GROUSE AND GRILLED SOLE.
Wild boars no longer roam the forests of England. Sportsmen do their pig-sticking in the jungles of India. But venison in season is still in evidence, and the hare will never be extinct, though he now comes to London chiefly in shiploads from Australia.
The well-informed editor of the "Hors d'Œuvre" department of the "Pall Mall Gazette" gives an amusing glimpse of the situation as regards English and Scotch venison, which he considers a veritable delicacy, preferable to the highly-sauced venison of France and Germany:
"We ought really to eat more venison when in season, but if the ordinary housewife were asked to provide it quite in the ordinary way for an ordinary dinner at home, she would be entirely nonplussed. 'But the butcher does not keep it.' 'Try the poulterer.' 'The poulterer says he can get it at a day's notice.' Why all this fuss? Venison is a national dish; it is not expensive; it is most nutritious and wholesome. Some one ought to 'buck up' the venison market."
Among British feathered animals the best is the grouse, "the only really native game bird of these islands." It comes to London by fast expresses from the North—recently also from Ireland, which would be a finer grouse country, were it not for poachers. For the first days of the season grouse bring easily a guinea a brace in London market, cheaper ones being cold-storage suspects. Later on—thanks to rational methods of game preservation—they pour in daily by the tens of thousands and come down to 8s. or less a brace. Though never as cheap in the restaurants as partridge is in Germany, grouse is worth its price when cooked in the English way, which preserves all the woodland flavor of the bird.
English farmers have not waked up to the opportunities that lie in catering to the demand for fresh-killed poultry of all kinds. The best restaurants get their supplies usually from France. There is in the Kingdom not even one adult fowl per acre of cultivated land. Here are possibilities of tremendous improvements, for, as Professor Edward Brown of the Ontario Agricultural College has truly said: "Masses of people living under highly artificial conditions must have food high in nutritive elements, easily digested and palatable, in which respect eggs stand first among all natural products and poultry not far behind."
A well-known poulterer is cited as saying in regard to the London markets: "Fat goslings and ducks are in good demand, and the best prices are being given for them. One hundred and fifty years ago tens of thousands of geese and turkeys were reared in Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, and adjacent counties. The numbers now are, in comparison, insignificant. Nevertheless, the industry is one which might be made one of great importance and quite comfortable profits."
A very different situation confronts us when we look at the supply of seafood. Here the British Isles hold their own in competition with any country, and the methods adopted to ensure a daily supply of fresh fish cannot be too urgently commended to American fish dealers.
One of the most interesting sights in London is Billingsgate market. Fish have been sold here for several centuries, but under changing conditions. No longer will you find here the "fat, motherly flatcaps, with fish-baskets hanging over their heads instead of riding-hoods, with silver rings on their thumbs, and pipes charged with 'mundungus' in their mouths, sitting on inverted eel-baskets and strewing the flowers of their exuberant eloquence over dashing young town-rakes who had stumbled into Billingsgate to finish the night.... But the town-rakes kept comparatively civil tongues in their heads when they entered the precincts of the Darkhouse. An amazon of the market, otherwise known as a Billingsgate fish-fag, was more than a match for a Mohock," as George Augustus Sala remarked in his "Twice Round the Clock, or the Hours of the Day and Night in London."
Gone are these amazons who by their abusive speech gave a new word to the English language. Men now monopolize Billingsgate Market, and the joke of it is that these men, as we found them at six o'clock on a September morning, are the very pink of politeness, most courteously ready to answer your questions regarding different fishes, and cockles, and periwinkles, though they know you are not there to buy. Even the rough, hurrying fish-porters make way for you to pass, and the auctioneers stop to warn you against places where your clothes might get soiled by drippings.
Billingsgate is now entirely given over to the wholesale fish-trade. The smell of it, fish-like but not ancient—for it is a clean place—easily guides you to the spot from the nearest station of the subway's inner circle. The streets near it are wet with the drip of fish-filled boxes, and crowded with wagons that are being loaded with the town's provisions of sea food—strictly fresh every day.
Billingsgate Market being on the water's edge all the fish is unloaded direct from the fishing boats. Processions of porters come from the boats, each with a great box full of fish balanced on the top of his head, on a queerly-shaped, padded, waterproof hat made expressly for this work. The fish are kept cool with loose ice, but are not frozen. The Spanish mackerel with their dark markings and opaline sides offer the most beautiful sight of all, so freshly caught that their colors are as vivid as when they left the water.
Besides these are whitings, flounders, pale-brown sole, halibut, turbot, all shining from the sea, and among the shell-fish may be seen oysters, huge crabs, lobsters,—white flecked dark green ones—periwinkles, and cockles. The latter look somewhat like very small clams, and they are sold cooked, having been separated from their shells by large sieves.
In the best New York restaurants you are not sure of getting fresh fish when you order it. In the best London restaurants you are. Probably some of the fish we saw that morning at Billingsgate was served to us that evening for dinner. I mean sole, of course. We were to be in London only a week on this occasion, and when you are in London a week only it would be unutterably absurd not to eat grilled sole at least once a day, for you cannot get anything equal to it anywhere else in the wide, wide world.
There are some, I know, who place turbot above sole, and others even prefer plaice. Put no faith in such people; they could never be honestly elected to a place on the bench of the Gastronomic Supreme Court. Turbot is delicious, and so is plaice, and so are chinook salmon and our shad and whitefish. Each of these seems the best of all fishes while you are eating it; but sole actually is the best. How do I prove this? Like the musician who boasted he was the best horn player in the world, I do not prove it; I admit it.
Seriously speaking, there can be no doubt that if a vote were taken on this question among the epicures of Europe, sole would win by a large majority. In Germany the Seezunge, or "sea-tongue," is the choicest of marine delicacies, and in France the chef's chief glory is his sole and the special sauce he serves with it. But nowhere is the sole so juicy and flavorful as in England; nor is it disguised there with any sauce, being served usually right off the grill. Grilled Sole is one of England's great specialties.
Whitebait is another. It is not a distinct species but consists of the fry of herrings, smelts, sprats, sand-eels, weevers, etc. It is supposed to have been first served in 1780. To this day no tourist who likes good things to eat omits a trip to Greenwich to enjoy a dish of whitebait at headquarters in the ship tavern. When Thackeray was there he indulged in these reflections: "Ah, he must have had a fine mind who first invented brown bread and butter with whitebait! That man was a kind, modest, gentle benefactor to his kind. We don't recognize sufficiently the merits of those men who leave us such quiet benefactions. A statue ought to be put up to the philosopher who joined together this charming couple."
Yarmouth bloaters and other cured fish are British specialties relished the world over. But the best of them is Finnan haddock, so named after Findon, a fishing village near Aberdeen where haddock smoking with peat or oak dust has attained perfection. There are flavorless imitations, preserved with pyroligneous acid. The genuine are cured in smoke houses. The condimental value of smoke is illustrated by the fact that while fresh haddock is by no means rated among the finest fishes, finnan haddie is one of the very best of cured fishes.
The Whitstable oyster is still another marine specialty enjoyed, not only throughout the British Isles as one of the most precious "natives," but also on the Continent. Far away Austria imports only $10,000 worth of oysters a year from all sources, but from Berlin and other German cities come large orders for the best English bivalves. France also takes them, but not on a large scale, as her own oyster production is large.
The best Whitstable oysters—from the coasts of Kent and Essex—are known as royals and cost in restaurants three or four shillings a dozen, which is considerably more than the price charged in our own restaurants. Whether they are worth more is a much disputed point. Most Americans object to what they call the coppery taste in English and Northern European oysters. Paderewski agreed with those who pronounce the English oyster superior to the American. I suggested that he probably had had the "floated" American oysters only. Certainly I have never tasted oysters with a more delicious Flavor than genuine Blue Points, Cotuits and Lynnhavens. The English natives are small, juicy, and fragrant of the sea—great appetizers indeed.
Alas, in England also the sewage plague has cast its blight on the shellfish business. Two decades ago 160,000,000 oysters are said to have been landed annually. In 1911 the number fell forty or fifty millions short of that figure because of typhoid fever and other diseases traced to the eating of oysters from polluted beds. The importation of American oysters was only at the rate of 100 barrels a week in 1911, as against 2,000 barrels fifteen years earlier.
Of the other British shellfish the periwinkle is much appreciated by the epicurean French who, not satisfied with importing them from England in bulk have also brought them over to plant in their own beds. They are boiled a few minutes in salted water and served with butter as an entrée, usually at the second morning meal.