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VEGETABLES, FRUITS, AND NUTS USED AS FOOD.

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pumelo, and citron, and many varieties of the orange. The most delicious is the chu-sha kih, or mandarin orange; the skin is of a cinnabar red color, and adheres to the pulp by a few loose fibres. The citron is more prized for its fragrance than taste, and the thick rind is made more abundant by cutting the skin into strips when growing, each of which becomes a roundish end like a finger, whence the name of Fuh shau, or Budha's hand, given it. It will remain uncorrupt for two or three months, diffusing an agreeable perfume.

Chapter VI. contains brief notices of other fruits. The shaddock, plantain, and persimmon, are common, and several varieties are enumerated of each; the plantain is eaten raw and cooked, and forms no inconsiderable item in the subsistence of the poor. The pomegranate, carambola or tree gooseberry, mango, custardapple, pine-apple, rose-apple, breadfruit, fig, guava, and olive, some of them as good and others inferior to what are found in other countries, increase the list. The whampe, líchí, lungan, or "dragon's eyes," and loquat, are the native names of four indigenous fruits at Canton. The first resembles a grape in size, and a gooseberry in taste; the loquat (Eriobotrya) is a kind of medlar. The lichí looks like a strawberry in size and shape; the tough, rough red skin incloses a sweet watery pulp of a whitish color surrounding a hard seed. Grapes are plenty and tolerably good, but the Chinese have not yet ascertained that they contain wine; at least none is made.

Chestnuts, walnuts, ground-nuts, filberts, almonds, and the seeds of the Salisburia and Nelumbium, are the most common nuts. The Chinese date is a species of Rhamnus, and has a sweetish, pleasant flesh; the olive is a species of Cannarium, and used chiefly as a pickle: the names of both these fruits are given them chiefly because of a partial resemblance to the western sorts, for neither the proper date nor olive grows in China. Almost the only berry at Canton is the mulberry; a pleasant sweetmeat is made from the seeds of the Arbutus which tastes like cranberry. The currant, gooseberry, blackberry, raspberry, and strawberry, are not seen in Canton, though the latter has been found at Fuhchau.

Preserved fruits are common among all classes, and the list of sweetmeats and delicacies is increased by the addition of many roots, some of which are preserved in syrup and others as comfits. Ginger, nelumbium roots, bamboo shoots, the common potatoe, and

other vegetables are prepared in this way, and form articles of export as well as domestic consumption. Pickles of an inferior quality are abundant, of which the natives consume enormous quantities, especially cabbages and onions, but foreigners consider them detestable. The Chinese eat but few spices; pepper is used medicinally, and mustard as greens.

Oils and fats are in universal use for cooking; crude lard or pork fat, castor oil, and that expressed from two species of Camellia and the ground-nut, are all employed for domestic and culinary purposes. The Chinese use little from the dairy, as milk, butter, or cheese; the very small number of cattle raised in the country, and the consequent dearness of these articles, may have caused them to fall into disuse, for they are all common among the Manchus and Mongols. A Chinese table seems ill furnished to a foreigner, when he sees neither bread, butter, nor milk upon it, and if he express his disrelish of the oily dishes or alliaceous stews before him, the Chinese thinks that he distils a sufficient retort to his want of taste, when he answers, "You eat cheese, and sometimes when it can almost walk." Milk is used a little, and no one who has lived in Canton can forget the prolonged mournful cry ngau nai! of the men hawking it about the streets late at night. Women's milk is sold in the streets of Ningpo and elsewhere, for the sustenance of infants and superannuated people, the idea being prevalent that it is peculiarly nourishing to aged persons.

Sugar is granulated and crystallized, and the cane in small sticks is hawked about the streets warm for chewing, and coarse molasses syrup is peddled by the wayside, as an accompaniment to bean-curd. The tobacco is weaker than the American plant; it is smoked and not chewed, and but little is made into cigars; snuff is largely used. The betel-nut is a common masticatory, consisting of a slice of the areca-nut and the fresh leaf of the betel-pepper with a little lime rubbed on it. The common beverages of the Chinese are tea and whiskey, both of which are drunk warm; cold water is not often drunk, as cold liquids of any kind are considered unwholesome. The constant practice of boiling water before drinking it, in preparing tea, doubtless tends to purify it, and make it less noxious, when the people are not particular as to its sources. Coffee, chocolate, and cocoa are unknown; and also beer, cider, porter, wine, and brandy.

KINDS OF ANIMAL FOOD EATEN.

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The meats consumed by the Chinese comprise perhaps a greater variety, than are used in other countries; while, at the same time, very little land is appropriated to rearing animals for food. Beef is not a common meat, nor seen upon the tables of the natives, chiefly from a Budhistic prejudice against killing so useful an animal. Mutton is both rare and dear, and sheep have profitably been brought from Sydney to Canton. The beef of the buffalo, and the mutton of the goat, are still less used; pork is consumed more than all other kinds, and no meat can be raised so economically. Hardly a family can be found so poor as not to be able to possess a pig, and they are kept even on the boats and rafts, to consume what others leave till they are themselves devoured. Fresh pork probably constitutes more than half of the meat eaten by the Chinese; hams are tolerably plenty, but corned or salt pork is little used. Horseflesh and venison are now and then seen, and probably also the flesh of the camel in those parts where he is reared, but in passing through the markets and streets, pork, fowls, and fish are the viands which everywhere meet the eye; the rest form the exception.

A few kittens and puppies are sold alive in cages, mewing and yelping as if in anticipation of their fate, or from pain caused by the pinching and handling they receive at the hands of dissatisfied customers. Those intended for the table are usually reared upon rice, so that if the nature of their food be considered, their flesh is far more cleanly than that of the omnivorous hog; few articles of food have, however, been so identified with the tastes of a people as kittens and puppies, rats and snails, have with the Chinese. The school geographies in the United States usually contain pictures of a market-man carrying baskets holding these unfortunate victims of a perverse taste (as we think), or else a string of rats and mice hanging by their tails to a stick across his shoulders, which almost necessarily convey the idea that such things form the usual food of the people. Travellers hear beforehand that the Chinese devour everything, and when they arrive in the country straightway inquire if these animals are eaten, and hearing that such is the case perpetuate the idea that they form the common articles of food. However commonly kittens and puppies may be exposed for sale, the writer never saw rats or mice in the market during a residence of twelve years there, and heard of but one gentleman who had seen them; in

fact, they are not so easily caught as to be either common or cheap. He once asked a native if he or his countrymen ever served up lau-shu tang, or rat-soup, on their tables; who replied that he had never seen or eaten it, and added, "Those who do use it should mix cheese with it, that the mess might serve for us both." Rats and mice are no doubt eaten now and then, and so are many other undesirable things by those whom want compels to take what they can get, but to put these and other strange eatables in the front of the list, gives a distorted idea of the every day food of the people.

Frogs are eaten by all classes. They are caught in a curious manner by tying a young and tender jumper, just emerged from tadpole life, by the waist to a fish-line, and bobbing him up and down in the grass and grain of a rice field, where the old croakers are wont to harbor. As soon as one sees the young frog, sprawling and squirming in the grass, he makes a plunge at him and swallows him whole, whereupon he is immediately conveyed to the frog-fisher's basket, losing his life, liberty, and lunch together, for the bait is rescued from his maw, and used again as long as life lasts.

Next to pork, poultry is the most common meat, including chickens, geese, and ducks; of these three, the geese are the best flavored, the flesh of the fowls and ducks being stringy and tasteless. All are reared cheaply, and supply a large portion of the poor with the principal meat they eat. The eggs of chickens and ducks are hatched artificially, and every visitor to Canton remembers the duck-boats, in which those birds are hatched and reared, and carried up and down the river seeking for pasture along its muddy banks. Hatching ducks and poultry is practised in all parts of the country. Sheds are erected for the purpose, in which are a number of baskets well plastered with mud, each one so placed over a fireplace that the heat shall be equally conveyed to the eggs through the tile in its bottom, and retained in it by a close cover. When the eggs are brought, a layer is put into the bottom of each basket, and the fire kindled underneath, a uniform heat of about 100° F. being maintained for four or five days. They are then carefully taken out, and looked through in a strong light to separate the addled ones; the others are replaced in the baskets, and the heat kept up for ten days longer, when they are all placed upon shelves in the centre of the shed, and

MODE OF HATCHING DUCKS' EGGS.

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covered with cotton and felt for fourteen days. At the end of the 28th day, the ducklings break their shells, and are sold to persons whose business is to rear them. Pigeons are raised to some extent; their eggs form an ingredient in soups. Wild and water fowl are caught in nets or killed by iron shot; the wild duck, teal, grebe, wild goose, plover, snipe, heron, egret, partridge, pheasant, and ortolan or rice bird, are all procurable at Canton; and the list could doubtless be increased elsewhere.

If the Chinese eat many sorts of birds and beasts rejected by others, they are still more omnivorous with respect to aquatic productions; here nothing comes amiss; all waters are vexed with their fisheries. Their nets and various contrivances for capturing fish display great ingenuity, and most of them are admirably adapted to the purpose. Rivers, creeks, and stagnant pools, the great ocean and the little tank, mountain lakes and garden ponds, all furnish their quota to the sustenance of man, and tend to explain, in a great degree, the dense population. The right to fish in running streams and natural waters is open to all, while artificial reservoirs, as ponds, pools, tanks, tubs, &c., are brought into available use; even rice grounds are turned into fishponds in winter, if they will thereby afford a more profitable return. The inhabitants of the water are killed with the spear, caught with the hook, scraped up by the dredge, ensnared by traps, and captured by nets; they are decoyed into boats by painted boards, and frightened into nets by noisy ones, taken out of the water by lifting nets, and dived for into it by birds; in short, every possible way of catching or rearing fish is practised among the Chinese. Tanks, with water running through them, are placed in the streets, where carp or salmon are reared until they become so large they can hardly turn round in their pens; and eels and water snakes o every color and size are fed in tubs and jars until customers carry them off.

King crabs, cuttle fish, sharks, rays, gobies, tortoises, turtles, crabs, prawns, crawfish, and shrimps, are all consumed. The best fish in the Canton market are the garoupa or rock cod, pomfret, sole, mackerel, bynni carp or mango fish, and the polynemus (commonly called salmon). Carp and tench of many kinds, herring, shad, perch, mullet, and bream, with others less usual at the west, are found in great abundance. They are usually eaten fresh, or merely opened and dried in the sun, as stockfish;

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