The curiosities of food

by P. L. Simmonds

The bones and meat being all rendered equally hard by the frost, the animals are sawn up into a number of slices, of an inch or two in thickness, and by this operation a quantity of animal sawdust is scattered on the snow, and afterwards gathered up by poor children, who haunt the market for that purpose. Fish, which is offered for sale, is sawn and sold in the same frozen condition.[3]

‘If one is to judge from the restaurants at Moscow,’ writes a correspondent of the Times, ‘there is no better place in the world to come to in order to try the temper. The best of them is dear and bad beyond comparison, and the only things good are the wine and the bread. It must be admitted that the latter is excellent, light, sweet, white, and wholesome, and our London bakers would do well if they came to Moscow for an apprenticeship in the art of making bread. It is very hard to have to pay 1l. for cabbage soup, filet du cheval, a bit of bad fish, one stewed pear, and a bottle of light French wine; but it is harder still to wait for twenty minutes between every dish, while leaden-eyed waiters are staring at you with a mixture of contempt and compassion because of your ignorance of the Russian tongue. Tired, cross, and dyspeptic, the stranger seeks a Russian dining room where the arts of French cookery have never been employed to render bad meat still worse. There, amid the odours of tobacco—for a Russian not being able to smoke in the streets makes up for it chez lui—you resign yourself to an unknown bill of fare and the caprices of your bearded attendant. It is fair to say of the said waiter, that he is clad in a milk-white and scrupulously clean robe, which descends in easy folds from his neck to his heels, so that he looks like a very high priest of the deity of gastronomy, and that you need not be as uneasy about his fingers and hands as you have good cause to be at the Russo-French restaurants. First you will be presented with a huge bowl of cabbage soup, a kind of pot-au-feu, which must be eaten, however, with several odd adjuncts, such as cakes stuffed with chopped vegetables, a dish of guelots, chopped fat, fried brown and crisp, and lastly a large ewer full of sour milk. Then comes a vol-au-vent of fowl and toad-stools. Next, if you are alive, porosenok, or a boiled sucking pig, with tart sauce; then a very nasty little fish, much prized in Moscow, and called sterlet; a fid of roast beef and a dish of birds about the size of pigeons, called guillemots; a compote of fruit closes the meal. I have forgotten to say how it begins. Before dinner a tray is laid out with caviare, raw salt herrings, raw ham and sardines, bottles of brandy, vodka, anisette, and doppel kümmel, a sweet spirit with a flavour of mint. It is de rigueur to eat some of this, and as the caviare is generally good, it is the best part of the dinner.’

The Governor of Cape Coast Castle, in his official report to the Colonial Office, in 1856, speaking of the food and cooking in the interior, remarks:—‘An officer of government, who has been about two years here, says, that he reckons he has eaten, during that time, 700 fowls, it being difficult at out-stations to cater in anything else but fowls.

‘In cooking, the natives seem to have almost a homeopathic prepossession for trituration. They pound and grind by hand labour, between stones, their maize, and bake it; so with their yams, and, I believe, cassada; they pound also their plantains and make soup of them.

‘Fish with a strong flavour and snails are favorites. The latter grow to a large, I had almost said formidable, size. I have in my possession the shell of one which I found buried about a foot in the ground, within a few yards of Government house, and which measures in length about five inches, and in circumference, in the widest part, about seven inches. A collection of these snails was once sent to me as a compliment, but I need hardly say, that I cannot speak of their taste from experience, though I do not know why I should not as well as I can of land crabs, which, when properly cooked, are, I think, general favorites with us. On the subject of cooking, I may observe, that the country cooked dishes (if of materials of a nature, and in a state, admitted in the category of our edibles) brought to table in the black native-made earthen pots in which they are cooked on the fire, are almost without exception favorites with the Europeans.’

The African Bushmen, who have few or no cattle, live upon what they can get. Hunger compels them to eat every thing, roots, bulbs, wild garlic, the core of aloes, the gum of acacias, berries, the larvæ of ants, lizards, locusts, and grasshoppers—all are devoured by these poor wanderers of the desert. Nothing comes amiss to them.

The principal diet of the Kaffir is milk, which he eats rather than drinks in a sour and curdled state. One good meal a day, taken in the evening, consisting of the curdled milk and a little millet, is almost all that he requires, and with this he is strong, vigorous, and robust, proving that large quantities of animal food are by no means necessary for the sustenance of the human frame.

Singularly enough a Kaffir, like a Jew, will never touch pork. To him it is unclean, though why he thinks so I suspect he cannot tell. Fish is likewise abstained from by him, as it is said to have been by the Egyptian priesthood. Yet with these antipathies he will eat the flesh of an ox, cooked or raw, when he can obtain it, not excepting portions of the animal from which one would imagine he would turn away with disgust.

To such tribes as the Shangalla negroes, occupying the wild tracts bordering on Abyssinia, roots are their daily food, and locusts and lizards their luxuries.

The Indians of Brazil do not reject any kind of food, and devour it almost without being cooked; rats and other small vermin, snakes, and alligators, are all accepted.