CHRISTMAS FARE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 18897, 20 December 1924, Page 21 (Supplement)

CHRISTMAS FARE.

PEEPS INTO AN OLD BOOK.

BY MATAXGA.

" About Christmas, if the weather be coldish, is the best time .to kill." This, gentle reader, is not a general incitement to murder taken from the unbosomings of Bluebeard or Deeming, but the expert advice of a highly respectablo Englishman, a great lowr of his countrymen, especially the pot v among them, and of other folk besides. You will find it in William Cobbctt's " Cottage Economy." A very intelligent and likeable man, Cobbett, if sometimes coarse and .contentious. He wrote much nonsense,. some of which he had the rare grace to. regret; and he did some eminently silly things, as when lie brought home from America Tom Paine's bones, although here and there are folk who think his origination of Hansard sillier still. But we aH have 'our lapses, and Cobbctt, on the. whole, was not a had soi t.

However, to return to his killingand Christmas. It is of pigs he is thinking, and of pigs as destined for the table; not as'pork, mark you, a food ho " would by no means recommend," but as prime bacon. And the pig, whether to be killed or cured, is to him a subject for delicate handling. "To kill a hog nicely," says he of this Christmas task, " is so much of a profession that it is better to pay a shilling for having it done," than to do it yourself with :> 'prentice hand.

For'bacon, and for its aristocratic associate, ham, given special honour at Christmas, lie had a profound regard. " A couple of flitches of bacon are worth fifty, thousand Methodist sermons and religious tracts. The sight of them upon the rack tends more to keep a man from poaching and stealing than whole volumes of penal statutes, though assisted by the terrors of the hulks and the gibbet. They are great softeners of the temper and promoters of domestic harmony. They are a great blessing." Democracy of the Table. About this time, wh<<n preparations for Christmas cheer are in full swing, there will be little disposition to quarrel with Cobbett's. flattery of the flitch. Even in our antipodean clime, Christmas is a feast of fat things. Its. rejoicings would be. woefully incomplete without the board piled high. Is not human fellowship at the very heart of the festival's significance, and in what fashion more fitting can that significance be cherished than in the unaffected democracy of the table? To eat together has ever been a symbol of fraternity; and, whatever lack may be suffered at other times, in this there must be nothing wanting. Hospitality must bo without stint. The shortest, surest way to the heart must be found. With lavish hand the most fundamental craving of mankind must have ministry and none go empty away. Heaven itself cannot be understood without the thought that " they shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more," and earth's gladness is dependent no less upon plenty. Let the unregenerate Scrooges scorn invitations to dine and cry "Out upon Merry Christmas! . . . Every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas "'. on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart!" Let these heathen rage; good Christian men, as has been their agelong wont., will rejoice, ' hailing the chef as a universal Minister of Internal Affairs and honouring the cook as a priestess. Nor "for themselves only. They will drive the wolf away from the door of others, arid barricade it with a hamper weighted with love's gifts. ■ The Kitchen Bible. The housewife's busy fingering of the kitchen Bible, that wonderful compilation to which Cobbett and Mrs. Beeton and many another inspired writer has contributed, should be blessedly secure from ridicule at this season. Not even the most profane husband can scoff with selfrespect at such devoutness. And . the hallowing influence of the season goes abroad into the farmyard. Even the animals marked for an honourable decease . share the solicitude and the plenty, as witnesses Cobbett's sage-and-onions advice about the last days of a valued porker. " Make him quite fat by all meaus," he says in an ecstasy of care. " The last bushel, even if he sit as he eat, is the most profitable. If he can walk two hundred yards at a time he is not well fatted." .

There have been cruelties, to be sure, as this manual on cottage economy, written especially for "the labouring classes of this kingdom" a century ago, reminds us. The famous Strasburg geese were caused to suffer. Cobbett's protest is thunderous. " The modes that are resorted to by the French for fattening geese, nailing them down by their webs, and other acts of cruelty are, I hope, such as Englishmen will never think of., . , . He who can deliberately inflict torture upon an animal, in order to heighten the pleasure his palate is to receive in eating it, . . . is, indeed, a tyrant in his heart. Who would think himself safe, if at the mercy of such a man ':"

And one particular inhumanity to turkeys made his blood boil. " In France," quoth he, "they sometimes pick turkeys alive, to make them tender; of which I shall only say that the man that can do this, or order it to be done, ought to be skinned alive himself." To that a heart with anything of Christmas in it responds with a truly Cromwellian "Amen" —merciful and fierce. Irish Appreciation. But, to come once more to our hams and bacon, a blest employ for this hallowed time —the sure regard in which they arc held is as universal a:» the English tongue! Not even Lamb's glorious "dissertation upon roast pig" can dim the ! honour that belongs to the finished product of British commissariat g;enius; and even Lamb himself, as read-as of "Mr. H." will remember, shows low despised Hogsflesh can be transmuted to unexceptionable Bacon. Some travelled Scotsmen may deem it nothing worth beside their liquid "luggage." Here and there a Welshman may demur, for Taffy's taste, on the unimpeachable testimony of a nursery-rhyme, runs to beef. The Irish, however, make no mistake. They cherish as one of themselves " the gintleman that pays the rint," There was one, an old peasant, brought nigh to death. He lay in lied motionless, inert, and it was whispered that, the, end might come at any moment. Soon all sign of life was gone. The door from the kitchen opened, and his wife passed llvough, carrying a boiled ham out to tic front door to cool. It;; delicious o<;our reached his nostrils. Ho raised hi:, head suddenly and looked at it. "Shure," said he, "and it's a foine ham, Mary; could I hive a bit?" "You could not, Pat: it's for the wake." After that, nothing more in praise of ham need be said. But it were well to take a last peep into Cobbett's manual, and glean hope from his advice and assurance "for you are to have bacon till Christmas comes again,"