human
The ordinary food of the early settlers here, for both breakfast and supper, was bean porridge, with bread and butter. On Sunday morning there was coffee in addition. Brown bread, made of rye and Indian, was the staff of life, white bread being used only when guests were present. Raked pumpkins (in their season) and milk composed a dish said to be luxurious. [This dish is in common use among the country people at the present time.] For dinner, twice every week, Sundays and Thursdays, baked beans and baked Indian pudding, the latter being served first. [This last custom has gone wholly out of practice; but the Sunday dinner prevails to-day over the whole of New England, to a very large extent.] Saturdays, salt fish; one day in every week, salt pork and corned beef, and one day, also, when practicable, roasted meat was the rule.
gpt
of living. It has been said that Americans are disposed to revel in big dinners; and, in fact, undertake to accomplish every thing with a big dinner, or at least celebrate the accomplishment of it in that way. One writer has said, if we welcome a guest it is done with a dinner; if we inaugurate a stock company or start a charity, it is pretty sure to have its relations with the market and the stomach. This may be partly so. A good dinner, social and liberal, is the reconciler, the inspiration, the motive power of good works generally; and what it cannot do, or at least help to do, is pretty sure not to be accomplished. Of course, all this is understood, and almost sure to be practised, so that, when any thing comes up, instead of going to bed to sleep on it, we hurry off to Parker's or Young's, or it may be, if the matter is very staid and respectable, to the old Tremont, and eat on it. The custom is in us--in the blood; it is Saxon, and comes naturally enough from the mother country. In England, the great diner-out, Douglas Jerrold, who knows all about it, says,
human
If an earthquake were to engulf all England to-morrow, Englishmen would manage to meet, and dine somewhere among the rubbish,
gpt
But not long after this, on the 24th of January, 1793, there was a grand festival in honor of French Liberty and Equality, when an ox of more than a thousand weight was roasted entire, and drawn on a car by fifteen horses, followed by other carriages with hogsheads of punch, loaves of bread, &c., and a large procession of civil, military, municipal officers, and citizens, through the principal streets to State Street, where the table was spread and the dinner was served up in high style. At the present time, it would be an easy matter to roast an ox every day, and big dinners are regarded as of small account on the score of rarity. Some philosopher has said,
human
Eating dinner is a task which, above all others, requires the conscience pure, the mind easy, a reason undisturbed, the senses critical, and the body and spirit perfectly at rest. It may be said that the philosophers of the present day do not deem eating a good dinner