Section VI Butter, Cheese, Milk, Cream, and Potatoes
Butter
Butter is not exempt from adulteration: the inferior kinds are frequently mixed up with hogs-lard which has lost its flavour and appearance; and not unfrequently kitchen-stuff forms a portion of the bulk.
Good butter is hard and firm; therefore that butter which is often sold in the shops in London, that adheres to the knife when applied to, or stuck into it, is factitious, that is, manufactured in a machine, of the following materials—viz. rancid fresh butter, the cheap unsaleable Scotch butters of various hues and dyes, and a quantity of salt, well rummaged and pomelled together. This spurious commodity is of a white cast, and generally sold under the denomination of “Dorset.” It should be recollected that the cheesemongers never beat the good butters, as the beating injures the flavour; they bestow their friendly castigations only on the worthless commodity for the purpose of extracting a portion of its rancidity and obnoxious smell.
Butter should be bought by the taste and smell. Both fresh and salt butter should smell sweet, and be of an equal colour throughout; if veiny and open, it has been mixed with a staler or an inferior sort. The quality of tub butter is ascertained by putting a knife into the butter; and if, on drawing it out, any rancid or unpleasant smell should attach to the knife, the butter is not good; but, perhaps, the best criterion is to taste the butter near the sides of the tub, for the middle is often sweet when the parts near the sides of the tub are quite rank.
Hogs-lard is adulterated with the skimmings of the liquor in which pork or bacon has been boiled. Lard thus adulterated has a grey colour, a soft consistence, and a salt taste; whereas lard, when pure, is white, granular, and rather firm in texture.
Cheese, Bacon, and Hams
When annatto is dear, or of inferior quality in appearance, it is customary with the venders of the article to adulterate it with vermilion or red lead. This contamination has chiefly been confined to the Gloucester cheese; and may be detected by macerating a small quantity of the suspected article in water impregnated with sulphuretted hydrogen, acidulated with muriatic acid; which will immediately cause the cheese to assume a brown or black colour, if the minutest portion of lead be present. I am informed by a respectable dealer, that cheese, especially old Stilton cheese, is frequently greened in particular parts with verdigris, in order to assume the appearance of age.
The best cheese is that which is of a dry compact texture, without holes in it; of a whitish colour, and which, on being rubbed between the finger and thumb, almost immediately becomes a soft and somewhat greasy mass. Nor is a moist smooth coat a bad criterion of its quality. It should also be of a moderate age; for neither very decayed, nor decaying cheese, is wholesome; nor is that which is new, adhesive, and ropy, when heated by the fire, of a good kind. Cheshire cheese which crumbles and tastes bitterish has been made of bad milk. Though cheese is generally chosen by the taste, this is by no means a criterion of its nutritive qualities; as the flavour generally depends on the nature of the food which the cows eat, and often on the mode of management in the manufacture of the cheese.
In the purchase of bacon and hams, pray bear in mind, friend John, that many more thousands of tons of those articles are sold annually in the metropolis of this land of “just and equal dealing” as “fine, new Hampshire bacon and fine Yorkshire hams,” than are received from those counties altogether; and that though the bacon merchants are supplied with bacon from Ireland, none sell Irish bacon. The large Irish hams are also dried and sold for “fine fresh” Yorkshire or Westmoreland varieties, to tickle the fancy of the “Bull Family” for rarities and expensive purchases.
Milk and Cream
The usual sophistication of milk is a liberal quantity of warm water, and to give consistence to the mixture, and correct the colour, a composition of flour and yolks of eggs is added; but should there not have been sufficient time for the operation, the immediate aid of the cock or the pump is invoked. But some of the more skilfully initiated “artistes au lait” dissolve the common cheese dye, annatto, which occasions a mixture of milk and water to assume the colour, and nearly the consistence of cream. Among some of the less expert a composition of treacle and salt supplies the place of the annatto; but this mixture does not combine so well as the annatto with the milk. Pure milk is of a dull white colour, and a soft sweetish taste; adulterated milk is of a bluish appearance and thin consistence.
Cream receives a copious addition of skimmed milk, flour, starch, rice-powder, or arrow-root boiled together, to increase the “milk-merchant’s” profits. But arrow-root is the substance which is best adapted, and most employed for the purpose. The generally received opinion that milk is adulterated with chalk and whitening is, as Mr. Accum observes, erroneous; for neither of those ingredients could be held in solution in the milk, and would therefore be useless to the adulterator, as they would sink to the bottom of the pail while the manufacturer was doling out his composition to his customers. But the practice of putting the milk into leaden pans, or vessels made of that metal, to occasion the milk to throw up a larger portion of cream, is sufficiently authenticated, and deserves exposure, from the liability of having the milk impregnated with particles of lead.
Perhaps some of my readers may be lovers of curds and whey; if so, I recommend them to endeavour to get a sight of the calf’s maw, from which the rennet is made before it is boiled. I have had the fortune of being “blessed” with “the captivating sight” more than once; and in each instance I absolutely saw the bladder moving alive with maggots.
Potatoes, Fruit, &c.
Even the humble green-grocer exerts his ingenuity and “tact” in the art of sophistication: to augment the weight of his “murphies,” and “make them tell,” he soaks “the dear cratures” in water during the night previous to their sale.
While discoursing of the little peccadilloes of the honest tradesmen of “this land of Christianity,” I never apprehended that it was possible to sophisticate fruit. But at the very moment I was about to consummate my bold, and I hope it will prove, patriotic undertaking, by affixing the important and consolatory, though little word, “Finis,” a new discovery presented itself to my astonished optics! Can you believe me, John? I happened to pop in rather inopportunely, that is to say, a-la-mode Paul Pry, on a fruit-artist, who was preparing some stale plums for sale, and giving them all the bloom and fragrance of having been just plucked from the tree. This recondite feat of fruitist-ingenuity consists in anointing certain parts of the fruit with gum water, and then shaking a muslin bag containing finely powdered blue upon the prepared parts of the fruit, which are laid uppermost upon a board, to receive the precious unction.—From the honest tradesman whom I thus found patriotically engaged in furthering “the trading and commercial interests of his dear native land,” I also learned that some of the more skilful and enterprizing artists soak plums in water, when they have become shrivelled, in order to plump them out, and make them, as it is fashionably phrased, en-bon-point.
What an age of intellect do we live in! Could our good old Druidical ancestors have supposed that their puny and degenerate offspring would be endowed with the extraordinary gift of being able to rejuvenize old worm-eaten nuts? Rare and sublime discovery! What, John, may we not next expect? Surely, we have reached the millenium of the march of intellect and the perfection of sophistication. But I must not keep the reader longer in suspense.
The rejuvenization of Old Nuts! Just as I had finished writing the above article, an old and almost forgotten friend called on me, one who has long and scientifically been patriotically engaged, “in this age of intellect,” in rejuvenizing old, rotten, worm-eaten walnuts and almonds, of each last year’s growth, and giving their “externals” all the whiteness and beauty of the lily-white hand of a “fine lady,” and their “internals” all the plumpness and en-bon-point admired by his “most moral majesty,” our late “gracious and beloved sovereign,” in his “fair defects of nature.” By this scion of “the trading interests” I am informed that old nuts of all kinds are first soaked in water in order to plump them out, and then they are fumigated with sulphur for the purpose of rendering the shells white and clean.