_Spoons unknown in Polynesia—People of Guinea at Dinner—Spoons of the
Peruvians and Astecs—Caldron and Spoon indigenous to Northern
Climes—Hot Fluids and Ultra Dietists—Warm Drinks sold in
Pompeii—Chinese Opinion—Natural Aliment of the Esquimaux—A Fuegian
eating Fresh Fish—Cooking—Original Sin—Sacrifices—Athenian Boiling
Feast—Anglo-Saxons—Unsavory Superstitions—Persians—Guatamalian
Kitchen—Tartar Cookery—Laplanders—Greenlanders—Cosmetics and Domestic
Economy in the Polar Regions._
It should be remarked that, notwithstanding the preceding specimens of
spoons from the South Seas, there is no question of the implements being
in many parts of Oceanica a modern innovation. In the Sandwich and other
islands of Polynesia they were unknown till introduced by whalemen or
national navigators. The inhabitants did not use them, because they had
no use for them. They had no idea of heating liquids, and no vessels
(except a small wooden bowl) in which to heat them. It was the same with
most if not all the people of Australasia. Their cookery was confined to
roasting and baking. Rutherford says the New Zealanders never drank any
thing hot or warm. Their only vessel for holding water was the calabash
which they never dreamt of turning to a boiler or skillet.
Some African tribes use the spoon, but many do not; yet all are
acquainted with the process of making pottage. Villault, speaking of
Negroes on the coast of Guinea, says: ‘Ils mangent avec beaucoup de mal
propreté. Leurs ongles leur servent de couteau; et n’ayant ni
fourchettes ni cuillers: ils se lancent avec les doigts chaque morceau
dans le gozier. On les voit porter tous ensemble la main au plat, et
prendre leurs ragouts a poignées.’ [_Histoire Générale, Tome V._ 197.]
To take up solid and even semifluid food (as boiled rice) with the
fingers, is of great antiquity. The custom prevails universally in the
Eastern world, except China; but this is not owing to ignorance of the
spoon, either with Africans or Asiatics. If neither use the implement in
eating rice, it invariably assists them to cook that great pabulum of
life.
Perhaps it may be doubted whether the aborigines of America had the
spoon previous to the arrival of white people: most of them certainly
had. Here, as in other parts of the earth, wherever the caldron was
known, spoons were in use. The Peruvians had them of silver and gold; so
had the Mexicans. The Astecs, in their feasts, ablutions, and table
furniture, approached in many respects to Asiatic customs. They kept
meats warm with chafing dishes. The tables of the wealthy were
ornamented with vases of silver and sometimes of gold; ‘their drinking
cups and _spoons_ were of the same costly materials.’ Montezuma took no
other beverage than chocolate flavored with vanilla and other spices, so
prepared as to be reduced to a froth of the consistency of honey, which
gradually dissolved in the mouth. This beverage, if so it could be
called, was served in golden goblets, with spoons of the same metal, or
of tortoise-shell, finely wrought.’ [_Prescott’s Mexico._]
But the less refined people, of both continents were found in possession
of the caldron and spoon. The brutalized Brazilians boiled victuals in
earthen vessels, and used knives of flint and spoons of wood and horn.
[_See Lafitau’s Mœurs des Sauvages, Tome I._ 572, _Plate 19_, and _Tome
II._ 114.] The Virginia Indians had clay pipkins of a very superior
quality, and wooden bowls, &c. of their own manufacture. [_Phil. Trans.
Abrid. III._ 572, and _IX._ 474.] The Mandans, a tribe now nearly
extinct, still fabricate earthen caldrons as their ancestors did. They
alone, of those occupying the Missouri valley, are believed to make
them.
The boiler and spoon would seem to be indigenous and indispensable to
northern climes. The former, made sometimes of a skin, at other times of
wood, and the latter of horn, bone, &c. are used at this day, as they
ever have been since man first took possession of the arctic regions. A
few Indians about Hudson’s Bay purchase brass kettles at the factories,
but the greater part prepare their food in the large upright boilers of
birch already mentioned. When animal food is scarce, and it often is so,
they have no resource but to make pottage with a species of moss that
collects on stones. To render it palatable or nutritive boiling is
essential.
The utility of hot fluids is a mooted point, but it is not our intention
to discuss it. If they are not natural to people in high latitudes, they
are to none, and the caldron and spoon, as vehicles for preparing and
receiving them, must be denounced as injurious devices. If heated
decoctions are violations of nature’s laws, warm or hot food of every
description must be deemed such, whether taken in sickness or in health;
but who, except the most ultra of dietists, will believe this—men that
not only reject animal food but every artificial preparation of
aliment—who insist that we should eat only raw fruit and unground grain,
and drink nothing. Of course, mills then should be abolished as
enervating inventions, preventing people from grinding their own grist
with their natural grinders. On the same principle, clothing, dwellings,
and fire might be dispensed with; for within the tropics people make
little use of the first, and not much of the second; while the Terra del
Fuegians can endure their severe climate apparently without the other.
Abandon the use of fire in cooking, and there would be little demand for
fuel even within the temperate zones. Probably three-fourths of the arts
connected with the working of metals are more or less allied to the
dining-room, kitchen, and toilet.
Nearly every device characteristic of civilization might with equal
propriety be abolished; not trifling things only, as knives and forks,
in place of teeth and fingers; plates and dishes, for leaves and slabs
of slate; napkins, instead of wiping the mouth with the hand; but
articles of dress, as shoes, that supersede the thick and more elastic
soles which nature bestows on those who go barefoot; straw, beaver and
other fancy coverings for the head, when she is ready to furnish gratis
matted or felted caps to all who have no dealings with the hatter.
Beneficial or not, the ancients had shops expressly fitted up for the
sale of hot drinks. Several _Thermopolia_ have been discovered in
Pompeii, with the urns in which the decoctions were made, and furnished
with metallic heaters and cocks, like our tea and coffee urns. The
Chinese (a pretty good authority as far as relates to antiquity of
customs connected with domestic life) drink all their beverages warm.
Cold liquids, even pure water, they say, engenders disease. Ice is
employed by them to cool meats and fruits, but not to refrigerate water.
[_Chinese Repos. III._ 464.]
Animal diet and warm fluids may be dispensed with in some countries, but
not everywhere. It is as absurd to suppose that man can in civilized
society live in the manner of the savage, as that he could in all
climates exist on the same food. Under the influence of science and the
division of labor consequent upon an advanced state of the arts, the
physical as well as the mental constitution is changed, and a different
aliment required to sustain the one as well as the other. If the Creator
designed the arctic regions of our planet to be inhabited, he designed
man to sustain himself there on animal food, since, generally speaking,
no other is within his reach, and in some parts absolutely no other.
Besides food, the Esquimaux derive material for clothing, dwellings,
light and fuel from the whale, seal, and a few land animals. Olaus
Magnus, speaking of the wild people of the north in his time, says,
“they dwell in caves made of the bones and ribs of sea-monsters; they
live without bread, but only on fish and deer.” Pulse, grain, fruit or
roots are not to be had; but if they were actually produced by the soil
the natives could not live upon them there.
With these people, then, the use of animal food cannot be wrong, nor the
cooking of it a crime. Indeed, so far as they are concerned the kettle
and spoon may be considered of divine origin; though like more valuable
gifts in more favored climes, these implements are too often neglected;
for the brutalized men and women of the north frequently feed, like the
bear, on raw flesh; while at the opposite extremity of the continent,
the Fuegian, on catching a fish, is in the habit of taking it by the
gills and instantly making a repast on the struggling victim—lowering
the tail into his mouth somewhat like a Neapolitan swallowing strings of
macaroni: thus literally obeying the injunctions of those reformers who
denounce “every species of cookery as polluting the food which the God
of our natures has provided for the sustenance of man.”
So far as history goes, people without cooking have ever been savages,
and no refined nations ever eat their food raw. Individual and partial
exceptions may of course be found. Cato, the censor, seldom drank
anything but water, and often ate dinner prepared without fire. Epicurus
is slandered as a voluptuary, for his ordinary diet was bread and water,
pulse, milk and cheese. The cynics lived austerely, water being their
beverage, and the ground their bed. Diogenes, it is well known, lived
more like a brute than a gentleman: his manners too were allied to those
of a Hottentot. But some modern ascetics leave the most eccentric of the
ancients behind, for they reject not merely flesh meats, but bread,
salt, milk, and even water itself! contending that juices of fruits and
herbs yield fluid sufficient for the human system; and as animals bake
not nor boil, make neither puddings, porridge nor pies—they conclude
such things are superfluous to us: nay, some look on cooking as original
sin—as the very crime for which Adam and his consort were driven out of
Eden!—not satisfied with celestial food, it is said they began to
improve (_i. e._ to spoil) it by art, and were therefore expelled, that
they might carry their wicked devices elsewhere. Hence the nature of
their punishment, and why so large a portion was inflicted on Eve; she
being the original transgressor and the greater sinner of the two, just
as all her daughters, in the same respect, have been since; for where
food is spoiled by cooking, it is woman generally who still commits the
crime.
Boiled meats have been common from the earliest periods which history
has noticed, and according to the scriptures, with divine approbation.
Sacrifices were so frequently boiled that capacious caldrons were
permanently erected near temples for the purpose. As the virtue of the
flesh was extracted by the soup, spoons must have been in as great
demand at Jewish and heathen festivals as knives, fleshforks, or any
other implement of the table. [_See Ewbank’s Hydraulics_, p. 392.]
The Athenians had an annual boiling-feast, dating back to the times of
Theseus and the fabulous Minotaur. It was instituted, according to
Plutarch, to commemorate the return of the hero and his companions from
their perilous adventure at Crete, and arose from the fact of their
having made a species of olla-podrida the moment they got safe
ashore—mixing the remains of their provisions, “and boiling them in one
pot.” Theseus is supposed to have been contemporary with Gideon, and to
have flourished 1350 B. C. about 1400 years before his ancient
biographer.
The Anglo-Saxon and contemporary people chiefly boiled their meat. Large
houses had “a boiling place for small meats and a boiling house for the
great boiler.” One resistless argument that nature designed men to
prepare food by fire is derived from the fact that some roots, upon
which large portions of mankind live, are positively noxious if eaten
without being cooked—the _potato_ is a sufficient example. In some parts
of the earth water for drinking requires to be boiled to render it
wholesome. Several ancient people besides the Persians found this
necessary.
Most northern nations have been noticed for a want of cleanliness,
especially in cooking. The further northward we proceed, the less regard
for this virtue appears. It diminishes with degrees of longitude, and
within the arctic may be said to have vanished. But it is not confined
to one people or one continent. We shall conclude this chapter with a
few examples of unsavory superstitions, of which some have direct
reference to the ladle and spoon. Let not the reader who is particular
in his tastes turn sick at the manners of his species, for not many ages
have elapsed since his forefathers became freed from practices as filthy
and foolish as any about to be noticed.
The polite and effeminate Persian grandee, so scrupulous in his
ablutions and personal purity, takes up his food with his hands, and
dreads to change his table cover. “On the ground before us,” observes
Mr. Morier, in describing a dinner given to the British embassy by the
governor of Bushire, “was spread the _sofra_, a fine chintz cloth, which
perfectly entrenched our legs, and which is used so long unchanged that
the accumulated fragments of former meals collect into a musty paste and
emit no very savory smell; but the Persians are content, for they say
that changing the sofra brings _ill luck_.”
Irish women were formerly described as very “unmannerly [unwomanly] in
making butter,” because they held it extremely unlucky to wash their
milk-vessels! But the daughters of St. Patrick were not alone addicted
to this filthy superstition. In some parts of Scotland the same
prejudice to soap and water exists or did recently exist. It is
humorously referred to in the Cottages of Glenburnie: “‘Don’t you clean
the churn before you put in the cream?’ asked Mrs. Mason. ‘Na, na,’
returned Mrs. McClarty; ‘that wadna be canny ye ken. Naebody hereabouts
wad clean their kirn for ony consideration. I never hard o’ sic a thing
in a’ my life!’”
‘Dirt bodes luck’ is an old Scottish proverb.
In the middle ages in Europe, candle-bearers in large houses were
allowed, among other perquisites, the broken meat which the _king_ or
_lords_ spilt on the floor from their plates! No wonder that kings’
houses were then littered with straw like modern stables.
Most travellers complain of South American cookery. Among others, Dunn,
in Guatamala, observes, “The whole of these messes were prepared under a
shed, in a large dirty yard, which served as a kitchen, and was full of
filth of all kinds. The knowledge of this, with the sight of the
servants had no tendency to quicken our appetites. The _spoons_, cups,
knives, and forks were of silver.”
Bell, in passing through Tartary, in the suite of the ‘Russian
Embassador to Pekin,’ mentions a hospitable matron, whose cooking was
not quite to his taste. Entering a tent, the mistress immediately set to
work to make him and his companions some tea. After placing a large iron
kettle over the fire, she wiped it out with a horse’s tail which hung in
one corner of the tent. Then some water was put in, coarse bohea tea,
and a little salt. When near boiling, she took a large brass ladle and
tossed the tea till the liquid became quite brown. It was next taken off
the fire and poured into another vessel. The kettle was now again wiped
out with the same implement as before, and a paste, made of meal and
butter, put in and fried; some cream taken from a sheep-skin was added.
The tea previously made was poured in, and the whole beat together with
the ladle. After being allowed to cool, it was handed round in wooden
bowls.
Maundeville, who 500 years before, seems to have passed through Tartary
on his way to or from China, says: “The Tartarienes han gret conscience,
and holden it for a gret synne to casten a knyf in the fuyr, and for to
drawe flessche out of a pot with a knyf.... Thei eten but littille bred,
but zif it be in the courtes of gretr Lordes. And thei han not in many
places nouther pesen ne benes, ne non other potages, but the brothe of
the flessche. For littille ete thei ony thing but flessche and the
brothe. And whan thei han eten, thei wypen hire hondes upon hire
skirtes; for thei usen non naperye ne towayelles, but zif it be before
grete Lordes.... And whan thei han eten, thei putten hire dissches
_vnwasschen_ in to the pot or cawdroun with remenant of the flessche and
of the brothe, til thei wole eten azen.” [_Travels_, _cap._ xxiii.]
The cookery of the Laplanders is generally performed by men, and in the
dirtiest manner possibly. It is said “the dishes and spoons are seldom
washed, or at most, only by squirting water upon them from the mouth,
and rubbing them with their fingers!” A favorite dish is made by boiling
in a deer’s paunch a mixture of minced meat, blood, and fat; “but the
fat is previously chewed by the men and boys to prepare it for mixing
more intimately with the other ingredients!” [_Ed. Encyc. Arts.
Lapland—Hudson Bay._]
With the Greenlanders, “the color and odor of the last dish are left to
remove those of a former one.” When a stranger is present, the woman of
the house takes a piece of meat from the kettle, _licks_ off the scum
and blood, and presents it to him in her hands. This is considered a
mark of respect—to decline on his part an insult! The inhabitants of the
Marquesas are still more polite: at San Christina it is considered an
act of civility to offer the food already chewed, to a friend, that he
may have no other trouble than that of swallowing it! Verily, there is
no accounting for tastes. The aboriginal women of Brazil prepared an
intoxicating drink by masticating manioc, and boiling the substance thus
reduced to a pulp. So the ladies of Otaheite made a beverage for their
lords by chewing yava and spitting the juice into a bowl, when it was
mixed with cocoa-nut liquor, and left to ferment.
All the inhabitants of the polar regions resemble each other in their
manners and customs. Their bodies are coated with a varnish of dirt and
grease, the accumulation of years—the color of the surface beneath being
as effectually concealed as in articles covered with paint or japan.
With regard to the kitchen, Esquimaux dames would seem to bear off the
palm, since they cleanse every culinary utensil, the caldron as well as
the spoon, with their tongues; continuing the operation as long as a
particle of blubber remains. When Captain Parry bought a lamp of a
matron, the economical owner _licked_ it quite clean, devouring the soot
and oil with which it was covered, as forming no part of the bargain,
and too precious to be given away.