90 MEALS MEDICINAL, 
effects were sold at Christie’s Auction rooms. Originally George 
Lambert, the Scene Painter of Covent Garden Theatre, had his 
beef-steak broiled there over the fire in the painting room, and 
was sometimes joined by visitors, whose conviviality from the 
savoury dish led them to form the Club. In 1808, when the Covent 
Garden Theatre was burnt down, the Club moved its quarters, 
first to the Bedford Coffee House, and then back to the Lyceum 
stage, where it met on Saturday nights in the famous oak- 
panelled room, and had steaks from the great gridiron; over 
this were inscribed Shakespeare’s words: “If it were done, 
when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.” 
In the Art of Cookery (1708) we read :— 
“Good beef for men ; pudding for youth and age, 
Come up to the decorum of the stage.” 
Also :— 
“ A cauldron of Fat Beef, and stoupe of ale 
On the huzzaing mob shall more prevail 
Than if you gave them, with the nicest art, 
Ragouts of peacock’s brains, or filber’d tart.” 
Beef and rump-steak are intimately associated with the history 
of the food discipline of pugilists. The famous trainer, Sir 
Thomas Parkyas, of Bunny Park, greatly preferred Beef-eaters 
to what he termed sheep-eaters, who ate mutton. On the other 
hand, Humphries, the pugilist, was trained by Ripshaw at 
first upon Beef, but made thereupon so much flesh that the Beef 
was changed for mutton, roast, or boiled. 
The action of air upon Beef, as upon all meat which has not 
been cooked, or frozen, is the same as that which it exercises 
in the living body,—oxygen is absorbed, and carbonic acid is 
exhaled. Concurrently, a certain amount of lactic acid forms 
in the meat, which, during the subsequent cooking, dissolves, 
or soitens the fibrinous parts. The flesh of an animal which 
has died otherwise than by being slaughtered for food, may never 
be safely cooked, and eaten ; it was a sanitary ordinance enjoined 
from the time of the Levitical law by Moses to the Israelites, ‘‘ Ye 
shall not eat of anything that dieth of itself”: though he pro- 
ceeded to say (in meanness of spirit which was strange for so 
wise a patriarch), “ Thou shalt give it unto the stranger that is 
within thy gates that he may eat it: or thou mayest sell it unto 
an alien.” 
Raw Beef, by some special virtue which it possesses, is a 
