Banting
The following is the diet of Mr. Banting, by which in a year-fifty-two weeks-he reduced himself in weight 52 lbs., to his great advantage. He began with. 202 lbs., and to his joy and comfort he came down to 150 lbs. "For breakfast," he says, "at nine a.m., I take five or six ounces of either beef, mutton, kidneys, broiled fish or cold meat of any kind excepting pork or veal; a large cup of tea or coffee without milk or sugar; a little biscuit or one ounce of dry toast, making together six ounces of solid and nine of liquid. For dinner, at two p.m., five or six ounces of any fish except salmon, herrings, or eels; any meat except pork or veal; any vegetable except potato, parsnip, beet-root, turnip, or carrot; one ounce of dry toast; fruit out of a pudding, not sweetened; any kind of poultry or game; and two or three glasses of good claret, sherry, or Madeira-champagne, port, and beer forbidden; making together ten or twelve ounces solid and ten liquid. For tea, at six p.m., two or three ounces of cooked fruit, a rusk or two, and a cup of tea without milk or sugar; making together two to four ounces solid and nine liquid. For supper, at nine p.m., three or four ounces of meat or fish, similar to dinner, with a glass or two of claret or sherry and water; making together four ounces solid Barbel and seven liquid. For nightcap, if required, a tumbler of grog (gin, whisky, brandy, without sugar), or a glass or two of claret or sherry."
BARBEL is hardly ever eaten in England. Our anglers either throw it away, or keep it for the cat. This is probably because its roe is pernicious. But the French speak well of the little carp, and have a special admiration for its head and its tongue, or the sort of palate which is called the tongue in carps. They sometimes admit, however, that the body of the fish is insipid, and requires a good *sauce.
BARD is an old English as well as an old French word, of origin uncertain, for horse-armour. It was also used for armour in general. Thus the chronicler Stowe speaks of 1500 men "barded and richly trapped." Noun or verb, the word is not now used save in the language of the kitchen, where it refers to the thin slices of bacon in which any kind of flesh likely to dry up in cooking, but more especially in roasting, is swathed. The metaphor has been as far as this particular word is concerned borrowed from the French kitchen. In England in the time of Chaucer, and in the kitchen of Richard II., a bird coated in this way with bacon was said to be armed or enarmed. The learned and reverend editors of the cookery-books which remain to us from that time seem to be not a little puzzled when they read of cranes and herons being "armed or enarmed with lards of swyne," and fancy it must mean larded in the modern acceptation. It means barded; and if one could recover the old MS. of The Forme of Cury, the receipt-book of Richard's court, it would probably be found that in many instances in which the editor, Dr. Pegge, read lard, the scribe wrote bard.