I prithee let me bring thee where crabs grow;
And I with my long nails will dig thee pig nuts;
Show thee a jay's nest, and instruct thee how
To snare the nimble marmozet; I'll bring thee
To clustering filberds, and sometimes I'll get thee
Young staniels from the rocks. Wilt thou go with me?
The Tempest.
In the lamb roasted whole we have one of the earliest dishes on record in the history of cookery. Stuffed with pistachio nuts, and served with pilaf, it illustrates the antiquity of the art, and at the same time gives an example of the food upon which millions of our fellow creatures are sustained.
At a dinner of the Acclimatization Society in London, all manner of strange and new dishes were offered, even the meat of the horse. A roast monkey filled with chestnuts was declared to be delicious; the fawn of fallow deer was described as good; buffalo meat was not so highly commended; a red-deer ham was considered very succulent; a sirloin of bear was "tough, glutinous, and had, besides, a dreadful, half-aromatic, half-putrescent flavour, as though it had been rubbed with assafœtida and then hung for a month in a musk shop."
We will not try bear unless we are put to it. However, at this same dinner—we read on—haunch of venison, saddle of mutton, roast beef of old England, which is really the roast beef which is of old Normandy now, all gave way to a Chinese lamb roasted whole, stuffed with pistachio nuts, and served with consousson, a preparation of wheat used among the Moors, Africans, and other natives of the north of Africa littoral, in place of rice. The Moorish young ladies are, it is said, fattened into beauty by an enforced meal of this strengthening compound. The consousson is made into balls and stuffed into the mouths of the marriageable young lady, until she grows as tired of balls as a young belle of three seasons.