Part 32

All the stories of Algiers read like tales of the Arabian Nights, and none is more poetic than the names and the story of these delicious wines.

The Greek wines are well spoken of in Europe: Santorin, and Zante, and St. Elié, and Corinth, and Mount Hymettus, Vino Santo, and Cyprus, while from Magyar vineyards come Visontaè, Badescony, Dioszeg, Bakator, Rust, Szamorodni, Oedenburger, Ofner, and Tokay.

The Hungarian wines are very heady. He must be a swashbuckler who drinks them. They are said to make the drinker grow fat. To this unhappy class Brillat Savarin gives the following precepts:--

"Drink every summer thirty bottles of seltzer water, a large tumbler the first thing in the morning, another before lunch, and the same at bedtime.

"Drink white wines, especially those which are light and acid, and avoid beer as you would the plague. Ask frequently for radishes, artichokes with hot sauce, asparagus, celery; choose veal and fowl rather than beef and mutton, and eat as little of the crumb of bread as possible.

"Avoid macaroni and pea soup, avoid farinaceous food under whatever form it assumes, and dispense with all sweets. At breakfast take brown bread, and chocolate rather than coffee."

Indeed Brillat Savarin seems to have inspired this later poet:--

"Talk of the nectar that flowed for celestials Richer in headaches it was than hilarity! Well for us animals, frequently bestials, Hebe destroyed the recipe as a charity! Once I could empty my glass with the best of 'em, Somehow my system has suffered a shock o' late; Now I shun spirits, wine, beer, and the rest of 'em, Fill me, then fill me, a bumper of chocolate.

"Once I drank logwood, and quassia and turpentine, Liqueurs with coxcubes, aloes, and gentian in, Sure, 't is no wonder my path became serpentine, Getting a state I should blush now to mention in. Farewell to Burgundy, farewell to Sillery, I have not tasted a drop e'en of Hock o' late, Long live the kettle, my dear old distillery, Fill me, oh fill me, a bumper of chocolate."

As we cannot all drink chocolate, I recommend the carefully prepared white wine, with quinine in it, which comes from Chateau Hydra in Algiers, or some of the Italian wines, Barolo for instance, or the excellent native wines which are produced in Savoy.

About Aix les Bains, where the cuisine is the best in Europe, many wines are manufactured which are honest wines with no headaches in them.

SOME ODDITIES IN THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.

"Comparisons are odorous."

I prithee let me bring thee where crabs grow; And I with my long nails will dig thee pig nuts; Show thee a jay's nest, and instruct thee how To snare the nimble marmozet; I'll bring thee To clustering filberds, and sometimes I'll get thee Young staniels from the rocks. Wilt thou go with me? THE TEMPEST.

In the lamb roasted whole we have one of the earliest dishes on record in the history of cookery. Stuffed with pistachio nuts, and served with pilaf, it illustrates the antiquity of the art, and at the same time gives an example of the food upon which millions of our fellow creatures are sustained.

At a dinner of the Acclimatization Society in London, all manner of strange and new dishes were offered, even the meat of the horse. A roast monkey filled with chestnuts was declared to be delicious; the fawn of fallow deer was described as good; buffalo meat was not so highly commended; a red-deer ham was considered very succulent; a sirloin of bear was "tough, glutinous, and had, besides, a dreadful, half-aromatic, half-putrescent flavour, as though it had been rubbed with assafoetida and then hung for a month in a musk shop."

We will not try bear unless we are put to it. However, at this same dinner--we read on--haunch of venison, saddle of mutton, roast beef of old England, which is really the roast beef which is of old Normandy now, all gave way to a Chinese lamb roasted whole, stuffed with pistachio nuts, and served with consousson, a preparation of wheat used among the Moors, Africans, and other natives of the north of Africa littoral, in place of rice. The Moorish young ladies are, it is said, fattened into beauty by an enforced meal of this strengthening compound. The consousson is made into balls and stuffed into the mouths of the marriageable young lady, until she grows as tired of balls as a young belle of three seasons.

In Spain, in those damp swamps near Valencia, where the poor are old before forty and die before forty-five, the best rice sells at eleven farthings, the poorest at eight farthings per pound. This, cooked with the ground dust of pimientos, or capsicums, is the foundation of every stew in the south of Spain. It is of a rich brick-dust hue, and is full of fire and flavour. Into this stew the cook puts the "reptiles of the sea" known as "spotted cats," "toads" and other oily fish, sold at two pence a pound, or the vogar, a silvery fish, or the gallina, a coarse fish, chick peas, garlic, pork, and sausages. If rich she will make an olla podrida with bacon, fresh meat, potatoes, cabbages, and she will pour off the soup, calling it caldo, then the lumps of meat and bacon, called cocida, will be served next. Then the cigarette is smoked. If you are a king she will add a quince and an apple to the stew.

Of puddings and pies they know nothing; but what fruit they have!--watermelons weighing fifteen pounds apiece; lemon pippins called perillons; crimson, yellow, and purple plums; purple and green figs; tomatoes by the million; carob beans, on which half the nation lives; small cucumbers and gourds; large black grapes, very sweet; white grapes and quinces; peaches in abundance; and all the chestnuts and filberts in the world. In the summer they eat goat's flesh; and on All Saints' Day they eat pork and chestnuts and sweet babatas of Malaga. In exile, in Mexico and Florida, the Spaniard eats alligator, which could scarcely be called a game bird; but the flesh of young alligators' tails is very fair, and tastes like chicken if the tail is cut off immediately after death, and stewed.

The frost fish of the Adirondacks is seldom tasted, except by those who have spent a winter in the North Woods. They are delicious when fried. There is a European fish as little known as this, the Marena, caught in Lake Moris in the province of Pomerania, also in one lake in southern Italy, which is very good.

There are two birds known in Prussia, the bustard, and the kammel, the former a species of small ostrich, once considered very fine eating, the latter very tough, except under unusual conditions.

The Chinese enjoy themselves by night. All their feasts and festivals are kept then, generally by moonlight. When a Chinaman is poor he can live on a farthing's worth of rice a day; when he gets rich he becomes the most luxurious of sybarites, indulges freely in the most recherché delicacies of the table, and becomes, like any Roman voluptuary, corpulent and phlegmatic. A lady thus describes a Chinese dinner:--

"The hour was eleven A. M., the locale a boat. Having heard much of the obnoxious stuff I was to eat, I adopted the prescription of a friend. 'Eat very little of any dish, and be a long time about it.'

"We commenced with tea, and finished with soup. Some of the intermediate dishes were shark's-fin; birds' nests brought from Borneo, costing nearly a guinea a mouthful, fricassee of poodle, a little dog almost a pig; the fish of the conch-shell, a substance like wax or india rubber, which you might masticate but never mash; peacock's liver, very fine and recherché; putrid eggs, nevertheless very good; rice, of course, salted shrimps, baked almonds, cabbage in a variety of forms, green ginger, stewed fungi, fresh fish of a dozen kinds, onions ad libitum, salt duck cured like ham, and pig in every form, roast, boiled, and fried, Foo-Chow ham which seemed to me equal to Wiltshire. In fact, the Chinese excel in pork, though the English there never touch it, under the supposition that the pigs are fed on little babies.

"But this is a libel. Of course a pig would eat a baby, as it would a rattlesnake if it came across one; but the Chinese are very particular about their swine and keep them penned up, rivalling the Dutch in their scrubbing and washing. They grow whole fields of taro and herbs for their pigs. And I do not believe that one porker in a million ever tastes a baby."

This traveller's sympathies appear to be with the pig.

"About two o'clock we arose from the table, walked about, looked out of the window. Large brass bowls were brought with water and towels. Each one proceeded to perform ablutions, the Chinese washing their heads; after which refreshing operation we resumed our seats and re-commenced with another description of tea.

"Seven different sorts of Samchou we partook of, made from rice, from peas, from mangoes, cocoa-nut, all fermented liquors, and the mystery remained,--I was not inebriated. The Samchou was drunk warm in tiny cups, during the whole course of the dinner.