The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. XX, No. 1025, August 19, 1899Various
General
The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. XX, No. 1025, August 19, 1899
Various
Children's literature -- Periodicals
Social position is the chief agent which determines to which class an
individual belongs. The working classes usually dine in the middle of
the day, and the professional and upper classes dine in the evening.
We will continue our remarks on the diet of the richer classes, not
because it is better or more suitable than the plainer diet of the
working classes, but because the rich naturally keep a more varied
table, and so will give us more material to criticise.
Luncheon is a desultory sort of meal, and though most people eat
something, many do so only because they think that it is the thing to
do, and not because they are really hungry.
If you will accompany us, we will go to see the luncheon given by Lord
X. at his Surrey home. But we cannot go as guests, for not only have we
not been invited, but we are going to criticise many things about the
table and the meal. We must, therefore, remain invisible and inaudible,
for it is unpardonable to make remarks at the table, even if those
remarks would save a whole company from indigestion and a sleepless
night.
Before the meal is served, our eyes are offended by something on the
sideboard which is sufficient to destroy the appetite of any extra
delicately-minded person if she only knew its secrets.
The object is nothing less than a cold pheasant pie ornamented by
the head or feathers of the bird whose flesh the pie is supposed to
contain. We want you to examine that ornament, and we feel pretty
certain that if you do, you will never again eat meat pies.
In order that the carcases of dead animals should not encumber the
earth, it has been ordained that when an animal dies, its body rapidly
decomposes and becomes dissolved into simple gases. The agents that
bring about the dissolution of the body are various. The chief agents
which cause the decomposition of organic matter are microbes. The
majority of these do not produce diseases in man, but some of them do,
and some of these you might find on that pheasant pie if you could see
it through a microscope.
Similarly offensive, but to a less degree, is the practice of putting
pigeons’ feet sticking outside a steak pie to suggest that the
remainder of the birds is inside, and putting feathers into the tails
of roast pheasants.
One of the chief values of cooking is to sterilise food, so why foul
the food you have so carefully sterilised by sticking decaying matter
into it?
The first item of the luncheon consists of oysters, and we notice that
only three out of the company of twelve partake of them. As nearly
everybody who can afford them likes oysters, there is probably some
special reason why nine out of twelve persons refuse them. Doubtless it
is the typhoid scare, and we are much pleased to see that some persons,
at all events, do occasionally give a side thought to preventive
medicine.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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