Fortunate are the people who possess a dish like kuscoussoo. Any comparison between them and the bread-eating nations is very difficult, for they have economy and comforts which are too subtle for calculation. The Indian has his rice and curry.[260] The inhabitants of the Eastern and Southern portions of Europe have their dishes (not bread) of Indian corn. The Turks, the Persians, the Tartars, the Arabs, have their pilaf, which spreads from the Adriatic to the Yellow Sea—from the Yrtish to the Indian Ocean. The domain of kuscoussoo extends from the Red Sea to the Atlantic. It does not appear to have been original amongst the Arabs, as indeed no farinaceous food could be; yet it has the unmistakable impress of antiquity. Wheat is one of those inventions or introductions which in Greece, in Egypt, in Etruria, has a date. We know of it nowhere as original. Its modern use is imagined to be restricted to the Northern and Western portions of Europe. It is, however, universal in Northern Africa, and would appear to have been original among its inhabitants; and I infer that we are indebted for it to the Holy Land. If we have borrowed from the Philistines the grain; we have neglected—just as with Indian corn and rice—to borrow the proper way of cooking it. In these other grains we cannot be brought to institute any comparison; but kuscoussoo is wheat.
Bread alone will not serve as a people’s diet, and is, moreover, expensive. We separate the parts of the flour which are adapted to one another—and so best fitted for food—and thus the coarse bread and the fine are equally deteriorated. By fermentation the nature of the grain is changed;[261] and by the baking, while in that state, considerable loss is incurred by the evaporation of alcohol, which our Excise laws now forbid us to collect. The difference in point of economy cannot be less than a quarter in favour of kuscoussoo; and taking it as furnishing forth the meal without the adjuncts which our labouring classes require, it will not be too much to say that, bushel for bushel, the grain is worth to them the double of what it is to us.[262]
A new discovery in baking has been made in New Holland, in consequence of the ignorance of common arts produced by the subdivision of labour. We do not know baking afloat; and in the first settlement of that colony, the women were from the cities, and did not know how to bake. The bakers appear to be a moral class, for the men were equally ignorant. The colony lived for years on biscuits, and even at the governor’s table the guests were in the habit of bringing their own biscuits. The convicts could not be so daintily treated: their weekly allowance of flour was served out to them, and they were allowed to do with it what they liked, when accident or genius led them to treat it in this manner. Each slaked his fourteen pounds with water, and having made it into dough, proceeded to heat and pummel it by the hour: this huge mass of dough was then tumbled into the fire, the ashes having been raked out to heap over it when laid in. The bread so made, is pronounced by those familiar with it, excellent: it is called “damper,” from damping the fire. It is not wet and sodden as might be supposed, the manipulation, as in the kuscoussoo, rendering it palatable, and being perhaps slightly raised by the expansion of the air driven in by the beating which it receives with the fist.
I cannot return from this dissertation without a word on the cooking of the two other grains from which national dishes are made—Indian corn and rice. The uncertainties attending the condition of our own island, increase the importance of the knowledge of the best methods of dressing the substances that might be substituted for potatoes; and in the art of cookery, England is behind every other people.[263]
Indian corn does not do when eaten cold. As bread, it is kneaded with water and fired upon the griddle, and then eaten hot: as polenta it is cooked like Scotch porridge, or eaten with milk, or it is turned out and left to cool, and then, when wanted, is sliced and cooked on the gridiron or fried. In these forms it is an agreeable and wholesome food.[264]
Pilaf is a dish, which, like kuscoussoo, has its secret. I never tasted it eatable when made by a Christian. It is rice and butter, and the art depends in the manner of introducing the butter. Boiled with the rice, or added in the dish, it would be no pilaf. It is only a person deserving the name of cook, who, after several failures, might succeed. Such a person will find all that is requisite in what follows:—
The salt must be put in the water; the pan must be thick; the quantity of water must be adapted to the rice, which varies, so that when the rice is cooked, the whole water be absorbed. It must never be touched or stirred while cooking. Butter is then put in a frying-pan; the proportions experience will teach. When it boils up, it is poured over the rice, which sputters and swells; then one turn with a spoon is given, and it is put on the fire for a moment, and must be served up hot in the pan. The Mussulmans with this, end their dinner, to show that they have not eaten to gratify appetite, but to supply want; and they have a saying, that every pilaf a man does not eat, will rise up against him at the day of judgment.
My attention was first turned to their diet by this people’s splendid teeth. Nothing can better exhibit the quality of the food they masticate. Amongst us clean teeth, except by being cleaned, is a thing unknown. Without dentifrices, and without brushes, their teeth are pure and clean—the sure sign that they are free from those acids, which in us produce the greater portion of our diseases; while by the continual strain upon the sources of vitality, they shorten life and diminish its contentment while it lasts.
The first of blessings to an individual is health; and the next, supposing it not the cause, sobriety. If these be of such value to the individuals, of what value must they not be to a nation? Yet these are points at which no constitution has ever aimed; they are beyond the reach of legislator, philosopher, or schoolmaster; they can come only from habit, and of this habit the cook is the original and source. It is not without cause that man has been defined a cooking animal. It is in the cooking of the race, that its sense is first tested, oftenest exercised, and longest enjoyed. Rigid Lacedæmon honoured cooks as she did victors at the Olympic games; and although no professional artist might breathe her air, still to unbought excellence in the culinary art she reared statues.[265]
How rational to distinguish nations, as formerly, by their food. In ancient times the listener was not sickened with hearing about Sclavonic or German or Anglo-Saxon “race;” neither was he distracted with “aristocratic,” “monarchical.” When they wanted to show what a man was, they said, “he is a fish-eater,” or a “lotus-eater.” So the oracular response to the Spartans, “Beware of them, they live on acorns.”