The actual phrase used is “First cast your hare,” or, in another edition, “Take your hare, and when it is cast.” This simply means flayed or skinned, and was commonly used at the time. The verb “to scotch” or “to scatch” is East Anglian, and has the same meaning. So much for the authenticity of the quotation.
Curiously enough, in the newspaper controversy above referred to, George Augustus Sala strongly supported the claims of Mrs. Glasse herself as the real author, and there certainly appears to be some circumstantial evidence as to a lady of that name who was “habit-maker to the Royal family” about that period, although her connexion with the culinary art is not to be traced. Incidentally Sala mentions a receipt from a cookery book written by “An ingenious Gaul” towards the middle of the seventeenth century, which begins with what he terms “A Culinary Truism,” since changed into “A proverbial platitude”—namely, the words “pour faire un civet, prenez un lièvre.” This is, however, of course merely a commonplace of the kitchen, and, according to the learned authority of Dr. Thudichum, the imperative of prendre has not the catching meaning apparently attached to it by Sala.
Abraham Hayward, Q.C., whose “Art of Dining,” a reprint of certain “Quarterly Review” articles, must always remain one of the greatest classics of English gastronomical literature, says that Mrs. Glasse’s cookery book was written by Dr. Hunter, of York. This is, of course, an egregious error. Dr. Hunter was the author of “Culina Famulatrix Medicinæ; or, Receipts in Modern Cookery” (1804, fourth edition), with the delightful dedication, “To those gentlemen who freely give two guineas for a Turtle Dinner at the Tavern, when they might have a more wholesome one at Home for Ten Shillings, this work is humbly dedicated”; and an exquisite frontispiece of a pig, by Carr, headed “Transmigration”; but he was in no way responsible for Mrs. Glasse.
LES AUDIENCES D’UN GOURMAND
(A. B. L. Grimod de la Reynière inv. 1804)
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The case is very fairly summed up by Mrs. Joseph Pennell in “My Cookery Books.” She says, speaking of Mrs. Glasse: “Her fame is due, not to her genius, for she really had none, but to the fact that her own generation believed there was no such person, and after generations believed in her as the author of a phrase she never wrote.” There really seems no more to be said on the matter.
It matters little, after all, whether Mrs. Glasse really existed or not; anyhow, some of her precepts are excellent and endure to this day. She preached thorough mastication as a primary rule for good digestion. This is thoroughly sound and praiseworthy.
“Most men dig their graves with their teeth,” so says an old Chinese proverb, meaning, no doubt, that we all eat too much, and too fast, and too often, and too promiscuously. The propriety of eating slowly ought always to be remembered. Mr. Gladstone’s thirty-two bites are historical. Napoleon was a terribly fast eater, and this habit is supposed to have paralysed him on two of the most critical occasions of his life, the battles of Leipzig and Borodino, which he might have converted into decisive and influential victories by pushing his advantages as he was wont. On each of these occasions he was known to have been suffering from indigestion. On the third day at Dresden, too, the German novelist Hoffmann, who was present in the town, asserts that the Emperor would have done much more than he did but for the effects of a shoulder of mutton stuffed with onions.