Royal Salmon Dinner," at which sometimes as many as two hundred guests enjoy "the fine fish."*

The increase of Salmon has been most successfully carried out. At the artificial breeding establishment at Stormontfield, on the Tay, the smolt of three ounces, duly marked and liberated in March and April, has been recaptured in June and July of the same year a grilse of five or six pounds' weight.

The Pike.

Pike were formerly very rare, as may be inferred from the fact, that in the latter part of the thirteenth century, Edward I. fixed the value of pike higher than that of fresh salmon, and more than ten times greater than that of the best turbot or cod. Pike were so rare in the reign of Henry VIII., that a large one was sold for double the price of a houselamb in February, and a pickerel, or small pike, for more than a fat capon. (Yarrell's British Fishes.) This rarity has been attributed to these fish having been but recently introduced into England; but pike were in our markets as early as the reign of Edward I. They were luxuries of the table when pleasure-hunters flocked to the theatrical locality of Bankside, where the fish were kept in stews, a name otherwise applied here. Of the fish appropriation, Pike Garden attests to this day. Almost every angler, says the author of Hints for the Table, has his pike story. We remember Alderman Ansley used to relate that during his Mayoralty, a gigantic pike was taken upon his estate in Huntingdonshire, and straightway forwarded to the Mansion House: a party was invited to eat this pike; but his Lordship's kitchen could not furnish a dish long enough to contain the fish; and after much search, there was found among the plate of one of the City Companies' halls a silver dish to hold the pike, the bringing in of which by two footmen, and setting the same upon the table, before the Lord Mayor and his guests, was attended with much pomp and circumstance.

Why Venison is sold by Fishmongers.

The origin of Venison being sold by Fishmongers is this. Many noblemen having more bucks than they had occasion for, wished to dispose of them, but were ashamed to take money. They therefore sent them to their fishmongers, and received fish in return. This practice commenced about the last quarter of the last century; and the fishmongers still continue to sell venison, though they do not obtain it in the

* In 1842, a poor fellow was taken before the authorities of Paris for begging in the streets. He had studied the science of Cookery under the celebrated Carême, and was the inventor of the delicious Saumons truffés à la broche: he attributed his poverty to the decline of Cookery from a science to a low art!

same way for the owners of parks now feel no reluctance in receiving cash for a certain number of bucks every season at a stipulated price.

Prejudice against eating Mutton.

The antipathy to eat Mutton is a prejudice which can be traced in the earliest history of the sheep: to this cause it must be referred, for mutton is of all meat the most wholesome. The sheep, however, never seems to have been used generally for human food. Many of the wandering tribes of the Tartars preferred the flesh of the horse to that of the sheep; and, even to this day, the latter is comparatively disliked in Spain. A prejudice exists against it in America; and in no country does it appear to have been so universally adopted and so much relished as in Great Britain; yet, even here the liking is but of recent growth. An old English poet sings of the sheep :

Poore beast, that for defense of man at first created wast,

And in thy swelling udder burst the iuyce of dainty tast;

And with thy fleece keep off the cold that would our limbs assaile,
And rather with thy life than with thy death doest us availe.

It is somewhat singular that, notwithstanding this seeming prejudice against the flesh of the sheep, all writers on diet have agreed in describing it as the most valuable of the articles of animal food. Pork may be more stimulating; beef, perhaps, more nutritious when the digestive powers are strong: but while there is in mutton sufficient nutriment, there is also that degree of consistency and readiness of assimilation which renders it most congenial to the human stomach, most easy of digestion, and most contributable to health.-Brewster's Cyclopædia: art. Aliment.

Mutton and Veal.

The oracle of the British Apollo, p. 546, has this odd enunciation:— Why our calves and our sheep whilst alive are so styled,

But are mutton and veal titled when they are killed.

From the Gallick du mouton, quasi mountainous breed,
Or the Flemish word motton, does your mutton proceed:
From the Gallick word veau the word veal we derive,
Which in Latin vitulus does (probably) give.

The Bustard.

Bustards, some twenty years since, were bred in the open parts of Suffolk and Norfolk, and were domesticated at Norwich. Their flesh was delicious, and it was thought that good feeding and domestication might stimulate them to lay more eggs; but this was not the case. There were formerly great flocks of bustards in England, upon the wastes and in woods, where they were hunted with greyhounds, and were easily taken. The bustard is, however, now extremely rare in this country. Three female birds were shot in Cornwall, in 1843; on Romney Marsh, in 1850; and in Devonshire in 1851. In January, 1856, a very fine

male bustard was taken near Hungerford, in Berkshire, on the borders of Wiltshire, this being the only male taken for many years in England: it weighed 13 lbs., and its wings measured from tip to tip 6 feet 3 inches; it is preserved in the museum of the Zoological Society. A writer in the Penny Cyclopædia (voce Bustard) says: "We are old enough to remember one, and sometimes two, bustards as the crowning ornaments of the magnificent Christmas larder at the Bush Inn, Bristol, in the reign of John Weeks, of hospitable memory; and we have heard, too, a romantic story of the last of the Salisbury Plain bustards, (a female,) coming into a farmer's barton, as if giving herself up." In 1819, a large male bird, taken on Newmarket Heath, was sold in Leadenhall market for five guineas. We remember to have seen the bustard in the Guildhall dinner bill of fare on Lord Mayor's Day, but do not remember the year of its disappearance.

A bustard was shot in the bustard-country, (Norfolk,) in 1830. Mr. Jesse knew a gentleman, a great sportsman, who assured him that he once had a pack of bustards rise before his gun; he suddenly came upon them in a gravel-pit. Mr. Southey and Sir Richard Colt Hoare both mention the curious fact, that the bustard has been known to attack men on horseback at night.

A fine bustard was shot on the estate of Baron Parke, at Less Hill, Kingswater, on March 8th, 1854. And the British officers in the Crimea, in December, 1855, enjoyed much sport with flocks of bustards, some of which were killed, weighing fifteen or sixteen pounds each.

Pork.

I make my stand upon pig," said Charles Lamb, in whose wake a lover of pork was accustomed to regard the pig as the greatest boon from the Giver of all good flavours; besides which, the pig is universally eatable. Southey has humorously commemorated its economy :

Whether ham, bacon, sausage, souse, or brawn,

Leg, blade-bone, bald-rib, griskin, chine, or chop.

A Griskin of Pork is the short bones taken out of the flitch of a baconpig; corresponding to the loin of another animal. Bishop Kennett, in his MS. Glossarial Collection, gives "grise, a pig," Irl. griis. Piers Plowman constantly uses grys for young pigs. Short-bones and sweetbones are other names for the same joint, and perhaps more local than griskin. (Miss Baker's Northamptonshire Glossary.)

The Spring of Pork is the lower part of a fore-quarter of pork divided from the neck. Beaumont and Fletcher have this reference to the joint :

Do you think, master, to be an emperor

With killing swine? You may be an honest butcher,

Or allied to a seemly family of souse-wives.

Can you be such an ass, my reverend master,

To think these springs of pork will shoot up Cæsars.-Prophetess.

Haslet is the small pieces cut off in trimming the hams and flitches of a singed pig; these cuttings are made into pork pies, or haslet-pies; and in many villages the farmers' wives send one of these pies, with some pigs' puddings, as presents to their neighbours. In some places the griskin is termed "haslit." Palgrave has "haslet of a hogge." Nares describes it as the entrails, or the heart, liver, and lights, of a hog.

There was not a hog killed within three parishes of bim, whereof he had not some part of the haslit and puddings.-Ozell's Rabelais.

Who can forget the exquisite humour of Charles Lamb's "Dis sertation upon Roast Pig," and the passage upon the leech or bark :—

There is no flavour comparable, I will contend, to that of the crisp, tawny, wellwatched not over-roasted crackling, as it is called-the very teeth are invited to their share of the pleasure at this banquet in overcoming the coy, brittle resistance with the adhesive oleaginous-O call it not fat! but an indefinable sweetness giving up to it the tender blossoming of fat-fat cropped in the bud-taken in the shoot-in the first innocence-the cream and quintessence of the child pig's yet pure food-the lean no lean, but a kind of animal manna-or rather fat and lean (if it must be so), so blended and running into each other, that both together make but one ambrosian result, or common substance.-The Essays of Elia.

But we must not confound the crackling with the leech, which is the cuticle, or bark, of mutton or beef, that remains on the back and loins of the animal after it is skinned. It is a common direction given by the butcher to his boy, when skinning an animal, "Take care you don't spoil the leech." Way, in his Promptorium Parvulorum, in an ingenious note under "Leche of flesche or other mete," gives two obsolete significations to this word in connexion with ancient cookery: "Such viands as it was usual to serve in slices, probably for the sake of convenience, before the general use of forks ;" and "a kind of jelly made of cream, isinglass, sugar, and almonds." These definitions are illustrated by curious extracts from early MSS. in the British Museum, and by reference to the bills of fare at various great festivities and banquets. Mr. Buckle, in his History of Civilization, has thus explained why the Mohammedans refuse to eat Pork:

In Europe, during many centuries, the only animal food in general use was pork, beef, veal, and mutton being comparatively unknown. It was, therefore, with no small astonishment that the Crusaders, on returning from the East, told their countrymen that they had been among

In the sacred books of the Scandinavians, pork is represented as the principal food, even in heaven. (See Mallet's Northern Antiquities, p. 105.) It was the chief food of the Irish in the twelfth century; and also of the Anglo-Saxons at an earlier period. In France it was equally common, and Charlemagne kept in his forests immense droves of pigs. In Spain, those who did not like pork were tried by the Inquisition as suspected Jews. Late in the sixteenth century there was a particular disease said to be caused by the quantity of it eaten in Hungary; and even at present, the barbarous Lettes are passionately fond of it. In the middle of the sixteenth century, we find that Philip II., when in England, generally dined on bacon; of which he ate so much, as frequently to make him very ill.

a people (the Mohammedans) who, like the Jews, thought pork unclean, and refused to eat it; which Matthew Paris traces to the following singular circumstance which happened to their prophet. It appears that Mohammed, having on one occasion gorged himself with food and drink till he was in a state of insensibility, fell asleep on a dunghill, and in this disgraceful condition was seen by a litter of pigs. The pigs attacked the fallen prophet, and suffocated him to death; for which reason his followers abominate pigs, and refuse to partake of their flesh. Matthew Paris states that he obtained his information of a clergyman; and according to Matthew of Westminster, the pigs not only suffocated Mohammed, but actually ate the greater part of him.

This striking fact explains one great peculiarity of the Mohammedans, and another fact, equally striking, explains how it was that their sect came into existence.* For it was well known that Mohammed was originally a cardinal, and only became a heretic because he failed in his design of being elected pope.

Frummety, or Furmety.

This favourite rural delicacy is, in Northamptonshire, more commonly Thrummety. It is made with baked creed wheat, boiled in milk, with sugar and plums, thickened with flour and eggs. Such is Miss Baker's receipt, in her interesting Glossary. A lexicographer might suggest that Frummety is traceable to Frumentum, corn.

Clare, in his Shepherd's Calendar, describing the sheep-shearing festivities, says:—

The high bowl was in the middle set,

At breakfast time, when clippers yearly met,
Fill'd full of furmety, where dainty swum
The streaking sugar, and the spotting plum.

And, lamenting the disuse and extinction of old rural customs, he exclaims:

Thus ale, and song, and healths, and merry ways

Keep up a shadow still of former days;

But the old beechen bowl, that once supplied

The feast of furmety is thrown aside.

* By a singular contradiction, the African Mohammedans now" believe that a great enmity subsists between hogs and Christians."—(Mungo Park's Travels.) Many medical men have supposed that pork is peculiarly unwholesome in hot countries; but this requires confirmation: and it is certain that it is recommended by Arabian physicians, and is more generally eaten both in Asia and Africa than is usually believed. To these facts it may be added that the North American Indians are said to have a disgust for pork; and Dobell believes there to be more pork eaten in China than in all the rest of the world put together.