“Saloop is a celebrated restorative among the Turks, and with us it stands recommended in consumptions, bilious cholics, and all disorders proceeding from an acrimony in the juices.
“Some people have a method of candying the roots, and thus prepared they are very pleasant, and may be eaten with good success against coughs and inward soreness.”
SMITHFIELD PUDDING.
Plate XXIX.
It would be almost criminal to proceed in my account of the present cry without passing a due encomium on the subject of it. The good qualities of an English pudding, more especially when it happens to be enriched with the due portion of enticing plums, are well known to most of us. It is a luxury to which our Gallic neighbours are entire strangers, and an article of cookery worth any dozen of their harlequin kick-shaws.
The justly-celebrated comedian, Ned Shuter, was so passionately fond of this article that he would never dine without it, and anything that led to the bare mention of a pudding would burst the silence of a couple of hours’ smoking; he was on one occasion known to lay down his pipe, and to exclaim, that the dinner the gentleman had just described would have been a very good one if there had but been a plum-pudding. The places where this excellent commodity is chiefly exposed to sale in the manner described in the engraving, are those of the greatest traffic or publicity, such as Smithfield on a market morning, where waggoners, butchers, and drovers, are sure to find their pence for a slice of hot pudding. Fleet Market, Leadenhall, Honey Lane, and Spital Fields, have each their hot-pudding men. In the lowest neighbourhoods in Westminster, where the soldiers reside, cook-shops find great custom for their pudding. The stalls, near the Horse Guards always have large quantities ready cut into penny slices, piled up like boards in a timber-yard.
At the time of relieving guard, vendors of pudding are always to be found on the parade. There is a black man, a handsome, well-made fellow, remarkably clean in his person, and always drest in the neatest manner, who never fails to sell his pudding; he also frequents the Regent’s Park on a Sunday afternoon, and, though he has no wit, his nonsense pleases the crowd. This person, who is now at the top of his calling, had a predecessor of the name of Eglington, who likewise carried on the business of a tailor.