Page 12 - Poetry-Family

It gives true epicures the vapors
To see boiled mutton, minus capers.

Boiled turkey, gourmands know, of course,
Is exquisite with celery sauce.

The cook deserves a hearty cuffing
Who serves roast fowls with tasteless stuffing,

Smelts require egg and biscuit powder.
Don’t put fat pork in your clam chowder.

Egg sauce—few make it right, alas!
Is good with blue-fish or with bass.

Nice oyster sauce gives zest to cod—
A fish, when fresh, to feast a god.

Shad, stuffed and baked, is most delicious—
‘Twould have electrified Apicius.

Roasted in paste, a haunch of mutton,
Might make ascetics play the glutton.

But one might rhyme for weeks this way,
And still have lots of things to say.

And so I’ll close—for, reader mine,
This is about the hour I dine.

— A Rhyming Epicure (Godey’s, 1868)

~ 10 ~