Feasting

“ It is highly probable that the alternate feasting and fasting to which the gluttony and improvidence of these people so constantly subject them, may have occasioned many of the complaints that proved fatal during the winter; and on this account we hardly knew whether to rejoice or not at the general success of their fishery. Certain it is, that on a particular occasion of great plenty, one or two individuals were seen lying in the huts, so distended by the quantity of meat they had eaten that they were unable to move, and were suffering considerable pain, arising solely from this cause. ”

“ To a few the snow means profit—for the hawks there is a carnival of feasting, and the fox finds weak and hungry hares and rabbits an easy prey, if ill-nourished on a diet of tree-bark and withered herbage. As to the pheasants, they are well cared for—and the keeper, in snowy weather, scatters his maize with a liberal hand. ”

“ Feasting is the favorite way of entertaining friends, so long as food is plentiful; and by a curious custom, of the portion allotted them, guests must carry away what they cannot eat. Water in aboriginal days was the only Nootka drink ”

“ Most of them used worms, but one, who had put a piece of raw meat for dinner into his skin wallet, cut off a little bit and baited his line with it, unseen by his companions.
For a long time they cast patiently, without receiving a single bite; the sun had grown low in the sky, and it seemed as if they would have to go home empty-handed, not even with a basket of roots to show; when the youth, who had baited his hook with raw meat, suddenly saw his line disappear under the water. ”

“ Can any of your correspondents or readers give any authentic information as to the fact having been witnessed by any one, of the old story of the fox relieving itself of fleas by taking a feather in its mouth, and gradually, though slowly enough, retrograding itself into the water, first by legs and tail, then body, shoulders, and head to the nose, and thus compelling the fleas, to escape from the drowning element, to pass over the nose on to the bridge of the feather, which is then committed to the stream. ”

“ I have frequently seen them with a piece of meat, half roasted, in the dirt and ashes, lying on the ground with their feet on it, and tearing like wild beasts with their teeth. After their fish is boiled, they turn it out on a mat, or, if they have not got one readily, on the ground, and collect round it like a pack of hounds, devouring dirt and all. ”

“ Other creatures may die of starvation in time of snow; but the fox then finds his prey with greatest ease. Cubs are weaned about the middle of May, and must be fed on flesh, when a majority of pheasants are sitting. And when a sitting pheasant is scented or seen by a vixen in search of food for her cubs, that pheasant, you may say, is dead. The keeper, though his blood boils afresh at each nesting tragedy—at the sight of the strewn feathers of the hen pheasant and at the cold touch of the lifeless eggs—appreciates the deftness of the marauder's work. ”

“ A woman who ‘has lost a feather of her wing,’ as an old woman put it to me, may not touch it. Sometimes also they merely put the two hands round the sheaf (New Deer) .
The clyackfeast or “meal and ale.” “Generally a feast and dance follow when all the wheat is cut. This feast and dance bear the name of clyack or [pg 160] ‘meal and ale.’ However, some people do not give ‘meal and ale’ till all the cut corn has been got in: then the feast is called ‘the Winter’ and they say that a farmer ‘has the Winter’ when all his sheaves have been carried home. ”

“ Take off the flesh, and mince it finely with a little beef, lard, a few truffles, pepper and salt to taste, and stuff the pheasant carefully with this. Cut a slice of bread, larger considerably than the bird, and cover it with the liver, &c., and a few truffles: an anchovy and a little fresh butter added to these will do no harm. Put the bread, &c., into the dripping-pan, and, when the bird is roasted, place it on the preparation, and surround it with Florida oranges.
Do not be uneasy, Savarin adds, about your dinner; for a pheasant served in this way is fit for beings better than men. ”

“ In winter, they are brought into the cities, lean, hard, dry, and black, and the meat infested all through with small threadlike white worms; showing that decomposition has commenced, and requiring the disguise of spices, wine, currant jelly, &c., to render it eatable, not wholesome, for every sort of food in the slightest degree tainted is utterly injurious to health, and cannot often be eaten with impunity. ”

“ For the lighter one I recommend the hen pheasant's or brown owl's wing feather, dubbed with hare's ear and yellow silk; for the dark, the tail feather of a partridge, a brown red hackle underneath the wings, and dark orange silk, or a woodcock's feather for wings, and a dark red hackle with dark orange silk,—kills exceedingly well. When the water is low and fine, I consider your chance of killing fish far greater with two, than three of the large spring flies. ”

“ Prepare your feathers, whether dirty whites or faded out light colors, by washing thoroughly in hot soap suds and rinsing well in hot water. Prepare your bath as follows: Take about a half teaspoonful of safranine and dilute in one gallon, more or less, of boiling water, and add thereto a half tablespoonful of extract of archil. Enter your feathers and let them remain in bath about two minutes; after which take out and add to bath a few drops of diluted violet, and re-enter your feathers, letting them remain in bath about one minute longer. ”

“ It is probably for the same or some similar reason that the various mammals and birds, such as foxes, bears, owls, crows, cranes, swans, &c., which one sees chained in or before the tent of the fisherman or the herdsman, are taken from the nest and reared. As long as they are young they are tended carefully and kindly; whenever they are full-grown and in good fur or feather they are killed, the edible parts are eaten, and the skin or feathers made use of or sold, the former especially often fetching an astonishingly high price. ”

“ It roasts or broils your meat to a turn, then battles with you for it and sears your fingers when you strive to snatch the morsel from its jaws, and perhaps burns it to a crisp before your very eyes, vouchsafing but the tantalizing fragrance of the feast. ”

“ Unless kept to the proper point, a pheasant is one of the most tough, dry, and flavourless birds that is sent to table; but when it has hung as many days as it can without becoming really tainted, and is well roasted and served, it is most excellent eating. ”

“ III. Have the feathers properly cleaned and well rinsed from the soap, respectively soda. Gray feathers may be used unbleached, but a purer color is obtained upon them when bleached. Prepare a hot bath, to which so much sulphuric acid is added, that it has a feeble sour taste; add the solution of two per cent. (of the weight of feathers) , navy blue, one per cent. fast blue or black, and one-eighth per cent. acid fuchsine. Stir well, enter the feathers, manipulate while raising the temperature to boiling point, but not to actual boiling, continue at this temperature for one half hour ”

“ Whatever opinion may be held in regard to the gaminess of these birds, one thing is quite certain—namely, that the meat of a fresh pheasant and that of a high one are two totally different things. When fresh, the meat is flavourless, whereas when it is reasonably high it is tender, full of taste, and of an incomparable flavour. ”

“ If, led by the evidence that in animals the amount of covering is in some cases affected by the degree of exposure, it were admitted as imaginable that the development of feathers from preceding dermal growths had resulted from that extra nutrition caused by extra superficial circulation, we should still be without explanation of the structure of a feather. Nor should we have any clue to the specialities of feathers—the crests of various birds, the tails sometimes so enormous, the curiously placed plumes of the bird of paradise, &c., &c. ”

“ When they are engaged in drying meat, they will throw down upon the ground a whole side of the Moose, beat it with stones, walk over it, trample upon it with their dirty feet; the hairs of men and of animals, the feathers of birds, if they have killed any, dirt and ashes,—all these are ground into the meat, which they make almost as hard as wood with the smoke. ”

“ The cattle are fed upon these [Pg 46] fish during the winter months. But it has been proved, which is very strange, that if, after they have been frozen for twenty-four hours or more, you put these fish into water and gradually thaw them as you do the meat, they will recover and swim about again as well as ever. ”

“ In fact, the only bait used by those people is in their opinion a composition of charms, inclosed within a bit of fish skin, so as in some measure to resemble a small fish. The things used by way of charm, are bits of beavers tails and fat, otter's vents and teeth, musk-rat's guts and tails, loon's vents, squirrel's testicles, the cruddled milk taken out of the stomach of sucking fawns and calves, human hair, and numberless other articles equally absurd. ”

“ After the pheasant season, young birds that have been hatched the same year are excellent substitutes for that fine game, and fetch a fair price. They should never be fattened, but have a good supply of grain and meal for a week or two before being killed. The flesh of the young bird is very delicate, juicy, and well-flavoured, but the old birds, even of the second year, are dry, tough, and tasteless. ”

“ The blood dries up when the feather has unfolded to its full size, leaving it light and dry, with a horny part at the root that sticks in the hole where it grew, and a spray-like part that makes up most of the feather. ”

“ NE who loves our feathered friends has described a curious instance of their instinct. On the back lawn at a gentleman's house, they have a feeding-box for the pheasants, which opens on their perching upon it, but remains shut if any lesser bird than a hen pheasant perches there, which saves the contents from the thefts of these, and of rats, mice, and other vermin. ”

“ Very little in the way of animal food comes amiss to the wild pheasant, which has been known to eat mice, wire worms by the thousand, slugs of all sorts, snails with shells and snails without, frogs, blind worms, and young vipers. ”

“ To pluck either game or poultry have the bird upon a board with its head towards you, and pull the feathers away from you, which is the direction they lay in; many persons pull out the feathers in a contrary direction, by which means they are likely to tear the skin to pieces, which would very much disfigure the bird for the table. ”

“ If, however, the bird be kept a proper length of time, distinguishable by a slight smell and change of colour, it becomes a highly-flavoured dish, occupying a middle distance in delicacy between chicken and venison. The exact time a pheasant should be "hung" is difficult to define, but the right moment a pheasant should be taken down is instinctively detected by a good cook.
1310.—PHEASANT, ROASTED. (Fr.—Faisan Rôti.)
Ingredients.—1 pheasant, 1⁄4 of a lb. of beefsteak, fried breadcrumbs, bacon, brown gravy, bread sauce (see Gravies and Sauces) , watercress, salad-oil, salt and pepper. ”

“ The water from its prolonged agitation is beaten, not into mere creaming foam, but into masses of accumulated yeast, which hangs in ropes and wreaths from wave to wave, and, where one curls over to break, form a festoon like a drapery from its edge ”

“ To the chicks of the pheasant hen a risky time is between the shedding of the soft fluffy down of infancy and the growth of feathers proof against cold and wet. Where pheasants have the advantage is that their hatching-time is spread over many weeks; so that whereas partridges may have their hopes ruined by a week or by a few days, or even a few hours of bad weather, the pheasants' hopes are never blighted while summer lasts. ”

“ At a given signal the poisonous stuff is baled into the river, and very soon afterwards a scene of wild excitement begins, for the fish are speared or captured with handnets as they rise, stupefied, to the surface. The women scoop up the small fry in their nets. ”

“ The period during which they lay and hatch their eggs and rear their young is much longer than with partridges. If the last ten days of June be days of cold, heavy, ceaseless rain, they may practically annihilate the partridge chicks. But at that time a great number of young pheasants are old enough to withstand a considerable rainfall. Nor are the pheasants of tender age—only a section of the pheasant crop—so much at the mercy of bad weather as are tender partridges, for their haunts are chiefly in and about the woods and hedgerows, which afford shelter from cold and wet. ”

“ I mean to make a brine and after cutting off the head and bellies, dipping them in the brine for but a short time, then hang them up and cure them by smoke, or dry them in the sun; for our people being so long accustomed to have fish whenever they wanted, would think it very bad to have none at all. ”

“ Those which are just beginning to have feathers are left in the nests, but their legs are broken, and, in order that they may be crammed, the food is put before the mothers, for they will feed themselves and their squabs on it all day long. ”

“ Pheasants may be fed the same things as are fed to fowls, and in much the same manner, but there is one important difference which the pheasant breeder must carefully observe. Fowls will stand abuse in the matter of diet much better than pheasants will. In feeding the latter more attention must be given to providing regular supplies of green food, to having all [Pg 220] food sound and good when fed, and to regulating the quantity given for a meal so that it will not lie about and become sour or soiled before it is eaten. ”