HODGE-PODGE:  OR, WHAT’S INTILT.

WRITTEN NOV. 20, 1875, AT STAGENHOE PARK.

The subject and treatment, as well as title, of this Lecture are suggested by the answer of the hostess at a Scottish inn to an English tourist, who was inquisitive to know the composition of a dish which she offered him, and which she called Hodge-Podge.  “There’s water intilt,” she said, “there’s mutton intilt, there’s pease intilt, there’s leeks intilt, there’s neeps intilt, and sometimes somethings else intilt.”  The analysis was an exhaustive one, and the intelligence displayed by the landlady was every way worthy of the shrewdness indigenous to her country; but her answer was not so lucid to her listener as to herself, as appeared by his bewildered looks, and his further half-despairing interrogatory.  “But what is intilt?” said he, impatiently striking in before she had well finished.  “Haven’t I been tellin’ ye what’s intilt?” she replied.  And she began the enumeration again, only with longer pause and greater emphasis at every step, as if she were enlightening a slow apprehension,—­“There’s water intilt, there’s mutton intilt;” quietly and self-complacently adding, as she finished, “Ye surely ken now what’s intilt.”  Whether her guest now understood her meaning, or whether he had to succumb, contented with his ignorance, we are not informed; but few of my readers need to be told that “intilt” is a Scotch provincialism for “into it,” and that the landlady meant by using it to signify that the particulars enumerated entered as constituents into her mysterious dish.

My aim is to discourse on the same constituents as they display their virtues and play their parts on a larger scale, in a wider economy; and when I have said my say, I hope I may be able to lay claim to the credit of having spoken intelligibly and profitably, though I must at the outset bespeak indulgence by promise of nothing more than the serving up of a dish of simple hodge-podge.  The question I put in a wider reference is the question of the Englishman, as expressed in the Scotchwoman’s dialect, What’s intilt? and I assume that there enter into it, as radically component parts, at least the ingredients of this motley soup.  Into the large hodge-podge of nature and terrestrial economics, as into this small section of Scotch cookery, there enter the element of water, the flesh of animals, and the fruits of the earth, as well as the processes by which these are brought to hand and rendered serviceable to life.  The ingredients of hodge-podge exist in rerum natura, and the place they occupy and the function they fulfil in it are no less deserving of our inquisitive regard.