“Curried narwhal’s skin can be tolerated, but not recommended”, or so suggests one of Lund Simmonds’ sources, in this splendid mid-19th century classic, now back in print for the first time since the 1850s.
The 19th century was a great period for compendiousness, with museums compiling huge systematic displays, while in print writers were putting together volumes exploring great swathes of nature and human behaviour. Best known of these is Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, collecting details of lives on the streets of London, and, to Forteans, Gould and Pyle’s Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine which gathers a cornucopia of bizarre medical and biological information. The century was also a time of great optimism and adventure, both physical and social. Explorers and colonisers were fanning out across the world, sending a constant flow of novel items and amazing stories home, while in England there was great enthusiasm for new products, ideas and activities.
This book is very much a product of these urges and that time. It gathers together as much information as Lund Simmonds could track down about the culinary habits of people the world over. Classified under the orders of animals being consumed, it offers a head-spinning array of information on what people were eating in the mid-19th century and how they were eating it, offered up in a freewheeling anecdotal style. There are reflections of another thriving 19th institution, the Acclimatisation Societies - bodies dedicated to selecting animals from the colonies to introduce into Britain for farming purposes. The best known of these, chaired by Lund Simmonds’ friend Frank Buckland, would regularly hold feasts of exotic creatures in order to promote the idea. While they receive no overt mention here, there are periodic suggestions that, say, wombats, might be profitable to farm in Britain.
There are debates on the pros and cons of eating horses, instructions on how to cook elephants feet (it involves deep pits, large fires and lots of people), recipes for bear’s paws, plus a menu from a San Francisco dive offering, among other arresting delicacies ”bow-wow soup, roasted grimalkin and stews rat-ified”. There are many other reminders of how much the world has changed in 150 years, most poignantly a eulogy to the wonders of cooked passenger pigeon, accompanied by a vivid description of how inexhaustibly numerous the birds actually were - no inkling of a possibility here that the species would have vanished in its entirety within 70 years of writing.
A joy to read or dip into, you will never open the covers without being astounded, this is a well selected reprint which deserves a place on all fortean bookshelves.
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