The spirit of cookery

Lamb's Ears and Lamb’s Head and Feet are treated even by serious authors such as Beauvilliers, but the products are never proportioned to the trouble involved in their pre- paration. CHAPTEB XL. PREPARATIONS OF PORK, THE FLESH OF THE ENCYCLOPAEDIC ANIMAL. It has been truly said that without pork there would have been no bacon, and without bacon no accomplished cookery ; PREPARA TIONS OF PORK 469 there would be neither ham, nor sausages, nor black puddings ; there would have been no 'patit saU for the Emperor Claudius, and perhaps neither he nor his Senate would have been at all happy. Without the living pig there would be fewer truffles available, for they are discovered in the earth mainly by the organ of smell of that sagacious animal. All nations of antiquity, and those succeeding them down to our own time, the Semitic races, the Egyptians, and the Gaelic inhabitants of the Western Islands of Scotland alone excepted, reared pigs in large numbers. Great is the number of places which enjoy a worldwide reputation for their special preparations of pork. Who has not heard of Yorkshire ham, of Cumberland bacon ; of the hams of Westphalia, Mayence, Bayonne, Granada, Estremadura ; of Savoy, or Saveloy (cervelat), sausages ; of Frankfort Knackwurst ; of Bath chaps and cold cream ? By the fact of the pig eating refuse when it is neglected by its owner, and by the frequent exercise of its prudent instinct of wallowing in mud and letting it dry upon its skin, a process by which it rids itself of the powerful skin parasites by which in unclean habitations it becomes at times afflicted, it has acquired the unjust reputation of being a dirty, or even a filthy, animal. But all these imputations are unfounded. We kept pigs as clean as possible, and the animals responded by perfect personal cleanliness, and by preserving the decorum of their stalls ; they were washed periodically with soap and warm water, and stood still and gi’unted while they were thus being cleaned. They refused to eat inferior or defiled food if they had the choice of eating clean materials. It has been often said that the construction of the inner organs of the pig is so like that of man, that by contemplating the dissected pig one could learn the anatomy of man. Cuvier corrected this popular prejudice when he wrote : ‘ The 470 THE SPIRIT OF COOKERY stomach of man and that of the pig have no great resem- blance to each other. In man this viscus has the shape of a bagpipe, in the pig it is globular ; in man the liver is divided in three lobes, in the pig it is long and flat ; in man the intestinal canal is seven to eight times as long as the body, in the pig it is from fifteen to eighteen times the length of the body. The caul {cawl, hall, epiploon, net, in French commonly called toilette or crdpine) is larger and more charged with fat, and what is most consoling for delicate souls who want to have nothing in common with the nature of the pigs is this, that its heart differs notably from that of man. I may add for the learned and aesthetical that the volume of the pig’s brain is also much smaller than that of man, which proves that its intellectual faculties are much smaller than those of our Academicians.’