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2450. The human body, materially considered, is a beautiful piece of mechanism, consisting of many parts, each one being the centre of a system, and performing its own vital function irrespectively of the others, and yet dependent for its vitality upon the harmony and health of the whole . . . the mouth secretes saliva, to soften and macerate the food; the liver forms its bile, to separate the nutriment from the digested aliment . . . the veins, equally busy, are carrying away the débris and refuse collected from where the zoophyte arteries are building, - this refuse, in its turn, being conveyed to the liver, there to be converted into bile.
Isabella Beeton, The Book of Household Management (1861)
There were long seats of stone within the chimney, where, in despite of the tremendous heat, monarchs were sometimes said to have taken their station, and amused themselves with broiling the umbles, or dowsels, of the deer, upon the glowing embers, with their own royal hands, when happy the courtier who was invited to taste the royal cookery.
Walter Scott, Woodstock; or, The Cavalier (1855)
Umble-pie. A pie made of umbles - i.e. the liver, kidneys, etc., of a deer. These "refuse" were the perquisites of the keeper, and umble-pie was a dish for servants and inferiors.
E. Cobham Brewer, Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1898)
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In 1893, overwhelmed by readers' insatiability for Sherlock Holmes stories, Arthur Conan Doyle killed his detective off at the height of his popularity. Writing to a friend in 1896, Doyle described how literally sick he was of the figure he had created: "I have had such an overdose of him that I feel towards him as I do towards pâté de foie gras, of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day" (Chabon 17). Holmes's (first) literary demise was marked by his creator with a culinary simile, one which recalls that his literary debut was made under the name that, above all others, stood for the culinary in late nineteenth-century Britain: Isabella Beeton. The first Sherlock Holmes story, "A Study in Scarlet," appeared in...