Table traits, with something on them

by Dr. Doran

“As soon as we had taken our seats, the chief (Wanotau) passed his pipe round; and while we were engaged in smoking, two of the Indians arose, and uncovered the large kettles which were standing over the fire. They emptied their contents into a dozen of wooden dishes which were placed all round the lodge. These consisted of buffalo meat boiled with tepsin; also the same vegetable boiled without the meat, in buffalo grease; and, finally, the much-esteemed dog-meat—all which were dressed without salt. In compliance with the established usage of travellers to taste of everything, we all partook of the latter, with a mixed feeling of curiosity and reluctance. Could we have divested ourselves entirely of the prejudices of education, we should, doubtless, unhesitatingly have acknowledged this to be one of the best dishes that we had ever tasted. It was remarkably fat,—was sweet and palatable. It had none of that dry, stringy character which we had expected to find in it; and it was entirely destitute of the strong taste which we had apprehended it must possess. It was not an unusual appetite, or the want of meat to compare with it, which led us to form this favourable opinion of the dog; for we had on our dish the best meat which our prairies afford. But so strongly rooted are the prejudices of education, that though we all unaffectedly admitted the excellence of this food, yet few of us could be induced to eat much of it. We were warned by our trading friends, that the bones of this animal are treated with great respect by the doctors. We therefore took great care to replace them in the dishes; and we are informed that after such a feast is concluded, the bones are carefully collected, the flesh scraped off them, and that after being washed, they are burned on the ground; partly, as it is said, to testify to the dog-species that in feasting on one of their number, no disrespect was meant to the species itself; and partly also from a belief that the bones of the animal will arise and reproduce another. The meat of this animal, as we saw it, was thought to resemble that of the finest Welsh mutton, except that it was of a much darker colour. Having so far overcome our repugnance as to taste it, we no longer wonder that the dog should be considered a dainty dish by those in whom education has not created a prejudice against this flesh. In China it is said that fatted pups are frequently sold in the market-place; and it appears that an invitation to a feast of dog meat is the greatest distinction that can be offered to a stranger by any of the Indian nations east of the Rocky Mountains. That this is not the case among some of the nations on the east of those mountains, appears from the fact that Lewis and Clarke were called in derision by the Indians of Columbia, ‘dog-eaters.’”

It may be readily believed that the food above spoken of must be more acceptable to the human appetite than the snails which are fattened for the public markets in the meadows about Ulm. Two Edinburgh doctors did indeed pronounce the prejudice against snails to be absurd, and they showed the strength of their own convictions by sitting down to a charmingly prepared little dish. The courage of each failed him at the first taste, but neither liked to confess as much to the other. They went on playing with their repast, until one ventured to say in a remarkably faint voice, “Don’t you think, doctor, they are a leetle green?” “D—d green, Sir! d—d green!” was the hearty confirmatory rejoinder; “they are d—d green! take them away!”

But the Australians do not always exhibit this extreme nicety. If they cannot, or once could not, eat biscuits, they have no such delicate scruples about eating babies, even when those babies are their own. The cannibalism of the Australians appears to be not so obsolete as those who wish well to humanity would fain desire. This is settled by the testimony of Mr. Westgarth, a member of the local parliament, and the latest writer who has touched upon the subject. In his “Victoria, late Australia Felix,” he says:—“In their natural state, the aborigines stand out with a species of rude dignity. The precision and acuteness of their observant faculties are not to be surpassed; and they exhibit a surprising tact in their various modes of discovering and securing food. The narrow compass of their minds is concentrated in a few lines of vocation, in which, as in the exhibitions of a Blind Asylum, there are displayed an extraordinary accuracy and skill. But to these barbaric excellences, must be added the most degrading, superstitious, and revolting customs. Civilized nations are still unwilling to believe that infanticide and cannibalism are associated with the customs of any race of human beings, or voluntarily practised, except in those rare cases of necessity which have broken down the barriers of nature alike to the white and the black; but nothing is better affirmed than that cannibalism is a constant habit with this degraded race, who alternately revel in the kidney fat of their slain or captured enemies, and in the entire bodies of their own friends and relatives. Nor can the infant claim any security from the mother who bore it, against some ruthless law, or practice, or superstition, that on frequent occasions consigns the female proportion, and sometimes both sexes, to destruction. On authentic testimony, bodies have been greedily devoured even in a state of obvious and loathsome disease; and a mother has been observed deliberately destroying her youngest child, serving it up as food, and gathering around her the remainder of the family to enjoy the unnatural banquet.” It is certainly pleasant to turn from such a spectacle as this to contemplate the wives of the King of Delhi, who pass their time in spoiling, but not killing, their children, and whose chief amusement, after matters of dress, consists in sitting and cracking nutmegs in presence of the Great Mogul!

But there are worse things than these which necessity can render acceptable to the palate. In Australia especially does nature appear to indulge in strange freaks. Many of our salt-water fish there live in fresh-water rivers; and, indeed, more than one inland river is brackish if not salt. Yet of salt itself the natives had never tasted, until the arrival among them of Europeans; they do not take kindly to the condiment even to this day. They prefer their own unadorned cookery; and they would especially have admired the late Dr. Howard, who published quarterly his denunciations against the use of salt. In Australia, the pears are made of wood, and the stones of the cherries grow on the outside, and not within. The aborigines are satisfied with very unsavoury diet. They have one fashion, however, in common with the self-appointed leaders of civilization, the French; they eat frogs. In France it is the pastime of the bourgeois, on a summer evening, to resort to some pool with a rod and line, and a piece of red rag or bit of soap for bait, and there catch the little people who could not agree about their king by the dozen. In Australia the native ladies, in their usual scantiness of costume, proceed to the swamps; and there, plunging their long arms up to the shoulders into the mud, they draw up the astonished frogs by handfuls. When caught they are cooked over a slow fire of wood-ashes; the hinder parts only are eaten, as in France; and there are worse dishes than the fricasée of the edible frog. Indeed, if the Australians devoured nothing more objectionable, their system of diet would almost defy reproof. But, alas! I find upon their bills of fare—grubs, raw and roasted, snakes, lizards, rats, mice, and weazels. The mussel is deeply declined by some of the tribes, in consequence of an opinion prevailing that the fish in question is the especial property of sorcerers, whose amiable propensity it is to destroy mankind by means of mussels. If all the world held the same opinion, I have no doubt of great profit therefrom resulting.

One of our earlier captains who visited Australia observing a native devouring some indescribable sort of food, offered him, in exchange for a portion of it, a sound sea-biscuit. The exchange was effected, and then it became a point of courtesy and honour that each should eat what he had acquired by the barter. The trial was a severe one for both parties. The Englishman swallowed slowly, and with a sickening sense of disgust that cannot be told, the odious food of the aboriginal; while the native, nibbling at the biscuit, appeared to grow more horror-stricken at each bit which he tried to swallow. The tears came into his eyes, he grew sick, faint, enraged; and at length, dashing the biscuit on the ground, he as violently seated himself upon it with a bounce that ought to have driven it to the very centre of the earth. The Englishman, in the meantime, had flung away the remnant of his “pièce de résistance,” and they remained gazing at each other, with the inward conviction that, as regarded food, each had tasted that day that which deserved to be designated as surprisingly beastly.

Keating’s Indians are not the only men of North America who have a delicate fancy for the dog: the Dacotas are also that way given. Their celebrated “dog-dance” is indeed a festival but of rare occurrence, but it is held to show that that highly respectable people would eat the hearts of their enemies with as little reluctance as the heart of a dog. And this is the manner of the feast of “braves;” they cook the heart and liver of a dog, cool them in water, and then hang the dainties on a high pole, around which they assemble as grave and silent as quakers. The spirit is literally supposed to move them, and when one is thus influenced, he begins to bark, and jumps towards the pole. Another follows his example. The jumping backwards and forwards, and the chorus of barking become gradually universal, and the solemn concert is then at its height. Every one does his best, according as nature has gifted him. The children snap like French poodles; the girls yelp like pugs; some snarl, others growl; the women “give tongue” as musically as the Bramham Park hounds; and the fathers of the tribe run through a scale of sounds that would highly astonish Lablache.

And thus, in the midst of it all, one becomes bolder than the rest, looks about him grinningly defiant, and making a run and a leap at the canine dainties suspended from the pole, he generally touches ground again with a piece thereof in his teeth! This good example is also followed universally, until the tempting prize is all consumed, and then there is “a general dance of characters,” and the drama is done. The Dacotas have an esteem for diminutive dogs; and, lest my readers should deem the tribe to be wholly unacquainted with civilization and its secrets, I will just mention that these Indians not only drink whisky with as much profusion as it is drunken in godly Glasgow, but they occasionally administer a little of it to their dogs, in order to stunt their growth. Such prayers too as they have, are also marked by a modern and civilized character; for example, they say, “Great Spirit! Father! help us to kill our enemies, and give us plenty of corn!” This is the very spirit of much of the prayer put up by the dwellers in the regions of enlightenment. And the spirit, with its proper motives, is not one to be blamed. These barbarous Indians do not, at all events, insult their Great Spirit, by asking him to give peace in their time, because none other fighteth for them but him. This would sound to their ear as though they needed peace, for the reason that their defence in war was not to be relied upon; and, if it had slipped into their formulary, they would at least amend it without delay.

But this is getting critical, and so to become reminds us of authors. Now to treat of them, in reference to the table, is generally speaking to fall upon the discussion of their “calamities,” and the Encyclopædia of famished writers would be a very heavy work indeed. We have yet time, however, before the chapter of “Supper” opens, to take a cursory glance at a few of the brotherhood of the brain and quill. It can be but of a few, and of that few but briefly. “Tanto meglio!” says the reader, and I will not dispute the propriety of the exclamation.

AUTHORS AND THEIR DIETETICS.

It is all very well for Mr. Leigh Hunt to write a poem on the “Feast of the Poets,” and to show us how Apollo stood “pitching his darts,” by way of invitation to the ethereal banquet. This is all very well in graceful poetry, but the account is no more to be received, than the new gospel according to ditto is likely to be by the Lord Primate and orthodox Christians. It is far more difficult to tell the matter in plain prose; for, where there are few dinners, many authors cannot well dine. It is easier to tell how they fasted than how they fed; how they died, choked at last by the newly-baked roll that came too late to be swallowed, than how they lived daily,—for the daily life of some would be as impossible of discovery, as the door of the “Cathedral of Immensities,” wherein Mr. Carlyle transacts worship. The soul of the poet, says an Eastern proverb, passes into the grasshopper, which sings till it dies of starvation. An apt illustration, but our English grasshoppers must not be used for the illustrative purpose, seeing that they are far too wise to do anything of the sort. A British grasshopper no more sings till he dies, than a British swan dies singing: these foolish habits are left to foreigners and poetry. Let us turn to the more reliable register of our ever-juvenile friend, Mr. Sylvanus Urban.