MEATS.
It may, therefore, be well to begin first by describing the appearance of the various kinds of meat.
In beef the fat should be of a rich cream or pale butter colour; if it is deep yellow, of a decided shade, the animal has probably been fed almost exclusively on oilcake, and its flesh will as a result be coarse and greasy. The fat should not be over-abundant, and if it is so distributed as to marble the meat delicately, the latter is pretty sure to be of excellent quality. The suet should be white and quite firm. The lean should be of a clear, bright, cherry-red, evenly and rather closely grained, and elastic to the touch. Any beef of a dark brown, almost livid, shade of red may be safely rejected as of inferior quality. The finest beef is obtained from Scotch bullocks, fed on old, long-established English pastures. Ox beef is the best, and indeed almost the only sort kept by good butchers, though heifer beef, which is lighter in colour and smaller in the bone than ox beef, is not to be despised. Bull beef is to be seen occasionally (though seldom, if ever, at a first-rate butcher's), but is easily detected by its deeper colour, coarser grain, and unpleasant smell. In choosing beef, look, if possible, at the kidney, as this is a pretty safe test, a good one being of a deep rosy red, with firm, elastic, and cream-coloured fat whilst that of an inferior beast will almost certainly be of a dark purplish brown, and deficient in fat, while what there is of it will be rather flabby and pinky in colour. Over-fat beef is always wasteful, and in general rather coarse; but over-lean beef betrays bad feeding and probable toughness. It