Our viands

* Years ago it was the custom in some parts of England to take bread rolls wrapped up in cabbage leaves. This imparted a peculiar and, to many palates, agreeable flavour to the bread. In a description of a recent Chinese dinner, we find among the delicacies, a knife fish, rolled in banana leaves, and baked between hot stones. io OUR VIANDS to form a bag, place the meat in this bag with some water, and then drop in stones, heated in the fire to a white heat, until the meat is cooked. It must be a very tedious process, and not particularly appetising, but the only one available where pottery and metal are alike unknown. The alternative method of placing the meat on hot stones and covering it with the ashes was doubtless that most generally practised, and is still adopted by hunters and by the gipsies in our own country; one of the dainties of the latter being a hedge- hog thus roasted, whilst the hunter in Africa will regale himself with the foot of the elephant, or a porcupine cooked in the same manner. Then of course there is the tripod of sticks, upon which the meat is hung over the flame, and it is doubtful whether meat thus cooked is not of finer flavour than that which we dry up in ovens, or boil to death in ordinary saucepans. In very hot countries the sun turns cook, and the hunter has only to place his steak on heated stones exposed to the mid-day sun, and it will soon be sufficiently cooked, or he may cut his game in slices and hang the pieces on a thorn-bush to be thoroughly dried in the sun, and then carry it away with him as biltong in South Africa, or jerked beef (charki] in America. We have heard of nests of eggs cooked by the heat of the sun in South Africa, whilst in Iceland and some other countries it is possible to cook by means of the boiling springs. We are apt to experience a feeling of disgust in reading of the Eskimo crowded in their snow houses, regaling themselves with great pieces of seal-blubber, and washing down the feast with train oil, but we do not consider the disadvantages under which these poor people labour in IN TROD UCTION 1 1 a country where it would be impossible to indulge in gastronomic luxuries, not only on account of the scarcity of food, but also because of the scarcity of fuel, their only cooking apparatus consisting of that simple oil lamp, which serves the treble purpose of fire, candle, and cooking- stove. Yet French and Italian cooks achieve most of their culinary triumphs by the aid of a cooking-stove only once re- moved from that of the Eskimo, being heated by charcoal only. Luxury has now taken such hold upon us that we wonder how it could ever have been possible to eat comfortably without silver forks, yet our grandmothers knew them not, but used forks of steel, at first with only two tines or prongs, which they managed as deftly as the Chinese do their chop-sticks, although they did not scruple to put the knife in the mouth on occasion, and, in fact, the knives were made rounded at the end for that purpose. Forks, indeed, are but a late invention, and our Saxon ancestors cut their meat from the spit with their hunting knives, not only when engaged in the chase, but when seated at table in their great banqueting halls, as witness a curious old drawing in the Cotton Manuscript, in which two serving- men or cooks are represented kneeling holding a spit in one han