“All flesh is grass;” and grass has been the foundation of all feasts,
in a double sense. It was not only a part of the early repast, in
some shape or another, by derivation rather than immediately, but
it formed the most ancient seats occupied by primitive and pastoral
guests in very remote times. Dr. Johnson approved of asparagus being
called “grass.” Romulus thought grass a sacred emblem, or he would
not have suddenly converted his twelve lay foster-brothers into a
priesthood to look after it. When Baber had defeated the Afghans of
Kohat, they approached him in despair, and, according to their custom
when in extremities, with grass between their teeth, to signify, as
the imperial autobiographer says, “We are your oxen.” Baber treated
them worse than oxen; for the amiable savage says, “All that were taken
alive were beheaded by my order, and at the next halting-place we
erected a minaret of their skulls.” And the conqueror dined pleasantly
in front of the monument.
My friend, Captain Lionel da Costa, tells me, that on accompanying (_en
amateur_) a French force on a razzia against an Arab tribe in Algeria,
he witnessed the employment of grass as an emblem of defiance rather
than of submission. The French officers had assembled the Arab Chiefs,
and, telling them that the foreigners had filled up their wells,
carried off their cattle, and burned their dwellings, exhorted them to
submission, asking them what they would do further against a country
so powerful as France? The Arabs, as if impelled simultaneously,
stooped to the earth, plucked some scant blades of grass there growing,
and began chewing the same in angry silence: this was all their reply,
and by it they intimated that they would eat what the earth gave, like
the beasts that are upon it, rather than surrender. Their enemies could
not refrain from admiring and feeding such adversaries; their mute
eloquence was worth more than any thing uttered to tyrants by Power’s
statue of the Greek Slave, which, according to Mrs. Elizabeth Browning,
“thunders white silence,”--a silence that must have been akin to that
in the French Tragedy, “_silence qui se fit entendre_!”
Soup, as I have remarked, is not a bad preparation for the stomach.
Some one calls it the “preface of a dinner,” adding, however, that
a good work needs no preface. Soup is of very ancient date. Rebecca
and Jacob ate of a pottage, in which the meat was cut into small bits
_before_ the muscular fibres had cooled and become hardened, and stewed
in milk, thickened with meal and herbs. The famous French gastronomist,
the Marquis de Cussy, was orthodox in his gastronomy, fed well, but
heeded the church. His favourite soup in Lent was an onion soup,
composed of a score of small bulbs, well cleaned, sliced, and put into
a stew-pan, with a lump of fresh butter and a little sugar. They were
turned over the fire till they became of a fine golden colour, when
they were moistened with broth, and the necessary quantity of bread
added. Before the soup was served, its excellence was perfected by the
addition of two small glasses of very old Cognac brandy. This Lent fare
was, however, only the preface to salmon and asparagus, with which the
orthodox epicure mortified his appetite.
The famous Carême did with the soups he discovered, what the most
famous navigators have done with the new territories on which they were
the first to land; namely, give them the names of the most illustrious
contemporaries then existing. Royalty was honoured in the “_Potage
Condé_;” music in that of “Boieldieu;” and the medical faculty, which
Carême generally despised, in the “_Soupes à la Broussais_, _Roques_,
and _Segalas_;” poetry was illustrated in the “_Lamartine_;” history
in the “_Dumesnil_;” and philosophy in the “_Potage Buffon_.” The
last name he thus bestowed, was to his last culinary inspiration just
before death, when he conferred on a vegetable soup the name of “Victor
Hugo.” It was after reading the “_Messéniennes_,” that he created the
“_Matelotte à la Delavigne_;” and he paid the doctor who had cured
him of an indigestion, by inventing the dish of fish which he called
“_Perche à la Gaubert_.” And with this record we will put the fish on
our own table.
“It is only the Arabs of the desert that affect to despise fish.” This
eastern proverb is tantamount to the more homely one of, “The grapes
are sour;” for the Arabs only affect to despise that which they cannot
readily obtain. The Jews were prohibited from eating fishes without
scales or fins. The Egyptian Priests cared not for fish of any sort,
but they generally allowed the people to eat with what appetite they
chose, of what the priesthood declined to taste. It is said in the
legend, that St. Kevin lived by the fish he caught in the Lake of
Glendaloch; and that when the celebrated beauty tempted him, she did it
by flattery and suggestion:--
“‘You’re a rare hand at fishing,’ says Kate,
‘It’s yourself, dear, that knows how to hook them;
But, when you have caught them, agrah!
Don’t you want a young woman to cook them?’”
Gatis, Queen of Spain, was something like Mr. Lover’s “Kate;” for, if
her subjects caught fish well, she it was who first taught them how to
cook what they caught, and how to enjoy what they cooked.
When philosophers were occupied with inquiries touching the soul of
an oyster, fish was probably not a popular diet. It certainly was not
so in Greece, until a comparatively late period. Then fish became
fashionable: the legislature secured their freshness by decreeing that
no seller should sit down until he had sold his entire stock; sages
discussed their qualities, and tragic writers introduced heroes holding
dialogues on the qualities of fish-sauce. There was a Greek society at
that day “against cruelty to fish,” by devouring what also, allegedly,
made the devourer ferocious and inhuman; but general society did not
allow its appetite to be influenced thereby.
The Romans were enthusiastic for the mullet. It was for them _the_
fish, _par excellence_. It was sometimes served up six pounds in
weight, and such a fish was worth £60 sterling. It was cooked on the
table, for the benefit and pleasure of the guests. In a glass vessel
filled with brine made from water, the blood of the mackerel, and salt,
the live mullet, stripped of its scales, was enclosed; and as its
fine pink colour passed through its dying gradations, until paleness
and death ensued, the _convives_ looked on admiringly, and lauded the
spectacle.
The turbot was next in estimation; but as, occasionally, offending
slaves were flung into the turbot preserves for the fish to feed upon,
some gastronomists have affected to be horror-stricken at the idea of
eating a _turbot à la Romaine_; quite forgetting that so many of our
sea-fish, in their own domain, feed largely on the human bodies which
accident, or what men call by that name, casts into the deep. Our own
early ancestors in Britain were said to have entirely abstained from
fish. In later days, however, here as in France, the finny tribes were
protected by royal decrees; and certain fish were named--the sturgeon
was one--as to be caught for the royal table alone. In the same days
porpoises and seals were devoured by the commonalty, and the latter
knew not the art of the cooks of Louis XIV., who could so dress fish as
to give it the taste of any flesh they pleased to fix on as an object
of imitation. By this means, the King in Lent, while he obeyed the
church, enjoyed the gratification of feeling as though he were cheating
Heaven,--and with impunity, too!
The most curious fish of which I have ever read, were those of a lake
attached to a Burgundian convent, and which were always of the same
number as the monks. If one of these sickened and died, the same
circumstance occurred with the fish; and if a new brother appeared in
the refectory, there was also sure to be found a new denizen in the
pond. These fish were, of course, piously inclined; but they did not
come up, in that respect, to the parrot of Cardinal Ascanius, which
could not only repeat the Creed, but could maintain a thesis! I believe
that the Burgundian fish were principally perch; and they _are_ an
eccentric fish. Arthur Young says, that “about the year 1760, perch
first appeared in all the lakes of Ireland and in the Shannon at the
same time.”
As a singularity with respect to the cooking of fish, I may mention
that observed by the Romans with the _sepia_, or “cuttle-fish.” They
invariably took out the eyes before boiling it. It is in allusion to
this custom that Trachalion says, in the _Rudens_,--
“_Age nunc jam,
Jube oculos elidere, itidem ut sepiis faciunt coqui._”
I think I have read somewhere, that the cuttle-fish was esteemed a
fitting sacrifice to the gods; but I do not know if pious people had
their pet _sepiæ_, as they had their pet lambs and pigs, (“_Sunt domi
agni et porci sacres_,” says the orthodox husband in the _Rudens_,)
reared for the purpose of being offered at the altars.
The sturgeon is at this day, in China, reserved for the imperial
table. At those of Greece it was introduced by sound of trumpet, and
it was almost as esteemed a subject at those of Rome, until Vespasian
condescended not to care for it, and to bring other fish into fashion.
“It is _caviare_ to the general,” is a proverb which Shakspeare has
popularized. The _caviare_ is the roe of the sturgeon dried; that of
the larger sturgeon, which produces hundredweights of eggs, and tons
of oil, is _caviare_ for the general, and is not worth eating. The
delicate white _caviare_ is the produce of the smaller sturgeon, and it
is highly esteemed by gastronomists. It forms a great portion of the
food taken by the Greeks during their long Lent.
We have heard of an American who tried to tame an oyster. The Romans
were more successful with their sea-eels, which would come when called,
and feed from the hands of men, who occasionally fattened them upon
live slaves. Vedius Pollio would have grown sick and disgusted, if he
had been asked to eat one of these slaves; but he was particularly fond
of the fish that had been fed upon such fare; and so he only ate his
slaves at second-hand; for _their_ flesh was declared by him to have
greatly improved the taste of the eel. Epicures with less ferocious
appetites preferred the fish that had been fattened upon veal steeped
in blood. Vitellius put the fish altogether out of fashion by only
eating the roes, which were procured for him at a great expense; and
Heliogabalus caused even the roes to cease to be modish, by forcing
them upon the Mediterranean peasants, who got as sick of their
repasts as English servants in the Scottish Highlands grow weary of
the everlasting sameness of their dinners consisting of venison and
salmon. The Egyptians placed the sea-eel in their Pantheon; and even
the unorthodox cannot deny that he was as good a deity as any to be
found there; and we are told that among the Sybarites, the fishers
and vendors of the eel were exempt from taxation! The origin of these
honours is, however, unknown. Nearly as great were offered, even in
Rome, to the fish known as the sea-wolf, which abounded in the most
filthy parts of the Tiber, and which some epicures distinguished by
the appellation of “child of the gods.” The Romans paid high prices
for it, as they did for the regicide lamprey,--a fish which killed our
first Henry, and which Italian cooks used to kill, as the murderers did
maudlin Clarence, in his Malmsey butt, by plunging the victim, decked
for the sacrifice with a nutmeg in his mouth, and a clove in either
gill, into a pan of Candian wine; after which, covered with almonds,
bread crumbs, and spices, he was exposed to a slow fire, and then to
the jaws that impatiently awaited him. It was once as popular as the
tunny,--a fish, by the way, which once so enriched the city of Sinope,
that the coin minted there bore the figure of the fish. Where they are
found at all, it is generally in shoals; but these are never to the
extent which Pliny speaks of, when he says that they so obstructed
the fleet of Alexander, that the pilots of the Macedonian madman were
compelled to shape a different course; and though they are to be found
in something like abundance in the Mediterranean, yet tourists who
resort thither must not expect to see realized the gay picture of
Vernet. It does not appear, however, that the tunny was ever in such
favour at ancient tables as the eel, which was greedily eaten where
it was not devoutly worshipped, or where medical ordinances had not
been directed against it, as unfavourable to the weak of digestion,
and perilous to those affected by pulmonary diseases. The pike, emblem
of fecundity and example of lengthened years, was still less popular.
The carp, which even surpasses the pike in fecundity, and is a long
liver to boot, was, on the other hand, an especial favourite, but it
was served up with sauces that would certainly not tempt a modern
gastronomist to eat a fish which is seldom worth eating, and which is
almost defiant of digestion. Carp, reduced to a pulp, and served up
with sows’ paps, and yolk of egg, must have been as nasty as gold fish
with carrots and myrtle leaves,--the delight of the Roman loungers at
their “Blackwall,” on the Tiber. So the Greeks spoiled good cod by
eating it with grated cheese and vinegar; and the Romans made perch
more indigestible than it was before, by swallowing Damascus plums
with it. But the ancients had strangely accommodating stomachs; a
sauce of honey could induce them to eat cuttle-fish. Garlic and cheese
made the swordfish delicacies; the rhombus floated into Greek stomachs
on a sauce of wine and brine; the ladies of Rome ate onions with the
muzil, and pine-nuts with the pilchard. The more refined Greeks, on
the other hand, would not touch the pilchard; and the same difference
of taste existed with regard to the loach; while, again, both Rome
and Greece united in admiration of the gudgeon. To neither of these
countries was the herring known. The Scots found the fish, and the
Dutch bought, pickled, and sold, or ate them; and it is said that
Charles V., in 1536, ate a herring upon the tomb of Beuckels, the first
salter of that fish, and therewith friend of the poor, and enricher of
the State. The profit realized by Holland exceeded two millions and
a half sterling, annually. But neither Greece nor Rome felt the want
of the herring while there was an abundant supply of the favourite
oyster. This shell-fish was easily procured by the Greeks from Pelorus,
Abydos, and Polarea; by the Romans, from Brindés, the Lake of Lucrinus,
Armorica, and even from Britain. The Romans were hardly worthy of the
delicacy, seeing that they abused it by mincing oysters, mussels, and
sea hedgehogs together, stewed the whole with pine-almonds and hot
condiments, and devoured the mixture scalding! Others, however, ate
them raw, when they were opened at table by a slave; and the larger the
fish, the more the Roman epicures liked them. They were not only eaten
before a feast to stimulate the appetite, but during a banquet, when
the appetite began to be palled. They excited to fresh exertion, and it
was a cleaner custom (perhaps) than that imperial one of exonerating
the stomach by tickling the throat with a peacock’s feather. The
Bourdeaux oyster was the favourite fish of most of the Emperors. It is
very inferior to the Whitstable oyster, however, and also to that which
goes by the name of “Colchester,” and which is not caught there. The
passion for the savoury fish is well illustrated in the epitaph which
says,--
“Tom ----
Lies buried in these cloisters;
If, at the last trump,
He does not quickly jump,
Only cry ‘_Oysters_!’”
If the Emperors affected oysters, the gods themselves patronized
mussels, a dish of which was contributed by Jupiter to the wedding
banquet of Hebe. The mythological sanction has, however, failed to
render the mussel popular, and for good reasons. It is often extremely
poisonous, and in certain conditions of the stomach they who eat
mussels may reckon upon being attacked by violent cutaneous disorders,
painfully participated in by the oppressed intestines.
It was otherwise with the tortoise, the blood of which was reckoned
good in cases of ophthalmia, and the flesh of which was eagerly
devoured. The natural history of the products of those early times
seems to have been written by philosophers with very poetical
imaginations. We read of shells of tortoises being converted into roofs
of cottages, as we are told by Pliny of crawfish measuring four cubits
in length. It was then that men ate lobsters _au naturel_, and crabs
converted into sausages. But this latter dish was a more dainty one
than that afforded by the frog,--the abhorrence of early gastronomists,
but the delight of many French and German epicures, who first find
delight in angling for these unclean beasts with a bait of yellow soap,
and then swallowing, with delight more intense, the hind-quarters of
the animal they have caught. But if the moderns swallow frogs, the
ancients ate the polypus,--and which were the nastiest even I could not
tell! The Romans were especially fond of fish; and some “fast” epicures
among them not only had preserve ponds of fish on the roofs of their
houses, but little rivulets stocked therewith around the dinner-table,
whence the guests selected their fish, and delivered them to be cooked.
It was once thought that the prawn, or shrimp, was somehow necessary to
the production of soles, acting, it was believed, as a sort of nurse,
or foster-parent, to the spawn. But this I suppose to be about as true
as that soles always swim in pairs, with three-pennyworth of shrimps
behind them, ready for sauce.
I remember two anecdotes connected with fish at table, which a guest
may retail when he is next at that period of the repast. Talleyrand
was dining, in the year 1805, with the Minister of Finance, who did
the honours of his house in the very best style. A very fine carp was
on the table opposite to Talleyrand, but the fish was already cold.
“That is a magnificent carp,” said the financier: “how do you like it?
It came from my estate of Vir-sur-Aisne.” “Did it?” said Talleyrand,
“but why did you not have it cooked _here_?” This reply was not as
fatal to the utterer of it, as a remark once made by Poodle Byng at
Belvoir Castle. “Ah, ah!” he exclaimed, as he saw the fish uncovered at
the Duke of Rutland’s board, “my old friend Haddock! I have not seen a
haddock, at a gentleman’s table, since I was a boy.” The implication
shut the gates of Belvoir on the unlucky Poodle from that day forward.
He was never again the Duke’s guest.
Some French writers have asserted, after tracing the “vestiges of
creation” according to a fashion of their own, that man originally
sprang from the ocean; and that his present condition is one of
development, the consequence of life ashore, and exposure to
atmospheric air! According to this theory, I suppose, Venus Anadyomene
was the Eve of our fishy generation, and mermaids show the transition
state, when our ancestors were of both land and sea, and yet properly
of neither!
As judges of fish, the moderns are inferior to the ancients. A Greek
or Roman epicure could, at first sight, tell in what waters the fish
before him had been caught. This sort of wisdom is, however, not
uncommon to oyster-eaters, who swallow so greedily what contains
little nourishment, but what may be easily digested. It was not
unusual, some years ago, in France, for a gourmand to prepare for
dinner by swallowing a gross, or a dozen dozen, of oysters! Twelve of
them, including the liquor, will weigh four ounces; and the gross,
four pounds (Troy)!--a pretty amount of ballast whereupon to take in
freight. The skin of such a feeder had need be in a good condition; but
so, indeed, ought that of every one who cares for his digestion. When
we remember that a person in health, who takes eight pounds of aliment
during twenty-four hours of his wakefulness, discharges five of the
eight pounds solely through the pores by perspiration, it will at once
be seen that to hold the skin clean, and keep the pores unobstructed,
is of first-rate necessity for the sake of digestion and comfort.
There are sea-board populations who live almost exclusively on fish.
They feed their domestic animals upon it, and with it manure their
ground; so that the pork they may occasionally indulge in, acquires
a fish-like flavour, and their bread is but a consequence of the
plentiful rottenness of sprats. Such populations are usually lean and
sallow, but they are strong-muscled and active-limbed; and altogether
they afford good testimony in favour of the efficacy of a fish diet,
when no better is to be had. As a diet, fish is only so far stimulating
that it augments the lymph rather than renews the blood. It is a puzzle
to many gastronomic philosophers that fish was so constant a diet of
the monkish orders. Its heating quality hardly suited men who were
required to be ever coolly contemplative. But this matter I leave to
the philosophers to determine. One of them,--that is, a gastronomic
philosopher,--M. Fayot, says, that “if you would have a dinner composed
altogether of fish,” the meal should consist of “a turbot, a large
salmon done in a _court-bouillon_, flanked with aromatic herbs, and
covered with a fresh winding-sheet of delicate seasoning. In such
dinners, sea-fish have, undoubtedly, the first rank; and among them
the Cherbourg lobster, the shrimp of Honfleur, the cray-fish of the
Seine, and the smelts of that river’s mouth, and numerous fresh-water
fish mingle agreeably. Salmon and turbot should be done briskly;
drink afterwards a glass of those old wines which give a digestive
action to the stomach.” With M. Fayot, the turbot is “the king of
fish, especially in Lent, as it is then of most majestic size. You may
serve up salmon with as much ornament as you will, but a turbot asks
for nothing but aristocratic simplicity. On the day after he makes
his first appearance, it is quite another affair. It may be then
disguised; and the best manner of effecting this is, to dress him _à
la Béchamel_,--a preparation thus called from the Marquis de Béchamel,
who, in the reign of Louis XIV., for ever immortalized himself by this
one _ragoût_.”
The _Almanach des Gourmands_ speaks of a Lorraine carp which was fed on
bread and wine, and which was twice sent to the Paris market, in the
care of a courier who travelled by the mail. It returned to its native
waters in default of a purchaser willing to give thirty _louis-d’ors_
for the monstrous delicacy. This was when fish dinners were much in
vogue in Paris. There was then a _table d’hôte_ for a fish repast only,
held at a house profanely called, “The Name of Jesus.” This house
stood in the “Cloître St. Jacques de l’Hôpital,” and every Wednesday
and Friday it was crowded by the Clergy, who dined magnificently on
_maigre_ fare, for about 2_s._ a head. It is of one of these that
Fayot recounts a pleasant story, the locality, however, of which was
the _Rocher de Cancale_. A certain Abbé dined there so copiously off
salmon, that a fit of indigestion was the consequence. Some days
afterwards, when celebrating Mass, the savoury memories of the fish
flocked into his mind; and he was heard to murmur, not the _meâ culpâ_
of the “_Confiteor_,” but, as he quietly beat his breast, “Ah! that
capital salmon! that capital salmon!”