146 THE DAIRYMAJs^'s MANUAL. 



well known to be soft and oily, while peas-fed pork 

 is firm and liard, and even more so than that made by 

 feeding corn. The flesh of sheep fed upon the short 

 sweet herbage of mountain pastures, and which consists 

 in part of resinous plants, as heather and various other 

 species of the heath family, is remarkable for its peculiar 

 and agreeable flavor. The hunter easily recognizes the 

 flavor of hemlock in the flesh of the northern hares, which 

 feed upon it in the winter; while the spruce or swamp par- 

 tridge indicates by the flavor of its flesh the various foods 

 which it has subsisted upon for some time before it has 

 been killed. It is the same with trout, the flesh of 

 which is of a bright red when it has been taken in cold, 

 clear, gravelly, or rocky streams, and of a muddy white 

 when it has lived in water flowing from swamps. The 

 law is general ; and it is to the differences of food in a 

 great measure that the differences in the flavors of meats 

 of various kinds are due. If we feed domestic fowls 

 upon the food of the prairie hen, and let them roost out 

 of doors in the pure air, the flesh will be vastly superior 

 in flavor to that of a fowl cooped up in a confined and 

 filthy yard, or fattened in a poulterer's cellar upon cheap 

 and damaged grain. And if these differences are so 

 noticeable in other animals, they cannot fail to exist in 

 regard to cows. 



Indeed, every one knows how quickly strong-flavored 

 weeds will scent and flavor butter, and it has happened 

 in our own dairy that the milk of cows, in whose stable 

 a heap of half-decayed frozen turnips were kept but one 

 day and night, smelled so strongly as to be detected in 

 the milk room immediately upon entering it, and .the 

 pans could be distinguished by the scent with the great- 

 est ease. And yet none of the turnips had been fed ; it 

 was merely the air of the stable impregnated with the 

 odor which conveyed the scent to the milk through the 

 animals' lungs and blood, 



