In all these cases, let me emphasize this fact once more, that what is eliminated from the food is its very soul, its precious Flavor, which makes it appetizing and enjoyable and therefore digestible. We allow covetous or ignorant manufacturers as well as incompetent or indolent cooks to spoil our naturally good food because we do not as a nation, realize that on its pleasurableness depend our health and comfort, our happiness and capacity for hard work, more than perhaps on anything else—a point which cannot be emphasized too often.
Now for a few details, beginning with the treatment to which our poultry is subjected, which has long been a national calamity and a scandal of the first order.
FOUL FOWL.
Perhaps more than anything else, what makes us stand before the world as a deplorably ungastronomic nation is our tolerance of the tainted, unpalatable, cold-storage poultry served in public eating places as well as in private houses in nine cases out of ten.
We spent the months of May to September, 1912, in Europe, traveling in France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, and England. Nearly every day we ate chicken, or some other kind of poultry and not once did we have any that was in the least like our cold-storage fowls; everything was fresh, sweet, juicy, and appetizing. Again and again I said to my wife, or she to me: "I wish we could get such chicken in New York!"
An American lady of wealth said to me a few years ago that one of the reasons why she went to Europe every summer was that she liked good things to eat and could get them so much more easily and regularly abroad—particularly butter, and her favorite dish, chicken. She knew of the poulet de Bresse—that explained it all. I shall never forget, though I live another half-century, my first taste of that particular brand of fowl. I had arrived at one of the leading Paris hotels too late for the table d'hôte, and thinking I was not hungry, ordered nothing but a portion of chicken and a bowl of salad. The waiter brought an enormous portion, and I had hardly tasted it when I found I was ravenously hungry. Not a shred of it was left.
The delicious taste of that sort of fancy poultry is due in part to the particular breed, but more still to the use of special kinds of food which give a rich and delicate flavor to the flesh, as the so-called wild celery of the Chesapeake Bay does in the case of our best ducks and turtles.
Nature provides our canvasback and redhead ducks and terrapin—not too bountifully, it is true—but when it comes to mortal man's treatment, in this country, of the poultry that has to take the place of the formerly abundant game, what do we see? A state of affairs that would not be tolerated one week on the European continent.
It is officially estimated that from 75 to 90 per cent. of all the poultry produced in the United States is preserved in cold storage for months, often for years. What is worse still, "only a very small percentage of the fowls which are placed in cold storage are drawn," the result being that by a physiological process known as osmosis the meat becomes tainted in a most offensive manner. The warehouse men and dealers have for years been fighting furiously against the health boards of various cities and states for the privilege of perpetuating this state of affairs, which greatly simplifies the poultry business and enables them to sell the entrails of a fowl at the same price per pound as the meat; but the long-suffering public has at last become thoroughly aroused, convinced that many obscure disorders of the digestive tract are due to the consumption of undrawn and other cold-storage poultry, not to speak of the horror of eating such stuff.