UNRECOGNISED DAINTIES.
GUILLEMOTS' eggs have this summer been sold in some of the best game-dealers' shops as a substitute for plovers' eggs, when the season for them was over. The Prince of Wales is credited with the promotion of the last into the front rank of the luxuries of the table, bringing them into line with ortolans and truffles, and rather beyond the place hitherto occupied by native oysters and prawns. There are those who still question the right of plovers' eggs to hold the place they do. But their reputation is established, and to doubt it is to risk the suspicion of an uneducated palate. Meantime, the main drawback to their enjoyment is that few people can have enough of them. In the trial of guillemots' eggs it may be that we are on the verge of a great discovery, for though of the same elegant shape as the eggs of the plover, they are not dearer, and four times as large, the white is of the same semi-transparent, opalescent tint, and, eaten cold in aspic, they have, like the eggs of most sea-fowl, or even of the common duck, a separate and pronounced flavour, on which the opinion of connoisseurs remains to be given, but
very different from that of the common fowl. The guillemots' colonies, though confined to the great cliffs, are so thickly peopled that the supply of eggs, should a real demand for them be created, would be far larger than could be obtained from the plovers' breeding-ground, though the moors of Holland, Denmark, and North Germany are now regularly preserved for their nests.
There are a number of unrecognised dainties, mainly of the smaller kinds, but nearly all owing their merits to natural flavour, which are, or might be, available for English tables, but are overlooked or have been forgotten. At the present moment every restaurant and buffet on the Continent, from Paris to Vienna, is supplied with punnets of the exquisite wild wood strawberries. These are not the little, round wild strawberries of our copses, but a larger variety, cone-shaped, and from half to three-quarters of an inch long. Their flavour is a concentrated essence of strawberry, slightly aromatic, and when deluged with cream they are perhaps the best of all early fruits. They can be grown in any number in market gardens, and being lighter and tougher than the common strawberry. travel well without bruising. They grow equally well in an English garden as on the Continent ; but except as a curiosity they are seldom seen.
Of two of the best among the cheaper fishes, one is never brought inland at all, while the other is for the moment for- gotten. These are the dab and the Thames flounder. Dabs are small oval fiat-fish, seldom growing to more than a foot long, and more commonly about the size of a man's hand. They swarm along almost all the south and east coasts and in every harbour and estuary, forming the main prize of the children who so industriously fish from the wharves and piers. When fresh they have a sea-flavour and firmness of flesh which is not exceeded by any flat-fish except the sole. In France they are regularly sent into the interior from the coast, and are very properly valued at treble the price of plaice or common flounders. We say " common" flounders because in the days when they were found as high up the river as Teddington, and were caught and sold fresh by the owners of the " Peter-boats," a souchet of Thames flounders was a dish of a class high enough to appear in the menus at the Guildhall. The last effort of the flounders to ascend the river carried them as far as Blackwall Point six years ago, where myriads of the fish were taken in a dying condition by the watermen. But there are signs that the flounder will soon reappear both above and below the bridges, and, pending its return, its merits should not be forgotten. The late Mr. Hayward maintained that there were two neglected fresh-water fish, the perch and the carp, which were fit to appear in a dinner for the Pope, the first fried in batter, and the latter cooked in Burgundy. " Pond carp," he adds, " acquire a muddy taste ; to counteract which a learned monk suggests the prudence of giving them for com- panions a few small pike, who nibble at their fins when they are half sunk in the mud, and compel them to take exercise."
Turning from fish to fowl, though there are few of the first or second class which are not well known and appreciated, we would ask why every one seems to have forgotten that besides the four recognised edible wild-ducks—the widgeon, mallard, teal, and pintail—there is a fifth—the pochard- which in January is perhaps better than any except a young mallard in September. The pochard is a medium-sized, chestnut-headed duck, common enough in the poulterers' shops after Christmas, where it sells for the same price as widgeon. But widgeon have then a somewhat rank, fishy flavour, while the pochard, a larger bird, is in the finest condition.
There is a good deal of sound gastronomy of a simple order in established nursery rhymes. What, for instance, could be stated with a clearer sense of conviction than the fact that " cherry pie is very nice, and so is currant wine " (which the latter can be made, if treated not as a wine but as a " sirup," for mixing with soda-water) ; but the assertion that blackbird pie is a "dainty dish to set before a King" is, in the writer's opinion, an error. At a country house surrounded with immense masses of evergreen trees, in a park much haunted by blackbirds, it was agreed one snowy day to try the experiment. Snow was falling, the wind was strong, and the blackbirds flew fast and high, but of ter a time the two dozen prescribed by the ancient recipe were shot, and in due course made their appearance at dinner as a subsidiary dish to roast pheasant. But though
the birds were plump and tender, the interior of the pie-dish was so filled with oily gravy, that they were pronounced " too rich " to be eaten with satisfaction. The only vegetable, as the word is understood in its culinary sense, which has a definite and agreeable acid taste, except the buds of the caper, is sorrel. This is not the little trefoil-leafed wood-sorrel, but a tall lance-leafed plant, growing like spinach, and native to the hedges and meadows of many parts of England. In France it is regularly grown as a garden vegetable, and when cooked is among the very best. It boils to a fine pulp, like very carefully prepared spinach, but is far more tender, and has a more agreeable colour. In flavour it is like a slightly acid spinach, but far more delicate, worthy to be made a separate course, or to form the centre of the most elaborately cooked entree. Sorrel is even more completely disregarded than the dandelion, for a dandelion salad is slowly obtaining recogni- tion here as one of the characteristic dishes of early spring. No Frenchman, even if domiciled in England, will go without it, and a bundle of the leaves are as much part of the necessary souvenirs of an April walk in the outskirts of London to a French family as a bunch of hawthorn is to the British excursionist later in the year. We shall never, in all likeli- hood, grow to share the French taste for the edible snail, though the big escargot is common enough in many parts of England, where tradition says they were introduced by the Romans, and still live on round the sites of their villas. The escargot is really at its best when taken in the vineyards at the end of March and the beginning of April. They live on the shoots of the vines, and during the winter bury themselves in the ground, during which time, like the souls hung up to air in Hades, they are purged of all gross humours before they return to enjoy themselves in the Elysian fields in spring. Cooking these snails is not an easy matter. They are drawn from the shell, which is then carefully scrubbed and washed. Their heads are cut off, and they are well soaked in salt and water, then returned to the shell which is stopped with parsley-butter and laid to simmer in a hot dish over the fire. An enthusiast sent the writer some dozens, taken at the right season, from his vineyard in Bur- gundy, with a few bottles of red and white wine (Gorton) made from the juice of the grapes from the vines on which they had fed, in order, as he said, that "the snails when eaten might find themselves en pays de connaissance." The .combination was excellent, and though there may be two opinions about the flavour of the escargot, there is no doubt that both in taste and substance it is an edible unlike any other known. The Wiltshire people, especially the population -of Swindon, eat the large garden-snails as a common dainty. They are sold in the market like periwinkles; " snailing " along the banks and hedgerows is a popular amusement in winter. A couple of Swindon foundry-men appeared last January at a small station near Wantage with a sack a quarter full of these snails, which they had drawn out in clusters from holes and chinks in the banks. " Eat 'em ? " said one, when questioned as to their use, " I do believe I could eat a hundred at a time."
The smallest bird now eaten in England is the wheatear, an exquisite little white-fleshed bird like a miniature partridge in flavour ; the smallest quadruped that was once a dainty, but is only remembered in Roman tradition, is the dormouse. There are those who have tried the bat, and found it taste like a house-mouse, only mousier. On the other hand, the smallest -of all plums, the wild sloe, whose bitterness equals its beauty, provides the best native liqueur which can be made. Cherry- -brandy owes what character it has to the sourness of the Morel cherry. But the austere little plum lends to the spirit in which it is drowned a subtle essence from its kernel and juices, which make it not merely a winter cordial, but a true liqueur, crimson in the first year, changing later into amber, in which the sloes float like little golden balls. Those who go -blackberry-gathering in autumn, should not forget the sloes, or that the crab-apples, when gathered ripe, make what is perhaps the nearest English reproduction of guava jelly.
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