Besides the attractions of the gold-fields for the Chinese, California is so abundantly supplied with rats, that they can live like Celestial emperors, and pay very little for their board. The rats of California exceed the rats of the older American States, just as nature on that side of the continent exceeds in bountifulness of mineral wealth. The California rats are incredibly large, highly flavoured, and very abundant. The most refined Chinese in California have no hesitation in publicly expressing their opinion of ‘them rats.’ Their professed cooks, we are told, serve up rats’ brains in a much superior style to the Roman dish of nightingales’ and peacocks’ tongues. The sauce used is garlic, aromatic seeds, and camphor.
Chinese dishes and Chinese cooking have lately been popularly described by the fluent pen of Mr. Wingrove Cooke, the Times’ correspondent in China, but he has by no means exhausted the subject. Chinese eating saloons have been opened in California and Australia, for the accommodation of the Celestials who now throng the gold-diggings, despite the heavy poll-tax to which they have been subjected.
Mr. Albert Smith, writing home from China, August 22, 1858, his first impressions, says:—
‘The filth they eat in the eating houses far surpasses that cooked at that old trattoria at Genoa. It consists for the most part of rats, bats, snails, bad eggs, and hideous fish, dried in the most frightful attitudes. Some of the restaurateurs carry their cook-shops about with them on long poles, with the kitchen at one end, and the salle-à-manger at the other. These are celebrated for a soup made, I should think, from large caterpillars boiled in a thin gravy, with onions.’
The following is an extract from the bill of fare of one of the San Francisco eating houses—
| Grimalkin steaks | 25 | cents. |
| Bow-wow soup | 12 | ” |
| Roasted bow-wow | 18 | ” |
| Bow-wow pie | 6 | ” |
| Stews ratified | 6 | ” |
The latter dish is rather dubious. What is meant by stews rat-ified? Can it be another name for rat pie? Give us light, but no pie.
The San Francisco Whig furnishes the following description of a Chinese feast in that city:—‘We were yesterday invited, with three other gentlemen, to partake of a dinner à la Chinese. At three o’clock we were waited upon by our hosts, Keychong, and his partner in Sacramento-street, Peter Anderson, now a naturalized citizen of the United States, and Acou, and escorted to the crack Chinese restaurant in Dupont-street, called Hong-fo-la, where a circular table was set out in fine style:—
‘Course No. 1.—Tea, hung-yos (burnt almonds), ton-kens (dry ginger), sung-wos (preserved orange).
‘Course No 2.—Won-fo (a dish oblivious to us, and not mentioned in the cookery-book).