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The Cook's Confrère: C'est

C'est un deuil, mais un deuil qui n'est pas sans saveur; Versons des pleurs, amis, surtout versons des litres! Il était si mignon, si lardé, si soyeux:

Nous l'aimions! Maintenant qu'il a subi la flamme, Qu'il est accommodé, qu'il est délicieux; Nous lui servons de tombe, et nous en mangeons l'âme. Dans la profonde paix des estomacs gourmands, Son échine avec sa fressure vont descendre; Il n'avait pas rêvé, dans ses gras ronflements, D'un semblable caveau pour contenir sa cendre.

C'est un honneur bien dû. Quel que soit ton regret Des repas plantureux, du son, de l'auge pleine, Tu peux t'enorgueillir, ô mon frère, ô goret.

Nous allons te changer, nous, en substance humaine!" (Of birth renowned, entitled well to boast, And reared with care, the little pig is dead:

We sorrow, but we scent the savoury roast, And mix a bumper while our tears we shed.

We loved him, silky-soft, and plump, and fine, And now that he has felt the crisping fire We wait his soul and body to enshrine, A morsel for an epicure's desire.

He little thought, when grunting in his pen, That, seasoned thus to tickle gourmand taste, His chine would glide down throats of feasting men, And to a noble tomb within us haste.

Regret not, little pig, thine early fate:

Honours are thine beyond the fattening sty, We eat thee, brother, and incorporate Thy substance, thus, in our humanity.)¹ Another poet, in a "Hymn to the Truffle," has accorded him a semi-complimentary stanza, referring to him as "a useful animal." A mediocre sonnet has also been addressed to him by Ernest d'Hervilly in a series of seven tributes to the oyster, the pig, the gudgeon, the rabbit, the roe-buck, the herring, and the lobster. "Man's ingratitude toward him," as Grimod de la Reynière remarks in the "Almanach," "has basely reviled the name of the animal that is the most useful to the human race when he is no more. He is treated as the Abbé Geoffroy treats Voltaire; his memory is defamed whilst his flesh is being savoured, and he is repaid with ironical contempt for the ineffable pleasures he procures for us." His classic Porcosity! sacred to Thor, patron of St. Anthony, the device of Richard III, the favourite animal of Morland and Jacque, how ungenerously he has been treated! "All his habits are gross, all his appetites are impure; his stomach is unbounded and his gluttony unparalleled," say his calumniators. Yet, in fact, he is no more unclean than most domestic beasts, any lapses in this respect being due to man and to the evil communications to which he has been subjected under do- 1 Rev. Joseph A. Ely's transl. mestication. The wild hog is proverbially cleanly, and is almost exclusively a vegetarian. In his natural state his courage is undaunted. The peccary will challenge the jaguar, while the wild boar is not unfrequently victorious in his combats with the tiger himself. "In this animal," says nothing to cast aside." truth, an aching void and an empty cuisine, no lard, no hams, no bacon; no sausages, no sparerib, no larded filets and game; no truffles and scientifically blended pâtés; no souse or headcheese; no "Dissertation on Roast Pig"; no chine "with rising bristles roughly spread." His ways are ways of fatness, and all his paths are progressive. He not only seeks to instruct, like Virgil; but seeks to please, like Theocritus. Civilisation radiates from him as light from a prism. With his increase culture advances, wealth accumulates, and cookery improves. And think of the services of his ploughshare to the farmer, whose orchards in many cases would otherwise remain untilled!

Beauvilliers, "there is almost Without him there were, in His unctuous Lardship! the very fat and marrow of the stock-exchange, the grease of the commercial wheel. Did he not directly furnish the inspiration to Dubufe for one of the grandest paintings the world has produced the "Return of the Prodigal Son" who shared his husks-to say nothing of Hogarth and the Scottish poet Hogg, whose ode "To a Skylark" is scarcely excelled by Shelley's, and whose "Kilmeny" is enduring among poetic strains? And what were the spirited hunting scenes of Weenix, Sneyders, and Oudry without the great wild boar? In the fourth canto of "The Faerie Queene" he is pictured as the symbol of gluttony: "And by his side rode loathsome Gluttony, Deformèd creature on a filthy swine.

His belly was upblown with luxury, And eke with fatness swollen was his eyne.

Full of diseases was his carcass blew, And a dry Dropsie through his flesh did flow, Which by misdiet daily greater grew; Such one was Gluttony, the second of that crew."

But is he a glutton? and has he not been outrageously reviled by Spenser as well as by the poets in general? Is it fair to accept the dogmas and predications concerning his status, his vulgarity, and his voracity that have been bequeathed him from time immemorial? Is he not a gourmet rather than a gourmand? Does he not infinitely prefer the smallest truffle of Périgord to the hugest pumpkin of the fat prairies of the West? Not only inordinately fond of the truffle, without which a pâté de foie gras were a flower without perfume, he is the great hunter of this highly prized esculent, recognising with Autolycus that a good nose is requisite to smell out work for the other senses. Yet even then he is thanklessly treated by man, who, instead of remunerating him with an occasional tuber, grudgingly tosses him a few kernels of corn. The despised razorback of the South, in like manner, steadfastly performs his mission of waging war upon the rattlesnake without ever having been chosen as the emblem of a State.

To the epicure he must ever bring to mind the perfumed product of the sunny provinces of Guienne and Dauphiné, the artists of Alsace, and the Wurstmachereis of Germany. His fondness for the truffle, as instanced in the wild boar, far exceeds that of the hare, the squirrel, and the deer; and although the basset-hound and sheep-dog are also of service in locating the tuber, the pig not only points it, but deftly uproots it for the greedy hand of man. The pig seeks it by instinct; the dog, through long and patient training. The pig's education is accomplished in a few lessons by obtaining his confidence and appealing to his epicurean taste. A boiled potato accompanied with a few truffle peelings is placed in a mound of sand, after finding which the animal is rewarded by a few chestnuts, acorns, or kernels of maize and the rest is left to his infallible memory. In fact, the discovery of the truffle is due to the animal under consideration. "His long snout," says La Reynière, "perceived the odour of this treasure at a depth of several metres. Up to this time, without a doubt, it had been reserved for the table of some evil genius jealous of the happiness of man; by his cunning he concealed it from the researches of the scientist, and some fairy, a friend of the human race, charged the pig, whose keen scent the goblin had forgotten to forefend, to mine the buried marvel and bring it to the light of day. However this may be, the first pig that discovered the truffle had excellent taste; there is no bel esprit to-day who is not eager to imitate him." 1 The boar's head, likewise, how suggestive of good cheer! It at once takes one back to the great baronial 1 "Le Gastronome Francais" (1828). G. D. L. R., "De La Truffe." dining-halls, the Knights of the Round Table, and the feasts and wassails of eld. It suggests the joyous festivals of harvest-home and Yule, with the chief table on the dais and the tables for retainers and servants, when the family and attendants assembled amid the blaze of the great hearth-fire and the music of the harpers and minstrels.

Again, consider his lovely appetite, exquisite digestion, and imperturbable slumbers that many a millionaire would gladly part with half his riches to obtain. The papillæ of his tongue are never furred by dyspepsia, flatulence, gout, or the spleen. Proverbially on the best of terms with his stomach, he needs no podophyllin, bicarbonates, or Hunyadi. Sudden variations of temperature affect him not, while all latitudes are equally conducive to his longevity. Ennui is to him unknown, and life is never a burden, unless it be the trifling burden of the weight he carries. He sleeps and eats and digests, and in his own way solves • the problem of content that is still unsolved by man. His blithesome Porkship! his graces steal into the heart insensibly if one be a minute philosopher. No cock-crowing or turkey-gobbling, no lowing of kine or bleating of flocks, no screaming of hawks or cawing of crows may vie as an expression of the rural landscape with his complacent grunt of satisfaction and "high-piping Pehlevi" of triumph. A vibrant chord of melody when snouted and bristled disputants crowd and jostle around the trough or squeal and scramble within the pen, it yet requires a more potent mediumship to draw forth in its fullest measure the piercing treble of the porcine lyre. Rather let us hear • it, arrectis auribus, rising sonorously along the highway or drifting adown some reverberant lane, with the dog as the plectrum of the ham-strings. Thomson, less gracious but more observant than Lamb, recognised his accomplishments as a lyrist, and in a stanza in "The Castle of Indolence," a complement to the stanza cited from "The Faerie Queene," thus apostrophises his power of song: "Ev'n so through Brentford town, a town of mud, An herd of bristly swine is pricked along; The filthy beasts that never chew the cud Still grunt and squeak, and sing their troublous song, And oft they plunge themselves the mire among:

But aye the ruthless driver goads them on, And aye of barking dogs the bitter throng Make them renew their unmelodious moan; Ne ever find they rest from their unresting fone."

Like Spenser, Thomson has grossly traduced him, except so far as his musical gifts are concerned, though in this respect he might have been more discriminating in the use of his adjectives. Why "troublous" and "unmelodious," in place of expressing his thrilling arpeggio of song?

But it is for qualities more sterling than those of a vocal nature that the confrère of the cook deserves recognition. He has his trifling faults, to be surewho is without them? He is obstinate in being driven to market, perhaps, knowing the fate which awaits him, and possibly his assurance may be somewhat obnoxious at public gatherings. It is admitted also that his savoir faire at table, while distinguished for aplomb, is not entirely without alloy. But although the ill-mannered among his tribe occasionally thrust their feet not under but upon the mahogany, and are sometimes guilty of elbowing one another at mealtime, yet it must be conceded that they are never late at their engagements to dine; neither do they ever commit that unpardonable breach of etiquette-eating with a knife. It is a belle fourchette rather than a fine blade they ply.

The late Horace Greeley, to repeat a well-known story, tells of a farmer who drove a herd of Yorkshires to market,— "When meads with slime were sprent, and ways with mire," the march proving so fatiguing to his charges that they shrank in flesh and had to be disposed of at a sacrifice on finally arriving at their destination. When asked on his return how much he had realised from the transaction, he replied he had made nothing out of his charges themselves"he had had the pleasure of their company, though." This point, through a singular oversight, -the idea is the same and equally charming everywhere, Leigh Hunt has not touched upon in his essay "On the Graces and Anxieties of Pig-Driving." It may be of interest to those whose manuscripts have been rejected to know that Hunt's exquisite conceit was refused by the magazine to which it was addressed, but fortunately it was not on this account consigned to the waste-basket, but lives and is embalmed with Lamb's dissertation. "I could never understand to this day," writes Hunt in his autobiography, "what it is that made the editor of a magazine reject an article which I wrote, with the mock-heroic title of 'The Graces and Anxieties of Pig-Driving.' I used to think he found something vulgar in the title. He declared it was not he who rejected it, but the proprietor of the magazine. The proprietor, on the other hand, declared that it was not he who rejected it, but the editor. I published it in a magazine of my own, 'The Companion,' and found it hailed as one of my best pieces of writing."

This reference of Hunt's recalls a piquant épigramme of lamb that is not down in the cook-books. It was when the writer was taking his departure from an old Paris bookstall, a number of years ago, that, as he turned to leave, the proprietor remarked: "Monsieur perhaps might like to glance at an English work, 'sur l'Agneau,' which came in with some other volumes recently."