276 COOKERY OF DUCKS AND GEESE 



about his partiality for the bean-fields. He quickly 

 puts on flesh and assimilates the rich bean flavour. 

 And instinct seems to bring the bean goose to our 

 fields while the beans are being gathered and the 

 wheat-fields cut. 



Wild geese are shot in the cool autumn, and will 

 bear any amount of keeping. Indeed, we have 

 known old sportsmen who said that, like water-hen, 

 they gained by being wrapped in canvas and buried 

 for a day or two. That was a practice successfully 

 adopted by Breton and Norman peasants with their 

 pigs, when the oppressive tax made the price of salt 

 prohibitory. As for the Solan goose, it is a delicacy 

 I have never tasted. Michael Scott, in ' The Cruise 

 of the Midge,' makes the Celtic Jamaica planter, Rory 

 McGregor, talk of the birds contemptuously, in 

 answer to a remark as to the Grecian philosopher : ' I 

 ken o' nae Solans, sir, put tae filthy ill-faured pirds 

 tut leeves in tae water.' All the same, there was 

 a time when the Solans were esteemed in southland 

 Scottish cookery. Walter Scott makes the Solan 

 figure at the Antiquary's dinner, when Sir Arthur 

 departed in dudgeon to come to trouble between 

 the tide and the cliffs. On that occasion the goose 

 was a failure, for it came to table ' blood-raw ' ; but 

 Sir Walter speaks of it as 'the relishing Solan, whose 



