NEW MEATS.
COOKERY is a great art, but it gives us only new flavours, and people want a new meat. The poor have a sauce which makes all food pleasant; but the middle class would welcome a change from the three sorts of meat which, with common poultry, form the staple of their flesh diet, while even the rich, who have the advantage of many sorts of game, and one or two kinds of scarce flesh, sigh for some food which shall be at once novel and procurable all the year round. Human skill in this matter has limits, for though cultivation, as we shall argue presently, might change the appearance and taste of many kinds of edible flesh, a new meat requires a creative power. Real "hybridization"—to use the barbarous word employed in the report of the Acclimatization Society—is usually believed to be an impossibility. Man cannot, for example, cross sheep with any other animals, and so produce a new mutton, for the product in the most favourable cases is only a " mule." Even the alliance of separate varie- ties is difficult; for the cross breed tends always towards the stock best adapted to climate and other unchangeable necessities, i.e. to the stock now most common, and occasionally like over-cultivated fruit
requires regrafting on the original stem. The only expedients we can adopt are to assemble all known varieties, and try which of them will live, and cultivate those we have. A society, chiefly composed of men of the highest rank, and practical breeders, led partly by phi- lanthropy and partly, we suspect, by a 'blase' hope of securing a new pleasure, are trying experiments in the former direction. It is a most useful end which they seek, but their means, as we said, are limited. There are scarce kinds of flesh well known, and entirely ap- proved by epicures, but which cannot be made popularly available. Bears' feet are good and so are bears' hams, but a colony of bears might be inconvenient on police grounds, and would certainly be very ex- pensive. Venison is a luxury to educated palates—uneducated palates thinking it very inferior to good mutton, i.e. mutton which eats "short," and is not like most mutton now-a-days overloaded with fat —but deer take up too much room. An animal requiring much exercise can never be cheap in England. Viscount Powerscourt has succeeded in breeding a cross between the sambur and red deer, has imported two Japanese deer, and possesses two Wapiti stags and two hinds in fine condition. That is very creditable to Lord Powerscourt, who in these experiments is doing his best to justify the existence of private" parks ; but a pound of sambur will never be cheap, nor a leg of wapiti in common demand in the market. Horseflesh is edible, and eaten in Austria; but even if horses were educated for the table the flesh would always be inferior to beef, and generally much more costly. The eland has been tried and pronounced good, and it will live in England; but we strongly suspect it requires either room, which involves outlay, or very expensive food. It may become, under the fostering care of the Society—who say they can buy young elands at 51.. apiece, but do not mention the 151. it will cost to bring them home—like venison, an occasional article of diet. A haunch of eland will always, however, we fear, justify a dinner in its honour, or, perhaps, obtain the distinction of being a mark of caste. More might be done with the gnus, which, living in herds, can be kept within reasonable space, and are, when fat, capital eating, and still more with lesser animals ; but we have little hope of meat at once really new, and adapted to general consumption. It is to the very small tribe of domestic animals that we must look, and their cultiva- tion and manufacture. The Society have tried the cow, crossing it with the eland, and failed ; and though the Zoological Society are more sanguine, they seeinsto have few reasons in their favour. They may get cow venison for aught we know, but if they do, a good many theories supposed to be scientific will have to be thrown to the winds. Have they tried to import the buffalo, which, if it can live in Cash- mere, can live here, and the flesh of which is at least equal to beef ; or the Brahminee bull, whose hump is better eating than any beef Englishmen ever saw? There seem to be chances there ; and there is a little bull on the Himalayas which, if we mistake not, will fatten almost as fast as the pig, which it in shape somewhat resembles. The new sheep, the " Chinese," seem exceedingly promising. Their specialty, fruitful breeding, tends to make mutton cheap, and four- teen specimens—ten ewes and four rams—have arrived in excellent condition. The Society think the "extensive establishment" of this sheep may be an accomplished fact in twelve months, and if so they will have furnished an unanswerable raison d'etre to all inquirers. Why, however, do they so quietly shirk the goat ? It will live any- where in England, and though its flesh—we speak of the short-legged goat of India and China—is exceedingly nasty, still it has never been fairly tried. Mutton would be nasty if the sheep ran about where they liked, bred as they chose, and were kept in a permanent state of semi-starvation. Kid's flesh is better than lamb, and a goat fattened deliberately for the table is, we fancy, meat yet to be tried. Then there is pork. Englishmen who can afford better food are banishing pork except when cured; but it is the cheapest of meats. Is it quite beyond the hope of improvement ? We have fattened our pigs—till they are about as eatable as soap—and lengthened our pigs, and made them tall, and made them short, and done most things with them except improving their flavour. Boars' flesh—we have eaten the head, and accept the verdict of accomplished "pig-stickers" on the remainder—is a very different thing, something edible when one is not savagely hungry. The wild boar of Southern Asia or Hungary might be crossed with our own breed to its manifest improvement in size, weight of lean, and flavour.
In the matter of fish and birds the Society has effected but little that can be pronounced very promising. It is creditable, of course, to Lord Craven to have acclimatized and "killed for the table"— that is the climax obviously—Kallagee pheasants from the Himalaya, bat as this bird "precisely resembles in colour and flavour" the flesh of the common pheasant, one does not, perhaps, feel much disposed to enthusiasm. Nor do we expect much from prairie grouse, though they are "healthful in form and feather," or the Chinese sand grouse, tried at Frogmore, or the Canadian grouse, eggs from which, sent over by Captain Hardy, were all addled. The new duck—a cross between the pintail and duck—promises better; it may be killed, says Mr. Grantley F. Berkeley, all the year round, without being found hard, as old ducks so commonly are. That species, if the cross can be kept np, may be exceedingly valuable, and Mr. Berkeley's success in breeding it may well outweigh, as well as outlast, his arguments in favour of the South. Of fish there is nothing to say, except that the only valuable experiment, an effort to bring over Murray cod, for a new pond fish, has failed through the carelessness of the officers entrusted with its conveyance. The experiment will be repeated, but the English want is not so much new fish as greater plenty of the very fair fish we have, and some instruction in an art forgotten since we turned Protestants—pisci- culture in ponds.
New vegetables are even more important than new meats, but we cannot congratulate the Society on their agricultural success. Unless they can change the Chinese yam, they are wasting their time over it, for it will never be generally eaten. It exhausts the land very much, and is to our taste as nasty as vegetable well can be, being, when dry, very like mashed potatoes and sugar, and when moist, a rotten jargonelle pear. It will no more be eaten than the parsnip, which educated palates, despite their hunger for variety, have given up to the beasts. The plant wanted is the kind of lentil which grows over most parts of Asia, producing the flour which Hindoos call dal, and English quacks Itevalents Arabica, which ought to be procurable at the price of common flour, and which is perhaps the most fattening food consumed by man. Indian corn, if people could be persuaded to cook it properly, would be twice as valuable. As cooked in England it is disagreeable, resembling what we fancy boiled peasecods might be, but properly treated it is a dainty, with a peculiar effect in allay- ing hunger. It should be slightly boiled, and then fried, and eaten hot and brown with butter, when each separate grain is as sweet as a filbert, to which it approximates in flavour. It can be procured in almost any quantity, and keeps well, and would, once popularized, be a real addition to the table of every class. Fruits the Society have not touched, and perhaps wisely. There are few dainties to be had. It has fallen to the lot of the writer to taste most fruits produced in the world, but he has never found, except in the mangosteen, an absolutely new flavour. The taste of that fruit indeed strikes the inexperienced eater like a revelation, revealing as it were not so much a new flavour as an entire ranks of new capacities for enjoyment ex- isting in the human palate. There is nothing like it, but it cannot, we fear, be acclimatized, hundreds of pounds having been already spent in the effort. It would grow, we doubt not, in Sicily, and keeps well for about three weeks, but England is too cold and too changeable. The real line of improvement in this direction is to discover and pro- pagate hardy varieties of well-known species. We want a hardier peach, and fancy they have one near Cincinnati, hardier greengages—they take as much care now as so many children—and, above all, a hardy, east-wind-enduring grape. This we ought certainly to obtain either from Southern Russia, Hungary, or, best chance of all, from Cabool. It is incalculable what a grape like the last, a thick-skinned, fat, luscious fellow, growing almost wild, might do to increase the market value of English gardens. We do not in this country really cultivate the grape. Peers on the council of the Acclimatization Society who see grapes quoted a shilling a pound, will question the statement, but grapes at that price are as unattainable by the people as hothouse pines. There is no earthly reason why, if we could get a grape as hardy as the white currant, they should not be sold in England at a shilling a stone, to the despair of sellers of quack medicines, and the infinite comfort of philanthropists who know that so long as a man has bread and grapes to his fill he has no reasonable ground of discon- tent with his food. There is a funny prejudice against this fruit current among the lower middle class, derived, we imagine, from its costli- ness. People who will eat any quantity of trash, half-ripe gooseberries, pears just beginning to rot, and vinegary currants, are afraid of grapes, and think eating a whole bunch quite an at of heroism. The fact is that grapes cure the disorders they are supposed to produce, and that when eaten by pounds at a meal they almost ensure health. Whole regiments at the Cape with dysentery breaking out among them have been cured by being turned loose among the vines, with leave to eat till nature rejected one of the very few things which, like bread, the potato, and the banana, never weary the palate.
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