Indian meal

“ INDIAN FRITTERS.—Having beaten eight eggs very light, stir them gradually into a quart of rich milk, in turn with twelve large table-spoonfuls of yellow Indian meal, adding a salt-spoon of salt. When all is in, stir the whole very hard. Have ready over a clear fire, in a pot or a large frying-pan, a pound of fresh lard, boiling fast. Drop the batter into it, a ladleful at a time. If you find the batter too thin, stir into it a little more Indian meal. As the lard boils away, replenish it with more. As fast as they are done, take out each fritter with a perforated skimmer ”

“ Scald a quart of Indian meal—when lukewarm, turn, stir in half a pint of flour, half a tea-cup of yeast, and a little salt. When light, fry them in just fat enough to prevent their sticking to the frying pan. Another method of making them, which is very nice, is to turn boiling milk or water on to the Indian meal, in the proportion of a quart of the former to a pint of the latter—stir in three table-spoonsful of flour, three eggs well beaten, and a couple of tea-spoonsful of salt. ”

“ The Southern meal is certainly coarser, and the bread made from it less compact. Moreover, there is a partiality at the North for yellow meal, which the Southerners regard as only fit for chicken and cattle-feed. The yellow may be the sweeter, but I acknowledge that I have never succeeded in making really nice bread from it.
Indian meal should be purchased in small quantities, except for a very large family. It is apt to heat, mould, and grow musty, if kept long in bulk or in a warm place. If not sweet and dry, it is useless to expect good bread or cakes. ”

“ Boys would be surprised to see how much an Indian can eat at a single meal. A "big chief" can eat a whole goose or turkey at one sitting. The Indians eat right along, till they have gorged themselves and can eat no more. Perhaps it is because they seldom get what is called "a square meal," and so when plenty offers they make the most of it. One day, four chiefs of the Ar-ap-a-hoe tribe came to Fort Russell, to see about getting rations for three hundred of their tribe. ”

“ If Indian meal is well boiled, and fed not too moist, it will answer a very good purpose, particularly after they are eight or ten days old. Pure water must be placed near them in such a manner as to enable them to drink without getting into the water, which, by wetting their feathers, benumbs and injures them. ”

“ At about midnight supper is announced, and every person in attendance marches out into another room and partakes of a frugal Indian meal, generally composed of wild game; Chilé Colorado or red-pepper tortillas, and guayaves, with a good supply of mush and milk, which completes the festive board of the veloris or wake. ”

“ On breaking the soft rind you find it full of white meal, probably eatable, and in the meal three or four great hard wrinkled nuts, rounded on one side, wedge-shaped on the other, which, cracked, are found full of almond-like white jelly, so delicious that one can well believe travellers when they tell us that the Indian tribes wage war against each other for the possession of the trees which bear these precious vagaries of bounteous nature. ”

“ Arsikere.—We have our carriage gently shunted at a siding here, and stop under a banyan tree, and have our meal in the moonlight—such moonlight and such a meal! I've heard so much of Indian cooking, of the everlasting chicken and curries, but out of our two tiny kitchens we get a dinner worthy of a moderately good French café, fish and beef, and game, and variety of vegetables.—Indian beef is not half bad in my humble opinion, and the Vino Tinto is straight from Lisbon, by Goa, the Portuguese port on this west coast, what better could a man desire? ”

“ But at these two principal meals the Indian, if he can afford it, eats a large quantity. It is not merely that his appetite should be satisfied, but if the meal is to be regarded as a satisfactory one there must be the physical sensation of repletion, and the diner does not need to eat again for several hours. ”

“ Some of the native dishes take a great deal of care and toil to prepare, and except that their tendency is to be rather too pungent for the English palate, a really first-class Indian dinner is refined in appearance; and in the variety of dishes, provided there are always certain things which can be eaten with pleasure. The varied objects which make up the meal are neatly grouped before each guest, and they are meant to be taken in a certain order, so that the palate will be constantly renovated for the next dish which it is to taste. ”

“ The smaller the menu the less, as a rule, any person will eat, be he Indian or white man. The extended menu is a series of temptations to overeat. The simple menu of the Indian was a preventive to gluttony. It will doubtless be recalled that when the great Bismarck was broken down in health, his physicians gave him no other prescription as to food than that he should eat but one kind of food to a meal. This is a dietetic axiom: The less variety the less one eats. In a diseased condition health can often be restored by giving the stomach and assimilative organs less work to do. ”

“ In tribal days, when one had food, all had food; when one starved, all starved. A reservation Indian does not like to take pay for a meal, especially from one of his own race; and he can not comprehend how any white man having food can let another go hungry.
His hospitality is often a hindrance to the Indian’s progress. Indolent Indians eat up the food stores of industrious relatives.
Page 56, l. 14: “Dried meat pounded fine and mixed with marrow fat.” ”

“ With regard to above, if care should be taken and make the Curries with any of the following meat:—Beef, mutton, chicken, fish, etc., etc., and vegetables, you will find it an economical dish for an English meal to have an Indian dish; if little care and attention is given to it, will find it as a relish. The same time I must say, many parties visited our Indian continent will know the taste of a Curry as well as my own experience. I have been instructed by several head cooks of India and Ceylon. My own people are cooks under several respected gentry of Ceylon and India. ”

“ The meal should be sifted separately. Put the Indian in your bread-pan, sprinkle a little salt among it, and wet it thoroughly with scalding water. Stir it up while you are scalding it. Be sure and have hot water enough; for Indian absorbs a great deal of water. When it is cool, pour in your rye; add two gills of lively yeast, and mix it with water as stiff as you can knead it. Let it stand an hour and a half, in a cool place in summer, on the hearth in winter. It should be put into a very hot oven, and baked three or four hours. It is all the better for remaining in the oven over night. ”

“ Quick waffles are made with sour cream. To one quart of sour cream add flour enough to make a batter, two eggs well beaten, a small piece of butter, and one teaspoonful of soda; just before baking, a little salt; bake immediately: a little boiled rice will be a great improvement. 74
REMARKS ON MAKING INDIAN BREAD.
It is better in making Indian bread to pour the liquid, either water or milk, boiling hot on the Indian meal. Indian takes more salt than wheat. ”

“ A few earthenware pots and a large dish in which to serve the food, some brass utensils, and a large jar for carrying water, complete the culinary arrangements. For plates, banana or plantain leaves are used, or, lacking these, small leaves are sewn together. This saves the drudgery of washing dishes, as the leaves are thrown away after each meal, and the fingers are used in place of the knives and forks of the more aesthetic races. Chairs and tables are not needed, as the Indian squats upon his haunches, as only an Oriental can ”

“ As such favourable opportunities of indulging the appetite happen but seldom, it is a general {144} rule with the Indians, which we did not neglect, to exert every art in dressing our food which the most refined skill in Indian cookery has been able to invent, and which consists chiefly in boiling, broiling, and roasting: but of all the dishes cooked by those people, a beeatee, as it is called in their language, is certainly the most delicious, at least for a change, that can be prepared from a deer only, without any other ingredient. ”

“ In time we ate an early and hurried tiffin—our daily goat-chop, garnished with green peas that rattled upon the plate like so much bird-shot, and the usual cold and sodden Indian rice poured over with a blackish curry mixture diversified by pools of clear grease—the worst-made curry in the world, always served one at Indian hotels, dak banglas, and railway refreshment-rooms. ”

“ As I before observed, these men generally eat but twice a day, and many times not more than once, and those meals are light and simple compared with the meals that are swallowed in the civilized world; and by the very people also, who sit at the festive board three times a day, making a jest of the Indian for his eating, when they actually guzzle more liquids, besides their eating, than would fill the stomach of an Indian. ”

“ The Indians are capable of extraordinary abstinence from food, in which they can persevere for successive days without complaint or apparent suffering. They even take a pride in long fasts, by which they usually prepare themselves for any great undertaking. Yet, when once set down to a feast, their gluttony is described as enormous, and the capacity of their stomachs almost incredible. They will go from feast to feast, doing honour to each in succession. The chief giving the entertainment does not partake, but with his own hands distributes portions among the guests. ”

“ There were also great stores of dried meat and fish put up in every village, quantities of maple sugar, squashes, beans, pumpkins, and an endless variety of roots and nuts.
We now know that there are seventeen separate foods for which civilization is indebted to the Indian. ”

“ The mahaseer is sent to table in various ways, Indian cooks being famous for their fish-stews and curries; but it does not require any adventitious aid from the culinary art, as it is exquisite when plain-boiled, being, according to the best gastronomic authority, luscious but yet unsatiating. In India, fish can only be eaten in perfection on the banks of the stream where it is caught ”

“ It is the habit in their country, when an Indian is invited to a feast, to go as hungry as he can, so as to be as fashionable as possible, by eating an enormous quantity, and for this purpose the invitations are generally extended some time beforehand, paying the valued compliment to the invited guest of allowing as much time as he can possibly require for starving himself and preparing his stomach by tonics taken in bitter decoctions of medicinal herbs. ”

“ It would seem that they are always hungry. The quantity of meat an Indian can eat is incredible, and after eating at six or eight feasts in succession his appetite appears fully as good for the tenth or even the twentieth as at the first. ”

“ A slight consideration of the facts which I have mentioned leads to the conclusion that the food of the inhabitants of very cold regions is required to produce a large amount of heat. Melons, rice, and other watery vegetable productions, however delicious to the palate of the Hindu, would be rejected with disgust by the Esquimaux, whilst the train oil, blubber, and putrid seal's flesh which the children of the icy North consider highly palatable, would excite the loathing of the East Indian. ”

“ The conglomeration of heterogeneous articles of food in the Indian's kettle was simply another act of conformity with Nature; as not what they ate, but the eating enough of anything, was their chief object, and it was the stomach, not the palate, which they had to satisfy. It is curious to note that down to quite recent years in New England, in the families of husbandmen, domestic usage approximated to this Indian habit, — vegetables, pastry, and meat (fresh or salt) being cooked in one kettle, served on one great platter, and dispensed after the same miscellaneous fashion. ”

“ It would occupy too large a space to enumerate here the several productions, indigenous and foreign, of the vegetable world in India. The Natives in their cookery, use every kind of vegetable and fruit in its unripe state. Two pounds of meat is in general all that is required to form a meal for twenty people, and with this they will cook several dishes by addition of as many different sorts of vegetables. ”

“ During the parley, when the Indians found they could not obtain a man, the next thing they wanted was flour. They were told we had none to spare, but would give them such presents as have already been mentioned. They persisted in wanting flour. We were getting short and so could not spare any. While the debate was going on an Indian went and got his blanket full of good dried meat, rode up near the captain, who was sitting down, and threw the meat on to him, saying, "You poor, hungry dog, if you have nothing for us we can give you something." ”

“ Then the squaws do the begging, and the great white packs which these dusky females carry upon their backs as they trudge along the streets of the city are filled with specked fruit, tainted chickens and meat, dried up cranberries and other unsalable stuff that the commission men of the city have kindly bestowed [Pg 758] upon them. An Indian is not so particular about what he eats as a white person. When meat is tainted he boils it until he gets all the taint out. What remains serves as savory sauce for the meat. The Indians are intelligent. ”

“ For the feeding of the Army is a delicate business and complicated. It is not enough to secure that there be sufficient "caloric units" in the men's rations; there are questions of taste. The Brahmin will not touch beef; the Mahomedan turns up his nose at pork; the Jain is a vegetarian; the Ghurkha loves the flesh of the goat. And every Indian must have his ginger, garlic, red chilli, and turmeric, and his chupattis [Pg 29] of unleavened bread. ”