Part 33

"The whole was cooked without salt and tasted very insipid to me. The bird's-nest seemed like glue or isinglass, but the coxcombs were palatable. The dog-meat was like some very delicate gizzards well-stewed, and of a short, close fibre. The dish which I most fancied turned out to be rat. Upon taking a second help, after the first taste I got the head, which made me rather sick; but I consoled myself that when in California we ate ground squirrels which are first cousins to the flat-tailed rats; and travellers who would know the world must go in for manners and customs. We had tortoise and frogs,--a curry of the latter was superior to chicken; we had fowls' hearts, and the brains of some birds, snipe, I think. We had a chow-chow of mangoes, rambustan preserved, salted cucumber, sweet potatoes, yams, taro, all sorts of sweets made of rice sugar, and cocoa-nuts; and the soup which terminated the entertainment was certainly boiled tripe or some other internal arrangement; and I wished I had halted some little time before. The whole was eaten with chop-sticks or a spoon like a small spade or shovel. The sticks are made into a kind of fork, being held crosswise between the fingers. It is not the custom for the sexes to meet at meals; I dined with the ladies."

This dinner has one suggestion for our hostesses,--it was in a boat, on a river, by torchlight. We can, however, give a better one on a yacht at Newport, or at New London, or down on the Florida coast; but it would be a pretty fancy to give it on our river. It is curious to see what varieties there are in the art of entertaining; and it is useful to remember, when in Florida, "that alligators' tails are as good, when stewed, as chicken."

The eating of the past included, under the Romans, the ass, the dog, the snail, hedge-hogs, oysters, asparagus, venison, wild-boar, sea-nettles. In England, in 1272, the hostess offered strange dishes: mallards, herons, swans, crane, and peacock. The peacock was, of old, a right royal bird which figured splendidly at the banquets of the great, and this is how the mediæval cooks dished up the dainty:--

"Flay off the skin, with the feathers, tail, neck, and head thereon. Then take the skin and all the feathers and lay it on the table, strewing thereon ground cumin; then take the peacock and roast him, and baste him with raw yolks of eggs, and when he is roasted take him off and let him cool awhile. Then sew him in his skin, and gild his comb, and so send him forth for the last course."

Our Saxon ancestors were very fond, like the Spaniards, of putting everything into the same pot; and we read of stews that make the blood boil. Travellers tell us of dining with the Esquimaux, on a field of ice, when tallow candles were considered delicious, or they found their plates loaded with liver of the walrus. They vary their dinners by helping themselves to a lump of whale-meat, red and coarse and rancid, but very toothsome to an Esquimau, notwithstanding.

If they should sit down to a Greenlander's table they would find it groaning under a dish of half-putrid whale's tail, which has been lauded as a savoury matter, not unlike cream cheese; and the liver of a porpoise makes the mouth water. They may finish their repast with a slice of reindeer, or roasted rat, and drink to their host in a bumper of train oil.

In South America the tongue of a sea-lion is esteemed a great delicacy. Fashion in Siam prescribes a curry of ants' eggs as necessary to every well-ordered banquet. The eggs are not larger than grains of pepper, and to an unaccustomed palate have no particular flavour. Besides being curried, they are brought to table rolled in green leaves mingled with shreds or very fine slices of pork.

The Mexicans make a species of bread of the eggs of insects which frequent the fresh water of the lagoons. The natives cultivate in the lagoon of Chalco a sort of carex called tonte, on which the insects deposit their eggs very freely. This carex is made into bundles and is soon covered. The eggs are disengaged, beaten, dried, and pounded into flour.

Penguins' eggs, cormorants' eggs, gulls' eggs, the eggs of the albatross, turtles' eggs are all made subservient to the table. The mother turtle deposits her eggs, about a hundred at a time, in the dry sand, and leaves them to be hatched by the genial sun. The Indian tribes who live on the banks of the Orinoco procure from them a sweet and limpid oil which is their substitute for butter. Lizards' eggs are regarded as a bonne bouche in the South Sea Islands, and the eggs of the guana, a species of lizard, are much favoured by West Indians. Alligators' eggs are eaten in the Antilles and resemble hens' eggs in size and shape.

We have spoken of horse-flesh as introduced at the dinner of the Acclimatization Society, but it is hardly known that the Frenchmen have tried to make it as common as beef. Isidore St. Helain says of it, that it has long been regarded as of a sweetish, disagreeable taste, very tough, and not to be eaten without difficulty; but so many different facts are opposed to this prejudice that it is impossible not to perceive the slightness of the foundation. The free or wild horse is hunted as game in all parts of the world where it exists,--Asia, Africa, and America, and perhaps even now in Europe. The domestic horse is itself made use of for alimentary purposes in all those countries.

"Its flesh is relished by races the most diverse,--Negro, Mongol, Malay, American, Caucasian. It was much esteemed until the eighth century amongst the ancestors of some of the greatest nations of Western Europe, who had it in general use and gave it up with regret. Soldiers to whom it has been served out and people who have bought it in markets, have taken it for beef; and many people buy it daily in Paris for venison."

During the commune many people were glad enough to get horse-flesh for the roast.

Locusts are eaten by many tribes of North American Indians, and there is no reason why they should not be very good. The bushmen of Africa rejoice in roasting spiders; maggots tickle the palates of the Australian aborigines; and the Chinese feast on the chrysalis of a silk-worm.

If this is what they ate, what then did they drink? No thin potations, no half-filled cups for the early English. Wine-bibbers and beer-bibbers, three-bottle men they were down to one hundred years ago. Provocatives of drink were called "shoeing horses," "whetters," "drawers off and pullers on."

Massinger puts forth a curious test of these provocatives:--

"I asked Such an unexpected dainty bit for breakfast As never yet I cooked; 'tis red botargo, Fried frogs, potatoes marroned, cavear, Carps' tongues, the pith of an English chine of beef, Now one Italian delicate wild mushroom, And yet a drawer on too; and if you show not An appetite, and a strong one, I'll not say To eat it, but devour it, without grace too, For it will not stay a preface. I am shamed, And all my past provocatives will be jeered at."

Ben Jonson affords us many a glimpse of the drinking habits of all classes in his day.

After the Restoration, England seems to have abandoned herself to one great saturnalia, and men drank deeply, from the king down. The novels of Fielding and Smollett are full of the wildest debauchery and drunken extravagance. Statesmen drank deep at their councils, ladies drank in their boudoirs, the criminal on his way to Tyburn stopped to drink a parting glass. Hogarth in his wonderful pictures has held the mirror up to society to show how general was the shame, how terrible the curse.

In Germany the Baierisch bier, drunk out of biergläschen ornamented as they are with engraved wreaths, "Zum Andenken," "Aus Freundschaft," and other little bits of national harmless sentiment, has come down from the remotest antiquity, and has never failed to provoke quiet and decorous, if sleepy hilarity.

We are afraid that the "Dew of Ben Nevis" is not so peaceful, nor the juice of the juniper, nor New England rum, nor the aquadiente of the Mexican, nor the vodka of the Russian. All these have the most terrible wild madness in them. To the honour of civilization, it is no longer the fashion to drink to excess. The vice of drunkenness rarely meets the eye of a refined woman; and let us hope that less and less may it be the bane of society, the disgrace of the art of entertaining.

THE SERVANT QUESTION.

Verily I swear, 't is better to be lowly born, And range with humble livers in content, Than to be perked up in a glistering grief And wear a golden sorrow. HENRY VIII.

It is impossible to do much with the art of entertaining without servants, and where shall we get them? In a country village, not two hundred miles from New York, I have seen well-to-do citizens going to a little restaurant in the main street for their dinners during an entire summer, because they could not get women to stay in their houses as servants. They are willing to pay high wages, they are generous livers, but such a thing as domestic service is out of the question. If any lady comes from the city bringing two or three maids, they are of far more interest in the village than their mistress, and are besieged, waited upon, intrigued with, to leave their place, to come and serve the village lady.

What is the reason? The American farmer's daughter will not go out to service, will not be called a servant, will not work in another person's house as she will in her own. The Irish maid prefers the town, and dislikes the country, where there is no Catholic church. Such a story repeated all over the land is the story of American service.

We have, however, every day, ships arriving in New York harbour which pour out on our shores the poor of all nations. The men seem to take readily enough to any sort of work. Italians shovel snow and work on railroads, but their wives and daughters make poor domestic servants.

The best that we can get are the Irish who have been long in the country. Then come the Germans, who now outnumber the Irish. French, Swedes, Danes, Norwegians, all come in shoals.

Of all these the French are by far the best. Of course, as cooks they are unrivalled; as butler, waiter, footman, a well-trained French serving-man is the very best. He is neat, economical, and respectful. He knows his value and he is very expensive. But if you can afford him, take him and keep him.

French maids are admirable as seamstresses, and in all the best and highest walks of domestic service, but they are difficult as to the other servants. They make trouble about their food; they do not tell the truth, as a rule.