The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866. VariousЧитать онлайн книгу.
displayed in these stalls looks as though it was precipitated from milk squeezed from Channel Island cows, those fawn-colored, fairest of dairy animals. In its present shape it is the herbage of a thousand clover-blooming meads and dewy hill-pastures in old Berkshire, in Vermont and Northern New York, transformed by the housewife's churn into edible gold. Not only butter and cheese are grass or of gramineous origin, but all flesh is grass,—a physiological fact enunciated by Holy Writ and strictly true.
Porcine flesh is too abundant here. How the New-Englander, whose Puritan forefathers were almost Jews, and hardly got beyond the Old Testament in their Scriptural studies, has come to make pork so capital an article in his diet, is a mystery. Small-boned swine of the Chinese breed, which are kept in the temple sties of the Josses, and which are capable of an obeseness in which all form and feature are swallowed up and lost in fat, seem to be plenty in Quincy Market. They are hooked upright upon their haunches, in a sitting posture, against the posts of the stall. How many pots of Sabbath morning beans one of these porkers will lubricate!
Beef tongues are abundant here, and eloquent of good living. The mighty hind and fore quarters and ribs of the ox,
"With their red and yellow,
Lean and tallow,"
appeal to the good-liver on all sides. They seem to be the staple flesh of the stalls.
But let us move on to the stalls frequented by the ichthyophagi. Homer calls the sea the barren, the harvestless! Our Cape Ann fishermen do not find it so.
"The sounds and seas, with all their finny droves,
That to the Moon in wavering morrice move,"
are as foodful as the most fertile parts of terra firma. Here lie the blue, delicate mackerel in heaps, and piles of white perch from the South Shore, cod, haddock, eels, lobsters, huge segments of swordfish, and the flesh of various other voiceless tenants of the deep, both finned and shell-clad. The codfish, the symbol of Puritan aristocracy, as the grasshopper was of the ancient Athenians, seems to predominate. Our frutti di mare, in the shape of oysters, clams, and other mollusks, are the delight of all true gastronomers. What vegetable, or land animal, is so nutritious? Here are some silvery shad from the Penobscot, or Kennebec, or Merrimac, or Connecticut. The dams of our great manufacturing corporations are sadly interfering with the annual movements of these luscious and beautiful fish. Lake Winnipiseogee no longer receives these ocean visitors into its clear, mountain-mirroring waters. The greedy pike is also here, from inland pond and lake, and the beautiful trout from the quick mountain brook, "with his waved coat dropped with gold." Who eats the trout partakes of pure diet. He loves the silver-sanded stream, and silent pools, and eddies of limpid water. In fact, all fish, from sea or shore, freshet or purling brook, of shell or fin, are here, on clean marble slabs, fresh and hard. Ours is the latitude of the fish-eater. The British marine provinces, north of us, and Norway in the Old World, are his paradise.
Man is a universal eater.
"He cannot spare water or wine,
Tobacco-leaf, or poppy, or rose,
From the earth-poles to the line,
All between that works and grows.
* * * * * *
Give him agates for his meat;
Give him cantharids to eat;
From air and ocean bring him foods,
From all zones and altitudes;—
From all natures sharp and slimy,
Salt and basalt, wild and tame;
Tree and lichen, ape, sea-lion,
Bird and reptile, be his game."
Quincy Market sticks to the cloven hoof, I am happy to say, notwithstanding the favorable verdict of the French savans on the flavor and nutritious properties of horse-flesh. The femurs and tibias of frogs are not visible here. At this point I will quote in extenso from Wilkinson's chapter on Assimilation and its Organs.
"In this late age, the human home has one universal season and one universal climate. The produce of every zone and month is for the board where toil is compensated and industry refreshed. For man alone, the universal animal, can wield the powers of fire, the universal element, whereby seasons, latitudes, and altitudes are levelled into one genial temperature. Man alone, that is to say, the social man alone, can want and duly conceive and invent that which is digestion going forth into nature as a creative art, namely, cookery, which by recondite processes of division and combination,—by cunning varieties of shape,—by the insinuation of subtle flavors,—by tincturings with precious spice, as with vegetable flames,—by fluids extracted, and added again, absorbed, dissolving, and surrounding,—by the discovery and cementing of new amities between different substances, provinces, and kingdoms of nature,—by the old truth of wine and the reasonable order of service,—in short, by the superior unity which it produces in the eatable world,—also by a new birth of feelings, properly termed convivial, which run between food and friendship, and make eating festive,—all through the conjunction of our Promethean with our culinary fire raises up new powers and species of food to the human frame, and indeed performs by machinery a part of the work of assimilation, enriching the sense of taste with a world of profound objects, and making it the refined participator, percipient, and stimulus of the most exquisite operations of digestion. Man, then, as the universal eater, enters from his own faculties into the natural viands, and gives them a social form, and thereby a thousand new aromas, answering to as many possible tastes in his wonderful constitution, and therefore his food is as different from that of animals in quality as it is plainly different in quantity and resource. How wise should not reason become, in order to our making a wise use of so vast an apparatus of nutrition!…
"There is nothing more general in life than the digestive apparatus, because matter is the largest, if not the greatest, fact in the material universe. Every creature which is here must be made of something, and be maintained by something, or must be landlord of itself.... The planetary dinner-table has its various latitudes and longitudes, and plant and animal and mineral and wine are grown around it, and set upon it, according to the map of taste in the spherical appetite of our race.... Hunger is the child of cold and night, and comes upwards from the all-swallowing ground; but thirst descends from above, and is born of the solar rays.... Hunger and thirst are strong terms, and the things themselves are too feverish provocations for civilized man. They are incompatible with the sense of taste in its epicureanism, and their gratification is of a very bodily order. The savage man, like a boa-constrictor, would swallow his animals whole, if his gullet would let him. This is to cheat the taste with unmanageable objects, as though we should give an estate to a child. On the other hand, civilization, house-building, warm apartments and kitchen fires, well-stored larders, and especially exemption from rude toil, abolish these extreme caricatures; and keeping appetite down to a middling level by the rote of meals, and thus taking away the incentives to ravenous haste, they allow the mind to tutor and variegate the tongue, and to substitute the harmonies and melodies of deliberate gustation for such unseemly bolting. Under this direction, hunger becomes polite; a long-drawn, many-colored taste; the tongue, like a skilful instrument, holds its notes; and thirst, redeemed from drowning, rises from the throat to the tongue and lips, and, full of discrimination, becomes the gladdening love of all delicious flavors.... In the stomach, judging by what there is done, what a scene we are about to enter! What a palatial kitchen and more than monasterial refectory! The sipping of aromatic nectar, the brief and elegant repast of that Apicius, the tongue, are supplanted at this lower board by eating and drinking in downright earnest. What a variety of solvents, sauces, and condiments, both springing up at call from the blood, and raining down from the mouth into the natural patines of the meats! What a quenching of desires, what an end and goal of the world is here! No wonder; for the stomach sits for four or five assiduous hours at the same meal that the dainty tongue will despatch in a twentieth portion of the time. For the stomach is bound to supply the extended body, while the tongue wafts only fairy gifts to the close and spiritual brain."
So far Wilkinson, the Milton of physiologists.
But lest these lucubrations should seem