover of good things, who finds a pleasure in eating, may also be told that there is a beautiful structure of nerve work spread out on the tongue, which carries upwards to the brain messages from the nice things in the mouth.

Moderation in food is, however, one of the great essentials to health. Sydney Smith, in a letter to Lord Murray, tells him that, having ascertained the weight of food that he could live upon, so as to preserve health and strength, and what he had lived upon, he found that between ten and seventy years of age, he had eaten and drunk forty-four one-horse wagon loads of meat and drink more than would have preserved him in life and health, and that the value of this mass of nourishment was about £7,000.

Sir John Ross tells us that an Esquimaux will eat twenty pounds of flesh and oil daily. But the most marvellous account of gormandizing powers is that published by Captain Cochrane, who in his _Narrative of a Pedestrian Journey through Russia and Siberian Tartary_, says, that the Russian Admiral, Saritcheff, was told that one of the Yakuti consumed in twenty-four hours, ‘the hind quarter of a large ox, twenty pounds of fat, and a proportionate quantity of melted butter for his drink.’ The Admiral, to test the truth of the statement, gave him ‘a thick porridge of rice, boiled down with three pounds of butter, weighing together twenty-eight pounds; and although the glutton had already breakfasted, yet did he sit down to it with great eagerness, and consumed the whole without stirring from the spot; and, except that his stomach betrayed more than ordinary fulness, he showed no sign of inconvenience or injury!’ The traveller I have just quoted also states, that he has repeatedly seen a Yakut, or Tongouse, devour forty pounds of meat a day; and he adds, ‘I have seen three of these gluttons consume a reindeer at one meal.’

It has been well remarked by Dr. Dieffenbach, in the _Transactions of the Ethnological Society_, that the labours of modern chemistry have thrown a new and most interesting light on the food of the various races of men, or inhabitants of parts of the globe which are widely different from each other in their geographical and climatological relations. The substances which serve as food, or the quantity which is taken, appear to the superficial observer often of a most extraordinary nature, because they are apparently so heterogeneous from what we are accustomed to; so that travellers relating such facts, do not withhold their astonishment or reprobation.

But it has been demonstrated, that the general use of certain articles, for instance, tea and coffee, betel-nut, tobacco, and wine, depends upon the presence in those substances of elements which are often identical, and which are necessary to the maintenance of the animal economy, more or less, according to the presence or absence of other elements in the food, the different occupation, mode of living, and so on. These points have been well illustrated and explained in the _Chemistry of Common Life_, of the late Professor Johnston. The fact of the Esquimaux consuming large quantities of train oil and blubber ceases to be astonishing, when we reflect that these highly carbonized substances serve to furnish fuel for his increased respiration.

In one word, it is necessary in the present state of chemical and physiological science, to collect analyses of all the substances which are consumed by a particular race, either as food or drink, or by an habitual custom, as so called matters of luxury, or as medicine. The ethnologist has the great merit of working here hand in hand with chemists and physiologists, and fills up in this manner a most important chapter in the natural history of man; as it shows how instinct and necessity have led him to adopt different customs, and to make use of different articles of consumption in different climates.

Among the ordinary domestic animals, there is little of novelty in the food they supply to man. But I may notice in passing, before proceeding to an investigation of unusual or extraordinary articles of consumption, a few things that may not be generally known.

Jerked beef, or _tasajo_, as it is termed in Cuba, is imported to the extent of 200 to 350 thousand quintals a year into that island, for feeding the slaves on the plantations.

That imported from Buenos Ayres and Monte Video is preferred for consumption on the sugar estates, to that which is received from Rio Grande, Venezuela, Campeachy, and the United States, it being more substantial, coming in larger and thicker pieces, better cured and salted, and also of handsomer appearance. The class imported from Venezuela and Campeachy, comes in thin pieces called _rebenque_, which is not generally liked, and only bought in small parcels, for consumption in the city of Havana. The beef which is cured in the River Plate, from December to May, or in summer, is preferred in Cuba, by reason of its being more nutritive than that which is cured in the other or winter months; the colour is yellowish, and it keeps a longer time.

In South America, the jerked beef is called _charqui_, and when salted, and smoked or dried in the sun, _sesina_. The commerce is very large in this species of provision.

The mode of preparing it in Chili is as follows:--When the horned cattle are sufficiently fat, or rather at the killing season, which is about the months of February and March, from 500 to 1000, according to the size of the farm, are slaughtered. The whole of the fat is separated from the meat and melted, forming a kind of lard, called _grasa_, which is employed for domestic purposes. The tallow is also kept separate, and the meat is jerked. This process is performed by cutting the fleshy substance into slices of about a quarter-of-an-inch thick, leaving out all the bones. The natives are so dexterous at this work that they will cut the whole of a leg, or any other large part of a bullock, into one uniformly thin piece.

The meat thus cut is either dipped into a very strong solution of salt and water, or rubbed over with a small quantity of fine salt. Whichever mode is adopted, the whole of the jerked meat is put on the hide, and rolled up for ten or twelve hours, or until the following morning. It is then hung on lines or poles to dry in the sun, which being accomplished, it is made into bundles, lashed with thongs of fresh hide, forming a kind of network, and is ready for market. In this operation it loses about one-third of its original weight. The dried meat, or _charqui_, finds immediate sale at Lima, Arica, Guayaquil, Panama, and other places. About 6000 quintals of _charqui_, with a proportionate quantity of tallow and fat (_grasa_) are shipped from Talcahuana to Lima alone. Besides the large quantity consumed in Chili, it furnishes a great part of the food of the slaves in Brazil, the negroes in some of the West India Islands, and seamen, being the general substitute for salt beef and pork. The _grasa_ and tallow are also readily sold throughout South America, and are of more value than the meat.

The slaughtering season is as much a time of diversion for the inhabitants of that country as a sheep shearing is in England. The females too are all busied cutting up the fat, frying it for _grasa_, and selecting some of the finer meat for presents and home consumption. The tongue is the only part of the head that is eaten, the remainder being left to rot.[1] Dried meat enters largely into consumption in several other countries.

In the Cape Colony dried meat is called _biltonge_. In the East, especially in Siam, the dried sinews of animals are considered a great delicacy; and dried elephant’s flesh we shall find is stored up for food, under the name of _pastoormah_. Beef is preserved in Asia Minor with garlic and pepper, and dried in the sun for winter food. It is prepared in Wallachia and Moldavia, and largely shipped from Varna in the Black Sea. Besides providing all Anatolia, Aleppo, and Damascus, 6000 cwt. or more is yearly sent from Kaissariah to Constantinople. Hung beef from Germany is well known at our tables.

Portable and concentrated animal food is of great consequence to explorers and travellers, and therefore it may be well to allude here to the article _pemmican_, which is so much used by arctic travellers and the Hudson’s Bay Company’s traders. This is meat of any kind dried and pounded, and saturated with fat. There is as much nourishment in one pound of pemmican as in four pounds of ordinary meat. It may be eaten as it is, or partially cooked, and has a pleasant taste. Sometimes it is mixed with a sufficient quantity of Indian meal and water to cause it to adhere, and then fried or stewed.

The North American Indians dry their venison by exposing thin slices to the heat of the sun, on a stage, under which a small fire is kept, more for the purpose of driving away the flies than for promoting exsiccation; and then they pound it between two stones on a bison hide. In this process the pounded meat is contaminated by a greater or smaller admixture of hair and other impurities.

The fat, which is generally the suet of the bison, is added by the traders, who purchase it separately from the natives, and they complete the process by sewing up the pemmican in a bag of undressed hide, with the hairy side outwards. Each of these bags weighs 90 lbs., and obtains from the Canadian voyageurs the designation of ‘un taureau.’ A superior pemmican is produced by mixing finely powdered meat, sifted from impurities, with marrow fat, and the dried fruit of the Amilanchier.

Sir John Richardson having been employed by government to prepare pemmican on a large scale, at the Victualling Yard, Gosport, for the use of the different arctic expeditions, it will be interesting to describe the process he adopted, as given in his _Arctic Searching Expedition, or a Journal of a Boat Voyage, &c._--

‘The round or buttock of beef of the best quality having been cut into thin steaks, from which the fat and membraneous parts were pared away, was dried in a malt kiln, over an oak fire, until its moisture was entirely dissipated, and the fibre of the meat became friable. It was then ground in a malt mill, when it resembled finely grated meat. Being next mixed with nearly an equal weight of melted beef suet or lard, the preparation of plain pemmican was complete; but to render it more agreeable to the unaccustomed palate, a proportion of the best Zante currants was added to part of it, and part of it was sweetened with sugar. Both these kinds were much approved of in the sequel by the consumers, but more especially that to which the sugar had been added. After the ingredients were well incorporated by stirring, they were transferred to tin canisters, capable of containing 85 lbs. each; and having been firmly rammed down and allowed to contract further by cooling, the air was completely expelled and excluded by filling the canister to the brim with melted lard, through a small hole left in the end, which was then covered with a piece of tin and soldered up.

‘As the meat in drying loses more than three-fourths of its original weight, the quantity required was considerable, being 35,651 lbs. (reduced by drying to about 8000 lbs.); and the sudden abstraction of more than one thousand rounds of beef, from Leadenhall Market, occasioned speculation among the dealers, and a rise in the price of a penny per pound, with an equally sudden fall when the extra demand was found to be very temporary.’