Carnes

“ Poultry and water-fowl, young pork, old beef, and fat meat in general, should not be eaten; but, on the contrary, meat of a proper age, of a warm and dry, but on no account of a heating and exciting nature. ”

“ The ample supply of poultry, of all descriptions, fed in coops on the poop, and a small flock of sheep, perhaps from twenty-five to forty in number, maintained there on hay, &c. enable the captain, for the most part, to exhibit fresh meat, of some sort, every day; which added to abundance of prime beef and pork for his use, together with tongues, pickles, sauces of all kinds, potatoes, rice, pastry, olives, &c. &c. form a tout ensemble, where even the most dainty may find something acceptable to the palate. ”

“ The various chapters treat successively of the following, among other branches of the art of pork [Pg vi] making: Possibilities of profit in home curing and marketing pork; finishing off hogs for bacon; class of rations best adapted, flesh and fat forming foods; best methods of slaughtering hogs, with necessary adjuncts for this preliminary work; scalding and scraping; the construction of vats; dressing the carcass; cooling and cutting up the meat; best disposition of the offal; the making of sausage and scrapple; success in producing a fine quality of lard and the proper care of it. ”

“ Meats.—While meats are in season all the year, they are better at stated times; for instance, pork is prime in late autumn and winter; veal should be avoided in summer for sanitary reasons; and even our staples, beef and mutton, vary in quality. The flesh of healthy animals is hard and fresh colored, the fat next the skin is firm and thick, and the suet or kidney-fat clear white and abundant; if this fat is soft, scant and stringy, the animal has been poorly fed or overworked. ”

“ The families of many farmers far in among the mountains rarely taste fresh meat, but subsist chiefly upon salt pork, fish, fresh or salted, as the season will permit, potatoes, wheat, rye, and Indian meal, with berries, dried apples, perhaps a few garden vegetables, plenty of good milk, and excellent butter. ”

“ HOW TO SELECT MEAT
When buying beef, see that it is bright red in color, streaked with fat—and firm. The streaks of fat add to the food value and make a more flavory steak or roast. Veal is pink in color, but less firm. Mutton flesh is firm and dull red in color, the fat hard and white or slightly yellow. Pork is dark pink in color and the fat is less firm than beef or mutton. ”

“ Hominy?”
“Yes,” returned I. “Or rice, or potato, or lobster, crab, salmon, halibut, cod, chicken, turkey, duck, game, veal, lamb, or beef. In short, of all kinds of fish, flesh, fowl, and vegetable. The smaller varieties are familiarly known to readers of cookery-books as ‘olives’ of meat, poultry, or game; the larger as rissoles or croquettes, the largest as cannelons or mirotons.” ”

“ Prepare soup stock in a kettle which will retain heat. Fit with a tight cover, for the vapors must be held in to add to the flavor of the stock. Shank and neck of beef, pork or lamb, left-over morsels of meat, bones from steaks, roasts, chops and the carcasses of poultry, are good materials from which to make meat stock. ”

“ Their food also consisteth principally in beef, and such meat as the butcher selleth—that is to say, mutton, veal, lamb, pork, etc., whereof he findeth great store in the markets adjoining, beside sows, brawn, bacon, fruit, pies of fruit, fowls of sundry sorts, cheese, butter, eggs, etc., as the other wanteth it not at home, by his own provision which is at the best hand, and commonly least charge. ”

“ Let us look for a moment at some of the things which the factory farmer does not buy, and perhaps we shall see that a comfortable existence need not demand much more. His cows give him milk, cream, butter, and veal; his swine give roast pig, fresh pork, salt pork, ham, bacon, sausages, and lard; his hens give eggs and poultry; his fields yield hulled corn, samp, and corn meal; his orchards give apples, pears, peaches, quinces, plums, and cherries ”

“ In much less time than we need to cook a pig in our convenient kitchens, the dweller under the cocoa-nut trees was beautifully browned, crisp, and tender. In cooking, much of the fat from the pork filtered through, and having given juice and relish to the meat, had, with a good deal of fat from the pig, fallen into the ashes around the bed of coals, leaving the meat rich and of peculiar sweetness and delicacy, without being too greasy. ”

“ Pork—fresh and salted, bacon and ham—is the natural and invariable food of the settler. Beef and mutton are too valuable as marketable steers, dairy cattle, and wool-growers, and are not so conveniently prepared into keeping forms; hence the pigs he breeds on his clearings are looked upon by the bush-farmer as the regular source whence to draw his household provision in the meat way. ”

“ The white meats—milk, butter, and cheese—though very dear, are reputed as good for inferior people, but the more wealthy feed upon the flesh of all sorts of cattle and all kinds of fish. The nobility (“whose cooks are for the most part musical-headed Frenchmen and strangers “) exceed in number of dishes and change of meat. Every day at dinner there is beef, mutton, veal, lamb, kid, pork, conie, capon, pig, or as many of these as the season yielded, besides deer and wildfowl, and fish, and sundry delicacies “wherein the sweet hand of the seafaring Portingale is not wanting.” ”

“ Salt pork, salt beef, salt fish, relieve one another in an endless chain upon her board. She averts scurvy by means of cabbage and potatoes. I know well-to-do farmers' wives who do not cook what they call "butcher's meat," three times a month, or poultry above twice a year. ”

“ For instance, the addition of some thousand carcasses in our exportation of barrelled beef: the propagation of swines flesh, and improvement in the art of making good bacon, so much wanted among us by the great destruction of pigs, too frequent at our table; which are no way comparable in taste or magnificence to a well grown, fat, yearling child, which roasted whole will make a considerable figure at a lord mayor's feast, or any other publick entertainment. ”

“ For the meat, three or four pounds of your favorite cut of corned beef, which has not been in the brine too long, and the same amount of fresh pork, the foot and lower part of the leg. This piece of pork you will find a great improvement, and the vegetables need the fat, as no butter is used in their preparation for the table. For vegetables, you need cabbage, turnips, carrots, parsnips, beets, and potatoes. ”

“ Legs and loins of pork, legs of mutton, fillets of veal, and many other joints, will bake to great advantage, if the meat be good; I mean well-fed, rather inclined to be fat: if the meat be poor, no baker can give satisfaction. ”

“ The next morning take the meat from the bones to use for potted meat, put the bones and vegetables into the stockpot, together with any bones, whether large or small, left from the previous day, trimmings of meat, cooked or uncooked, gristle, skin, &c.: bones from poultry and game of any kind should be used with the rest, and a ham or bacon bone, or trimmings from a tongue, all help to improve the flavour of the stock. ”

“ Such appetite at all events as has rarely offered itself during years preceding, when the choice of food was conventionally limited to the unvarying progression and array of mutton and beef, in joint, chop, and steak, arriving after a strong meat soup, with a possible interlude of fish, and followed by puddings of which the ingredients are chiefly derived from animal sources. ”

“ In plump young lamb and pork all cuts are tender. With veal, rib and loin are generally more tender than the rest of the carcass. The cheaper cuts of lamb, pork, and veal—that is, shoulder, breast, and shank meat—make good chops, roasts, pot roasts, and stews.
Learn the cuts of meat so you can name them when you see them. The best teacher is the reliable meat dealer. Arrange to do your marketing at the time of day when he can help you. ”

“ I have known people mix grated lobster with birds’-nests, and mint with chicken or pork!
“The cooks of to-day think nothing of mixing in one soup the meat of chicken, duck, pig, and goose. But these chickens, ducks, pigs, and geese have doubtless [410] souls. And these souls will most certainly file plaints in the next world on the way they have been treated in this. A good cook will use plenty of different dishes. Each article of food will be made to exhibit its own characteristics, while each made dish will be characterised by one dominant flavour. ”

“ Sheep are handled in the same way. The dipping corrals are situated on different parts of the estancia in selected positions, and when these are at a long distance from the farmhouse the men, when employed there, cook their meals of great lumps of beef over a blaze of crackling sticks. The meat is hooked on to a long iron bar which is stuck upright in the ground, and the savoury smell of the roasting, crackling meat fills the air. ”

“ Take any scraps of cooked or uncooked meat; any bones, cooked or uncooked, to make second stock. Allow one pint of water to every pound of meat and bones, and vegetables in the same proportion as for first stock. The bones should be broken up. Boil gently until all the virtue is extracted from the meat, bones, and vegetables. The contents of the stockpot should be emptied into a pan every night, and the stock strained from the meat, bones, and vegetables. ”

“ Make your dairy amply large and of such kind that there will be plenty of milk, cream and butter. Feed the skim-milk to the hogs and grow your pork meat. Where practicable cure your own bacon and ham, make your own sausage and dry and corn your own beef. ”

“ But neither beef nor mutton require to be so well done as pork, lamb, and veal.—Pork, in particular, requires to be thoroughly done. It must be basted with salt and water; and the skin or rind of the leg, loin, and spare-rib, must be scored, with a sharp knife, after it has been some time at the fire, to make it eat the better. Geese, pigs, and young pork, require a brisk fire, and should be turned quickly.
Great care should be taken in spitting the meat, that the prime part of the joint be not injured:—to balance it on the spit, cook-holds and loaded skewers are very handy. ”

“ It is not a little provoking under all our privations to know that we have on board the bark a sufficient quantity of wholesome food to make us comfortable. In addition to good beef, pork, codfish, beans, potatoes and hard-bread, we have a quantity of flour, sufficient to give us a reasonable supply of soft-tack, besides rice, dried apples, raisins and sugar. ”

“ I have only the most primitive facilities for cooking, and the butcher is twelve miles away over a mountain road. He is anything but dependable, and when I send for a piece of roast beef I may get a soup bone of veal, or a small bit of liver, or a side of breakfast bacon, which I keep hung in a tree. ”

“ If you have no bones or bits of meat on hand to make stock with, a knuckle of beef or veal can be procured with little expense; or, if a rich soup is desired, several kinds of meat should be mixed. For instance: Take four pounds of the shin of beef, four pounds of the knuckle of veal, and a half-pound of good lean ham—any scraps of poultry, necks, wings, etc.—that may chance to be unused. Three onions, three carrots, one head of celery, a few chopped mushrooms, two or three fresh tomatoes, or what would be equal to them in canned tomatoes, if they can be obtained ”

“ Never as long as you live put meat, either fresh or salt, near your milk-vessels; if you do, you will surely spoil your milk and lose your butter.” “This may account for my loss, but what have you to say to its coming back?” “Why, what’s to hinder it, when your bacon is in the chimney and your cow at grass?” ”

“ Such a one should avoid afternoon tea as he would poison, and at six or seven have his dinner, which should consist of plainly cooked fish, mutton, venison, chicken, grouse, partridge, hare, pheasant, tripe boiled in milk, sweetbread, lamb, roast beef, and stale bread. ”

“ As the cow is kept for its meat and its milk, and the sheep for its meat and its wool, so is the hen kept for two purposes, its flesh and its eggs. Some kinds are bred for the table and they are of great value in our food-supply. Everybody likes a dish of chicken meat, which is fine in flavor, easy [181] of digestion, and very good for the weak or sick. ”

“ No, you will find, ladies, that if you use a cloth well wet in cold water you can remove all objectionable matter from the outside of meat or poultry. Indeed, if a piece of meat or poultry can not be cleaned with a wet cloth, it is not clean enough to use. One lady asks me about keeping meat for a long time. Of course that is a question of taste entirely, whether you like meat hung a long time or whether you like it fresh. All meat, when it is first killed, whether it is poultry, or game, or the ordinary domestic meat, is very tender. ”

“ Coarse-grained meat, and meat streaked with connective tissue or gristle, is sure to be tough. (2) Freshness. Fresh beef is a good red colour, modified, when it is very cold, to a purplish shade. If black or greenish in tint the meat is stale, and its odour will be bad. Meat is flabby after it is killed, but soon grows firm. It is in suitable condition for cooking before this change takes place, or some days after it. ”

“ When we had meat at all it was pork—boiled pork, fried pork, pigs' liver, an' all that, enough to make you 'shamed to look a pig in the face—an' fer the rest, potatoes, an' duff, an' johnny-cake, an' meal mush, an' milk emptins bread that you c'd smell a mile after it got cold. ”

“ The food of the proprietor or farmer labourer chiefly consists in vegetable soups, potatoes, salt fish, pork, bacon, &c., and seldom or ever butcher’s meat, and invariably Indian corn bread, homebaked. ”