On
the other hand, in robust health, and when hungry with exercise, you can
eat fat pork with relish on a Scotch hillside, or dine off fresh salmon
three days running without inconvenience. Even a Spanish stew, with
plenty of garlic in it, and floating in olive oil, tastes positively
delicious after a day's mountaineering in the Pyrenees.
The healthy popular belief, still surviving in spite of cookery, that
our likes and dislikes are the best guide to what is good for us, finds
its justification in this fact, that whatever is relished will prove on
the average wholesome, and whatever rouses disgust will prove on the
whole indigestible. Nothing can be more wrong, for example, than to make
children eat fat when they don't want it. A healthy child likes fat, and
eats as much of it as he can get. If a child shows signs of disgust at
fat, that proves that it is of a bilious temperament, and it ought never
to be forced into eating it against its will. Most of us are bilious in
after-life just because we were compelled to eat rich food in childhood,
which we felt instinctively was unsuitable for us. 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.
Of course, in our existing modern cookery, very few simple and
uncompounded tastes are still left to us; everything is so mixed up
together that only by an effort of deliberate experiment can one
discover what are the special effects of special tastes upon the tongue
and palate.
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