Our viands

Maize is hardly used for the making of bread in the sense in which we use the term, although in America it was 40 OUR VIANDS doubtless from time immemorial ground and made into cakes resembling oat cake. The Mexican, Peruvian, and Central American graves of very ancient date contain numbers of grinding stones, made something like a stool with short legs, the top sloping and somewhat hollowed out. These are always accompanied by large stones resembling short rolling- pins, with which the Indian women crushed the maize and made it fit to boil into porridge or make into cakes. The Kaffirs generally take maize — I do not know the Kaffir name, but the Colonists call it mealies (a term, by the way, which the generality of English people take to mean potatoes) — and put a quantity into a jar or pot of water, pile burning fuel round it, and let it stew all day: it thus swells and becomes tender, and is eaten in this form as their staple food. Sometimes the women stamp it in a wooden mortar with one, or sometimes two, long pestles to get off the outer husk, and occasionally they grind it on stones in the same manner as the ancient American Indian did, and make cakes of the flour. It is only of late that our English cooks have deigned to make use of this foreign bread-stuff. When first introduced, it was deemed only fit to feed pigs and poultry : we are so exceedingly conservative, especially with regard to food, that it requires at least half a century to acclimatise a new comestible, but at last we have accepted maize in its various forms as passably good food for John Bull and his family. Brown & Poison's corn flour is perhaps the best known and most extensively used of all, and this is not a flour ground in a mill, but a precipitated starch. Maizena, hominy, Oswego, and other preparations of Indian corn are also now in common use, and doubtless enter into the composition MAIZE AND MILLET 41 of sundry cakes, biscuits, etc., which formerly were compounded solely of wheat flour, and are extensively used for thickening soups, gravies, blancmanges, and custards, instead of the far more expensive isinglass, eggs, etc., which are recommended in cookery books. But we have not yet attained to the full knowledge of the capabilities of this useful cereal, and cannot com- pound the endless variety of corn cakes and crackers in use in America. Doubtless, in time we shall come to appreciate all these foreign delicacies, but at present we are content to make wheat our staple cereal, and to use maize merely as an adjunct, except as cattle and poultry food, for which it has come into general use, being cheap and abundant, although I am still conservative enough to believe that poultry fed by the old method — that is, upon barley-meal and potatoes — are far better than those fattened upon Indian corn, which, if used exclusively, is apt to make more yellow fat than that firm, white meat so much appreciated by the cook and housekeeper.