Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 16, 2025
It was not the time just after tea to eat an immense dish of coos-coosoo, or a steaming pile of hot mutton and raisins, cooked in oil, which lay on the round trenchers, when the great beehive-like straw covers were raised: some of the hot cakes accompanying them might be managed, but the rest was handed over to the expectant servants, to whom coos-coosoo is as roast beef to the British labourer, though less stimulating, for it only consists of wheat or millet or maize flour, granulated, steamed, and eaten hot, sometimes crowned with chicken.
We left the fried-fish shops and fried spitted-meat shops behind, whence emerge kabobs second only to coos-coosoo and a smell indescribable; and we wound down tortuous alleys, past quiet windowless houses, whose great painted doors, yellow and brown, studded with enormous nails and knockers, spoke respectability. Never a straight street for six yards.
He was fat and lineless: soft white hands, fleshy ankles, no knots of muscle in so well-turned-out a mould of cream, not a spot, not a flush, no sign of liver; the lips slightly suggested sensuality, and there was a line of cruelty round the mouth, but no further indication of self-indulgence; he might have lived on sugar and chicken coos-coosoo all his life, and altered in nothing but size since he was a year old, except for a beard on the soft white chin, and his eyes, which were infinitely cunning.
Laid at our feet, we tasted, as courtesy demanded, a coos-coosoo made of grated almonds, powdered sugar, and cream a sweet which cloys at an early hour in the day, though to Moorish servants, at any and every moment of their lives, it is as caviare to the few. A circle was formed round the dish: in two minutes, all that was left, was "an aching china blank."
Quantity rather than quality distinguishes Moorish cookery. The rich man's dishes are more or less like the poor man's, only that he has six times as many; indeed, there are said to be dishes of coos-coosoo which seven men can barely carry. The Sultan's own cuisine is quite simple, better served, and more of it perhaps, than his subjects', but otherwise exactly the same.
What those bundles, which bent their backs half double, had inside them it was impossible to certify: often part of it was a baby, judging by a round shape like a head under the haik, and the fact that, when it had a knock, there was a cry: the rest might be chickens, oranges, vegetables, baskets of eggs, baskets of coos-coosoo, heads of brooms made of bamboo, honey, and so on.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking