The famous Carême did with the soups he discovered, what the most famous navigators have done with the new territories on which they were the first to land; namely, give them the names of the most illustrious contemporaries then existing. Royalty was honoured in the “Potage Condé;” music in that of “Boieldieu;” and the medical faculty, which Carême generally despised, in the “Soupes à la Broussais, Roques, and Segalas;” poetry was illustrated in the “Lamartine;” history in the “Dumesnil;” and philosophy in the “Potage Buffon.” The last name he thus bestowed, was to his last culinary inspiration just before death, when he conferred on a vegetable soup the name of “Victor Hugo.” It was after reading the “Messéniennes,” that he created the “Matelotte à la Delavigne;” and he paid the doctor who had cured him of an indigestion, by inventing the dish of fish which he called “Perche à la Gaubert.” And with this record we will put the fish on our own table.
“It is only the Arabs of the desert that affect to despise fish.” This eastern proverb is tantamount to the more homely one of, “The grapes are sour;” for the Arabs only affect to despise that which they cannot readily obtain. The Jews were prohibited from eating fishes without scales or fins. The Egyptian Priests cared not for fish of any sort, but they generally allowed the people to eat with what appetite they chose, of what the priesthood declined to taste. It is said in the legend, that St. Kevin lived by the fish he caught in the Lake of Glendaloch; and that when the celebrated beauty tempted him, she did it by flattery and suggestion:—
“‘You’re a rare hand at fishing,’ says Kate,
‘It’s yourself, dear, that knows how to hook them;
But, when you have caught them, agrah!
Don’t you want a young woman to cook them?’”
Gatis, Queen of Spain, was something like Mr. Lover’s “Kate;” for, if her subjects caught fish well, she it was who first taught them how to cook what they caught, and how to enjoy what they cooked.
When philosophers were occupied with inquiries touching the soul of an oyster, fish was probably not a popular diet. It certainly was not so in Greece, until a comparatively late period. Then fish became fashionable: the legislature secured their freshness by decreeing that no seller should sit down until he had sold his entire stock; sages discussed their qualities, and tragic writers introduced heroes holding dialogues on the qualities of fish-sauce. There was a Greek society at that day “against cruelty to fish,” by devouring what also, allegedly, made the devourer ferocious and inhuman; but general society did not allow its appetite to be influenced thereby.
The Romans were enthusiastic for the mullet. It was for them the fish, par excellence. It was sometimes served up six pounds in weight, and such a fish was worth £60 sterling. It was cooked on the table, for the benefit and pleasure of the guests. In a glass vessel filled with brine made from water, the blood of the mackerel, and salt, the live mullet, stripped of its scales, was enclosed; and as its fine pink colour passed through its dying gradations, until paleness and death ensued, the convives looked on admiringly, and lauded the spectacle.
The turbot was next in estimation; but as, occasionally, offending slaves were flung into the turbot preserves for the fish to feed upon, some gastronomists have affected to be horror-stricken at the idea of eating a turbot à la Romaine; quite forgetting that so many of our sea-fish, in their own domain, feed largely on the human bodies which accident, or what men call by that name, casts into the deep. Our own early ancestors in Britain were said to have entirely abstained from fish. In later days, however, here as in France, the finny tribes were protected by royal decrees; and certain fish were named—the sturgeon was one—as to be caught for the royal table alone. In the same days porpoises and seals were devoured by the commonalty, and the latter knew not the art of the cooks of Louis XIV., who could so dress fish as to give it the taste of any flesh they pleased to fix on as an object of imitation. By this means, the King in Lent, while he obeyed the church, enjoyed the gratification of feeling as though he were cheating Heaven,—and with impunity, too!