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I forget the other American dishes, if there were any more, O yes! canvas-back ducks, coming on with the sweets, in the usual English fashion. We ought to have had Catawba wine; but this was wanting, although there was plenty of hock, champagne, sherry, madeira, port, and claret.
We might still be indulging with impunity in thick turtle, canvas-back ducks, devilled whitebait, meringues, and Nesselrode puddings, if we hadn't been so persistently overdosed in our earlier years with things that we didn't want and knew were indigestible.
POULTRY AND GAME. Rabbits, hares, partridges, woodcocks, grouse or prairie chickens, snipes, antelope, quails, swans, geese, chickens, capons, tame pigeons, wild ducks, the canvas-back duck being the most popular and highly prized; turkeys. FISH. Haddock, fresh codfish, halibut, flounders, bass, fresh salmon, turbot.
Good for you," cheered the self-made Barbarians, and drank success to the absent disseminator of hardware. With much loud talk of this unedifying character the dinner progressed to an end; through selle d'agneau, floated in '84 champagne, terrapin convoyed by a special Madeira of 1850, and canvas-back duck with Romanee Conti, 1865, to a triumphant finale of Turkish coffee and 1811 brandy.
Then, when I looked at a duck blind out in the Potomac, near the shore, I thought how George used to put on an old coat and slouch hat and take his gun and go out in the blind, and shoot canvas-back ducks for dinner, and paddle his boat out after the dead birds, the way Grover Cleveland did a century later.
After boiling the livers, gizzards and hearts, chop them, and put them into the gravy; having first skimmed it, and thickened it with a little browned flour. Send to table with the ducks a small tureen of onion-sauce with chopped sage leaves in it. Accompany them also with stewed cranberries and green peas. Canvas-back ducks are roasted in the same manner, omitting the stuffing.
Nor do all the delicate artifices of French cookery suffice wholly to replace for an American palate the dainties of his native land. The buckwheat cakes and waffles, the large, delicate-flavored, luscious oysters, the canvas-back ducks, the Philadelphia croquettes and terrapin, find no substitutes on this side of the water.
Among the many varieties of fowl varying from wild swan to widgeon that are slain here, the canvas-back holds, by common consent, the pre-eminence for delicacy of flavor and tenderness of meat; but I confess I have thought almost as highly of an occasional "red-head" in perfect condition.
This evening I made sure that I should be enlightened. But no! You have given me a wonderful dinner from you I expected it. We have eaten terrapin, canvas-back duck, and many other things the names of which alone were known to me. But of the reason for which you have summoned me here I know nothing. Not one word have you spoken.
On the first occasion, though several varieties of fowl were bagged, we only secured one canvas-back, which was courteous enough to tumble to the stranger's gun.
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