“My chief trouble was that I was desperately hungry. When a Jew shoots himself in the City and there is an inquest, the newspapers usually report that the deceased was “well-nourished”. I remember thinking that they would not call me well-nourished if I broke my neck in a bog-hole. I lay and tortured myself—for the ginger biscuits merely emphasized the aching void—with the memory of all the good food I had thought so little of in London. There were Paddock’s crisp sausages and fragrant shavings of bacon, and shapely poached eggs—how often I had turned up my nose at them! There were the cutlets they did at the club, and a particular ham that stood on the cold table, for which my soul lusted. My thoughts hovered over all varieties of mortal edible, and finally settled on a porterhouse steak and a quart of bitter with a welsh rabbit to follow. In longing hopelessly for these dainties I fell asleep.”
A cook of roughly the same moment, setting down the same dish.
662. INGREDIENTS.--To every lb. of suet allow 2 lbs. of lean beef; seasoning to taste of salt, pepper, and mixed spices. _Mode_.--Clear the suet from skin, and chop that and the beef as finely as possible; season with pepper, salt, and spices, and mix the whole well together. Make it into flat cakes, and fry of a nice brown. Many persons pound the meat in a mortar after it is chopped ( but this is not necessary when the meat is minced finely.) _Time_.--10 minutes. _Average cost_, for this quantity, 1s. 6d. _Seasonable_ at any time.
Sources: The passage is from John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps, free to read in full at Project Gutenberg. The recipe is from Beeton, The Book of Household Management of 1861, also free in full. Both are in the public domain in the United States. The binding above is ours — burgundy cloth, boar stamp.