The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866. VariousЧитать онлайн книгу.

      "But lo, the fanatic in eating appears! Miserably hot with gluttonous debauchery. He has feasted upon a thousand deaths! Belshazzar's court fed on fish of every type, birds of every flight, brutes of every clime, and added thereto each finer luxury known in the catalogue of the temperate Epicurus....

      "Behold the sceptics. A shivering group of acid ghouls at their scanty board.... Bread, milk, bran, turnips, onions, potatoes, apples, yield so much starch, so much sugar, so much nitrogen, so much nutriment! Enough! to live is the end of eating, not to be pleased and made better with objects, odors, flavors. Therefore welcome a few articles of food in violation of every fine sensibility. Stuff in and masticate the crudest forms of eatables,—bad-cooking, bad-looking, bad-smelling, bad-tasting, and worse-feeling,—down with them hastily,—and then, between your headaches and gastric spasms, pride yourself upon virtues and temperance not possessed by any student in the gastronomic school of Epicurus! Let it be perpetually remembered to the credit of this apostle of alimentation and vitativeness with temperance, that, in his religious system, eating was a 'sacramental' process, and not a physical indulgence merely, as the ignorant allege."

      Bravo for the seer of Poughkeepsie! In the above extracts, quoted from his "Thinker," he has vindicated the much maligned Epicurus better than his disciples Lucretius and Gassendi have done, and by some mysterious process (he calls it psychometry) he seems to know more of the old Athenian, and to have a more intimate knowledge of his doctrines, than can be found in Brucker or Ritter.

      When it is considered how our mental states may be modified by what we eat and drink, the importance of good ingesta, both fluid and solid, becomes apparent. Among the good things which attached Charles Lamb to this present life was his love of the delicious juices of meats and fishes.

      But these things are preliminary, although not impertinent to the main subject, which is Quincy Market. After having perambulated the principal markets of the other leading American cities, I must pronounce it facile princeps among New-World markets. A walk through it is equal to a dose of dandelion syrup in the way of exciting an appetite for one's dinner. Such a walk is tonic and medicinal, and should be prescribed to dyspeptic patients. To the hungry, penniless man such a walk is like the torture administered to the old Phrygian who blabbed to mortals the secrets of the celestial banquets. Autumn is the season in which to indulge in a promenade through Quincy Market, after the leaf has been nipped by the frost and crimson-tinted, when the morning air is cool and bracing. Then the stalls and precincts of the chief Boston market are a goodly spectacle. Athenæus himself, the classic historian of classic gluttons and classic bills of fare, could not but feel a glow at the sight of the good things here displayed, if he were alive. Quincy Market culminates at Thanksgiving time. It then attains to the zenith of good fare.

      Cleanliness and spruceness are the rule among the Quincy Market men and stall-keepers. The matutinal display outside of apples, pears, onions, turnips, beets, carrots, egg-plants, cranberries, squashes, etc., is magnificent in the variety and richness of its hues. What a multitude of orchards, meadows, gardens, and fields have been laid under contribution to furnish this vegetable abundance! And here are their choicest products. The foodful Earth and the arch-chemic Sun, the great agriculturist and life-fountain, have done their best in concocting these Quincy Market culinary vegetables. They wear a healthful, resplendent look. Inside, what a goodly vista stretches away of fish, flesh, and fowl! From these white stalls the Tempter could have furnished forth the banquet the Miltonic description of which has been quoted.

      Here is a stall of ripe, juicy mutton, perhaps from the county of St. Lawrence, in Northeastern New York. This is the most healthful and easily digested of all meats. Its juiciness and nutritiousness are visible in the trumpeter-like cheeks of the well-fed John Bull. The domestic Anglo-Saxon is a mutton-eater. Let his offshoots here and elsewhere follow suit. There is no such timber to repair the waste of the human frame. It is a fuel easily combustible in the visceral grate of the stomach. The mutton-eater is eupeptic. His dreams are airy and lightsome. Somnus descends smiling to his nocturnal pillow, and not clad in the portentous panoply of indigestion, which rivals a guilty conscience in its night visions. The mutton department of Quincy Market is all that it should be.

      Next we come upon "fowl of game," wild ducks, pigeons, etc.—What has become of those shoals of pigeons, those herrings of the air, which used in the gloom and glory of a breezy autumnal day to darken the sun in their flight, like the discharge of the Xerxean arrows at Thermopylæ? The eye sweeps the autumnal sky in vain now for any such winged phenomenon, at least here in New England. The days of the bough-house and pigeon-stand strewn with barley seem to have gone by. Swift of flight and shapely in body is the North American wild pigeon, running upon the air fleeter than Anacreon's dove. He can lay any latitude under contribution in a few hours, flying incredible distances during the process of digestion. He is an ornament to the air, and the pot also.—Here might be a descendant of Bryant's waterfowl; but its journeyings along the pathless coast of the upper atmosphere are at an end.

      "All flesh is not the same flesh; but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds." The matter composing the vegetables and the lower animals is promoted, as it were, by being eaten by man and incorporated into his body, which is a breathing house not made with hands built over the boundary-line of two worlds, the sensible and noumenal. "The human body is the highest chemical laboratory which matter can reach. In that body the highest qualities and richest emoluments are imparted to it, and it is indorsed with a divine superscription." It there becomes part and parcel of the eye, the organ of light and the throne of expression,—of the blood, which is so eloquent in cheek and brow,—of the nerves, the telegraph-wires of the soul,—of the persuasive tongue,—of the tear-drop, the dew of emotion, which only the human eye can shed,—of the glossy tresses of beauty, the nets of love.

      The provision markets of a community are a good index of the grade of its civilization. Tell me what a nation eats, what is its diet, and I will tell you what is its literature, its religious belief, and so forth. Solid, practical John Bull is a mutton, beef, and pudding eater. He drinks strong ale or beer, and thinks beer. He drives fat oxen, and is himself fat. He is no idealist in philosophy. He hates generalization and abstract thought. He is for the real and concrete. Plain, unadorned Protestantism is most to the taste of the middle classes of Great Britain. Music, sculpture, and painting add not their charms to the Englishman's dull and respectable devotions. Cross the Channel and behold his whilom hereditary foeman, but now firm ally, the Frenchman! He is a dainty feeder and the most accomplished of cooks. He etherealizes ordinary fish, flesh, and fowl by his exquisite cuisine. He educates the palate to a daintiness whereof the gross-feeding John Bull never dreamed. He extracts the finest flavors and quintessential principles from flesh and vegetables. He drinks light and sparkling wines, the vintage of Champagne and Burgundy. Accordingly the Frenchman is lightsome and buoyant. He is a great theorist and classifier. He adheres to the ornate worship of the Mother Church when religiously disposed. His literature is perspicuous and clear. He is an admirable doctrinaire and generalizer,—witness Guizot and Montesquieu. He puts philosophy and science into a readable, comprehensible shape. The Teutonic diet of sauer-kraut, sausages, cheese, ham, etc., is indigestible, giving rise to a vaporous, cloudy cerebral state. German philosophy and mysticism are its natural outcome.

      Baked beans, pumpkin pie, apple-sauce, onions, codfish, and Medford rum,—these were the staple items of the primitive New England larder; and they were an appropriate diet whereon to nourish the caucus-loving, inventive, acute, methodically fanatical Yankee. The bean, the most venerable and nutritious of lentils, was anciently used as a ballot or vote. Hence it symbolized in the old Greek democracies politics and a public career. Hence Pythagoras and his disciples, though they were vegetable-eaters, eschewed the bean as an article of diet, from its association with politics, demagogism, and ochlocracy. They preferred the life contemplative and the fallentis semita vitæ. Hence their utter detestation of beans, the symbols of noisy gatherings, of demagogues and party strife and every species of political trickery. The primitive Yankee, in view of his destiny as the founder of this caucus-loving nation and American democracy, seems to have been providentially guided in selecting beans for his most characteristic article of diet.

      But to move on through the market. The butter and cheese stalls have their special attractions. The butyraceous gold