eub | (no subject)

Besides, your forte is not invention. It is judgement, particularly shown in your choice of dishes. We seem in that instance born under one star. I like you for liking hare. I esteem you for disrelishing minced veal. Liking is too cold a word -- I love you for your noble attachment to the fat unctuous juices of deer's flesh & the green unspeakable of turtle. I honour you for your endeavours to esteem and approve of my favorite, which I ventured to recommend to you as a substitute for hare, bullock's heart, and I am not offended that you cannote taste it with my palate. A true son of Epicurus should reserve one taste peculiar to himself. For a long time I kept the secret about the exceeding deliciousness of the marrow of boiled knuckle of veal, till my tongue weakly ran riot in its praises, and now it is prostitute & common.-- But I have made a discovery which I will not impart till my dying scene is over, perhaps it will be my last mouthful in this world: delicious thought, enough to sweeten (or rather make savoury) the hour of death. It is a little square bit about this size [here Lamb sketched a square] in or near the knuckle bone of a fried joint of . . . fat I can't call it nor lean neither altogether, it is that beautiful compound, which Nature must have made in Paradise, Park venison, before she separated the two substances, the dry & the oleaginous, to punish sinful mankind; Adam ate them entire & inseparate, and this little taste of Eden in the knuckle bone of a fried . . . seems the only relique of a Paradisaical state. When I die, an exact description of its topography shall be left in a cupboard with a key, inscribed on which these words, "C. Lamb dying imparts this to C. Chambers as the only worthy depository of such a secret." You'll drop a tear....

-- Letter from Charles Lamb to his schoolfellow Charles Chambers