In article >, Bob Pastorio
> wrote:

> I got this on a mailing list I subscribe to. It was forwarded by one
> of the subscribers. Looks like an, um, interesting read. And only
> $200. <kof>
>
> Pastorio

<snip>

> An interesting early study of food, drink and table habits. The author
> lets little escape his notice, and covers various types of food,
> meals, wine, special occasions, and all sorts of other material from
> the pantry, including- The French Cafes; The Ancient Cook and His Art;
> The Making and Marring of Wine; Imperial Drinkers and Incidents in
> Germany; The Tables of the Ancient and Modern Egyptians; The Caesars
> at the Table; Strange Banquets; Authors and their Dietetics, and a
> whole lot more.
>
> The text is all the more interesting because Doran will repeat just
> about anything he has heard, as for example- "I have spoken of
> gigantic asparagus; the Jews had radishes that could vie with them, if
> it be true that a fox and cubs could burrow in the hollow of one, and
> that it was not uncommon to grow them of a hundred pounds in weight.
> It must have been such radishes as these that were employed by
> seditious mobs of old, as weapons, in insurrections. In such case, a
> rebellious people were always well victualled, and had peculiar
> facilities, not only to beat their adversaries, but to eat their own
> arms".

Sounds rather like Soyer's "Pantropheon". What is it about the
nineteenth century that led to such spotty (I was gonna say feeble, but
I suppose it's not really pandemic) scholarship? Maybe it's just that
what we would recognize as the sciences of logic, critical thinking,
and forensics have evolved over the years, but so many works of classic
19th-century scholarship are a little dubious in the area of
conclusions based on insufficient or improperly examined/presented
evidence.

Phil