BEEF.
If I have a mission upon this earth, (apart from the patent and notable one of being a frightful example to the rising generation of blighted existence and misused energies)—that mission is, I believe, beef. I am a Cœlebs, not in search of a wife, as in Mrs. Hannah More’s white-neck-clothed novel, but in search of beef. I have travelled far and wide to find it—good, tender, nourishing, juicy, succulent; and when I die, I hope that it will be inscribed on my tombstone: “Here lies one who sought for beef. Tread lightly on his grave: quia multum amavit.”
Next to the Habeas Corpus and the Freedom of the Press, there are few things that the English people have a greater respect for and a livelier faith in than beef. They bear, year after year, with the same interminable unvarying series of woodcuts of fat oxen in the columns of the illustrated newspapers; they are never tired of crowding to the Smithfield Club cattle-show; and I am inclined to think that it is their honest reverence for beef that has induced them to support so long the obstruction and endangerment of the thoroughfares of the metropolis, by oxen driven to slaughter. Beef is a great connecting link and bond of better feeling between the great classes of the commonwealth. Do not dukes hob and nob with top-booted farmers over the respective merits of short-horns and Alderneys? Does not the noble Marquis of Argentfork give an ox to be roasted whole on the village green when his son, the noble Viscount Silvercorrel, comes of age? Beef makes boys. Beef nerves our navvies. The bowmen who won Cressy and Agincourt were beef-fed, and had there been more and better beef in the Crimea a year ago, our soldiers would have borne up better under the horrors of a Chersonesean winter. We feast on beef at the great Christian festival. A baron of beef at the same time is enthroned in St. George’s Hall, in Windsor’s ancient castle, and is borne in by lacqueys in scarlet and gold. Charles the Second knighted a loin of beef; and I have a shrewd suspicion that the famous Sir Bevis of Southampton was but an ardent admirer, and doughty knight-errant in the cause of beef. And who does not know the tradition that even as the first words of the new-born Gargantua were “A boyre, à boyre,” signifying that he desired a draught of Burgundy wine—so the first intelligible sounds that the infant Guy of Warwick ever spake were, “Beef, beef!”
When the weary pilgrim reaches the beloved shores of England after a long absence, what first does he remark—after the incivility of the custom-house officers—but the great tankard of stout and the noble round of cold beef in the coffee-room of the hotel? He does not cry “Io Bacche! Evöe Bacche!” because beef is not Bacchus. He does not fall down and kiss his native soil, because the hotel carpet is somewhat dusty, and the action would be, besides, egregious; but he looks at the beef, and his eyes filling with tears, a corresponding humidity takes place in his mouth; he kisses the beef; he is so fond of it that he could eat it all up; and he does ordinarily devour so much of it to his breakfast, that the thoughtful waiter gazes at him, and murmurs to his napkin, “This man is either a cannibal or a pilgrim grey who has not seen Albion for many years.”
By beef I mean, emphatically, the legitimate, unsophisticated article. Give me my beef, hot or cold, roast, boiled, or broiled; but away with your beef-kickshaws, your beef-stews, your beef-haricoes, your corned beef, your hung beef, and your spiced beef! I don’t think there is anything so contemptible, fraudulent, adulterine in the whole world (of cookery) as a beef sausage. I have heard that it is a favourite dish with pickpockets at their raffle-suppers. I believe it. There was a boy at school with me in the byegone—a day-boy—who used to bring a clammy brownish powder, in a sandwich-box, with him for lunch. He called it powdered beef; and he ate this mahogany, sawdust-looking mixture between slices of stale bread and butter. He was an ill-conditioned boy who had begun the world in the face-grinding sense much too early. He lent halfpence at usury, and dealt in sock (which was our slang for surreptitious sweet-stuff); and I remember with what savage pleasure I fell upon and beat him in the course of a commercial transaction involving a four-bladed penknife he had sold me, and which wouldn’t cut—no, not even slate-pencil. But the penknife was nothing more than a pretext: I beat him for his beef. He had the ring-worm, and it was bruited about afterwards that he was of Jewish parentage. I believe, when he began life, he turned out but badly.
I am reminded, however, that the subject of beef, as a British institution, has already been treated at some length in this journal.[A] I have merely ventured a few remarks on the bovine topic generally, to preface the experiences I have to record of some recent travels in search of beef I have made in the capital of France. One might employ oneself better, perhaps, than in transcribing the results of a week’s hankering after the flesh-pots of Egypt; and surely the journey in search of bread is long and wearisome enough that we might take beef as it comes, and thankfully. But, as I have said, beef is my mission. I am a collector of bovine experiences, as some men collect editions of Virgil, and some Raffaelle’s virgins, and some broadsides, and some butterflies. And I know that there are moralities to be found in beef as well as in the starry heavens and the vestiges of creation.