e —_ —> 
468 MEAI.S MEDICINAL. 
At the “ Boiled leg of Mutton Swarry ” held by the fashionable 
footmen in Bath (Pickwick), Mr. Whiffers, the gentleman in 
orange, (who was giving up his situation in service) “ could have 
wished to spare the company then before him the painful and 
disgusting details on which he was about to enter, but he had 
no alternative other than to state that he had been required 
to eat cold meat.”—“ Try a subtraction sum,” says the Red. 
Queen to Alice (Through the Looking Glass); “take a bone 
from a dog: what remains?” Charles Lamb has told (in 
Grace before Meat), “‘ A man may feel thankful, heartily thankful, 
over a dish of plain Mutton with turnips, and have leisure to 
reflect upon the ordinance, and institution of eating, when he 
shall confess a perturbation of mind, inconsistent with the 
purposes of a Grace before Meat, at the presence of venison, or 
turtle. I have always admired the silent Grace of the Quakers, 
who go about their business of every description with more 
calmness than we, with applications to meat and drink less 
passionate and sensual than ours. They are neither gluttons, 
nor wine-bibbers as a people; they eat as a horse bolts his 
chopped hay, with indifference, calmness, and cleanly circum- 
stances; they neither grease, nor slop themselves.” : 
Mutton fat has a strong characteristic odour, and turns rancid 
more readily than beef fat. In South Africa the tail of the 
native Cape ‘sheep, (which tail is composed entirely of fat, and 
often weighs five or six pounds), when minced, and melted out, 
supplies the Cape housewife with a very good substitute for 
lard; this is excellent for frying fish, or fritters in, is more 
delicate than lard, and when eaten on hot toast, with pepper 
and salt, is a good imitation of beef marrow. Our forefathers 
thought the person served to begin with from a leg of Mutton 
badly off. “‘ The cut that is worst of a leg is the first,” said they. 
George A. Sala, telling in his Thorough Good Cook (1895) about 
Mutton-chops, commends one “ so judiciously broiled as to be 
thoroughly done through, but not to exhaust its gravy, aS an 
incomparably good lunch for a busy person up to the age of 
fifty ; with the addition of a mite of minced shallot, for gentlemen 
only, Worcester sauce being too potent an accompaniment, and 
interfering with the hot chop’s balminess of flavour; whilst a 
large, well-boiled, mealy potato goes well together with a chop 
having a curly tail.” Sydney Smith, in a letter from Green Street. 
London, W. (1839), says: “I will give you very good Mutton 
