Soyer's Culinary Campaign: Being Historical Reminiscences of the Late War.: With The Plain Art of Cookery for Military and Civil Institutions

music, we landed in one of the many pretty valleys of which the Bosphorus alone can boast; it was called the Sultana, near the Sultan’s valley. Such a culinary encampment I never before beheld; four men-cooks were busily engaged in dishing up sixteen hot _entrées_, fowls were being grilled, quails and dotrelles were being roasted, kaboub frizzling, and all kinds of fish were submitted to the science of cookery; four sheep and two lambs were roasted whole in the adjacent forest, while a table for about a hundred and fifty people was laid out under the shadowy folds of a huge tree, luxuriously situated at the base of a delightful Turkish fountain; sherbet, ices, jam, and cakes were also freely partaken of. At twelve, to the minute, the open-air banquet was placed upon the table, and soon the warning note of the tum-tum assembled all around it. Oriental fruit and flowers profusely ornamented the festive board, while Smyrna melons of large dimensions perfumed the air. The banquet lasted two hours, after which dancing and oriental games were in full swing in all directions, including the Greek, Armenian, and Albany dances, accompanied by the twang of music, to the great delight of the participators, as well as the admiration of several hundred Turkish spectators, both men and women, dressed in their best, this being their Sabbath. It gave this scene a purely oriental aspect, which cannot be beheld anywhere but under the heavenly paradise of Mahomet. As the evening approached, more animated became the party, and no finale could have wound up the day’s fun better than the dance of all creeds, each dancer holding a lighted torch, which flickered about the forest like so many will-o’-the-wisps. Turkish fireworks terminated this day of romance, which ended to the sorrow of all. Iron pots elevated on poles, along the shore, filled with wood and vitriol, were then fired, throwing a blaze of light on the caidjees, who were gaily fluttering round the shore on the agitated ripples of the Bosphorus; each caique, headed by its pot of fire--blue, green, or yellow--bands of