than escargots, which is considered the contrary of fattening. Fisher states that this particularity has given rise, near Bordeaux, to a singular custom. Every Ash-Wednesday, the people go out to the commune of Canderan to eat escargots, to terminate the Carnival gaily, and have a foretaste of Lent. Formerly the town of Ulm, famous for its escargotières, furnished annually more than ten millions of vine escargots, to be consumed during Lent in the monasteries of Austria. Pliny informs us, that escargots formed a dainty dish to the inhabitants of Rome. We know to what pitch the culinary art rose amongst the conquerors of the world. We know how they relished the oysters of Albion. Apicius, in his treatise on cookery, mentions no less than three principal sauces for snails, one of which, composed of sweet herbs, milk, butter, cheese, boiled wine, flour, and saffron, deserves to be mentioned.
In Paris, at the present day, we are not quite so fastidious. We eat them in general cooked on the gridiron or in the oven. Escargots à la poulette, of which I have partaken on the sly, and licked my lips after, since my memorable introduction to a snail supper by Wagstaff, are thus prepared:
It is premised that the escargots have been fasting for at least two months, to rid themselves of impurities. We boil them in a pint of water, with wood-ashes and salt, until they can be drawn easily out of the shell. To proceed to this operation they are placed in fresh water, and as fast as they are untwined from the shell they are thrown into tepid water. When we have the required number together, we boil them for ten minutes, and then strain them. Next, we place them in a saucepan, with a piece of butter, and toss them well about, and afterwards add a tablespoonful of flour, and moisten them with half white-wine and half beef-soup, not forgetting to flavour the cookery with a judicious proportion of sweet herbs. In this state they are allowed to stew for two hours longer, and then they are tender; and then would the sight of them bring water into the mouth of a Roman Emperor, especially when thickened with the yolk of eggs, and farther flavoured with citron and verjuice. In Paris they may be bought all ready for cooking at a sou a piece. The doctors consider the escargot, properly cooked, very nutritious and digestible; but care must be had that they have been properly purged, for, as already stated, the escargot takes a fancy to feed sometimes on the hemlock plant, and sometimes on belladonna; and cases of poisoning have been known through ignorance of this fact, and cooking them too soon after being gathered.
“But,” said Wagstaff, in conclusion, “if the escargot has its merits as an aliment, it has its demerits in another respect. It causes great damage to the vine crop. In 1856 the escargot committed more ravages than oïdium among the vines of Charente Inférieure. Up to the present time, there is no other way of getting rid of the escargot, as a scourge, than by catching him alive with the hand during or after the warm rains of spring. Don’t squash him under your foot. Put him into a cask, and at the end of a term you will know how to love your enemy, first killing him with kindness.”
By this time Wagstaff had finished his cigar. I had finished my second demi-tasse, and (why need I blush to tell it, as almost every one in a café does the same?) pocketed the remaining lumps of sugar brought with the tray. Midnight had sounded at various intervals during twenty minutes, as the manner is with the clocks of Paris; and, thanking Wagstaff for his snail-supper and discourse on conchology, varied with hints on cookery, I bade him good night near the Madeleine, and retired to my den in the seventh floor of the Rue du Rocher.
JAPANESE FRAGMENTS.
BY CAPTAIN SHERARD OSBORN, R.N.
CHAPTER III.
Reverting to the hostilities between China and Japan, which sprung out of the attempt to invade the latter, it soon became evident that the weak mere book-learned civilisation of China was no match for the courage and physical energy of the Japanese islanders. Trained to a seafaring life upon their own storm-swept shores, these bold sailors, returning from successful marauding expeditions against the seaboard of the Chinese empire, awakened a general spirit for adventure amongst the inhabitants of Japan, and the Japanese sailor and the Japanese ship became formidable throughout the Eastern seas. Apart from the conquest of the Chusan group, and the establishment of military and mercantile posts in Ningpo and other Chinese cities, they ranged in their barks from India to lands situated in the Pacific, far to the eastward of their homes. The strong similarity in appearance, habits, and disposition, of the Kanaka inhabitants of the Sandwich and Georgian groups, leads one to suppose that, if not then, in periods still more remote it was the ships of Japan that carried colonists to those distant isles,—and the passions and nautical hardihood of the Malayan races of the Archipelago doubtless received much of their tone from intermixture with these Japanese freebooters. Of their voyages to the Asiatic continent and Malayan archipelago we have historical record; but until we shall master the Japanese language sufficiently to explore their ancient writings, we must be content with mythical information as to their wanderings eastward in the Pacific. Aided by such myths, and the light of modern knowledge in the direction of currents and winds, we may try to infer what lands they could have reached which lay beyond the ken of China and India.
Amongst those tales of Japanese explorations in the olden days, there is one strangely circumstantial, recorded by a worthy and venerable Christian historian of China, Father Juan de Mendoza, of the Augustinian Order. The statements there made, though sufficiently startling, do not exceed a condition of public morals prevalent to-day in more than one spot of that South Sea. Writing in 1588, the pious monk says, that at no great distance from Japan, the natives had discovered certain islands nearly peopled by women, and that they might be said to be Amazons,