ost desirable meal in
a lump of raw blubber, the most condensed form of carbonaceous food being
required to preserve life. It is not a perverted taste, but the highest
instinct; for in that cruel cold the body must furnish the food on which
the keen air draws, and the lamp of life there has a very literal supply.

Take now the other extreme of temperature,--the East Indies, China,
Africa, and part even of the West Indies and America,--and you find rice
the universal food. There is very little call, as you may judge, for
heat-producers, but rather for flesh-formers; and starch and sugar both
fulfill this end, the rice being chiefly starch, which turns into sugar
under the action of the saliva. Add a little melted butter, the East
Indian _ghee_, or olive-oil used in the West Indies instead, and we have
all the elements necessary for life under those conditions.

A few degrees northward, and the same rice is mingled with bits of fish
or meat, as in the Turkish _pilau_, a dish of rice to which mutton or
poultry is added.

The wandering Arab finds in his few dates, and handful of parched wheat or
maize, the sugar and starch holding all the heat required, while his
draught of mare's or camel's milk, and his occasional _pilau_ of mutton,
give him the various elements which seem sufficient to make him the model
of endurance, blitheness, and muscular power. So the Turkish
burden-bearers who pick up a two-hundred-pound bag of coffee as one picks
up a pebble, use much the same diet, though adding melons and cucumbers,
which are eaten as we eat apples.

The noticeable point in the Italian dietary is the universal and profuse
use of macaroni. Chestnuts and Indian corn, the meal of which is made into
a dish called _polenta_, something like our mush, are also used, but
macaroni is found at every table, noble or peasant's. No form of wheat
presents such condensed nourishment, and it deserves larger space on our
own bills of fare than we have ever given it.

In Spain we find the _olla podrida_, a dish containing, as chief
ingredient, the _garbanzo_ or field-pea: it is a rich stew, of fowls or
bacon, red peppers, and pease. Red pepper enters into most of the dishes
in torrid climates, and there is a good and sufficient reason for this
apparent mistake. Intense and long-continued heat weakens the action of
the liver, and thus lessens the supply of bile; and red pepper has the
power of stimulating the liver, and so assisting digestion.