Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/142

Rh are, for the most part, very good, and the dishes less highly seasoned than I have been accustomed to find them at American tables, and especially at the hotels. Although I here always find a deficiency of vegetables, yet I am fond of one which is called squash, and which is the flesh of a species of very common gourd here, boiled and served up much in the style of our cabbage, and which is eaten with meat. It is white, somewhat insipid, but soft and agreeable, rather like spinach; it is here universally eaten; so also are tomatoes, a very savoury and delicately acid fruit, which is eaten as salad. Of the second course I dare not venture to eat anything but sago pudding or custard, a kind of egg-cream in cups, and am glad that these are always to be had here.

One standing dish at American tables at this season is the so-called “sweet corn.” It is the entire corn ear of a peculiar kind of maize, which ripens early. It is boiled in water and served whole; it is eaten with butter, and tastes like French petit pois—they scrape off the grains with a knife, or cut them out from the stem. Some people take the whole stem and gnaw them out with their teeth: two gentlemen do so who sit opposite Professor Hart and myself at table, and whom we call “the sharks,” because of their remarkable ability in gobbling up large and often double portions of everything which comes to table, and it really troubles me to see how their wide mouths, furnished with able teeth, ravenously grind up the beautiful white pearly maize ears, which I saw so lately in their wedding attire, and which are now massacred, and disappear down the ravenous throats of the sharks. When I see that, I am convinced that if eating is not a regularly consecrated act, and is it not so in the intention of the grace before meat?—then it is a low and animal transaction, unworthy of man and unworthy of nature.

After dinner I again sit with my book in my hand, and contemplate the sea, and enjoy the life-giving sea-breeze.