Chapter VII

_Spoons unknown in Polynesia—People of Guinea at Dinner—Spoons of the
Peruvians and Astecs—Caldron and Spoon indigenous to Northern
Climes—Hot Fluids and Ultra Dietists—Warm Drinks sold in
Pompeii—Chinese Opinion—Natural Aliment of the Esquimaux—A Fuegian
eating Fresh Fish—Cooking—Original Sin—Sacrifices—Athenian Boiling
Feast—Anglo-Saxons—Unsavory Superstitions—Persians—Guatamalian
Kitchen—Tartar Cookery—Laplanders—Greenlanders—Cosmetics and Domestic
Economy in the Polar Regions._

It should be remarked that, notwithstanding the preceding specimens of spoons from the South Seas, there is no question of the implements being in many parts of Oceanica a modern innovation. In the Sandwich and other islands of Polynesia they were unknown till introduced by whalemen or national navigators. The inhabitants did not use them, because they had no use for them. They had no idea of heating liquids, and no vessels (except a small wooden bowl) in which to heat them. It was the same with most if not all the people of Australasia. Their cookery was confined to roasting and baking. Rutherford says the New Zealanders never drank any thing hot or warm. Their only vessel for holding water was the calabash which they never dreamt of turning to a boiler or skillet.

Some African tribes use the spoon, but many do not; yet all are acquainted with the process of making pottage. Villault, speaking of Negroes on the coast of Guinea, says: ‘Ils mangent avec beaucoup de mal propreté. Leurs ongles leur servent de couteau; et n’ayant ni fourchettes ni cuillers: ils se lancent avec les doigts chaque morceau dans le gozier. On les voit porter tous ensemble la main au plat, et prendre leurs ragouts a poignées.’ [_Histoire Générale, Tome V._ 197.] To take up solid and even semifluid food (as boiled rice) with the fingers, is of great antiquity. The custom prevails universally in the Eastern world, except China; but this is not owing to ignorance of the spoon, either with Africans or Asiatics. If neither use the implement in eating rice, it invariably assists them to cook that great pabulum of life.

Perhaps it may be doubted whether the aborigines of America had the spoon previous to the arrival of white people: most of them certainly had. Here, as in other parts of the earth, wherever the caldron was known, spoons were in use. The Peruvians had them of silver and gold; so had the Mexicans. The Astecs, in their feasts, ablutions, and table furniture, approached in many respects to Asiatic customs. They kept meats warm with chafing dishes. The tables of the wealthy were ornamented with vases of silver and sometimes of gold; ‘their drinking cups and _spoons_ were of the same costly materials.’ Montezuma took no other beverage than chocolate flavored with vanilla and other spices, so prepared as to be reduced to a froth of the consistency of honey, which gradually dissolved in the mouth. This beverage, if so it could be called, was served in golden goblets, with spoons of the same metal, or of tortoise-shell, finely wrought.’ [_Prescott’s Mexico._]

But the less refined people, of both continents were found in possession of the caldron and spoon. The brutalized Brazilians boiled victuals in earthen vessels, and used knives of flint and spoons of wood and horn. [_See Lafitau’s Mœurs des Sauvages, Tome I._ 572, _Plate 19_, and _Tome II._ 114.] The Virginia Indians had clay pipkins of a very superior quality, and wooden bowls, &c. of their own manufacture. [_Phil. Trans. Abrid. III._ 572, and _IX._ 474.] The Mandans, a tribe now nearly extinct, still fabricate earthen caldrons as their ancestors did. They alone, of those occupying the Missouri valley, are believed to make them.

The boiler and spoon would seem to be indigenous and indispensable to northern climes. The former, made sometimes of a skin, at other times of wood, and the latter of horn, bone, &c. are used at this day, as they ever have been since man first took possession of the arctic regions. A few Indians about Hudson’s Bay purchase brass kettles at the factories, but the greater part prepare their food in the large upright boilers of birch already mentioned. When animal food is scarce, and it often is so, they have no resource but to make pottage with a species of moss that collects on stones. To render it palatable or nutritive boiling is essential.

The utility of hot fluids is a mooted point, but it is not our intention to discuss it. If they are not natural to people in high latitudes, they are to none, and the caldron and spoon, as vehicles for preparing and receiving them, must be denounced as injurious devices. If heated decoctions are violations of nature’s laws, warm or hot food of every description must be deemed such, whether taken in sickness or in health; but who, except the most ultra of dietists, will believe this—men that not only reject animal food but every artificial preparation of aliment—who insist that we should eat only raw fruit and unground grain, and drink nothing. Of course, mills then should be abolished as enervating inventions, preventing people from grinding their own grist with their natural grinders. On the same principle, clothing, dwellings, and fire might be dispensed with; for within the tropics people make little use of the first, and not much of the second; while the Terra del Fuegians can endure their severe climate apparently without the other. Abandon the use of fire in cooking, and there would be little demand for fuel even within the temperate zones. Probably three-fourths of the arts connected with the working of metals are more or less allied to the dining-room, kitchen, and toilet.

Nearly every device characteristic of civilization might with equal propriety be abolished; not trifling things only, as knives and forks, in place of teeth and fingers; plates and dishes, for leaves and slabs of slate; napkins, instead of wiping the mouth with the hand; but articles of dress, as shoes, that supersede the thick and more elastic soles which nature bestows on those who go barefoot; straw, beaver and other fancy coverings for the head, when she is ready to furnish gratis matted or felted caps to all who have no dealings with the hatter.

Beneficial or not, the ancients had shops expressly fitted up for the sale of hot drinks. Several _Thermopolia_ have been discovered in Pompeii, with the urns in which the decoctions were made, and furnished with metallic heaters and cocks, like our tea and coffee urns. The Chinese (a pretty good authority as far as relates to antiquity of customs connected with domestic life) drink all their beverages warm. Cold liquids, even pure water, they say, engenders disease. Ice is employed by them to cool meats and fruits, but not to refrigerate water. [_Chinese Repos. III._ 464.]

Animal diet and warm fluids may be dispensed with in some countries, but not everywhere. It is as absurd to suppose that man can in civilized society live in the manner of the savage, as that he could in all climates exist on the same food. Under the influence of science and the division of labor consequent upon an advanced state of the arts, the physical as well as the mental constitution is changed, and a different aliment required to sustain the one as well as the other. If the Creator designed the arctic regions of our planet to be inhabited, he designed man to sustain himself there on animal food, since, generally speaking, no other is within his reach, and in some parts absolutely no other. Besides food, the Esquimaux derive material for clothing, dwellings, light and fuel from the whale, seal, and a few land animals. Olaus Magnus, speaking of the wild people of the north in his time, says, “they dwell in caves made of the bones and ribs of sea-monsters; they live without bread, but only on fish and deer.” Pulse, grain, fruit or roots are not to be had; but if they were actually produced by the soil the natives could not live upon them there.

With these people, then, the use of animal food cannot be wrong, nor the cooking of it a crime. Indeed, so far as they are concerned the kettle and spoon may be considered of divine origin; though like more valuable gifts in more favored climes, these implements are too often neglected; for the brutalized men and women of the north frequently feed, like the bear, on raw flesh; while at the opposite extremity of the continent, the Fuegian, on catching a fish, is in the habit of taking it by the gills and instantly making a repast on the struggling victim—lowering the tail into his mouth somewhat like a Neapolitan swallowing strings of macaroni: thus literally obeying the injunctions of those reformers who denounce “every species of cookery as polluting the food which the God of our natures has provided for the sustenance of man.”

So far as history goes, people without cooking have ever been savages, and no refined nations ever eat their food raw. Individual and partial exceptions may of course be found. Cato, the censor, seldom drank anything but water, and often ate dinner prepared without fire. Epicurus is slandered as a voluptuary, for his ordinary diet was bread and water, pulse, milk and cheese. The cynics lived austerely, water being their beverage, and the ground their bed. Diogenes, it is well known, lived more like a brute than a gentleman: his manners too were allied to those of a Hottentot. But some modern ascetics leave the most eccentric of the ancients behind, for they reject not merely flesh meats, but bread, salt, milk, and even water itself! contending that juices of fruits and herbs yield fluid sufficient for the human system; and as animals bake not nor boil, make neither puddings, porridge nor pies—they conclude such things are superfluous to us: nay, some look on cooking as original sin—as the very crime for which Adam and his consort were driven out of Eden!—not satisfied with celestial food, it is said they began to improve (_i. e._ to spoil) it by art, and were therefore expelled, that they might carry their wicked devices elsewhere. Hence the nature of their punishment, and why so large a portion was inflicted on Eve; she being the original transgressor and the greater sinner of the two, just as all her daughters, in the same respect, have been since; for where food is spoiled by cooking, it is woman generally who still commits the crime.

Boiled meats have been common from the earliest periods which history has noticed, and according to the scriptures, with divine approbation. Sacrifices were so frequently boiled that capacious caldrons were permanently erected near temples for the purpose. As the virtue of the flesh was extracted by the soup, spoons must have been in as great demand at Jewish and heathen festivals as knives, fleshforks, or any other implement of the table. [_See Ewbank’s Hydraulics_, p. 392.]

The Athenians had an annual boiling-feast, dating back to the times of Theseus and the fabulous Minotaur. It was instituted, according to Plutarch, to commemorate the return of the hero and his companions from their perilous adventure at Crete, and arose from the fact of their having made a species of olla-podrida the moment they got safe ashore—mixing the remains of their provisions, “and boiling them in one pot.” Theseus is supposed to have been contemporary with Gideon, and to have flourished 1350 B. C. about 1400 years before his ancient biographer.

The Anglo-Saxon and contemporary people chiefly boiled their meat. Large houses had “a boiling place for small meats and a boiling house for the great boiler.” One resistless argument that nature designed men to prepare food by fire is derived from the fact that some roots, upon which large portions of mankind live, are positively noxious if eaten without being cooked—the _potato_ is a sufficient example. In some parts of the earth water for drinking requires to be boiled to render it wholesome. Several ancient people besides the Persians found this necessary.

Most northern nations have been noticed for a want of cleanliness, especially in cooking. The further northward we proceed, the less regard for this virtue appears. It diminishes with degrees of longitude, and within the arctic may be said to have vanished. But it is not confined to one people or one continent. We shall conclude this chapter with a few examples of unsavory superstitions, of which some have direct reference to the ladle and spoon. Let not the reader who is particular in his tastes turn sick at the manners of his species, for not many ages have elapsed since his forefathers became freed from practices as filthy and foolish as any about to be noticed.

The polite and effeminate Persian grandee, so scrupulous in his ablutions and personal purity, takes up his food with his hands, and dreads to change his table cover. “On the ground before us,” observes Mr. Morier, in describing a dinner given to the British embassy by the governor of Bushire, “was spread the _sofra_, a fine chintz cloth, which perfectly entrenched our legs, and which is used so long unchanged that the accumulated fragments of former meals collect into a musty paste and emit no very savory smell; but the Persians are content, for they say that changing the sofra brings _ill luck_.”

Irish women were formerly described as very “unmannerly [unwomanly] in making butter,” because they held it extremely unlucky to wash their milk-vessels! But the daughters of St. Patrick were not alone addicted to this filthy superstition. In some parts of Scotland the same prejudice to soap and water exists or did recently exist. It is humorously referred to in the Cottages of Glenburnie: “‘Don’t you clean the churn before you put in the cream?’ asked Mrs. Mason. ‘Na, na,’ returned Mrs. McClarty; ‘that wadna be canny ye ken. Naebody hereabouts wad clean their kirn for ony consideration. I never hard o’ sic a thing in a’ my life!’”

‘Dirt bodes luck’ is an old Scottish proverb.

In the middle ages in Europe, candle-bearers in large houses were allowed, among other perquisites, the broken meat which the _king_ or _lords_ spilt on the floor from their plates! No wonder that kings’ houses were then littered with straw like modern stables.

Most travellers complain of South American cookery. Among others, Dunn, in Guatamala, observes, “The whole of these messes were prepared under a shed, in a large dirty yard, which served as a kitchen, and was full of filth of all kinds. The knowledge of this, with the sight of the servants had no tendency to quicken our appetites. The _spoons_, cups, knives, and forks were of silver.”

Bell, in passing through Tartary, in the suite of the ‘Russian Embassador to Pekin,’ mentions a hospitable matron, whose cooking was not quite to his taste. Entering a tent, the mistress immediately set to work to make him and his companions some tea. After placing a large iron kettle over the fire, she wiped it out with a horse’s tail which hung in one corner of the tent. Then some water was put in, coarse bohea tea, and a little salt. When near boiling, she took a large brass ladle and tossed the tea till the liquid became quite brown. It was next taken off the fire and poured into another vessel. The kettle was now again wiped out with the same implement as before, and a paste, made of meal and butter, put in and fried; some cream taken from a sheep-skin was added. The tea previously made was poured in, and the whole beat together with the ladle. After being allowed to cool, it was handed round in wooden bowls.

Maundeville, who 500 years before, seems to have passed through Tartary on his way to or from China, says: “The Tartarienes han gret conscience, and holden it for a gret synne to casten a knyf in the fuyr, and for to drawe flessche out of a pot with a knyf.... Thei eten but littille bred, but zif it be in the courtes of gretr Lordes. And thei han not in many places nouther pesen ne benes, ne non other potages, but the brothe of the flessche. For littille ete thei ony thing but flessche and the brothe. And whan thei han eten, thei wypen hire hondes upon hire skirtes; for thei usen non naperye ne towayelles, but zif it be before grete Lordes.... And whan thei han eten, thei putten hire dissches _vnwasschen_ in to the pot or cawdroun with remenant of the flessche and of the brothe, til thei wole eten azen.” [_Travels_, _cap._ xxiii.]

The cookery of the Laplanders is generally performed by men, and in the dirtiest manner possibly. It is said “the dishes and spoons are seldom washed, or at most, only by squirting water upon them from the mouth, and rubbing them with their fingers!” A favorite dish is made by boiling in a deer’s paunch a mixture of minced meat, blood, and fat; “but the fat is previously chewed by the men and boys to prepare it for mixing more intimately with the other ingredients!” [_Ed. Encyc. Arts. Lapland—Hudson Bay._]

With the Greenlanders, “the color and odor of the last dish are left to remove those of a former one.” When a stranger is present, the woman of the house takes a piece of meat from the kettle, _licks_ off the scum and blood, and presents it to him in her hands. This is considered a mark of respect—to decline on his part an insult! The inhabitants of the Marquesas are still more polite: at San Christina it is considered an act of civility to offer the food already chewed, to a friend, that he may have no other trouble than that of swallowing it! Verily, there is no accounting for tastes. The aboriginal women of Brazil prepared an intoxicating drink by masticating manioc, and boiling the substance thus reduced to a pulp. So the ladies of Otaheite made a beverage for their lords by chewing yava and spitting the juice into a bowl, when it was mixed with cocoa-nut liquor, and left to ferment.

All the inhabitants of the polar regions resemble each other in their manners and customs. Their bodies are coated with a varnish of dirt and grease, the accumulation of years—the color of the surface beneath being as effectually concealed as in articles covered with paint or japan. With regard to the kitchen, Esquimaux dames would seem to bear off the palm, since they cleanse every culinary utensil, the caldron as well as the spoon, with their tongues; continuing the operation as long as a particle of blubber remains. When Captain Parry bought a lamp of a matron, the economical owner _licked_ it quite clean, devouring the soot and oil with which it was covered, as forming no part of the bargain, and too precious to be given away.