Cleanliness and spruceness are the rule among the Quincy Market men and stall-keepers. The matutinal display outside of apples, pears, onions, turnips, beets, carrots, egg-plants, cranberries, squashes, etc., is magnificent in the variety and richness of its hues. What a multitude of orchards, meadows, gardens, and fields have been laid under contribution to furnish this vegetable abundance! And here are their choicest products. The foodful Earth and the arch-chemic Sun, the great agriculturist and life-fountain, have done their best in concocting these Quincy Market culinary vegetables. They wear a healthful, resplendent look. Inside, what a goodly vista stretches away of fish, flesh, and fowl! From these white stalls the Tempter could have furnished forth the banquet the Miltonic description of which has been quoted.
Here is a stall of ripe, juicy mutton, perhaps from the county of St. Lawrence, in Northeastern New York. This is the most healthful and easily digested of all meats. Its juiciness and nutritiousness are visible in the trumpeter-like cheeks of the well-fed John Bull. The domestic Anglo-Saxon is a mutton-eater. Let his offshoots here and elsewhere follow suit. There is no such timber to repair the waste of the human frame. It is a fuel easily combustible in the visceral grate of the stomach. The mutton-eater is eupeptic. His dreams are airy and lightsome. Somnus descends smiling to his nocturnal pillow, and not clad in the portentous panoply of indigestion, which rivals a guilty conscience in its night visions. The mutton department of Quincy Market is all that it should be.
Next we come upon "fowl of game," wild ducks, pigeons, etc.What has become of those shoals of pigeons, those herrings of the air, which used in the gloom and glory of a breezy autumnal day to darken the sun in their flight, like the discharge of the Xerxean arrows at Thermopylæ? The eye sweeps the autumnal sky in vain now for any such winged phenomenon, at least here in New England. The days of the bough-house and pigeon-stand strewn with barley seem to have gone by. Swift of flight and shapely in body is the North American wild pigeon, running upon the air fleeter than Anacreon's dove. He can lay any latitude under contribution in a few hours, flying incredible distances during the process of digestion. He is an ornament to the air, and the pot also.Here might be a descendant of Bryant's waterfowl; but its journeyings along the pathless coast of the upper atmosphere are at an end.
"All flesh is not the same flesh; but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds." The matter composing the vegetables and the lower animals is promoted, as it were, by being eaten by man and incorporated into his body, which is a breathing house not made with hands built over the boundary-line of two worlds, the sensible and noumenal. "The human body is the highest chemical laboratory which matter can reach. In that body the highest qualities and richest emoluments are imparted to it, and it is indorsed with a divine superscription." It there becomes part and parcel of the eye, the organ of light and the throne of expression,of the blood, which is so eloquent in cheek and brow,of the nerves, the telegraph-wires of the soul,of the persuasive tongue,of the tear-drop, the dew of emotion, which only the human eye can shed,of the glossy tresses of beauty, the nets of love.
The provision markets of a community are a good index of the grade of its civilization. Tell me what a nation eats, what is its diet, and I will tell you what is its literature, its religious belief, and so forth. Solid, practical John Bull is a mutton, beef, and pudding eater. He drinks strong ale or beer, and thinks beer. He drives fat oxen, and is himself fat. He is no idealist in philosophy. He hates generalization and abstract thought. He is for the real and concrete. Plain, unadorned Protestantism is most to the taste of the middle classes of Great Britain. Music, sculpture, and painting add not their charms to the Englishman's dull and respectable devotions. Cross the Channel and behold his whilom hereditary foeman, but now firm ally, the Frenchman! He is a dainty feeder and the most accomplished of cooks. He etherealizes ordinary fish, flesh, and fowl by his exquisite cuisine. He educates the palate to a daintiness whereof the gross-feeding John Bull never dreamed. He extracts the finest flavors and quintessential principles from flesh and vegetables. He drinks light and sparkling wines, the vintage of Champagne and Burgundy. Accordingly the Frenchman is lightsome and buoyant. He is a great theorist and classifier. He adheres to the ornate worship of the Mother Church when religiously disposed. His literature is perspicuous and clear. He is an admirable doctrinaire and generalizer,witness Guizot and Montesquieu. He puts philosophy and science into a readable, comprehensible shape. The Teutonic diet of sauer-kraut, sausages, cheese, ham, etc., is indigestible, giving rise to a vaporous, cloudy cerebral state. German philosophy and mysticism are its natural outcome.
Baked beans, pumpkin pie, apple-sauce, onions, codfish, and Medford rum,these were the staple items of the primitive New England larder; and they were an appropriate diet whereon to nourish the caucus-loving, inventive, acute, methodically fanatical Yankee. The bean, the most venerable and nutritious of lentils, was anciently used as a ballot or vote. Hence it symbolized in the old Greek democracies politics and a public career. Hence Pythagoras and his disciples, though they were vegetable-eaters, eschewed the bean as an article of diet, from its association with politics, demagogism, and ochlocracy. They preferred the life contemplative and the fallentis semita vitæ. Hence their utter detestation of beans, the symbols of noisy gatherings, of demagogues and party strife and every species of political trickery. The primitive Yankee, in view of his destiny as the founder of this caucus-loving nation and American democracy, seems to have been providentially guided in selecting beans for his most characteristic article of diet.
But to move on through the market. The butter and cheese stalls have their special attractions. The butyraceous gold in tubs and huge lumps displayed in these stalls looks as though it was precipitated from milk squeezed from Channel Island cows, those fawn-colored, fairest of dairy animals. In its present shape it is the herbage of a thousand clover-blooming meads and dewy hill-pastures in old Berkshire, in Vermont and Northern New York, transformed by the housewife's churn into edible gold. Not only butter and cheese are grass or of gramineous origin, but all flesh is grass,a physiological fact enunciated by Holy Writ and strictly true.
Porcine flesh is too abundant here. How the New-Englander, whose Puritan forefathers were almost Jews, and hardly got beyond the Old Testament in their Scriptural studies, has come to make pork so capital an article in his diet, is a mystery. Small-boned swine of the Chinese breed, which are kept in the temple sties of the Josses, and which are capable of an obeseness in which all form and feature are swallowed up and lost in fat, seem to be plenty in Quincy Market. They are hooked upright upon their haunches, in a sitting posture, against the posts of the stall. How many pots of Sabbath morning beans one of these porkers will lubricate!
Beef tongues are abundant here, and eloquent of good living. The mighty hind and fore quarters and ribs of the ox,
"With their red and yellow,
Lean and tallow,"
appeal to the good-liver on all sides. They seem to be the staple flesh of the stalls.
But let us move on to the stalls frequented by the ichthyophagi. Homer calls the sea the barren, the harvestless! Our Cape Ann fishermen do not find it so.
Beef tongues are abundant here, and eloquent of good living. The mighty hind and fore quarters and ribs of the ox,
"With their red and yellow,
Lean and tallow,"
appeal to the good-liver on all sides. They seem to be the staple flesh of the stalls.
But let us move on to the stalls frequented by the ichthyophagi. Homer calls the sea the barren, the harvestless! Our Cape Ann fishermen do not find it so.
"The sounds and seas, with all their finny droves,
That to the Moon in wavering morrice move,"
are as foodful as the most fertile parts of terra firma. Here lie the blue, delicate mackerel in heaps, and piles of white perch from the South Shore, cod, haddock, eels, lobsters, huge segments of swordfish, and the flesh of various other voiceless tenants of the deep, both finned and shell-clad. The codfish, the symbol of Puritan aristocracy, as the grasshopper was of the ancient Athenians, seems to predominate. Our frutti di mare, in the shape of oysters, clams, and other mollusks, are the delight of all true gastronomers. What vegetable, or land animal, is so nutritious? Here are some silvery shad from the Penobscot, or Kennebec, or Merrimac, or Connecticut. The dams of our great manufacturing corporations are sadly interfering with the annual movements of these luscious and beautiful fish. Lake Winnipiseogee no longer receives these ocean visitors into its clear, mountain-mirroring waters. The greedy pike is also here, from inland pond and lake, and the beautiful trout from the quick mountain brook, "with his waved coat dropped with gold." Who eats the trout partakes of pure diet. He loves the silver-sanded stream, and silent pools, and eddies of limpid water. In fact, all fish, from sea or shore, freshet or purling brook, of shell or fin, are here, on clean marble slabs, fresh and hard. Ours is the latitude of the fish-eater. The British marine provinces, north of us, and Norway in the Old World, are his paradise.
Man is a universal eater.
"He cannot spare water or wine,
Tobacco-leaf, or poppy, or rose,
From the earth-poles to the line,
All between that works and grows.
* * * * * *
Give him agates for his meat;
Give him cantharids to eat;
From air and ocean bring him foods,
From all zones and altitudes;
From all natures sharp and slimy,
Salt and basalt, wild and tame;
Tree and lichen, ape, sea-lion,
Bird and reptile, be his game."
Quincy Market sticks to the cloven hoof, I am happy to say, notwithstanding the favorable verdict of the French savans on the flavor and nutritious properties of horse-flesh. The femurs and tibias of frogs are not visible here. At this point I will quote in extenso from Wilkinson's chapter on Assimilation and its Organs.
"In this late age, the human home has one universal season and one universal climate. The produce of every zone and month is for the board where toil is compensated and industry refreshed. For man alone, the universal animal, can wield the powers of fire, the universal element, whereby seasons, latitudes, and altitudes are levelled into one genial temperature. Man alone, that is to say, the social man alone, can want and duly conceive and invent that which is digestion going forth into nature as a creative art, namely, cookery, which by recondite processes of division and combination,by cunning varieties of shape,by the insinuation of subtle flavors,by tincturings with precious spice, as with vegetable flames,by fluids extracted, and added again, absorbed, dissolving, and surrounding,by the discovery and cementing of new amities between different substances, provinces, and kingdoms of nature,by the old truth of wine and the reasonable order of service,in short, by the superior unity which it produces in the eatable world,also by a new birth of feelings, properly termed convivial, which run between food and friendship, and make eating festive,all through the conjunction of our Promethean with our culinary fire raises up new powers and species of food to the human frame, and indeed performs by machinery a part of the work of assimilation, enriching the sense of taste with a world of profound objects, and making it the refined participator, percipient, and stimulus of the most exquisite operations of digestion. Man, then, as the universal eater, enters from his own faculties into the natural viands, and gives them a social form, and thereby a thousand new aromas, answering to as many possible tastes in his wonderful constitution, and therefore his food is as different from that of animals in quality as it is plainly different in quantity and resource. How wise should not reason become, in order to our making a wise use of so vast an apparatus of nutrition!
"There is nothing more general in life than the digestive apparatus, because matter is the largest, if not the greatest, fact in the material universe. Every creature which is here must be made of something, and be maintained by something, or must be landlord of itself.... The planetary dinner-table has its various latitudes and longitudes, and plant and animal and mineral and wine are grown around it, and set upon it, according to the map of taste in the spherical appetite of our race.... Hunger is the child of cold and night, and comes upwards from the all-swallowing ground; but thirst descends from above, and is born of the solar rays.... Hunger and thirst are strong terms, and the things themselves are too feverish provocations for civilized man. They are incompatible with the sense of taste in its epicureanism, and their gratification is of a very bodily order. The savage man, like a boa-constrictor, would swallow his animals whole, if his gullet would let him. This is to cheat the taste with unmanageable objects, as though we should give an estate to a child. On the other hand, civilization, house-building, warm apartments and kitchen fires, well-stored larders, and especially exemption from rude toil, abolish these extreme caricatures; and keeping appetite down to a middling level by the rote of meals, and thus taking away the incentives to ravenous haste, they allow the mind to tutor and variegate the tongue, and to substitute the harmonies and melodies of deliberate gustation for such unseemly bolting. Under this direction, hunger becomes polite; a long-drawn, many-colored taste; the tongue, like a skilful instrument, holds its notes; and thirst, redeemed from drowning, rises from the throat to the tongue and lips, and, full of discrimination, becomes the gladdening love of all delicious flavors.... In the stomach, judging by what there is done, what a scene we are about to enter! What a palatial kitchen and more than monasterial refectory! The sipping of aromatic nectar, the brief and elegant repast of that Apicius, the tongue, are supplanted at this lower board by eating and drinking in downright earnest. What a variety of solvents, sauces, and condiments, both springing up at call from the blood, and raining down from the mouth into the natural patines of the meats! What a quenching of desires, what an end and goal of the world is here! No wonder; for the stomach sits for four or five assiduous hours at the same meal that the dainty tongue will despatch in a twentieth portion of the time. For the stomach is bound to supply the extended body, while the tongue wafts only fairy gifts to the close and spiritual brain."
So far Wilkinson, the Milton of physiologists.
But lest these lucubrations should seem to be those of a mere glutton and gastrolater,of one like the gourmand of old time, who longed for the neck of an ostrich or crane that the pleasure of swallowing dainty morsels might be as protracted as possible,let me assume a vegetable, Pythagorean standpoint, and thence survey this accumulation of creature comforts, that is, that portion of them which consists of dead flesh. The vegetables and the fruits, the blazonry of autumn, are of course ignored from this point of view. Thus beheld, Quincy Market presents a spectacle that excites disgust and loathing, and exemplifies the fallen, depraved, and sophisticated state of human nature and human society. In those juicy quarters and surloins of beef and those fat porcine carcasses the vegetable-eater, Grahamite or Brahmin, sees nothing but the cause of beastly appetites, scrofula, apoplexy, corpulence, cheeks flushed with ungovernable propensities, tendencies downward toward the plane of the lower animals, bloodshot eyes, swollen veins, impure blood, violent passions, fetid breath, stertorous respiration, sudden death,in fact, disease and brutishness of all sorts. A Brahmin traversing this goodly market would regard it as a vast charnel, a loathsome receptacle of dead flesh on its way to putrescence. His gorge would rise in rebellion at the sight. To the Brahmin, the lower animal kingdom is a vast masquerade of transmigratory souls. If he should devour a goose or turkey or hen, or a part of a bullock or sheep or goat, he might, according to his creed, be eating the temporary organism of his grandmother. The poet Pope wrote in the true Brahminical spirit, when he said,"Nothing can be more shocking and horrid than one of our kitchens sprinkled with blood, and abounding with cries of creatures expiring, or with the limbs of dead animals scattered or hung up there. It gives one an image of a giant's den in romance, bestrewed with the scattered heads and mangled limbs of those who were slain by his cruelty." Think of the porcine shambles of Cincinnati, with their swift-handed swine-slayers!