The well-informed editor of the "Hors d'Œuvre" department of the "Pall Mall Gazette" gives an amusing glimpse of the situation as regards English and Scotch venison, which he considers a veritable delicacy, preferable to the highly-sauced venison of France and Germany:
"We ought really to eat more venison when in season, but if the ordinary housewife were asked to provide it quite in the ordinary way for an ordinary dinner at home, she would be entirely nonplussed. 'But the butcher does not keep it.' 'Try the poulterer.' 'The poulterer says he can get it at a day's notice.' Why all this fuss? Venison is a national dish; it is not expensive; it is most nutritious and wholesome. Some one ought to 'buck up' the venison market."
Among British feathered animals the best is the grouse, "the only really native game bird of these islands." It comes to London by fast expresses from the North—recently also from Ireland, which would be a finer grouse country, were it not for poachers. For the first days of the season grouse bring easily a guinea a brace in London market, cheaper ones being cold-storage suspects. Later on—thanks to rational methods of game preservation—they pour in daily by the tens of thousands and come down to 8s. or less a brace. Though never as cheap in the restaurants as partridge is in Germany, grouse is worth its price when cooked in the English way, which preserves all the woodland flavor of the bird.
English farmers have not waked up to the opportunities that lie in catering to the demand for fresh-killed poultry of all kinds. The best restaurants get their supplies usually from France. There is in the Kingdom not even one adult fowl per acre of cultivated land. Here are possibilities of tremendous improvements, for, as Professor Edward Brown of the Ontario Agricultural College has truly said: "Masses of people living under highly artificial conditions must have food high in nutritive elements, easily digested and palatable, in which respect eggs stand first among all natural products and poultry not far behind."
A well-known poulterer is cited as saying in regard to the London markets: "Fat goslings and ducks are in good demand, and the best prices are being given for them. One hundred and fifty years ago tens of thousands of geese and turkeys were reared in Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, and adjacent counties. The numbers now are, in comparison, insignificant. Nevertheless, the industry is one which might be made one of great importance and quite comfortable profits."
A very different situation confronts us when we look at the supply of seafood. Here the British Isles hold their own in competition with any country, and the methods adopted to ensure a daily supply of fresh fish cannot be too urgently commended to American fish dealers.
One of the most interesting sights in London is Billingsgate market. Fish have been sold here for several centuries, but under changing conditions. No longer will you find here the "fat, motherly flatcaps, with fish-baskets hanging over their heads instead of riding-hoods, with silver rings on their thumbs, and pipes charged with 'mundungus' in their mouths, sitting on inverted eel-baskets and strewing the flowers of their exuberant eloquence over dashing young town-rakes who had stumbled into Billingsgate to finish the night.... But the town-rakes kept comparatively civil tongues in their heads when they entered the precincts of the Darkhouse. An amazon of the market, otherwise known as a Billingsgate fish-fag, was more than a match for a Mohock," as George Augustus Sala remarked in his "Twice Round the Clock, or the Hours of the Day and Night in London."
Gone are these amazons who by their abusive speech gave a new word to the English language. Men now monopolize Billingsgate Market, and the joke of it is that these men, as we found them at six o'clock on a September morning, are the very pink of politeness, most courteously ready to answer your questions regarding different fishes, and cockles, and periwinkles, though they know you are not there to buy. Even the rough, hurrying fish-porters make way for you to pass, and the auctioneers stop to warn you against places where your clothes might get soiled by drippings.
Billingsgate is now entirely given over to the wholesale fish-trade. The smell of it, fish-like but not ancient—for it is a clean place—easily guides you to the spot from the nearest station of the subway's inner circle. The streets near it are wet with the drip of fish-filled boxes, and crowded with wagons that are being loaded with the town's provisions of sea food—strictly fresh every day.
Billingsgate Market being on the water's edge all the fish is unloaded direct from the fishing boats. Processions of porters come from the boats, each with a great box full of fish balanced on the top of his head, on a queerly-shaped, padded, waterproof hat made expressly for this work. The fish are kept cool with loose ice, but are not frozen. The Spanish mackerel with their dark markings and opaline sides offer the most beautiful sight of all, so freshly caught that their colors are as vivid as when they left the water.