Page:Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management.djvu/749

Rh for five or six months after it has been laid, stop up its pores with a slight coating of varnish or mutton-suet. Birds, however do not lay eggs before they have some place to put them; accordingly, they construct nests for themselves with astonishing art.

In building their nests the male and female generally assist each other, and they contrive to make the outside of their tenement bear as great a resemblance as possible to the surrounding foliage or branches, so that it cannot very easily be discovered even by those who are in search of it.

Birds as Food.—There is no bird, nor any bird's egg, that is known to be poisonous, though they may, and often do, become unwholesome by reason of the food that the birds eat, which at all times greatly changes the quality of the flesh, even in birds of the same breed.

Barndoor fowls are less fat than, but far superior in flavour to the fowls fed close crops for the town market, and the eggs of fowls fed on scraps and house refuse are generally strong and disagreeable. Wild ducks and other aquatic birds are often rank and fishy flavoured. The pigeon fattens and wastes in the course of a few hours. The pronounced flavour of the grouse is said to be due to the heather shoots on which it feeds.

Poultry.—Most poultry breeders arrange that poultry intended for the table shall undergo a special preparation previously to being killed, but it will be found that the flesh of a healthy fowl which has lived a free out-of-door life till the last moment is both better in flavour and more wholesome than that of one which has been kept in confinement, and fed perhaps compulsorily into an unhealthy condition of obesity. If well fed and killed at the right time, naturally fed birds will be quite plump enough. Pheasants and partridges, for instances, come fairly plump to table, even when left quite free to find their own living. Sussex has long been famous for the quality of the poultry it sends to market; the Sussex, or Surrey fowls, as they are more frequently called, invariably command the highest prices; and deservedly so, for they carry the largest proportion of flesh.

While the birds are being fattened they must have only soft food, no hard corn being admissible. The best fattening foods are ground oats, buckwheat-meal, maize-meal and whole wheat-meal. Some breeders add suet and other fatty substances. These undoubtedly contribute to the fat of the birds, but not so much to the flesh; and in fattening fowls, the true object is not to lay on fat, but to develop