Various - The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866

"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,

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.

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.

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.