For Breakfast,
Mutton Cutlets, Coffee, And Things Made With Maize.
Eggs were
plentiful - eggs of fowl, duck, goose, and wild fowl's eggs - wild duck
and plover in their season.
In spring - August to October - we
occasionally had an ostrich or rhea's egg in the form of a huge
omelette at breakfast, and it was very good. The common native way of
cooking it by thrusting a rod heated red through the egg, then burying
it in the hot ashes to complete the cooking, did not commend itself to
us. From the end of July to the end of September we feasted on
plovers' eggs at breakfast. In appearance and taste they were
precisely like our lapwings' eggs, only larger, the Argentine lapwing
being a bigger bird than its European cousin. In those distant days
the birds were excessively abundant all over the pampas where sheep
were pastured, for at that time there were few to shoot wild birds and
nobody ever thought of killing a lapwing for the table. The country
had not then been overrun by bird-destroying immigrants from Europe,
especially by Italians. Outside of the sheep zone in the exclusively
cattle-raising country, where the rough pampas grasses and herbage had
not been eaten down, the plover were sparsely distributed.
I remember that one day, when I was thirteen, I went out one morning
after breakfast to look for plovers' eggs, just at the beginning of
the laying season when all the eggs one found were practically new-
laid.
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