As I Have Mentioned Our Famous Pigeon-Pies, When Describing The
Dovecote, I May As Well Conclude This Chapter With
A fuller account of
our way of living as to food, a fascinating subject to most persons.
The psychologists tell
Us a sad truth when they say that taste, being
the lowest or least intellectual of our five senses, is incapable of
registering impressions on the mind; consequently we cannot recall or
recover vanished flavours as we can recover, and mentally see and
hear, long past sights and sounds. Smells, too, when we cease
smelling, vanish and return not, only we remember that blossoming
orange grove where we once walked, and beds of wild thyme and penny-
royal when we sat on the grass, also flowering bean and lucerne
fields, filled and fed us, body and soul, with delicious perfumes. In
like manner we can recollect the good things we consumed long years
ago - the things we cannot eat now because we are no longer capable of
digesting and assimilating them; it is like recalling past perilous
adventures by land and water in the brave young days when we loved
danger for its own sake. There was, for example, the salad of cold
sliced potatoes and onions, drenched in oil and vinegar, a glorious
dish with cold meat to go to bed on! Also hot maize-meal cakes eaten
with syrup at breakfast, and other injudicious cakes. As a rule it was
a hot breakfast and midday dinner; an afternoon tea, with hot bread
and scones and peach-preserve, and a late cold supper. For breakfast,
mutton cutlets, coffee, and things made with maize. Eggs were
plentiful - eggs of fowl, duck, goose, and wild fowl's eggs - wild duck
and plover in their season. In spring - August to October - we
occasionally had an ostrich or rhea's egg in the form of a huge
omelette at breakfast, and it was very good. The common native way of
cooking it by thrusting a rod heated red through the egg, then burying
it in the hot ashes to complete the cooking, did not commend itself to
us. From the end of July to the end of September we feasted on
plovers' eggs at breakfast. In appearance and taste they were
precisely like our lapwings' eggs, only larger, the Argentine lapwing
being a bigger bird than its European cousin. In those distant days
the birds were excessively abundant all over the pampas where sheep
were pastured, for at that time there were few to shoot wild birds and
nobody ever thought of killing a lapwing for the table. The country
had not then been overrun by bird-destroying immigrants from Europe,
especially by Italians. Outside of the sheep zone in the exclusively
cattle-raising country, where the rough pampas grasses and herbage had
not been eaten down, the plover were sparsely distributed.
I remember that one day, when I was thirteen, I went out one morning
after breakfast to look for plovers' eggs, just at the beginning of
the laying season when all the eggs one found were practically new-
laid.
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