quasify

Going absolutely blind tonight trying to read the worlds worst pdf, Narrative of the expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan. This is a primary account of Commodore Perry’s gunboat diplomacy with Japan, which, as you might imagine, is a touch biased toward the author’s perspective but still fascinating, full of obnoxiously detailed day to day accounts. The except below is an account from Lew Chew, or Ryukyu (today, Okinawa) which at the time was an independent political state.

Four tables were set in the central apartment and three in each of the wings, and these were covered with a most bountiful collation. Immediately on entering the guests were desired to seat themselves, the Commodore, with Captains Buchanan and Adams, occupying the highest table on the right hand, and the regent and his associates the one opposite on the left. A pair of chop-sticks was placed at each corner of every table; in the centre was an earthen pot filled with saki, (the intoxicating drink made by the Lew Chewans,) surrounded with four acorn cups, four large, coarse China cups, with clumsy spoons of the same material, and four tea-cups. On each table were dishes to the number of some twenty, of various sizes and shapes, and the exact basis of some of which no American knoweth to this day; possibly it was pig. Of the dishes, however, which were familiar to western apprehension, there were sliced boiled eggs, which had been dyed crimson, fish made into rolls and boiled in fat, pieces of cold baked fish, slices of hog’s liver, sugar candy, cucumbers, mustard, salted raddish tops, and fragments of lean pork, fried. Cups of tea were first handed round; these were followed by very small cups of saki, which had the taste of French liqueur. Small bamboo sticks, sharpened at one end, and which some of the guests mistook for toothpicks, were furnished, to be used as forks in taking balls of meat and dough from the soup, which made the first course. Soup constituted also the next seven courses of the twelve, whereof the repast consisted. The other four were gingerbread, salad made of bean sprouts and young onion tops, a basket of what appeared to be some dark red fruit, but proved to be artificial balls composed of a thin dough rind covering a sugary pulp, and a delicious mixture compounded of beaten eggs and a slender white root with an aromatic taste.