In especial I would direct the Englishman's attention to the broiled
pompano of New Orleans; the kingfish filet of New York; the sanddab
of Los Angeles; the Boston scrod of the Massachusetts coast; and that
noblest of all pan fish--the fried crappie of Southern Indiana. To these
and to many another delectable fishling, would I introduce the poor
fellow; and to him and his fellows I fain would offer a dozen apiece of
Smith Island oysters on the half shell.
And I would take all of them to New England for baked beans and brown
bread and codfish balls; but on the way we would visit the shores of
Long Island for a kind of soft clam which first is steamed and then is
esteemed. At Portsmouth, New Hampshire, they should each have a broiled
lobster measuring thirty inches from tip to tip, fresh caught out of the
Piscataqua River.
Vermont should come to them in hospitality and in pity, offering
buckwheat cakes and maple sirup. But Rhode Island would bring a genuine
Yankee blueberry pie and directions for the proper consumption of it,
namely--discarding knife and fork, to raise a crusty, dripping wedge
of blueberry pie in your hand to your mouth, and to take a first
bite, which instantly changes the ground-floor plan of that pie from a
triangle to a crescent; and then to take a second bite, and then to lick
your fingers--and then there isn't any more pie.
Down in Kentucky I should engage Mandy Berry, colored, to fry for them
some spring chickens and make for them a few pones of real cornbread. In
Creole Louisiana they should sample crawfish gumbo; and in Georgia
they should have 'possum baked with sweet potatoes; and in Tidewater
Maryland, terrapin and canvasback; and in Illinois, young gray squirrels
on toast; and in South Carolina, boiled rice with black-eyed peas;
and in Colorado, cantaloupes; and in Kansas, young sweet corn; and in
Virginia, country hams, not cured with chemicals but with hickory smoke
and loving hands; and in Tennessee, jowl and greens.
And elsewhere they should have their whacking fill of prairie hen and
suckling pig and barbecued shote, and sure-enough beefsteak, and
goobers hot from the parching box; and scrapple, and yams roasted in hot
wood-ashes; and hotbiscuit and waffles and Parker house rolls--and
the thousand and one other good things that may be found in this our
country, and which are distinctively and uniquely of this country.
Finally I would bring them back by way of Richmond, and there I would
give them each an eggnog compounded with fresh cream and made according
to a recipe older than the Revolution. If I had my way about it no
living creature should be denied the right to bury his face in a
brimming tumbler of that eggnog--except a man with a drooping red
mustache.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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