And, choked with vapours, feels his bottom glow!”
This is not a very elegant version of the original, it must be confessed, albeit the translation is Pope’s. It is, however, the only reference to boiling to be found in Homer, and here the fat of the sacrifice boiled down is that of a pig.
Κνίσσῃ κελδόμενος ἁπαλοτρεφέος σιάλοιο.
I do not know that I can take leave of mutton and the meats by doing them greater honour than by mentioning that Napoleon ate hastily of mutton before he entered on the contest at Leipsic, and he lost the triumph of the bloody day through a fit of indigestion.
Before the era of kitchen gardens, scurvy was one of the processes by which the English population was kept down. Cabbages were not known here until the period of Henry VIII.; and turnips are so comparatively new to some parts of England, that their introduction into the northern counties is hardly a century old. A diet exclusively of animal food is too highly stimulant for such a climate as ours; and an exclusively vegetable diet is far less injurious in its effects. No meat is so digestible as tender mutton. It has just that degree of consistency which the stomach requires. Beef is not less nutritious, but it is rather less easy of digestion, than mutton: much, however, depends upon the cooking, which process may, really not inaptly, be called the first stage of digestion. The comparative indigestibility of lamb and veal arises from the meat being of a more stringy and indivisible nature. Old laws ordained that butchers should expose no beef for sale, but of an animal that had been baited. The nature of the death rendered the flesh more tender. A coursed hare is thus more delicious eating than one that has been shot; and pigs whipped till they die, may be eaten with relish, even by young ladies who pronounce life intolerable. A little vinegar, administered to animals about to be killed, is said, also, to render the flesh less tough; and it is not unusual to give a spoonful of this acid to poultry, whose life is required for the immediate benefit of the consumer. Some carnivorous animals have been very expert at furnishing their own larder. Thus we read, that the eagles in Norway exhibit as much cunning in procuring their beef as can well be imagined; and more, perhaps, than can well be believed. They dive into the sea, we are told, then roll in the sand, and afterwards destroy an ox by shaking the sand in his eyes, while they attack him. I think the French eagle tried a similar plan with the English bull, during the wars of the Empire, and very ineffectually. It dived into the sea, and rolled itself in the sand at Boulogne, and shook abundance of it across the Channel; but the English bull more quietly shook it off again from his mane, and the eagle turned to an easier quarry in Austria. Animals not carnivorous have sometimes been as expert. There have been horses, for instance, who have had their peculiar appetite also for meat. Some twenty years ago, we heard of one at Brussels, which, fond of flesh generally, was particularly so of raw mutton, which it would greedily devour whenever it could get, as it sometimes did, to a butcher’s shop.
The Jews, it is said, never ate poultry under their old dispensation; and French gastronomists assert that this species of food was expressly reserved to enrich the banquets of a more deserving people. About the merits of the people the poultry, and winged animals generally, would perhaps have an opinion of their own, were they capable of entertaining one; for nowhere, as in France, have those unfortunate races been so tortured, and merely in order to extract out of their anguish a little more exquisite enjoyment for the palled appetites of epicures. The turkey has, perhaps, the least suffered at the hands of the Gallic experimentalists, though he has not altogether escaped. The goose has been the most cruelly treated, especially in the case of his being kept caged before a huge fire, and fed to repletion until he dies, the Daniel Lambert of his species, of a diseased liver, which is the most delicious thing possible in a pie. But it is ignoble treatment for the only bird which is said to be prescient of approaching earthquakes. The goose saved Rome, and was eaten in spite of his patriotism. He is skilled in natural philosophy, and his science does not save him from death and sage-and-onions. Nay, even a female Sovereign of England could not hear of the defeat of the Spanish Armada without decreeing “death to the geese,” until the time comes when Mr. Macaulay’s Huron friend shall be standing on a fragment of Blackfriars’ Bridge, sketching the ruins of St. Paul’s.
It must be allowed, however, that the scientific ladies of farm-yards have improved upon the knowledge of their ancestresses. Formerly, of turkeys alone, full one-half that pierced the shell perished; but now we rear more than fifteen out of twenty. I do not know, however, that that fact is at all consolatory to the turkey destined to be dined upon.
Themistocles ordered his victory over Xerxes to be yearly commemorated by a cock-fight; and the bird itself was eaten out of honour, as dogs in Rome were for reasons of vengeance. At Rome, the hen was the favourite bird; but hens were consumed in such quantities, that Fannius, the Consul, issued a decree, prohibiting their being slain for food, during a certain period; and, in the mean time, the Romans “invented the capon.” The duck was devoured medicinally, that is, on medical assurance that it was good diet for weak stomachs; and there were great sages who not only taught that duck, as a food, would maintain men in health, but that, if they were ill, the ample feeding thereon would soon restore them again. Mithridates, it is alleged, ate it as a counter-poison; other people, of other times and places, simply because they liked it. The goose was in as much favour as the duck with the digestion-gifted stomachs of the older races. It was the royal diet in Egypt, where the Monarch did not, like Queen Elizabeth, recommend it to the people, but selfishly decreed that it was only to be served at his own table. Gigantic geese, with ultra-gigantic livers, were as much the delight of epicures in Rome, as the livers, if not the geese, are now the voluptas suprema of the epicure of France, and of countries subject to the French code of diet. A liver weighing as much as the rest of the animal without it, was a morceau, in Rome, to make a philosopher’s mouth water. This was not proof of a more depraved taste than that exhibited by a Christian Queen of France, who spent sixteen hundred francs in fattening three geese, the delicate livers of which alone Her Majesty intended to dine upon. The pigeon and guinea-hen never attained to such popularity as the goose and duck; while the turkey, and especially the truffled turkey-hen, has its value sufficiently pointed out by the saying of the gastronome, that there must be two at the eating of a truffled turkey,—the eater and the turkey! The turkey, originally from the East, was slowly propagated in Europe, and the breed appears to have gradually passed away, like the bustard in England. It was brought hither again from America, and its first re-appearance is said to have been at the wedding-dinner of Charles IX. of France.
The turkey was not protected, as the peacock was by Alexander, by a decree denouncing death against whomsoever should kill this divine bird, with its devilish note. The decree did not affect Quintus Hortensius, who had one served up at the dinner which celebrated his accession to the office of Augur. Tiberius, however, preserved the peacock with great jealousy, and it was only rich breeders that could exhibit this bird at their banquets.
A man who passes through Essex may see whole “herds” of geese and ducks in the fields there, fattening without thought of the future, and supremely happy in their want of reflection. These birds are “foreigners;” at least, nearly all of them are so. They are Irish by birth, but they are brought over by steam, in order to be perfected by an English education; and when the due state of perfection has been attained, they are, like many other young people partaking of the “duck” or the “goose,” transferred to London, and “done for.”