Nutmeg
There was scarcely a dish in the olden time which was not flavoured with nutmeg; and Boileau, in his satire, could ask- Aimez vous la muscade? on en a mis partout.
It has been so ridiculed that we have now gone to the other extreme; and it is rarely if ever used, except for sweet dishes. It will no doubt one of these days recover a good deal of the favour it has lost, and we shall not confine ourselves to mace, which is its husk.
Oil A بي IL.-Pliny makes an interesting remark about oil. "It is not with olive oil as with wine; for by age it acquires a bad flavour, and at the end of a year it is already old.
This is a wise provision of nature. Wine, which tends to drunkenness, she invites us to keep; but she has not willed that we should be thus sparing of oil, and so has rendered its use common and universal by the very necessity of using it while fresh." The French are wonderfully proud of their olive-trees, but the chief supply for England comes from Italy and Spain: from Italy we get 12,000 tuns a year, from Spain 5,000. The next largest supplies come in order from Portugal, Tripoli, Malta, Greece; and from France we obtain no more than 300 tuns -a tun being 252 gallons. The French pride themselves on the fact that their olives are gathered in November and December, while in Italy they are left on the tree all winter, and are culled in February and March. The olive in poetry betokens fruitfulness; but if French accounts be true, there is not much felicity in the emblem. An olivetree at twelve years of age yields on an average three kilogrammes of olives, making 240 grammes of oil, worth 60 centimes; at twenty years its yield is worth 1 fr. 50 c.; at thirty years, 2 fr. 55 c.; at forty years 3 fr. 80 c.; and at a hundred years 9 fr. 95 c. The whole of this fruitful tree being at twelve years old worth only sixpence, what are the olive-branches worth of which we hear so much?
Good olive oil is not over abundant; and that is indeed one of the reasons why many people in England cannot bear it. About 1000 years ago (A.D. 817) it was so scarce in Europe that the council of Aix la Chapelle authorised the priests to manufacture anointing oil from bacon. Imagine divine right shed over kings in the essential oil of swine; and imagine how, as the Hindoo Olla Podrida now dies happy with the tail of a cow in his hand, the good Christian of those days went shining to heaven in the extreme unction dropped from a flitch of bacon. We are driven to no such straits in these days, when oil bubbles up in wells, and fortunes are made by striking it from the rock; but still it is not easy to get the oil of Lucca good, and it is much adulterated with inferior kinds. The best olive oil in London is to be had at the Italian shop of Perelli-Rocco, No. 8, Greek Street, Soho. ..