Culinary Chemistry / The Scientific Principles of Cookery, with Concise Instructions for Preparing Good and Wholesome Pickles, Vinegar, Conserves, Fruit Jellies, Marmalades, and Various Other Alimentary Substances Employed in Domestic Economy, with Observations on the Chemical Constitution and Nutritive Qualities of Different Kinds of Food.

by Friedrich Christian Accum

SINGULAR KIND OF ALIMENTS OF VARIOUS NATIONS.

Besides the before-mentioned diversities of national and individual taste for different kinds of substances, used as aliments, there are other kinds of food which we at least think more singular. Some of the tribes of Arabs, Moors, the Californians, and Ethiopians, eat tad-poles, locusts, and spiders.

In some places the flesh of serpents, that of the coluber natrix for example, is eaten; and the viper is made into broth. Several other reptiles are used as food by the European settlers in America, such as the rana bombina and rana taurina, two species of toads.

In the East, the lacerta scincus is considered a great luxury, and also an approdisiac. Even the rattle snake has been eaten, and the head boiled along with the rest of the body of the animal.

The horse, ass, and camel, are eaten in several regions of the earth, and the seal, walruss, and Arctic bear, have often yielded a supply to sailors.

On the singular taste of epicures it is not necessary to speak. Mæcenas, the prime minister of Augustus, and refined patron of Horace, had young asses served upon his table when he treated his friends; and, according to Pliny,[7] the Romans delighted in the flavour of young and well fattened puppies. This strange practice subsists still in China, and among the Esquimaux. Plump, and well roasted bats, laid upon a bed of olives, are eaten in the Levant as a dainty.

[7] 2 Book 29, c. 4.

The Roman luxury, garum, which bore so high a price, consisted of the putrid entrails of fishes, (first of the garum,) stewed in wine, and a similar dish is still considered as a great luxury, in some parts of the East. Some modern epicures delight in the trail of the woodcock, and even collect with care the contents of the intestines which distill from it in the process of roasting.

“The Irishman loves usquebah,
The Scot loves ale called blue cap,
The Welshman, he loves toasted cheese,
And makes his mouth like a mouse trap.”

Apicius,[8] among other whimsical personages of ancient Rome, presented to his guests ragouts, exclusively composed of tongues of peacocks and nightingales. This celebrated epicure, who instituted a gormandizing academy at Rome, having heard that shrimps and prawns of a superior flavour were to be met with on the coasts of Africa than on the Italian shore, freighted a ship, and sailed in search of these far famed marine insects. This person spent more than £.60,000 merely to vary the taste of culinary sauces.

[8] Three brothers of that name were celebrated at Rome, on account of their unparallelled love of good eating.

Vitellus was treated by his brother with a dinner, consisting of 2,000 dishes of fish, and 7,000 of poultry—surely this is not doing things by halves.

A Mr. Verditch de Bourbonne[9] is said to have bought 3,000 carps for the mere sake of their tongues, which were brought, well seasoned and learnedly dressed, to his table, in one dish.

[9] Cours Gastronomique.