The gills should also smell sweet, the fins be tight up, and the eyes not sunk. The reverse of any of these signs shows that it is stale. Thickness of flesh generally shows the good condition of fish.
Fish out of season, that is after spawning, are unwholesome; and for this reason the legislature has found it necessary to fix the periods at which the fishing of salmon and the dredging of oysters shall be lawful.
SECTION III.
Tea, Coffee, Chocolate, and Sugar.
TEA.
No article of consumption is more subject to adulteration than the pleasant one which forms the principal ingredient of the tea-table. It is not only adulterated by the Chinese vender, but it undergoes sophistication by the Chinese artist. By the former several vegetable productions, particularly a kind of moss, are mixed among genuine tea, and often sold by the antemundane subjects of “the Brother of the Sun and Moon, and The Light of Nations,” in its stead.
Among the manufacturers and venders of tea in our “fair isle”—“the land of the wise, the eloquent, the free,”—the dried leaves of the birch, ash, or elder tree, and particularly those of the privet or white thorn, and the black thorn or sloe, (both which last-mentioned specimens possess more of the qualities of the tea leaf than any other known vegetable,) are manufactured and fabricated to represent this delicious article of English female consumption: and the colouring, dyeing, and staining process is accomplished by the agency of terra japonica, logwood, verdigris, copperas, Prussian blue, carbonate of copper, Dutch pink, &c. by the English, and, it is said, even by the Chinese artist; which ingredients (namely, the five last-mentioned,) are among the most potent poisons. According to Mr. Accum’s testimony (Culinary Poisons, p. 220, note,) Mr. Twining, the eminent tea-dealer, asserts that “the leaves of spurious tea are boiled in coppers with copperas and sheep’s dung.” And it is a known fact that tea-leaves are purchased, from the London coffee houses and shops, by a regular set of men, who make their weekly rounds for the purpose, to be re-dried and coloured.
As it may be interesting to my readers to be informed of the progress of the “march of intellect” in the imitative process of preparing sham tea, and to have an opportunity of admiring the ingenuity of fraud and villany displayed in the fabrication, I shall endeavour to gratify their reasonable curiosity.
The white thorn and the sloe, or black thorn, as I have already said, are the principal leaves employed in the fabrication of the sham or imitative teas, on account of their possessing more of the qualities of the tea-leaf than any other known vegetable. From the white thorn is manufactured the green tea; and from the black thorn, or sloe, the black variety. These leaves are gathered and collected from the hedges around the metropolis, by a number of agents hired by the fabricators; and these sub-imps in the “black art” are rewarded for their honest labours with a remuneration of from one penny to twopence a pound. I have been told by one of those worthies that he is able to make between two and three pounds a week by his “vocation,” and has not “hard labour too;” for he likes, as he says, “to play oft at times a bit of the gentleman.” And, by a tea-leaf collector, I was once informed that his usual returns, or rather clear gains, were between six and seven pounds per week, and this “for only mornings’ work.” Of course, I suppose, like other large “capitalists” and “the moneyed interests,” he put on his silk stockings in the evenings, and exhibited his “sweet person” at “Almacks,” or some of the fashionable “Hells,” or “Evening,” or “Musical parties” at the “West End.” But, as to the indisputable reality of this “transmogrification,” your deponent knoweth not.
But to the subject in hand. The sloe, or black thorn, leaves are first boiled; then, when the water is squeezed from them in a press, they are baked on a flat iron plate; and, when dry, rubbed between the hands to produce the curl of the genuine tea. The colour is then produced by the application of Dutch pink, and a small quantity of logwood; when, “mirabile dictu!” “good, wholesome, nutritious black tea” is produced equal to, and probably surpassing the specimens of the monopolists of Leadenhall-street.