RECIPES FOR MAKING GOUT.* TRADITION relates that the late Duke
of Beaufort, in the days when as "Dandy Worcester" he led the fashion of London, consulted Sir Henry Halford as to the best means of warding off the gout. "Above all things avoid side dishes," replied the great physician ; "side dishes are poison." I dare say yours are, Doctor," replied Lord Worcester, with the agreeable frankness of his age and station, and I should never dream of eating them ; but mine are a very different story." Rightly indignant at this "budge doctor of the stoic fur," the lordly patient should have sent for Dr. A. Hunter, F.R.S., who wrote the delectable tractate Culina, and had learned his dietetics in a more liberal school. Lord Beaconsfield, who had bestowed some of his ingenious research on the eating habits of our grand- fathers, has concocted, in an early chapter of Venetia, a bill-of- fare which superficial critics have often regarded as a mere exercise of gastronomical imagination. Whosoever peruses the pages of Dr. Hunter will find minute and practical instructions for the preparation of a variety of dishes, to the full as elaborate and as astonishing as the bombarded veal and the pompetone of larks which Lady Annabel Herbert provided for the enter- tainment of good Dr. Masham.
A feeling of friendly confidence is engendered by the very dedication of the book,—" To those Gentlemen who freely give two Guineas for a Turtle Dinner at the Tavern, when they might have a more wholesome one at Home for ten Shillings." We feel that we are listening to the voice of a wise friend, who knows that comfort and expense are not synonymous terms, and every page, as we turn it over, assures us that our oracle is no mere theorist, but an experimental philosopher. In his very preface he utters a timely protest against that baffling vagueness of culinary direction which in a later day so per- plexed the irahappy Mrs. Wragge :—" 'Take a piece of butter the size of your thumb.' Yes, but whose thumb?" Had she been able to consult Culina, all her doubts had been resolved. The marked characteristic of this admirable book is that the fine raptures of the epicure are never permitted to blunt the sensitive conscience of the physician. Thus, after a recipe for giblet soup, in which veal stock, lemons, yolk of egg, forced- meat balls, and madeira are superadded to the fundamental ingredients, Dr. Hunter frankly remarks that this dish '• contains a considerable quantity of gout and scurvy." Of a mock-turtle soup, "extracted from the archives oi a wealthy " Callan Faniulutriz Madicint; or, Receipts in Modern Cookery : with a Medical Commentary. By A. Hunter, M.D., F.H.B. L. k E. A New Edition York : Printed by Wilson and Son. High On.segate, for John Murray, 32 Fleet Street, London; Wilson and Son. York ; and A. Constable and Co., Edinburgh. 1310. Peke Six Shillings in Boards. (Entered at Stationers' Hall.) Corporation in the North of England," he remarks,—" A dangerous dish, and will soon bring a man to his crutches."
A second version of the same soup is denounced as "a most diabolical dish, only fit for the Sunday dinner of a rustic who is to work the six following days in a ditch bottom ;" while of a third form of mock-turtle—a veritable hell-broth, made with beef, ham, giblets, lemon-peel, truffles, eggs, orange-juice, force-meat, and madeira—though "much admired at the London Tavern, when Mr. Farley was the principal cook," Dr. Hunter observes, with scarcely exaggerated solemnity,— " There is death in the pot."
To praise jugged hare, made with beef, ham, port wine, and cayenne pepper, would be "an eulogium on the gout." On the other hand, a maigre soup, composed chiefly of anchovies, coss lettuces, and pot-marjoram, is noted as a favourite with "those physicians who have a greater regard for the health of their patients than they have for their fees." It is a little sur- prising to our degenerate organisms to find a compound of stewed lobsters, anchovy, melted butter, and mace recom- mended as a "restorative dish." "Restorative," too, is the epithet attached to a dish of chocolate, milk, lemon-peel, yolk of egg, pulped apples, puff-paste, and spun sugar. It would seem that in cookery, as in architecture, " restoration " is a process not always distinguishable from destruction.
Where compounds of lobster, chocolate, and spun sugar are thus prescribed for indiscriminate use, it is startling to find an innocuous-sounding soup composed entirely of common vegetables and stock denounced as "only proper for those who do not stand in 'fear of gouty shoes and a pair of crutches." "A cheap soup," composed of beef, pease, potatoes, rice, celery, leeks, mint, cabbage, and onions, is recommended for dinner every fourth day, as "a preservative against gout and scurvy," and a fricandeau of veal with sorrel is eulogised as "a corrector of putrescency " It is difficult to believe that an abominable mess in which a loin of mutton is sophisticated with port wine, shalot, parsley, marjoram, pepper, mace, lemon-peel, and currant-jelly, could ever be a satisfactory substitute for venison ; and one's idea of a "neat supper dish" is not com- pletely realised by half-a-pound of mutton, three-quarters of a pound of suet, forty scalded oysters, bread-crumbs, and yolks of eggs, rolled into the shape of sausages, and fried; nor by fillets of veal stewed with cream, butter, eggs, and lemon-juice. From such complicated horrors, it is a relief to turn to the sweet simplicity of stewed pork-steaks, "a very palatable dish for a first course."
There are touches of international interest about a sauce "condescendingly communicated by a Russian Princess;" a way of cooking maccaroni, "supplied direct from the Pope's own kitchen ;" and a partridge soup, "brought over front Barbary by a British officer." It would argue an insensibility were we to ignore the giblet soup, communicated by "a sur- viving friend of the celebrated Chace Price, Esq., who was supposed to keep the best table of his time ;" and a pathetic and tender melancholy lingers round the "cheap fish sauce imparted by a Burgomaster of Amsterdam on his death-bed." But as it appears to consist only of melted butter, yolk of egg, and vinegar, it may, without breach of charity, be presumed that the good man only gave away what neither he nor his descendants could possibly have sold. There is an ecclesias- tical flavour which, like grace before meat, almost sanctifies the viands in a "Duneha of crabs," and an " Eborised wood- cock ;" and we touch the very poetry of cooking in a goose-pie covered with jelly "as transparent as the Topaz."
A perusal of this astonishing volume, and a careful study of what it enjoins, what it forbids, and what it takes for granted, will perhaps give us a clearer notion than we had before of those gastronomical sins of the fathers which are now visited on the third and fourth generations of the gouty and dyspeptic. No wonder that Dr. Hunter, calmly surveying his own delect- able but dangerous handiwork, is moved to exclaim, in language worthy of the great (and gluttonous) lexicographer of Lichfield, —" Cookery has completed the sum of Crapulary Indulgence."
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