mostly in persons who are frequently in bad health and are restricted
to a low diet; naturally at such times vegetarianism appeals to them.
As their health improves they think less of their fellow-mortals. A
little chicken broth is found uplifting; then follows the inevitable
sole, then calves’ brains, then a sweetbread, then a partridge, and
so on, progressively, until they are once more able to enjoy their
salmon or turbot, veal and lamb cutlets, fat capons, turkeys and geese,
sirloins of beef, and, finally, roast pig. That’s the limit; we have
outgrown cannibalism, and are not keen about haggis, though it is still
eaten by the wild tribes inhabiting the northern portion of our island.
All this should serve to teach vegetarians not to be in a hurry.
Thoreau’s “handful of rice” is not sufficient for us, and not good
enough yet. It will take long years and centuries of years before the
wolf with blood on his iron jaws can be changed into the white innocent
lamb that nourishes itself on grass.
Let us now return to my friend the pig. He inhabited a stye at the far
end of the back garden of a cottage or small farmhouse in a lonely
little village in the Wiltshire downs where I was staying. Close to
the stye was a gate opening into a long green field, shut in by high
hedges, where two or three horses and four or five cows were usually
grazing. These beasts, not knowing my sentiments, looked askance at me
and moved away when I first began to visit them, but when they made the
discovery that I generally had apples and lumps of sugar in my coat
pockets they all at once became excessively friendly and followed me
about, and would put their heads in my way to be scratched, and licked
my hands with their rough tongues to show that they liked me. Every
time I visited the cows and horses I had to pause beside the pig-pen to
open the gate into the field; and invariably the pig would get up and
coming towards me salute me with a friendly grunt. And I would pretend
not to hear or see, for it made me sick to look at his pen in which he
stood belly-deep in the fetid mire, and it made me ashamed to think
that so intelligent and good-tempered an animal, so profitable to man,
should be kept in such abominable conditions. Oh, poor beast, excuse
me, but I’m in a hurry and have no time to return your greeting or even
to look at you!
In this village, as in most of the villages in all this agricultural
and pastoral county of Wiltshire, there is a pig-club, and many of the
cottagers keep a pig; they think and talk a great deal about their
pigs, and have a grand pig-day gathering and dinner, with singing
and even dancing to follow, once a year. And no wonder that this is
so, considering what they get out of the pig; yet in any village you
will find it kept in this same unspeakable condition. It is not from
indolence nor because they take pleasure in seeing their pig unhappy
before killing him or sending him away to be killed, but because they
cherish the belief that the filthier the state in which they keep their
pig the better the pork will be! I have met even large prosperous
farmers, many of them, who cling to this delusion. One can imagine a
conversation between one of these Wiltshire pig-keepers and a Danish
farmer. “Yes,” the visitor would say, “we too had the same notion at
one time, and thought it right to keep our pigs as you do; but that
was a long time back, when English and Danes were practically one
people, seeing that Canute was king of both countries. We have since
then adopted a different system; we now believe, and the results prove
that we are in the right way, that it is best to consider the animal’s
nature and habits and wants, and to make the artificial conditions
imposed on him as little oppressive as may be. It is true that in a
state of nature the hog loves to go into pools and wallow in the mire,
just as stags, buffaloes, and many other beasts do, especially in the
dog-days when the flies are most troublesome. But the swine, like the
stag, is a forest animal, and does not love filth for its own sake, nor
to be left in a miry pen, and though not as fastidious as a cat about
his coat, he is naturally as clean as any other forest creature.”
Here I may add that in scores of cases when I have asked a cottager why
he didn’t keep a pig, his answer has been that he would gladly do so,
but for the sanitary inspectors, who would soon order him to get rid of
it, or remove it to a distance on account of the offensive smell. It is
probable that if it could be got out of the cottager’s mind that there
must need be an offensive smell, the number of pigs fattened in the
villages would be trebled.
I hope now after all these digressions I shall be able to go on with
the history of my friend the pig. One morning as I passed the pen he
grunted--spoke, I may say--in such a pleasant friendly way that I had
to stop and return his greeting; then, taking an apple from my pocket,
I placed it in his trough. He turned it over with his snout, then
looked up and said something like “Thank-you” in a series of gentle
grunts. Then he bit off and ate a small piece, then another small bite,
and eventually taking what was left in his mouth he finished eating
it. After that he always expected me to stay a minute and speak to him
when I went to the field; I knew it from his way of greeting me, and
on such occasions I gave him an apple. But he never ate it greedily:
he appeared more inclined to talk than to eat, until by degrees I came
to understand what he was saying. What he said was that he appreciated
my kind intentions in giving him apples. But, he went on, to tell the
real truth, it is not a fruit I am particularly fond of, I am familiar
with its taste as they sometimes give me apples, usually the small
unripe or bad ones that fall from the trees. However, I don’t actually
dislike them. I get skim milk and am rather fond of it; then a bucket
of mash, which is good enough for hunger; but what I enjoy most is a
cabbage, only I don’t get one very often now. I sometimes think that if
they would let me out of this muddy pen to ramble like the sheep and
other beasts in the field or on the downs I should be able to pick up
a number of morsels which would taste better than anything they give
me. Apart from the subject of food I hope you won’t mind my telling you
that I’m rather fond of being scratched on the back.
So I scratched him vigorously with my stick, and made him wriggle his
body and wink and blink and smile delightedly all over his face. Then I
said to myself: “Now what the juice can I do more to please him?” For
though under sentence of death, he had done no wrong, but was a good,
honest-hearted fellow-mortal, so that I felt bound to do something to
make the miry remnant of his existence a little less miserable.
I think it was the word _juice_ I had just used--for that was how
I pronounced it to make it less like a swear-word--that gave me an
inspiration. In the garden, a few yards back from the pen, there was a
large clump of old elder-trees, now overloaded with ripening fruit--the
biggest clusters I had ever seen. Going to the trees I selected and cut
the finest bunch I could find, as big round as my cap, and weighing
over a pound. This I deposited in his trough and invited him to try
it. He sniffed at it a little doubtfully, and looked at me and made a
remark or two, then nibbled at the edge of the cluster, taking a few
berries into his mouth, and holding them some time before he ventured
to crush them. At length he did venture, then looked at me again and
made more remarks, “Queer fruit this! Never tasted anything quite like
it before, but I really can’t say yet whether I like it or not.”
Then he took another bite, then more bites, looking up at me and saying
something between the bites, till, little by little, he had consumed
the whole bunch; then turning round, he went back to his bed with a
little grunt to say that I was now at liberty to go on to the cows and
horses.
However, on the following morning he hailed my approach in such a
lively manner, with such a note of expectancy in his voice, that I
concluded he had been thinking a great deal about elder-berries, and
was anxious to have another go at them. Accordingly I cut him another
bunch, which he quickly consumed, making little exclamations the
while--“Thank you, thank you, very good--very good indeed!” It was a
new sensation in his life, and made him very happy, and was almost as
good as a day of liberty in the fields and meadows and on the open
green downs.
From that time I visited him two or three times a day to give him huge
clusters of elder-berries. There were plenty for the starlings as well;
the clusters on those trees would have filled a cart.
Then one morning I heard an indignant scream from the garden, and
peeping out saw my friend, the pig, bound hand and foot, being lifted
by a dealer into his cart with the assistance of the farmer.
“Good-bye, old boy!” said I as the cart drove off; and I thought that
by and by, in a month or two, if several persons discovered a peculiar
and fascinating flavour in their morning rasher, it would be due to the
elder-berries I had supplied to my friend the pig, which had gladdened
his heart for a week or two before receiving his quietus.
XXVI
THE POTATO AT HOME AND IN ENGLAND
When I was a small boy running about wild on the pampas, amazingly
interested in everything and making wonderful discoveries every
day, I was attracted by a small flower among the grasses--pale and
meek-looking, with a yellow centre, petals faintly washed with purple,
and a lovely scent. It charmed me with its gentle beauty and new
fragrance, and surprised me with its resemblance, both in flower and
leaf, to the potato-plant. On showing a spray to my parents, they
told me that it _was_ a potato-flower. This seemed incredible, since
the potato was a big plant with large clusters of purplish flowers,
almost scentless, and, furthermore, it was a _cultivated_ plant. They
explained that all cultivated plants were originally wild; that long
cultivation had had the effect of changing their appearance and making
them larger; that was how we had got our wheat, which came from a poor
little grass with a seed scarcely bigger than a pin’s head. Even the
botanists had had great difficulty in identifying it as the original
wheat-plant. Also our maize and huge pumpkins and water-melons, and
all our vegetables and fruit. I then took a table-knife and went to
look for a plant, and when I found one I dug down to a depth of six
inches, and there sure enough was the tuber, attached to the root, but
quite small--not bigger than a hazel-nut--perfectly round with a pimply
skin, curiously light-coloured, almost pearly. A pretty little thing to
add to my collection of curios, but all the same a potato. How strange!
From that time I began to take a new interest in the potato, and would
listen eagerly when the subject of potatoes was discussed at table.
When the potatoes were taken up about the beginning of December, and
then the second crop in autumn--April or May--my father would tell the
gardener to pick out a few of the biggest for him, and these, when
washed and weighed, would be placed as ornaments on the dining-room
mantelpiece, in a row of half-a-dozen. They were not pretty to look
at, but they were astonishingly big when I put my small marble of a
wild potato by the side of them. Then when some English neighbour, ten
or twenty miles away, would ride over to see us and stay to lunch,
my father would take up the potatoes one by one and hand them to him
and say: “What do you think of this one? And of this one?” Then:
“And of _this_ one?” _This_ one would be the biggest. Then he would
add: “What does _your_ biggest potato weigh?” And when the other
replied: “Ten”--or perhaps twelve--“ounces,” my father would laugh
and say: “This one weighs fourteen ounces and a half; this fifteen and
three-quarters; this one just turns the balance at sixteen, and _this_
one seventeen ounces. What do you say to that?” The other would reply
that he couldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen and handled the
potato himself, and my father would be happy and triumphant.
Not only were the potatoes of that land as large as any in the world,
but they were probably the best in the world to eat. They were
beautifully white and mealy, with that crystalline sparkle of the
properly cooked potato in them which one rarely sees in this country.
Strange to say, our Spanish neighbours, even those who had a garden,
did not grow or eat them; they were confined to the English settlers
and a few foreigners of other nationalities.
Here I will venture to relate an incident which, though trivial,
goes to show how little our native neighbours knew about the potato,
which was so important to us; and at the same time it will serve to
illustrate a trait common to the native of that land--the faculty of
keeping his face.
A young girl of about twelve, the child of poor natives living in a
small ranch a couple of miles from us, was invited by a little sister
of mine to come and spend a day with her, to look at dolls and other
treasures, eat peaches, and enjoy herself generally. We were a big
family, but my sister’s little guest, Juanita, took her place at table
as if to the manner born. Lamb cutlets with a nice big potato on the
plate were placed before her, also a cup of tea, for in those days
tea was drunk at every meal. After a glance round to see how eating
was managed in these novel conditions, she began on the cutlets, and
presently my little sister, anxious to guide her, called attention to
the untasted potato. She looked at it, hesitated a moment, then, taking
it up in her fingers, dropped it into her tea-cup! The poor girl had
never seen a boiled potato before and had never had a cup of tea, and
had just made a guess at what she was expected to do. We youngsters
exploded with laughter and our elders smiled, but the girl kept her
balance--not a flush, not a change in her countenance.
“Oh, you must not do that!” cried my sister. “You must eat the potato
with the cutlet on the plate, with salt on it.”
And Juanita, turning towards her little hostess, replied in a quiet but
firm tone: “I prefer to eat it this way.” And in _this_ way she did eat
it, first mashing it up, stirring it about in the tea, making a sort of
gruel of it, “not too thick and not too thin,” then eating it with a
spoon.
This singular presence of mind and faculty of keeping their dignity
under difficulties is, I imagine, an instinct of all uncivilised
people, and is in some curious way related to the instinct of
self-preservation, as when they are brought face to face with a great
danger and are perfectly cool where one would expect them to be in a
state of confusion and panic.
Other memories connected with the potato come back to me. I had a small
brother, and one day we were discussing that most important subject
to small boys, the things we liked best to eat, when it occurred to
us as very strange that certain articles of food were only eaten in
combination with certain other things; some with salt, and others with
sugar, and so on, and we agreed to try and discover a new and better
way of combining different flavours. We started on our boiled eggs
and ate them with sugar or treacle and cinnamon instead of salt, and
found that it wasn’t very nice. By and by we found that peaches cut
up and eaten with cream and sugar tasted delicious. And after that we
broke the peach-stones and made a mash of the kernels in a mortar and
ate that with cream and sugar, and agreed that it was a great success.
By and by one of our elders told us that the peculiar flavour of the
peach-stone pip which delighted us and was so good with cream and
sugar was due to the presence of prussic acid, and that if we went on
with this dish it would certainly kill us all in a little while. That
frightened us, and we started experimenting with the harmless potato.
And here we met with our greatest success; let all gourmets make a note
of it. Select a good-sized egg-shaped baked potato and place it in a
small cup and treat it as you would an egg, cutting off the top. Then
with your spoon break it up inside, pour in oil and vinegar, and add
pepper and salt. A delightful combination! We tried to improve on it
by substituting cream or butter for the oil, but it was the flavour of
olive oil and vinegar combined with that of the potato which made it
perfect.
Other experimenters may have discovered this way of eating a potato,
but the only approach to it I have found in reading is contained in
an anecdote of Byron, at the time when he was the hero of London
society. He dined with a friend who had got together a company of the
poet’s ardent admirers to meet him. But he was in a difficult mood:
he declined soup and fish and meats of all kinds. “What then will you
eat?” asked his host, getting impatient. “Oh, a potato,” said Byron.
And when a big potato was put before him, he broke it up, drenched it
in vinegar and ate it, and this was his dinner. And dinner over, he
took himself off, to the deep disappointment of all those who had come
to gaze and listen and worship.
“How long,” said one of them to his host, “will his lordship be able to
keep this dietary?”
“How long--how long!” said his host. “As long as people think it worth
while to pay any attention to what he eats.”
The story goes on to say that, quitting his friend’s house, the poet
walked to his club in Piccadilly and told the waiter to bring him an
underdone beef-steak. He had perhaps discovered that a potato drenched
in vinegar was good as an appetiser, but he probably did not know how
much better it would have been with the addition of oil.
The other most interesting memory of the potato refers to its
chief enemy, an insect called in the vernacular _Bicho moro_--a
blister-beetle or Cantharides, its full scientific name being _Epicauta
adspersa_. Not every year but from time to time this pest would make
its appearance in numbers, and invariably just when the potato-plant
was at its best, when the bloom was coming. On a warm, still, bright
day, when the sun began to grow hot, all at once the whole air would
be filled with myriads of the small grey beetles, about twice as big
as a house-fly, and the buzzing sound of their innumerable wings, and
the smell they emit. It was something like the smell of the fire-fly
when they are in swarms--a heavy musty and phosphorous smell in the
fire-fly. The blister-beetle had the mustiness but not the phosphorus
in its odour; in place of it there was another indescribable and
disagreeable element, which perhaps came from that acrid or venomous
principle in the beetle’s pale blood. Though we heartily detested it,
the insect was not without a modest beauty, its entire oblong body
being of a pleasing smoke grey, the wing-cases minutely dotted with
black.
The sight and sound and smell of them would call forth a lamentation
from all those who possessed a potato-patch and had rejoiced for weeks
past in their little green plants with their green embossed leaves,
since now there would be no potatoes for the table except very small
ones, until the autumn crop, which would come along after the grey
blister-fly had vanished like smoke from the earth after leaving his
evil seed in it.
The beetle feeds on the leaves of solanaceous plants and prefers the
potato above all others, so that when he comes in a slow-flying swarm
over the potato-field, you see the beetles dropping in thousands like a
grey rain upon it, and know that before the sun sets the whole of the
leaves will be devoured, the stalks being left till the following day,
when he will eat them pretty well down to the ground before passing on
to attack the tomatoes. Attempts were sometimes made to drive them off
by lighting smoky fires of half-dried weeds round the potato-patch, but
never once did we succeed in saving the plants.
As a small boy I was naturally incapable of entering into the bitter
feelings of our elders with regard to the blister-beetle. Its
appearance excited me and had the exhilarating effect produced by any
and every display of life on a great scale. At the same time I hated
it, not because it devoured the potato-plants, but for the reason that
I had been feelingly persuaded of its power to produce blisters. I was
out running about in the sunshine all day, and the air being full of
beetles, they were always dropping upon me and had to be brushed or
shaken off my straw hat, my jacket and trousers and boots continually;
but from time to time one would get into my shoe or slip down my neck
or creep up my sleeve to get broken on the skin, and in due time a
pain would set in just at that spot; then on pulling off my clothes a
noble blister would come to light, a boss of a pale amber colour and a
jelly-like appearance. It was ornamental but painful, and I would go
sore for a day in that part.
Being a boy naturalist, I tried to discover the secret of its breeding
habits and transformations, but failed utterly. However, they are
known, and are like those of our familiar English oil-beetle, which
stagger the mind that contemplates the strange case of a big beetle
whose eggs produce mites--mere animated specks--endowed with an
extraordinary activity and a subtle devilish knowledge and cunning
in building up their own lives out of others’ lives. I did, however,
succeed in discovering one singular fact when on this quest. There is a
family of big rapacious flies common all over the world, the Asilidae,
and we have several species on the pampas, some arrayed in the colours
and markings of bees and wasps. One is black and has bright red instead
of transparent wings, and appears to mimic our common red-winged wasp.
I found out that this fly preyed on the blister-beetle, and it amazed
me to see that almost every one of these flies I could find had one
grasped in its feet and was diligently sucking its juices through its
long proboscis. Yet those juices had so potent a poison in them that a
few drops of them on a man’s skin would raise a big blister!
Although the potato was very much to me in those early years, all my
feelings regarding it having originated in the chance discovery of
the meek-looking little flower with a delicate perfume among the
grasses, it grew to be more when I heard the history of the plant in
cultivation, and how it had been used as food by the Aborigines both in
North and South America for long centuries before the discovery of the
great green continent, and just as the yellow-haired Demeter, the Corn
Mother, and her loved lost daughter Persephone, the Corn Maiden, were
worshipped in ancient Greece; and as the Rice Mother is worshipped in
the East, in many lands and islands; and as the Maize Mother and God
were worshipped in all the Americas, by nations savage and civilised,
so did the Peruvians, who built temples glittering with gold to their
chief god, the sun, and to the sun’s children, the lightning and
rainbow, worship the Potato Mother, and pray to her to look kindly on
their labours when the seed was committed to the ground and to give
them good increase.
Finally I came to know the history of the introduction of the potato
into these islands by Sir Walter Raleigh. This action served to make
him appear to me the greatest of all the shining Elizabethans--greatest
in all he thought, said, and did, good or evil; as courtier, poet,
explorer and buccaneering adventurer and seeker after a golden city
in savage wildernesses; as prisoner in the Tower and author of that
most eloquent History of the World; and, most beautiful of all, on the
scaffold, by the block, the headsman with his glittering axe standing
by him, when, like a king who was to come after him, he nothing said
or did on that memorable scene to cast a shadow on his lustre or cause
any lover then and in the ages to follow to grieve at even a momentary
weakness on his part.
All this served to make the potato so important to me that when I stood
among the plants, growing higher than my knees, in their lush-green
embossed leaves and purple bloom, with a cloud of red and black and
yellow and orange and white butterflies hovering about them, it seemed
to me that America had given the two greatest food-bearing plants to
the world--maize and potato; and which was the greatest I could not
say, although the great maize-plant was certainly the most beautiful
in its green dress and honey-coloured tresses, which the hot sun would
soon turn to gold and by and by to a Venetian red of a tint which
one sees but rarely in his life, in the hair of some woman of almost
supernatural loveliness.
The potato, then, as I have said before, was very much to me. How
natural, then, when I came to England that I should have been shocked
at the sight of my first dish of potatoes on the table.
“Is _this_ the way potatoes are cooked in this country?” I asked in
astonishment.