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Title: The greedy book
A gastronomical anthology
Author: Frank Schloesser
Release date: June 12, 2024 [eBook #73816]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Gay and Bird, 1906
Credits: Carol Brown, Charlene Taylor and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GREEDY BOOK ***
THE GREEDY BOOK
“How admirable and beautiful are eating and drinking,
and what a great invention the human digestive system
is! How much better to be a man than an alligator! The
alligator can fast for a year and a half, whereas five
hours’ abstinence will set an edge on the most pampered
human appetite. Nature has advanced a little since Mesozoic
times. I feel certain that there are whole South Seas of
discovery yet to be made in the art and science of eating
and drinking.”
JOHN DAVIDSON
[Illustration: LES SENS: PAR BERTALL
[Frontispiece]
THE
GREEDY BOOK
A GASTRONOMICAL ANTHOLOGY
BY
FRANK SCHLOESSER
AUTHOR OF
“THE CULT OF THE CHAFING DISH”
[Illustration]
LONDON
GAY AND BIRD
12 & 13 HENRIETTA STREET, STRAND
1906
_All rights reserved_
_To_
THE IDEAL WAITER
_They also serve who only stand and wait_
Milton’s Sonnet “On his Blindness”
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. Cooks and Cookery 1
II. Byways of Gastronomy 20
III. The Poet in the Kitchen 41
IV. The Salad in Literature 62
V. Mrs. Glasse and her Hare 81
VI. Menus 112
VII. Oysters 166
VIII. Waiters and Snails 189
IX. Dishes of History 220
X. Lenten Fare 242
LIST OF PLATES
Les Sens _Frontispiece_
Les Aliments _To face page_ 30
Les Audiences d’un Gourmand ” 89
Les Rêves d’un Gourmand ” 135
Des Magens Vertheidigung der edlen Austern ” 178
Les Boissons ” 194
My thanks are due to the Editors of the _St. James’s
Gazette_, the _Evening Standard_, the _Academy_, the _Daily
Mail_, the _Daily Express_, the _Globe_, the _Tribune_, and
_Vanity Fair_ for permission to reproduce certain portions
of these papers.
[Illustration: CHAPTER I
COOKS AND COOKERY]
“In short the world is but a Ragou, or a large
dish of Varieties, prepared by inevitable Fate to
treat and regale Death with.”
‘Miscellanies: or a Variety of Notion and
Thought.’ By H. W. (Gent.) [Henry Waring] 1708.
The only thing that can be said against eating is that it takes away
one’s appetite. True, there is a French proverb to the contrary, but
that really only applies to the _hors d’œuvre_ and the soup. We all eat
three meals a day, some four, and a few even five, if one may reckon
afternoon tea as a meal. Yet the art of eating--that is to say, how to
eat, what to eat, and when to eat it--is studiously neglected by those
who deem they have souls superior to the daily stoking of the human
engine.
Whosoever simply wants to eat certainly does not require to know how
to cook. But whosoever desires to criticize a dinner and the dishes
that compose it--and enjoyment without judgment is unsatisfactory--need
not be a cook, but must understand what cooking implies; he must have
grasped the spirit of the art of cookery.
Cooks themselves almost always judge a dinner too partially, and
from the wrong point of view; they are, almost without exception,
obstinately of the opinion that everything they cook must taste equally
good to everybody. This is obviously absurd (but so like a cook), for
allowance must be made for the personal equation. Nothing tastes so
good as what one eats oneself, so it is not to be expected that one and
the same dish will please even the most fastidious octette. Still there
have been occasional instances.
The late Sir Henry Thompson once had a new cook, and, in an interview
with her after the first dinner-party, she expressed herself as being
delighted that everything had been so satisfactory. “But how do you
know it was?” asked Sir Henry. “I’ve not given you my opinion yet.”
“No, Sir Henry,” said the cook, “but I know it was all right, because
none of the salt-cellars were touched.”
It is a mistaken idea that a man-cook can be a _cordon-bleu_. That
title of high distinction is reserved for the feminine sex. According
to Lady Morgan (Sidney Owenson, 1841), in her “Book without a Name,” a
_cordon-bleu_ is defined as an honorary distinction conferred on the
first class of female cooks in Paris, either in allusion to their blue
aprons, or to the order whose blue ribbon was so long considered as the
adequate recompense of all the highest merit in the highest classes.
The Fermier Général who built the palace of the Elysée became not more
celebrated for his exquisite dinners than for the moral courage with
which he attributed their excellence to his female cook, Marie, when
such a chef was hardly known in a French kitchen; for when Marie
served up _un petit diner délirant_ she was called for like other
_prime donne_, and her health drunk by the style of _Le Cordon Bleu_.
One of the most famous of the bearers of the title was undoubtedly that
wonderful Sophie who is so charmingly described in _La Salle-à-manger
du Docteur Véron_. She was cook and politician too, and even Alexandre
Dumas père did not disdain to dine with her at a dinner of her own
cooking; and moreover eminent statesmen of the period consulted her
about politics, her clear-headed simplicity and wide experience of
popular sentiment rendering her opinions of considerable value. The
editor adds that her name was not _Sophie_, but that her many friends
will nevertheless easily recognize her.
The value of a good chef in a well-ordered household cannot be
over-estimated. His tact, his experience, and his art go far to make
life pleasant and easy. Moreover, a good cook is a direct aid to good
health, for he uses none but the best materials, and, if he be of the
highest rank of his order, knows just how to assimilate those suave
and subtle suggestions and flavourings which go so far to make cookery
such as the great Careme (1828) called _le genre mâle et élégant_.
Cooks were held in the highest estimation in Venice in the sixteenth
century. Here is the beginning of a letter from one Allessandro Vacchi,
a Venetian citizen, to an acquaintance of his, a cook and carver by
profession: “_Al magnifico Signor Padron mio osservandissimo il Signor
Matteo Barbini, Cuóco e Scalco celeberrimo della città di Venetia._”
In our own time honour to the profession is not lacking, for a little
while ago the King decorated M. Ménager, his _maître-chef_, with the
Royal Victorian Medal.
At the same time the competition of many rich folk for the services of
some of the best-known chefs has made these artists, in some cases at
least, place an extortionate value upon their ministrations. A very
clever chef, reliable in everything except his sauces, in which he is
slightly heterodox, was recently engaged by a _nouveau riche_ at a
salary far exceeding that which he paid to his private secretary.
In one of Matthew Bramble’s letters from Bath (“Humphry Clinker”)
he refers to such a one as “a mushroom of opulence, who pays a cook
seventy guineas a week for furnishing him with one meal a day.”
Mushroom of opulence is good. That species of fungus is always with us.
Dr. Kitchiner in his “Housekeeper’s Oracle” (1829) quotes from “The
Plebeian Polished, or Rules for Persons who have unaccountably plunged
themselves into Wealth.” A work of this nature, if published nowadays,
should surely command a large sale, for the number of people who have
“unaccountably plunged themselves into Wealth” seems to be multiplying
rapidly. Most of them know how to feed. Few of them seem to have
mastered the mystery of how to dine. “Man ist was man isst” says the
German proverb, and there is no valid reason for spending fabulous sums
on a dinner of out-of-the-season delicacies, when the good reasonable
and seasonable things of this earth are ready and ripe for consumption.
At the same time, meanness has nothing to recommend it. There is no
credit in starving yourself or your guests. The difference between
mere parsimony and economy has never been more deftly illustrated than
in those pregnant sentences from Edmund Burke: “Mere parsimony is not
economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential article in
home economy. Economy is a distributive virtue, and consists, not in
saving, but selection. Parsimony requires no providence, no sagacity,
no powers of combination, no comparison, no judgment. Mere instinct,
and that not an instinct of the noblest kind, may produce this false
economy in perfection.”
This is very solid wisdom, because it bears in mind the great element
of perspective in expense, which is so often forgotten or overlooked.
To revert to the preciousness and rarity of the really good female
cook, to the artist in pots and pans. It was in 1833 that the Prince
de Ligne, who had just lost his second wife, came to Paris to seek
consolation. He lived temporarily in the Rue Richelieu. One evening
in passing the lodge he became aware of a peculiarly alluring odour of
cooking. He saw the concierge, an old woman of sixty, bending eagerly
over a battered stewpan on a small charcoal fire, stirring some mess
which evidently was exhaling this delicious odour. The Prince was one
of the affable kind. He asked the poor old lady for a taste of her
dish, which he liked so much that he gave her a double louis, and asked
her how it happened that with such eminent culinary genius she was
reduced to the porter’s lodge. She told him that she had once been head
cook to a cardinal-archbishop. She had married a bad man who had spent
all her savings. Although very poor, she added with conscious pride,
and no longer disposing of the full _batterie_ of an archiepiscopal
kitchen, she flattered herself she could manage with a few bits of
charcoal and a _méchante casserole_ to cook with the best of them. Next
day the lodge was vacant, the old concierge being on her way to Belœil,
the Prince de Ligne’s residence, near Mons, in Belgium, where she
presided for fifteen years over one of the best-appointed kitchens in
the world.
Less fortunate than the Prince de Ligne was a middle-aged bachelor in
Paris, a few years ago, who gave away an odd lottery ticket to his
cook, a worthy and unprepossessing spinster. Shortly afterwards, to his
amazement, he saw that this particular ticket had drawn the _gros lot_.
He could not afford to part with such a valuable and valued servant, so
he proposed marriage, was accepted, and duly became one with his cook
before the _maire_ with as little delay as possible. Directly after the
marriage he asked his wife for the lottery ticket. “Oh, I gave that
away,” she said, “to Jean, the coachman, to compensate him for our
broken engagement.”
It has been the ambition of many highly placed men to become cooks.
According to Miss Hill’s interesting book on Juniper Hall, and its
colony of refugees, M. de Jaucourt is recorded to have said: “It seems
to me that I have something of a vocation for cookery. I will take up
that business. Do you know what our cook said to me this morning? He
had been consulting me respecting his risking the danger of a return
to France. ‘But you know, monsieur,’ he said, ‘an exception is made in
favour of all artists.’ ‘Very well then,’ concluded M. de Jaucourt,
‘_I_ will be an artist-cook also.’”
A notable instance of the chef who took a pride in his art and could
not understand any one referring to him as “a mere cook” is the
delightful hero of Mr. H. G. Wells’s story of “A Misunderstood Artist”
in his “Select Conversations with an Uncle.” “They are always trying
to pull me to earth. ‘Is it wholesome?’ they say;--‘Nutritious?’ I
say to them: ‘I do not know. I am an artist. I do not care. It is
beautiful.’--‘You rhyme?’ said the Poet. ‘No. My work is--more plastic.
I cook.’”
There was a famous cook too, Laurens by name, who was chef for a
long time to George III, and who combined with his culinary skill a
wonderful _flair_ for objects of art, so that the King bought a large
number of the beautiful things which are even now at Buckingham Palace
and Windsor Castle on the advice of this same Laurens. It has been said
of him that he rarely made a mistake in buying, and that he attended
the principal picture and art sales on the Continent on behalf of his
royal master.
Some cheerful noodles have had much to say anent the want of
imagination of the modern chef. This is the most arrant blatherumskite.
The chef, who is only, after all, a superior servant, paid (and well,
too) to carry out the gastronomic ideas of his master, or, if he lack
such ideas, to pander to his ignorance, too frequently arrogates to
himself a culinary wisdom which is not justified by results. The chef
need only be a thoroughly good cook. The ideas, the suggestions, the
genius behind the pots and pans, come from the gastronomic student.
Neither Brillat-Savarin nor Grimod de la Reynière was a cook--nor was
Thomas Walker, G. A. Sala, or E. S. Dallas, but they were all notable
authorities. And they inspired the culinary art of their times by their
knowledge, invention, and discrimination.
As a matter of fact, our chefs are unimaginative--and a good job too;
because when a chef, be he never so clever, begins to launch out on
novelties of his own invention, he almost invariably comes to grief. A
really good _maître d’hôtel_ may occasionally suggest a new dish, but
in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it is merely a slight variation
of something perfectly well known and appreciated. There may be a new
garnishing, a trifling alteration in the manner of serving, and there
is invariably a brand-new (and usually inappropriate) name, but the
dish remains practically the same, despite its new christening-robe.
A fine joint of Southdown mutton has been recently renamed _Béhague_,
but it remains sheep, and nothing is gained by the alteration save a
further insight into the ignorance of the average chef. This is only a
simple example, but it might be multiplied indefinitely. I have been
served at a well-known restaurant with cutlets _à la Trianon_, which
turned out to be our old and tried friend cutlets _à la Réforme_ under
a new title. In a like manner, but at another restaurant, an ordinary
and excellent _mousse de jambon_ paraded as _jambon à la Véfour_;
Heavens and the chef only know why; and the one won’t tell, and the
other doesn’t know.
_Béhague_, by the way, is, so to say, chefs’ French, which has much
in common with dog Latin, if one may be allowed the comparison.
_Béhague_ will not be found in a French dictionary, but it is the
new _nom de cuisine_ for fine-quality mutton (such as Southdown); it
has only lately come into use, and there seems no particular reason
for it. Probably it was invented in “a moment of enthusiasm,” as the
barber-artist remarked when he made a wig that just fitted a hazel-nut.
There are several different kinds of bad language. That used by chefs
and _maîtres d’hôtel_ on their menus is one of the worst. They are
incorrigibly ignorant--and glory in it. It is an undeniable fact that
the average menu, whether at a club or restaurant, contains usually at
least a brace of orthographic howlers, while at the private house,
an it boast a chef who writes the dinner programmes, the average is
distinctly higher. I have encountered on an otherwise quite reputable
card the extraordinary item _Soufflet de fromage_. The kind hostess had
no intention of inflicting a box on the ears to the cheese, but had
mistaken _soufflet_ for _soufflé_. By such obvious errors are social
friendships imperilled.
But I should like to go much further than this comparatively harmless
example. No less an authority than Æneas Dallas in Kettner’s “Book of
the Table” says: “It is a simple fact, of which I undertake to produce
overwhelming evidence, that the language of the kitchen is a language
‘not understanded of the people.’ There are scores upon scores of its
terms in daily use which are little understood and not at all fixed,
and there is not upon the face of this earth an occupation which is
carried on with so much of unintelligible jargon and chattering of apes
as that of preparing food. Not only cooks, but also the most learned
men in France have given up a great part of the language of the kitchen
as beyond all comprehension. We sorely want Cadmus amongst the cooks.
All the world remembers that he taught the Greeks their alphabet. It
is well-nigh forgotten that he was cook to the King of Sidon. I cannot
help thinking that cooks would do well to combine with their cookery,
like Cadmus, a little attention to the alphabet.”
It is easy, of course, to ridicule such obvious ineptitudes as a
dish of “breeches in the Royal fashion with velvet sauce” (_Culotte
à la Royale sauce velouté_) or “capons’ wings in the sun” (_ailes de
poularde au soleil_), but these are but trifling offences compared
to the egregious lapses of grammar, history, and good taste which
disfigure our menus. There is no culinary merit in describing an
otherwise harmless dish of salmon as _saumon Liberté au Triomphe
d’Amour_. It is simply gross and vulgar affectation. Let the cooks
do their cooking properly and all will be well. Their weirdly
esoteric naming of edible food is an insult of supererogation to the
intelligence of the diner.
At the same time, due credit must be given to the chef for the part
he has played in the general improvement of gastronomics and the art
of feeding during the past two decades. The mere multiplication of
restaurants is nothing; but the general improvement of the average menu
is everything. Here, for instance, is the menu of a dinner of the year
1876, recommended by no less an authority than the late _Fin Bec_,
Blanchard Jerrold, whose Epicure’s Year Books, Cupboard Papers, and
Book of Menus are by way of being classics.
MENU.
Crécy aux Croûtons.
Printannier.
Saumon bouilli, sauce homard.
Filets de soles à la Joinville.
Whitebait.
Suprême de Volaille à l’écarlate.
Côtelettes d’Agneau aux concombres.
Cailles en aspic.
Selle de Mouton.
Bacon and beans.
Caneton.
Baba au Rhum.
Pouding glacé.
This was the dinner given by the late Edmund Yates on the occasion
of the publication of the _World_ newspaper. Observe its heaviness,
clumsiness, and want of delicacy. Three fish dishes are ostentatious
and redundant; three entrées simply kill one another; the quails are
misplaced before the saddle; the bacon and beans is, of course, a joke.
Altogether it is what we should call to-day a somewhat barbarian meal.
Contrast therewith the following artistically fashioned programme of
a dinner given by the Réunion des Gastronomes; it is practically _le
dernier mot_ of the culinary art.
MENU.
Huîtres Royales Natives.
Tortue Claire.
Filets de Soles des Gastronomes.
Suprême de Poularde Trianon.
Noisettes d’Agneau à la Carême.
Pommes Nouvelles Suzette.
Sorbets à la Palermitaine.
Bécassines à la Broche.
Salade.
Haricots Verts Nouveaux à la Crème.
Biscuit Glacé Mireille.
Corbeille de Friandises.
Dessert.
Nothing could be lighter or more graceful. There is naught that is
over-elaborate or indigestible; on the contrary, the various flavours
are carefully preserved, and there is a subtle completeness about the
whole dinner which is very pleasing.
It was the late lamented Joseph, of the _Tour d’Argent_, the Savoy, and
elsewhere, who once said: “Make the good things as plain as possible.
God gave a special flavour to everything. Respect it. Do not destroy it
by messing.”
Joseph, who, by the way, was born in Birmingham, was a _mâitre d’hôtel_
of genius, though even he had his little weaknesses, and merely to
watch the play of his wrists whilst he was “fatiguing” a salad for
an especially favoured guest was a lesson in inspired enthusiasm.
His rebuke to a rich American in Paris is historic. The man of
dollars had ordered an elaborate _déjeuner_, and whilst toying with
the _hors-d’œuvre_ carefully tucked his serviette into his collar
and spread it over his waistcoat, as is the way with some careless
feeders. Joseph, rightly enough, resented this want of manners, and,
approaching the guest, said to him politely, “Monsieur, I understand,
wished to have _déjeuner_, not to be shaved.” The restaurant lost that
American’s custom, but gained that of a host of nice and delicate
feeders.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: CHAPTER II
BYWAYS OF GASTRONOMY]
“La Cuisine n’est pas un métier, c’est un art,
et c’est toujours une bonne fortune que la
conversation d’un cuisinier: mieux vaut causer
avec un cuisinier qu’avec un pharmacien. S’il n’y
avait que de bons cuisiniers, les pharmaciens
auraient peu de choses à faire, les médecins
disparaîtraient; on ne garderait que les
chirugiens pour les fractures.”--NESTOR ROQUEPLAN.
I am going to be very rude. Not one woman in a hundred can order a
dinner at a restaurant. I’ve tried them, and I know. Not only can
she not order a dinner with taste, discretion, and due appreciation
of season, surroundings, and occasion; but she inevitably shows her
character, or want of it, if she be allowed to choose the menu. The
eternal feminine peeps out in the soup, lurks designedly in the
entrées, and comes into the full glare of the electric light in the
sweets and liqueurs.
Let me explain. As a bachelor who is lucky enough to be asked out
to many dinner parties, I have cultivated a slight reciprocative
hospitality in the shape of asking my hostesses (and their daughters,
if they have any) to dine with me at sundry restaurants. It is my habit
to beg my guests to order the dinner, “because a woman knows so much
more about these things than a mere man”; and all unwittingly the dear
ladies invariably fall into the innocent little trap, wrinkle up their
foreheads and study the carte, while I sit tight and study character.
Luckily my digestion is excellent. I have survived several seasons of
this sort of thing, but I feel that the time is coming when I must
really give it up and order the dinners myself.
The wife of a very important lawyer was good enough to dine with me
at the Savoy recently. She is, I believe, a thoroughly good wife and
mother, and, moreover, she has a happy knack of humorous small talk.
She graciously agreed to order our dinner--after the usual formula.
The _crême santé_ was all right--homely and healthy, if a trifle dull
and uninteresting; but when we went on to boiled sole, mutton cutlets,
and a rice pudding, I felt that the sweet simplicity of the Jane
Austen cuisine was too much with us, and I recognized sadly that she
was not imbued with the spirit of place; she mistook the Savoy for the
schoolroom. Her forte was evidently decorous domesticity. Nevertheless,
I had a good dinner.
Less fortunate was I in my experience with the eldest daughter of
a celebrated painter. She was all for colour. “There is not enough
colour in our drab London life,” she said; so, at the Carlton, she
ordered Bortsch, because it was so pretty and pink; fish à la Cardinal,
because of the tomatoes; cutlets à la Réforme, because she liked
the many-coloured “baby-ribbons” of garnishing; spinach and poached
eggs--“the contrast of colour is so daring, you know”; beetroot salad;
a peach à la Melba--“so artistic and musical”; and, of course, crême
de menthe to accompany the coffee. It was a feast--of colour--and the
food was thoroughly well cooked; but I was reminded of Thackeray’s
chef, M. Mirabolant, who conceived a white dinner for Blanche Amory to
typify her virginal soul.
Then there was an amiable and affected widow, whose mitigated woe and
black voile frock were most becoming. She presumed, however, on her
widowhood to order everything _en demi-deuil_, which meant that every
dish from fish to bird was decorated with mourning bands of truffles.
The thoughtful chef sent up the ice in the form of a headstone, and we
refrained from Turkish coffee because French _café noir_ was so much
blacker.
The great Brillat-Savarin, speaking of female gourmets, said, “They
are plump and pretty rather than handsome, with a tendency to
embonpoint.” I confess that my experience leads me to disagree; the
real female gourmet (alas, that she should be so rare!), broad-minded,
unprejudiced, and knowledgeable, is handsome rather than pretty, thin
rather than stout, and silent rather than talkative. This, however, by
the way.
Two schoolgirls did me the honour of dining with me at Prince’s not
long ago, before going to the play. I gave them carte blanche to order
what they liked, and this was the extraordinary result:--
Langouste en aspic.
Meringues Chantilly.
Consommé à la neige de Florence.
Selle de Chevreuil.
Gelée Macédoine.
Faisan en plumage.
Bombe en surprise.
Nid de Pommes Dauphine.
I ventured to suggest that there was a certain amount of fine confused
feeding about this programme, that it was so heavy that even two hungry
schoolgirls and a middle-aged bachelor might find it difficult to
tackle, also that the sequence of dishes was not quite conventional.
Eventually they blushingly explained that they had ordered all these
things because they did not know what any of them meant, and they
wanted to find out--“besides, they’ve got such pretty names, and it
will help us so much in our French lessons.” I reduced the formidable
dimensions of the dinner, and there were no disastrous results.
I once had the temerity to invite a real lady journalist to dine with
me at the Berkeley. I think that she writes as Aunt Sophonisba, or
something of the sort, and her speciality is the soothing of fluttering
hearts and the explaining of the niceties of suburban etiquette.
Anyhow, she knows nothing about cookery, although I understand
she conducts a weekly column entitled “Dainty Dishes for Delicate
Digestions.” It was in July, and she said we might begin with oysters
and then have a partridge. When I explained that owing to official
carelessness these cates happened to be out of season, she waxed
indignant and said that she thought “they were what the French call
_primeurs_.” Nevertheless, she made a remarkably good hot-weather
dinner, eating right through the menu, from the melon _réfraichie_ to
the _petits fours_. Women who golf, lady journalists, and widows, I
observe, have usually remarkably good appetites.
I recollect also an American actress who sang coon songs--and yearned
for culture. We lunched at the Cecil, and when she espied on the card
eggs à la Meyerbeer, she instantly demanded them because “he was a
composer way back about the year dot, and I just love his music to
‘Carmen.’” She hunted through the menu for celebrated names, preferably
historical, and ordered successively _Sole à la Colbert_, _Poulet Henri
Quatre_, and Nesselrode pudding, because they reminded her of the time
when she was studying French history.
With the keenest desire not to be thought disrespectful or ungallant,
I really believe that, however well a woman may manage her household,
her cook, her husband, and her kitchen expenses, she cannot order a
dinner at a restaurant. Whether it be the plethora of choice, or the
excitement of the lights and music, or awe of the _maître d’hôtel_ and
the _sommelier_, I do not know, but I am sure that the good hostess
who gives you a very eatable little dinner at her own house will make
hash of the best restaurant _carte du jour_ in her endeavours to order
what she thinks is nice and appropriate.
In referring just now to the excellent Miss Jane Austen, I am reminded
that eating and drinking play no small part in her delightful novels.
Who does not remember Mrs. Bennet, who dared not invite Bingley to an
important dinner, “for although she always kept a good table, she did
not think anything less than two courses could be good enough for a
man on whom she had such anxious designs, or satisfy the appetite and
pride of one who had ten thousand a year.” The dinner eventually served
consisted of soup, venison, partridges, and an unnamed pudding. And a
very good meal too!
An American critic is of opinion that there is a surfeit of mutton in
English literature. “It is boiled mutton usually, too.” Now boiled
mutton is, to the critic, a poor sort of dish, unsuggestive, boldly and
flagrantly nourishing, a most British thing, which “will never gain a
foothold on the American stomach.” This last is a vile phrase, even for
an American critic, and suggests a wrestling match. The critic goes on:
“The Austenite must e’en eat it. Roast mutton is a different thing. You
might know Emma Woodhouse would have roast mutton rather than boiled;
it is to roast mutton and rice pudding that the little Kneightleys go
scampering home through the wintry weather.”
From Miss Austen to Mrs. Gaskell is no such very far cry. “We had
pudding before meat in my day,” says Mr. Holbrook, the old-fashioned
bachelor-yeoman in “Cranford.” “When I was a young man we used to keep
strictly to my father’s rule: ‘No broth, no ball; no ball, no beef.’ We
always began dinner with both, then came the suet puddings boiled in
the broth with the beef; and then the meat itself. If we did not sup
our broth, we had no ball, which we liked a deal better, and the beef
came last of all. Now folks begin with sweet things, and turn their
dinners topsy-turvy.”
What would such a one have said to our modern dinners, at home, or at
a restaurant; a place which he probably would not comprehend at all,
for, at any rate with us, the fashion of dining in public, especially
with our women-folk, is a very recent innovation. The hearty individual
of Mr. Holbrook’s time and type would have more sympathy with the
frugalities of the La Manchan gentleman Cervantes drew, with his lean
horse and running greyhound, courageous ferret, and meals of “duelos y
quebrantes,” that strange dish, which Mr. Cunninghame Graham tells us
“perplexed every translator of the immortal work.”
The modern restaurant is, I suppose, part and parcel of the
evolutionary trend of the times. It has its advantages and its
drawbacks. Its influence on public manners or manners in public (which
are not altogether the same thing), are not entirely salutary. He was a
wise person who once said, “Vulgarity, after all, is only the behaviour
of others.” Go into any frequented restaurant at dinner-time, watch the
men and women (especially the latter), how they eat, talk, and observe
their neighbours--_et vous m’en direz des nouvelles_! Our forbears,
although, or perhaps because, they dined out less, or not at all, had
a certain reticence of table manner which has been lost in succeeding
generations. Be good enough to note the reception of a party of guests
entering a full restaurant and making their way to their reserved
table. Notice how every feminine eye criticizes the new-comers. Not a
bow, nor a frill, nor a sleeve, nor a jewel, nor a twist of chiffon is
unobserved. Talk almost ceases whilst the progress through the already
filled tables takes place. The men of the party ask polite questions,
and endeavour to continue the even tenor of the conversation, but the
feminine replies are vague and malapropos. No woman seems able to
concentrate her attention on talk whilst other women are passing. She
must act the critic; note, observe, copy, or deride. These are our
table manners of to-day. Not entirely pretty, perhaps; but typical and
noteworthy.
[Illustration: LES ALIMENTS: PAR BERTALL
[To face page 30]
The multiplication of restaurants continues, and yet, come to think
of it, the actual places where one lunches, dines, or sups, the
“legitimate” houses, so to say, can be numbered on the fingers of both
hands--including the thumbs. All the others are more or less esoteric.
One can, possibly, dine as well in Soho as in the Strand, but there is
no _cachet_ about the dinner, and one never meets any one one knows, or
if one does, one wishes one hadn’t.
Still, compared with our grandfathers’ times, things have vastly
altered. In the “Epicure’s Almanack or Calendar of Good Living for
1815,” there is a list of over one hundred eating-houses of sorts, but
the only ones that survive to this day are Birch’s of Cornhill; the
“Blue Posts” in Cork Street; the “Cheshire Cheese,” Fleet Street; the
“Golden Cross,” Charing Cross; Gunter’s of Berkeley Square; Hatchett’s
in Piccadilly; the “Hummums” in Covent Garden; Long’s in Bond Street
(better known as “Jubber’s”); the “Ship,” Charing Cross; the London
Tavern; and “Sweeting’s Rents.”
Speaking of the music at a very well-known restaurant in town, a
morning paper said recently: “It is noticeable that many of the
visitors occasionally stop talking and listen to the music.” This set
me thinking. It is worth while listening to good music. Bad music we
are better without. Good cooking and good conversation are natural
concomitants, and mutually assist one another. _Ergo_, it seems obvious
that good music and a good dinner are incompatible. It is rude to talk
whilst musical artists are giving of their best for your delectation,
and, at the same time, a dinner partaking of Wordsworth’s Peter Bell’s
party in a parlour “all silent and all damned” is contrary to the best
gastronomic traditions. Thus I think I have the musical diner in an
_impasse_.
Speaking from memory, among the best dozen restaurants in London there
is music in every one save three; I am therefore bound to conclude
that it is merely a question of supply and demand, and that I am in a
minority. I overheard a quaint protest the other night at a restaurant
where the music is particularly loud, blatant, and objectionable. A man
and, presumably, his wife were dining together, and were evidently
anxious to keep up their conversation on some mutually interesting
topic. During a lull in the clatter and noise I heard the woman’s voice
say, “I do wish they would play more quietly, one really cannot hear
what one is eating.”
Oh! the Roast Beef of Old England,
And oh! the old English Roast Beef!
How many casual diners at the Carlton could hum or whistle that fine
old air? Probably not one--not even M. Jacques. And yet it is about
the only really appropriate and legitimate tune to which Britons ought
to feed. What do we get instead? Musical-comedy selections, languorous
waltzes, cornet solos, coon songs, and an occasional czardas. Is music
really an aid to digestion, or is it designed, like the frills on the
cutlets, to induce us to ignore the imported mutton in favour of the
trimmings?
It is tolerably certain that music with dinner (at a restaurant, for
the ordinary diner) was unknown in England before 1875. In the previous
year the late George Augustus Sala, who knew most things worth
knowing--gastronomically--wrote an article in a monthly magazine on
dinner music, and refers to it as existing only in royal palaces. Very
soon afterwards, however, it was offered to anybody who could afford
to pay a few shillings for a set dinner amid clean and appetizing
surroundings. Subject to correction, it is fairly certain that the
first place in London where they provided music at dinner was the
Holborn Restaurant, which had been a swimming-bath, a dancing-casino,
and other things. The example was speedily followed, and very soon
bands sprang up like mushrooms right and left, at every restaurant
which made any pretence of attracting the multitude.
The Criterion started glee-singers, although this was perhaps more
directly an outcome of Herr Jongmanns’ boys’ choir at Evans’ in Covent
Garden.
[Music]
Nearly every restaurant in London nowadays has a band, and go where you
will, such spectacles are offered you as a man with music in his soul
trying to take his hot soup in jig time, because the band is playing
_prestissimo_ forsooth, and getting very red in the face whilst so
doing. Then will follow the whitebait, and the band, just out of pure
cussedness, plays a languishing slow movement, whereupon the musical
diner is obliged to eat his whitebait _andante_, and the dear little
fish get quite cold in the process.
[Music]
Over in Paris, Berlin, and on the Riviera it is even worse. The
_restaurateurs_ there encourage a wild, fierce race of hirsute ruffians
called Tsiganes, who are supposed to be Hungarian gipsies: “A nation of
geniuses, you know; they can’t read a note of music, and play only by
ear!” That’s just the trouble of it--because their ears are often all
wrong. There is absolutely nothing less conducive to a good appetite
than to watch these short-jacketed, befrogged, Simian fiddlers playing
away for dear life the Rakoczy March or a maltreated Strauss waltz, and
ogling à la Rigo any foolish female who seems attracted by them. It is
on record that an Englishman once approached the leader of such a band
in a Paris restaurant and asked him the name of the dance he had just
been playing. “Sure, an’ I don’t know, yer honour,” was the reply, “but
I’m thinking it’s a jig.” All the Hungarians do not come from Hungary.
Curiously enough, there is an old-time connexion between music and
dinner, although not precisely as we understand either. In the great
houses of the seventeenth century dinner was announced by a concert
of trumpets and drums, or with blasts from a single horn, blown by
the head huntsman. The music of huntsmen running in upon their quarry
was the music which declared the venison and wild boar ready for the
trenchers. Blown to announce the coming of dinner and supper, the horn
was also wound to celebrate the virtue of particular dishes. The nobler
creatures of the chase were seldom brought to table without notes from
the trumpet. Musical honours were accorded to the peacock, the swan,
the sturgeon, and the turbot. The French used to say, “Cornez le
diner,” i.e. “Cornet the dinner”--hence we derive our corned beef.
But to return to our own times; things have come to such a pass,
musically speaking, that the suburbanest of suburban ladies shopping
of an afternoon in Oxford Street cannot drink her cup of tea without
a band in the basement. It is quite humorous to listen to a selection
from “La Bohême” punctuated by “Ten three-farthings, my dear, and cheap
at that,” or “You must really tell Ethel to have a silk foundation”;
but women are such thoroughly musical beings that they seem to
accommodate themselves to all sorts of incongruities.
The old gourmets, who knew how to dine, loved music in its right place
and at the right time, but that was not at dinner. Rossini, the great
composer, was one of them. He loved good cheer and he wrote wonderful
music--but he never mixed the two. It is passing strange that various
ways of cooking eggs have been called after various composers. Thus
we have œufs à la Meyerbeer, à la Rossini, à la Wagner, even à la
Sullivan. Why music and eggs should be thus intimately connected is
somewhat of a puzzle.
The late Sir Henry Thompson, who married a musician, and the late
Joseph of the Savoy, who was an artist at heart, both despised music
at dinner. The former said that it retarded rather than assisted
digestion; and the latter remarked that he could never get his cutlets
in tune with the band. Either the band was flat and his cutlets were
sharp, or vice versâ.
There are a few restaurants in London, some half-dozen at most, where
one can dine in peace, undisturbed by potage à la Leoncavallo, poisson
à la Rubinstein, rôti à la Tschaikowski, and entremet à la Chaminade.
But it would be unwise to say where they are, because it might attract
crowds and induce the proprietors to start a band. And, after all, a
dinner-table is not a concert platform.
In the “Greville Memoirs” (1831) you may read that dinners of all
fools have as good a chance of being agreeable as dinners of all
clever people: at least the former are often gay, and the latter are
frequently heavy. Nonsense and folly gilded over with good breeding
and _les usages du monde_ produce often more agreeable results than
a collection of rude, awkward, intellectual powers. This must be our
consolation for enjoying “gay” dinners.
In a translation from Dionysius, through Athenæus, occur these lines:--
To roast some beef, to carve a joint with neatness,
To boil up sauces, and to blow the fire,
Is anybody’s task; he who does this
Is but a seasoner and broth-maker;
A cook is quite another thing. His mind
Must comprehend all facts and circumstances:
Where is the place, and what the time of supper;
Who are the guests, and who the entertainer;
What fish he ought to buy, and where to buy it.
This shows a nice appreciation of the duties of the all-round cook,
supervised by a knowledgeable master, and is preferable to the
fastidiousness of Sir Epicure Mammon in “The Alchemist,” who leaves
the best fare, such as pheasants, calvered salmon, knots, godwits,
and lampreys, to his footboy; confining himself to dainties such
as cockles boiled in silver shells, shrimps swimming in butter of
dolphin’s milk, carp tongues, camels’ heels, barbels’ beards, boiled
dormice, oiled mushrooms, and the like. One must go back to Roman
cookery, via Nero and others, for such gustatory eccentricities, a
number of which, one may shrewdly believe, were not precisely what they
are described to be in modern English. Do we not know, for instance,
that a famous Roman cook (who was probably a Greek), having received
an order for anchovies when those fish were out of season, dexterously
imitated them out of turnips, colouring, condiments, and the inevitable
_garum_; as to the exact and unpleasant constituents of which,
authorities, including the great Soyer, differ considerably.
The result cannot have been of the nature described by Miss Lydia
Melford in “Humphry Clinker,” who called the Bristol waters “so clear,
so pure, so mild, so charmingly mawkish.”
[Illustration: CHAPTER III
THE POET IN THE KITCHEN]
“Drinking has indeed been sung, but why, I have
heard it asked, have we no ‘Eating Songs’?--for
eating is, surely, a fine pleasure. Many practise
it already, and it is becoming more general
every day. I speak not of the finicking joy of
the gourmet, but the joy of an honest appetite
in ecstasy, the elemental joy of absorbing
quantities of fresh, simple food--mere roast
lamb, new potatoes, and peas of living green. It
is, indeed, an absorbing pleasure.”
R. LE GALLIENNE.
The quotation with which I have headed this chapter, though appropriate
enough in a sense, disproves itself in the assertion. We have “Eating
Songs” in plenty, both in our own language and in foreign tongues, but
they have been neglected and spurned, and for that reason they well
repay a little enterprising research. Here and there, throughout our
literature, are gems of gastronomical versification, and it is, in
fact, impossible to do more than indicate a tithe of the treasures that
may be unearthed with a very little trouble and patience.
Among the anthologies of the future, the near future maybe, is
undoubtedly the Anthology of the Kitchen. It is ready written, and only
remains to be gathered. There is barely a poet of note who could not be
laid under contribution. Shakespeare, Byron, Béranger, Browning, Burns,
Coleridge, Crabbe, Dryden, Goethe, Heine, Landor, Prior, Moore, Rogers,
and Villon are the first chance names to occur, but there are many more
who might be cited with equal justice.
Thackeray wrote verses on Bouillabaisse; which it would be absurd to
quote, so well are they known. Méry, Alexandre Dumas, Th. de Banville,
Th. Gautier, and Aurélien Scholl collaborated, under the editorship
of Charles Monselet (himself a gastronomic poet of no mean order),
in a little book published in 1859 under the title “La Cuisinière
Poétique.” Five years later there appeared in Philadelphia “A Poetical
Cook Book,” by J. M. M., with charming rhymed recipes for such things
as stewed duck and peas:--
When duck and bacon in a mass
You in a stew-pan lay,
A spoon around the vessel pass,
And gently stir away!
The poetical author dilates too upon buckwheat cakes and oatmeal
pudding, and quotes Dodsley on butter and Barlow on hasty pudding.
Sydney Smith’s recipe for a salad is only too well known, and it may
be hoped that it is not often tried, because from a gastronomic point
of view it is a dire decoction. Arthur Hugh Clough in “Le Diner”
(Dipsychus) has this entirely charming verse:--
A clear soup with eggs: _voilà tout_; of the fish
The _filets de sole_ are a moderate dish
_A la Orly_, but you’re for red mullet you say.
By the gods of good fare, who can question to-day?
How pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
How pleasant it is to have money!
Nearly two hundred years ago (in 1708, to be precise) Dr. William King
wrote “The Art of Cookery,” in imitation of Horace’s “Art of Poetry”;
in the original edition it was advertised as being by the author of “A
Tale of a Tub,” but although King was a friend of Swift, there seems to
have been no authority to make use of his name. In the second edition,
in the following year, some letters to Dr. Lister are added, and the
title page ascribes the poem to “the Author of the Journey to London,”
who dedicates it--or, rather, “humbly inscribes” it--to “The Honourable
Beefsteak Club.” This edition has an exquisitely engraved frontispiece
by M. Van der Gucht.
In the fifth volume of Grimod de la Reynière’s entrancing “Almanach des
Gourmands” (1807) there is a poetical epistle _d’un vrai Gourmand à son
ami, l’Abbé d’Herville, homme extrêmement sobre, et qui ne cessoit de
lui prêcher l’abstinence_. These are a few of his lines:--
Harpagon dit: Il faut manger pour vivre;
Et je dis, moi, que je vis pour manger.
Que l’on m’appelle un cochon d’epicure:
C’est un éloge, et non pas une injure.
Subsequent volumes contain many poetical references. There is even
a hymn to Epicurianism, a fable _gourmande et plus morale encore_,
entitled “Les Œufs; a _logogriphe_; several chansons; and a _boutade_.”
Mortimer Collins, in “The British Birds,” has an exquisitely humorous
tourney of three poets who respectively sing the praises of salad; and
the late Dr. Kenealy wrote a book (in 1845) called “Brallaghan, or the
Deipnosophists,” in which he tunes his lyre in praise of good food--and
Irish whisky. Although Sydney Smith’s salad mixture is useless, his
verses entitled “A Receipt to Roast Mutton” are excellent, particularly
this verse:--
Gently stir and blow the fire,
Lay the mutton down to roast,
Dress it quickly, I desire,
In the dripping put a toast,
That I hunger may remove--
Mutton is the meat I love.
An anonymous author has given us the immortal lines:--
Turkey boiled
Is turkey spoiled,
And turkey roast
Is turkey lost;
But for turkey braised
The Lord be praised!
That they are absolutely true every _Feinschmecker_, as the Germans
say, is bound to admit. The famous Cheshire Cheese pudding has not been
without its laureate, one J. H. Wadsworth, who opens his pæan thus:--
We sought “The Cheese” with thirst and hunger prest,
And own we love the Pudding Day the best,
But no one quarrels with the chops cooked here,
Or steaks, when wash’d down with old English beer!
The leg of mutton has not lacked its devotees from Thackeray’s--
A plain leg of mutton, my Lucy,
I prithee get ready at three,
to Berchoux’ praise of the gigot--
J’aime mieux un tendre gigot
Qui, sans pomp et sans étalage,
Se montre avec un entourage
De laitue ou de haricot.
Sir John Suckling contributes to the poetic garland in his lines:--
The business of the Kitchen’s great
And it is fit that men should eat,
Nor was it e’er denied.
And an anonymous Scotch poet indites the following ode to luncheons:--
There are the sausages, there are the eggs,
And there are the chickens with close-fitted legs,
And there is a bottle of brandy,
And here some of the best sugar candy,
Which is better than sugar for coffee.
There are slices from good ham cut off; he
Who cut them was but an indifferent carver,
He wanted the delicate hand of a barber.
And there is a dish,
Buttered over! And fish.
Trout and char
Sleeping are,
The smooth-like surface over.
There’s a pie made of veal, one of widgeons,
And there’s one of ham mixed with pigeons.
A well-known French critic, Achille (not Octave) Uzanne, has compiled
a little collection of menus and receipts in verses, with a notable
preface by Chatillon-Plessis, which includes poems on such thrilling
subjects as jugged hare, lobster in the American fashion, Charlotte
of apples, truffles in champagne, epigrams of lamb, mousse of
strawberries, and green peas. A more recent American poetaster has
published during the last few years “Poems of Good Cheer,” which are
in the manner of fables, such as that of the man who “Wanted Pearls
with his Oysters,” and the busy broker “Who had no time to eat,” and
consequently acquired dyspepsia.
Lord Byron too may be allowed to have his say:--
... Man is a carnivorous production,
And must have meals--at least one a day.
He cannot live, like woodcocks, upon suction;
Although his anatomical construction
Bears vegetables in a grumbling way,
Your labouring people think, beyond all question,
Beef, veal, and mutton, better for digestion.
One of the most ambitious efforts in the culinary-poetic line is,
undoubtedly, “La Gastronome, ou l’homme des Champs à Table; poème
didactique en quatre chants, par J. Berchoux, 1804,” wherein is set
forth, at some length--firstly, the history of cooking; then the order
of the services; and lastly, some fugitive pieces which allude to the
gay science in choice and poetic terms. The book is enriched with some
exquisite copper-plate engravings by Gravelot, Cochin, and Monsiau.
The lines addressed by the author to his contemporaries warning them
against the “repas monstreux des Grecs et des Romains” are full of
repressed dignity and good sound common sense. One puts down the book
with a sense of poetical-gastronomical repletion.
The poetic afflatus has possessed most great cooks, but none with
more practical application than the immortal Alexis Soyer, the hero
of the Crimea and the Reform Club, who, on the death of his wife, a
clever amateur artist, wrote this simple and witty epitaph, “Soyez
tranquille.” Gay’s poem on a knuckle of veal is also worthy of record,
and an anonymous American poet has immortalized the duck in four
pregnant verses.
A very modern poet who writes over the initials of M. T. P. has four
charming verses on the propriety of ladies wearing their hats whilst
dining. The second and third stanzas read as follows:--
Anchovies from Norwegian shores!
Sardines from sunny southern seas!
There’s naught my simple soul adores
One half so ardently as these.
And while I munch the well-fumed sprat,
Sit thou and watch and wear thy hat.
I need no entrée, want no bird,
Nor care for joints, or boiled or roast,
But my imagination’s stirred
By titillating things on toast.
Soft roes the commissariat
Shall serve me opposite thy hat.
Some folks who are not yet very old may remember a quaint part-song or
quartette for male voices, entitled “Life is but a Melancholy Flower,”
which was sung alternately somewhat in this fashion:--
Life is butter!
Melon!!
Cauliflower!!!
Life is but a melancholy flower!
It had much deserved success in its day.
An old recipe for the roasting of a swan is very fairly summed up in
these lines:--
TO ROAST A SWAN
Take three pounds of beef, beat fine in a mortar,
Put it into the swan--that is, when you’ve caught her.
Some pepper, salt, mace, some nutmeg, an onion,
Will heighten the flavour in Gourmand’s opinion.
Then tie it up tight with a small piece of tape,
That the gravy and other things may not escape.
A meal paste (rather stiff) should be laid on the breast,
And some “whitey brown” paper should cover the rest.
Fifteen minutes at least ere the swan you take down,
Pull the paste off the bird that the breast may get brown.
THE GRAVY
To the gravy of beef (good and strong) I opine
You’ll be right if you add half a pint of port wine;
Pour this through the swan--yes, quite through the belly,
Then serve the whole up with some hot currant jelly.
N.B.--The swan must not be skinned.
This poem has been attributed to Mr. George Keech, chef of the
Gloucester Hotel at Weymouth--of course a famous breeding place for
swans.
The following recipe for making a “soft” cheese is said to be by Dr.
Jenner:--
Would you make a soft cheese? Then I’ll tell you how.
Take a gallon of milk quite fresh from the cow;
Ere the rennet is added, the dairyman’s daughter
Must throw in a quart of the clearest spring water.
When perfectly curdled, so white and so nice,
You must take it all out of the dish with a slice,
And put it ’thout breaking with care in the vat,
With a cheese-cloth at bottom--be sure to mind that.
This delicate matter take care not to squeeze,
But fill as the whey passes off by degrees.
Next day you may turn it, and do not be loth
To wipe it quite dry with a clean linen cloth.
This must be done you cannot well doubt,
As long as you see the whey oozing out.
The cheese is now finished, and nice it will be,
If enveloped in leaves of the green ashen tree.
Or what will do better, at least full as well,
In nettles just plucked from the bank of the dell.
In praise of the best food in the world--plain British roast and
boiled--Mr. G. R. Sims has dilated in his weekly columns; a verse from
his perfectly correct and strict “_Ballade_ of New-Time Simpson’s” is
well worth quoting:--
They do not call the saddle “selle”
That you with currant jelly eat;
Boiled fowl’s not _à la_ Béchamel.
Your eyes no foreign phrases meet
That English waiters can’t repeat,
And so to Simpson’s I repair.
The English kitchen’s bad to beat,
Plain roast and boiled are British fare.
The “Envoi,” which commences most cleverly according to traditional
rule, runs as follows:--
Prince’s and Carlton, you I greet,
Savoy, I own your chef is rare;
But you with Simpson’s shall compete.
Plain roast and boiled are British fare.
To come back to recipes, here is one for the famous _Homard à
l’Amèricaine_ written by the chef of the Grand International Hotel
at Chicago, who is quite annoyed with M. Rostand for his obvious
plagiarism in “Cyrano de Bergerac.”
COMMENT ON FAIT LE HOMARD À L’AMÉRICAINE
Prenez un homard qu’on vend
Bien vivant;
Avant qu’il se carapate
Sans vous laisser attendrir,
Sans souffrir,
Détachez-lui chaque patte.
Faites alors revenir
Et blondir
Du beurre en la casserole;
Fourrez-y votre homard
Sans retard,
Mais avant qu’il ne rissole
Ajoutez un court-bouillon
De bouillon
A vous brûler la bedaine!
Faites cuire. Servez-le
Et c’est le
Homard à l’américaine!
Many curious old poems may be found by careful delving in the books our
great-grandfathers used to read, and which we ought to read, but don’t.
For instance, the Roxborough Ballads contain a delightful poem briefly
entitled “The Cook-Maid’s Garland: or the out-of-the-way Devil: shewing
how four highwaymen were bit by an ingenious cook-maid” (1720).
There is a still older ballad in the same collection called “The Coy
Cook-Maid, who was courted simultaneously by Irish, Welch, Spanish,
French and Dutch, but at last was conquered by a poor English Taylor”;
this is in blackletter, and is dated 1685.
A French lady with a happy knack of verse has written the following
rhymed recipe for
SAUCE MAYONNAISE
Dans un grand bol en porcelaine
Un jaune d’œuf étant placé,
Sel et poivre, vinaigre à peine,
Et le travail est commencé.
On verse l’huile goutte à goutte;
La mayonnaise prend du corps,
Epaississant, sans qu’on s’en doute,
En flot luisant, jusqu’aux bords.
Quand vous jugez que l’abondance
Peut suffire à votre repas,
Au frais mettez-la par prudence....
Tout est fini; n’y touchez pas!
Under the title of “Women I have never married,” O. S. of “Punch”
writes delightfully on the lady who knew too much about eating. This
is one of his verses:--
She came. She passed a final word
Upon the _bisque_, the _Mornay_ sole,
The _poulet_ (said she thought the bird
Shewed at its best _en casserole_);
She found the _parfait_ “quite first-rate,”
Summed up the chef as “rather handy,”
Knew the Lafitte for ’88,
And twice encored a fine old brandy.
The following couplets are by--I think--an American author.
Always have lobster sauce with salmon,
And put mint sauce your roasted lamb on.
In dressing salad mind this law,
With two hard yolks use one that’s raw.
Roast veal with rich stock gravy serve,
And pickled mushrooms, too, observe.
Roast pork, sans apple sauce, past doubt,
Is “Hamlet” with the Prince left out.
Your mutton chops with paper cover
And make them amber-brown all over.
Broil lightly your beefsteak. To fry it
Argues contempt of Christian diet.
To roast spring chickens is to spoil ’em;
Just split ’em down the back and broil ’em.
It gives true epicures the vapours
To see boiled mutton minus capers.
The cook deserves a hearty cuffing
Who serves roast fowl with tasteless stuffing.
Nice oyster sauce gives zest to cod--
A fish, when fresh, to feast a god.
The Old Beef Steak Society, otherwise known as the Sublime Society of
Beef Steaks, and of which the full history has too often appeared in
print, entertained the Prince of Wales, afterwards George IV, on his
election as a member; the following is a verse of a song written in
honour of the occasion by the poet-laureate to the Society, Captain
Charles Morris of “Pall Mall” fame:--
While thus we boast a general creed,
In honour of our shrine, sir,
You find the world long since agreed
That beef was food divine, sir;
And British fame still tells afar
This truth, where’er she wanders,
For wine, for women, and for war,
Beefsteaks make Alexanders.
I venture to think that this little excerpt from Lafcadio Hearn’s
“Kokoro” is worthy of record here as a piece of real poetry in
prose. It is from a story called “The Nun of the Temple of Amida.”
“Once daily, at a fixed hour, she would set for the absent husband,
in his favourite room, little repasts faultlessly served on dainty
lacquered trays--miniature meals such as are offered to the ghosts of
the ancestors and to the gods. (Such a repast offered to the spirit
of the absent one loved is called a _kagé-sen_, lit. ‘shadow-tray.’)
These repasts were served at the east side of the room, and his
kneeling-cushion placed before them. The reason they were served at the
east side was because he had gone east. Before removing the food, she
always lifted the cover of the little soup-bowl to see if there was
vapour upon its lacquered inside surface. For it is said that if there
be vapour on the inside of the lid covering food so offered, the absent
beloved is well. But if there be none, he is dead, because that is a
sign that his soul has returned by itself to seek nourishment. O-Toyo
found the lacquer thickly beaded with vapour day by day.”
It would be unfair to omit mention of Molière, who so often and wisely
devotes attention to the culinary craft, for which, indeed, he had a
high appreciation. Did he not read his plays to his cook? A typical
passage is that from his “Femmes Savantes,” when Chrysale expatiates to
Philaminte and Bélise.
Que ma servante manque aux lois de Vaugelas,
Pourvu qu’a la cuisine elle ne manque pas.
J’aime bien mieux pour moi qu’en épluchant ses herbes,
Elle accommode mal les noms avec les verbes,
Et rédise cent fois un has et méchant mot,
Que de brûler ma viande ou saler trop mon pot.
Je vis de bonne soupe, et non de beau langage,
Vaugelas n’apprend point à bien faire un potage;
Et Malherbe et Balzac, si savans en beaux mots,
En cuisine peutêtre auraient été des sots.
Very few people, I am afraid, read the entirely delightful verse of
Mortimer Collins, poet, journalist, novelist, epicure (in the best
sense), and country-lover--all in one. He was among the nowadays
less-known masters of gastronomics, a man who, although no cook
himself, knew by intuition and experience just what was right, and
if it were wrong, just why it was wrong. His novels and poems,
although very unequal, do not deserve to be forgotten, for they
contain many fine, thoughtful, and beautiful passages. His burlesque
of Aristophanes, “The British Birds,” is, in its way, a masterpiece.
He wrote much and well on cookery and dining, both in prose and verse.
Here follows one of his sonnets from a sequence addressed to the
months--from a gastronomic point of view.
JUNE
O perfect period of the sweet birds’ tune,
Of Philomel and Procne, known to fable;
Of wayward morns, and never utterable
Joys of the evenglome, beneath the moon!
Cool be thy food, O gourmand, runs the Rune:
Pigeon and quail are suited to the table;
Anchovy and sardine are noticeable;
Red mullet, first of fish, is prime in June.
Richmond and Greenwich tempt the Londoner
To dine where Thames is cool, and whitebait crisp,
And soft the manners are and lax the morals.
But I (when twilight’s breezes softly stir,
Rob the rich roses, though the woodbine lisp)
Dine on my lawn hedged in by limes and laurels.
The “Minora Carmina” of the late C. C. R., whose verse has much of the
charm of J. K. S. and C. S. Calverley, contains a few verses anent the
pleasure of dining out, which are headed
NUNC EST COENANDUM
Although the season sadly
May open, in contrast grim
With those when pleasure madly
Whirled on the wings of Whim--
Though sporting members sigh for
The huntsman, hound, and horn,
And invalids loud cry for
Health-spots from which they’re torn;
Yet e’en to town detested
Comes comfort in the line--
“Your presence is requested”--·
You’re going out to dine.
It would be easy to extend this list indefinitely, but enough is as
good as a feast.
[Illustration: CHAPTER IV
THE SALAD IN LITERATURE]
“I could digest a salad gathered in a churchyard
as well as in a garden. I wonder not at the
French with their dishes of frogs, snails, and
toadstools; nor at the Jews for locusts and
grasshoppers; but being amongst them make them
my common viands, and I find they agree with my
stomach as well as theirs.”
SIR THOMAS BROWNE, “Religio Medici.”
We have it on the authority of Chaucer that salad is cooling food, for
he says:--
... And after that they yede about gadering
Pleasaunt Salades which they made hem eat,
For to refresh their great unkindly heat.
That the eating of green meat is and always has been closely bound up
with healthy human life is a fact which needs no demonstration; but
the constantly recurring references to it in the literature of all
ages would seem to point the moral in so far as salads must always have
appealed peculiarly to those leading a more or less sedentary life.
In a serious Biblical commentary of the eighteenth century, Baron von
Vaerst, a German savant, refers to Nebuchadnezzar’s diet of grass as
a punishment which did not in any way consist in the eating of salad,
but in the enforced absence of vinegar, oil, and salt. That salad adds
a zest to life is proved by St. Anthony, who said that the pious old
man, St. Hieronymus, lived to the green old age of 105, and during the
last ninety years of his life existed wholly upon bread and water, but
“not without a certain lusting after salad.” This is confirmed by St.
Athanasius.
In Shakespeare’s “Henry VI,” Jack Cade remarks that a salad “is not
amiss to cool a man’s stomach in the hot weather.” Cleopatra too refers
to her “salad days, when she was green in judgment, cool in blood.” In
“Le Quadragesimal Spiritual,” a work on theology published in Paris in
1521, these lines occur:--
La Salade moult proffitable
Signe la parolle de Dieu
Qu’il faut ouyr en chascun lieu.
Pêcheurs, entendez ce notable!
All writers agree as to the cooling properties of salads, and
particularly lettuce, on the blood. In his “Acetaria: a Discourse of
Sallets” (1699), John Evelyn says that lettuce, “though by Metaphor
call’d Mortuorum Cibi (to say nothing of Adonis and his sad Mistress)
by reason of its soporiferous quality, ever was and still continues the
principal Foundation of the universal Tribe of Sallets, which is to
Cool and Refresh. And therefore in such high esteem with the Ancients,
that divers of the Valerian family dignify’d and enobled their name
with that of Lactucinii.” He goes on to say that “the more frugal
Italians and French, to this Day, Accept and gather _Ogni Verdura_,
any thing almost that’s Green and Tender, to the very Tops of Nettles;
so as every Hedge affords a Sallet (not unagreeable) season’d with its
proper Oxybaphon of Vinegar, Salt, Oyl, &c., which doubtless gives it
both the Relish and Name of Salad, Ensalade, as with us of Sallet,
from the Sapidity, which renders not _Plants_ and _Herbs_ alone, but
_Men_ themselves, and their Conversations, pleasant and agreeable.”
In praise of Lettuce he has much to say, and waxes almost dithyrambic
as to its virtues. “It is indeed of Nature more cold and moist than any
of the rest; yet less astringent, and so harmless that it may safely be
eaten raw in Fevers; for it allays Heat, bridles Choler, extinguishes
Thirst, excites Appetite, kindly Nourishes, and above all represses
Vapours, conciliates Sleep, mitigates Pain; besides the effect it has
upon the Morals. Galen (whose beloved Sallet it was) from its pinguid,
subdulcid and agreeable Nature, says it breeds the most laudable blood.”
And again: “We see how necessary it is that in the composure of a
Sallet every plant should come in to bear its part without being
overpowered by some herb of a stronger taste, but should fall into
their place like the notes in music.”
Here is a salad recipe, _temp._ Richard II.
Take parsel, sawge, garlyc, chibolles, oynons, lettes,
borage, mynte, poirettes, fenel, and cressis; lave and
waithe hem clene, pike hem, plucke hem smalle wyth thyne
honde, and myng hem wel wyth rawe oyl, lay on vynegar and
salt and serve ytt forth.
This must have been a strong salad, and full-flavoured rather than
delicate. “Honde” is of course “hand,” and to “myng” is to mix. The
etymology of the recipe is interesting.
Old Gervase Markham, in his “English Housewife,” has this quaint
account of how to make a “Strange Sallet.”
First, if you would set forth any Red flower, that you
know or have seen, you shall take your pots of preserved
Gilly-flowers, and suting the colours answerable to the
flower, you shall proportion it forth, and lay the shape of
the Flower in a Fruit dish, then with your Purslane leaves
make the Green Coffin of the Flower, and with the Purslane
stalks make the stalk of the Flower, and the divisions
of the leaves and branches; then with the thin slices of
Cucumers, make their leaves in true proportions, jagged or
otherwise; and thus you may set forth some full blown, some
half blown and some in the bud, which will be pretty and
curious. And if you will set forth yellow flowers, take
the pots of Primroses and Cowslips, if blew flowers, then
the pots of Violets or Buglosse flowers, and these Sallets
are both for shew and use, for they are more excellent for
taste, than for to look on.
Another variety of old “Sallet” is referred to in “The Gentlewoman’s
Delight” (1654), which instructs one
How to make a Sallet of all manner of Hearbs. Take your
hearbs, and pick them clean, and the floures; wash them
clean, and swing them in a strainer; then put them into a
dish, and mingle them with Cowcumbers, and Lemons, sliced
very thin; then scrape on Sugar, and put in Vinegar and
Oil; then spread the floures on the top; garnish your dish
with hard Eggs, and all sorts of your floures; scrape on
Sugar and serve it.
An even earlier work, Cogan’s “Haven of Health” (1589), has the
following reference: “Lettuse is much used in salets in the sommer
tyme with vinegar, oyle, and sugar and salt, and is formed to procure
appetite for meate, and to temper the heate of the stomach and liver.”
Montaigne recounts a conversation he had with an Italian chef who had
served in the kitchen of Cardinal Caraffa up to the death of his
gastronomic eminence. “I made him,” he says, “tell me something about
his post. He gave me a lecture on the science of eating, with a gravity
and magisterial countenance as if he had been determining some vexed
question in theology.... The difference of salads, according to the
seasons, he next discoursed upon. He explained what sorts ought to be
prepared warm, and those which should always be served cold; the way
of adorning and embellishing them in order to render them seductive to
the eye. After this he entered on the order of table-service, a subject
full of fine and important considerations.”
An excerpt from “a late exquisite comedy” called _The Lawyer’s Fortune,
or Love in a Hollow Tree_, is quoted by Dr. King (1709):--
_Mrs. Favourite._ Mistress, shall I put any Mushrooms,
Mangoes, or Bamboons into the Sallad?
_Lady Bonona._ Yes, I prithee, the best thou hast.
_Mrs. Favourite._ Shall I use Ketchop or Anchovies in the
Gravy?
_Lady Bonona._ What you will!
A quaint old book on Salads is entitled “On the Use and Abuse of
Salads in general and Salad Plants in Particular,” by Johann Friedrich
Schütze, Doctor of Medicine, and Grand-Ducal Saxe-Coburg-Meiningen,
Physician at Sonnenburg and Neuhaus: Leipzig, 1758. The learned doctor
adopts the classical division of humanity into the Temperamentum
Sanguineum, or warm and damp, the Cholericum, or warm and dry, the
Phlegmaticum, or cold and damp, and the Melancholicum, or cold and dry.
To each of these classes a particular form of Salad applies, and none
other.
When Pope Sixtus the Fifth was an obscure monk he had a great friend
in a certain lawyer who sank steadily into poverty what time the monk
rose to the Papacy. The poor lawyer journeyed to Rome to seek aid from
his old friend the Pope, but he fell sick by the wayside and told
his doctor to let the Pope know of his sad state. “I will send him a
salad,” said Sixtus, and duly dispatched a basket of lettuces to the
invalid. When the lettuces were opened money was found in their hearts.
Hence the Italian proverb of a man in need of money: “He wants one of
Sixtus the Fifth’s salads.”
Fourcroy and Chaptal, notable chemists of the end of the eighteenth
century, unite in praise of salads, and have written disquisitions on
the dressing thereof; and Rabelais opines that the best salad-dressing
is Good Humour, which is just the sort of thing that one might expect
from him. His references to salad are numerous, and in the one
oft-quoted case humorously apposite.
In the olden time salads were mixed by pretty women, and they did it
with their hands. This was so well understood that down at least to the
time of Rousseau (Littré gives a quotation from the “Nouvelle Heloise,”
VI. 2) the phrase _Elle peut retourner la salade avec les doigts_ was
used to describe a woman as being still young and beautiful. “Dans le
siècle dernier,” says Littré, “les jeunes femmes rétournaient la salade
avec les doigts: cette locution a disparu avec l’usage lui-même.”
Among the gastrological Italian authors of the seventeenth century
I must refer to Salvatore Massonio, who wrote a great work on the
manner of dressing salads, entitled “Archidipno, overo dell’ Insalata e
dell’ uso di essa, Trattato nuovo Curioso e non mai più dato in luce.
Da Salvatore Massonio, Venice, 1627.” The British Museum copy, by the
way, belonged to Sir Joseph Banks. As was usual in those leisurely and
spacious times, there is a most glowing dedication beginning thus: “A
Molto Illustri Signori miei sempre osservandissimi i Signori fratelli
Ludovico Antonio e Fabritio Coll’ Antonii.” There is also a compendious
bibliography of 114 authors consulted and mentioned in this work,
which, indeed, is of considerable importance and of great interest.
Every one knows the oft-told tale of the French _emigré_ who went
about to noblemen’s houses mixing delicate salads at a high fee. Most
authorities refer to him as d’Albignac, although Dr. Doran, in his
“Table Traits,” calls him le Chevalier d’Aubigné; but Grenville Murray,
who generally knew what he was writing about, says that his name was
Gaudet. However, that matters little. He, whoever he was, appears to
have been an enterprising hustler of the period, and it is recorded
that he made a decent little fortune on which he eventually retired to
his native land to enjoy peace and plenty for the remainder of his days.
In Mortimer Collins’s “The British Birds, by the Ghost of Aristophanes”
(1872), there is a poetic tourney between three poets for the
laureateship of Cloud-Cuckooland; the subject is “Salad.” The poet with
the “redundant brow” sings:--
O cool in the summer is salad,
And warm in the winter is love;
And a poet shall sing you a ballad
Delicious thereon and thereof.
A singer am I, if no sinner,
My muse has a marvellous wing,
And I willingly worship at dinner
The Sirens of Spring.
Take endive ... like love it is bitter;
Take beet ... for like love it is red:
Crisp leaf of the lettuce shall glitter,
And cress from the rivulet’s bed:
Anchovies foam-born, like the Lady
Whose beauty has maddened this bard;
And olives from groves that are shady;
And eggs ... boil ’em hard.
The poet with the “redundant beard” chants next.
Waitress, with eyes so marvellous black,
And the blackest possible lustrous gay tress,
This is the mouth of the Zodiac
When I want a pretty deft-handed waitress.
Bring a china bowl, you merry young soul;
Bring anything green, from worsted to celery;
Bring pure olive oil, from Italy’s soil ...
Then your china bowl we’ll well array.
When the time arrives chip choicest chives,
And administer quietly chili and capsicum ...
(Young girls do not quite know what’s what
Till as a poet into their laps I come).
Then a lobster fresh as fresh can be
(When it screams in the pot I feel a murderer):
After which I fancy we
Shall want a few bottles of Heidseck or Roederer.
The poet of “the redundant hair” then sings his lay in
Tennysonian-Arthurian lines, and is ultimately awarded the laureateship
of Cloud-Cuckoo-Town.
The verses do not show poor Collins at his best, and are only
interesting as relating to the subject of salad. Other songs of his
have never been excelled in a certain delicate charm of fancy and
quaint turns of versification.
Many salads have been mixed on the stage; the most famous perhaps is
the Japanese salad which occurs in Alexandre Dumas fils’ “Francillon”
(produced at the Théâtre Français, 17 January, 1887). It is not
orthodox, and, even when deftly mixed, not particularly nice, the
flavours being coarsely blended. Annette de Riverolles, inimitably
played by Reichemberg of the smiling teeth, dictates the recipe to
Henri de Symeux, originally acted by Laroche. Here is the passage:--
_Annette._ You must boil your potatoes in broth, then cut
them into slices, just as you would for an ordinary salad,
and whilst they are still lukewarm, add salt, pepper, very
good olive oil, with the flavour of the fruit, vinegar....
_Henri._ Tarragon?
_Annette._ Orleans is better, but it is not important.
But what is important is half a glass of white wine,
Château-Yquem, if possible. Plenty of finely-chopped
herbs. Now boil some very large mussels in a small broth
(_court-bouillon_), with a head of celery, drain them
well and add them to the dressed potatoes. Mix it all up
delicately.
_Thérèse._ Fewer mussels than potatoes?
_Annette._ One-third less. The flavour of the mussels must
be gradually felt; it must not be anticipated, and it must
not assert itself.
_Stanislas._ Very well put.
_Annette._ Thank you. When the salad is finished, mixed....
_Henri._ Lightly....
_Annette._ Then you cover it with slices of truffles, like
professors’ skull-caps.
_Henri._ Boiled in champagne.
_Annette._ Of course. All this must be done a couple of
hours before dinner, so that the salad may get thoroughly
cold before serving it.
_Henri._ You could put the salad-bowl on ice.
_Annette._ No, no. It must not be assaulted with ice. It
is very delicate, and the different flavours must combine
peacefully. Did you like the salad you had to-day?
_Henri._ Delicious!
_Annette._ Well, follow my recipe and you will make it
equally well.
A few years ago Mr. Charles Brookfield mixed an admirable salad on the
stage of the Haymarket in the course of his clever monologue “Nearly
Seven.” On 31 January, 1831, “La salade d’oranges, ou les étrennes dans
la mansarde,” by M. M. Varin and Desvergers, was played at the Palais
Royal. The first-named author was a sort of gastronomic playwright, for
he wrote plays called “Le cuisinier politique,” “J’ai mangé mon ami,”
and others.
In the Bohemian quarter of Paris, not so very many years ago, the
students of the _plein air_ school, the _Paysagistes_, used to sing
this song at their convivial meetings:--
Ah! que j’aime avec de la salade,
Un gros morçeau de jambon!
Y a pas danger qu’on soit jamais malade
Quand on mange avec de la salade
Un bon morçeau de jambon.
Amis, cassons les pots, les plats, les verres,
Cassons les verres, les plats, les pots;
Puisqu’il n’y a plus dans l’plat qu’des pommes de terre,
Cassons les verres, les pots, les plats!
“When summer is icumen in,” one naturally turns to the cooling salad,
the refreshing salmon mayonnaise, and the concomitant delights of
mid-season entertaining. Regularly at that time of the year learned
pundits in the daily papers tell us with portentous gravity what we
ought to eat and what we ought to let alone. All this is the direst
nonsense. A man or a woman of sense will eat that for which he or she
feels inclined, and will have the requisite gastronomic gumption to
avoid heating dishes which are unseasonable and unpalatable.
With all changes of the weather sensible people accommodate their diet
to the meteorological conditions; fish is preferable to meat, and fruit
plays its strong suit, because its cooling juices are just what we
yearn to dally with when our appetites are a little under the weather.
All this is axiomatic. Of salads in particular. I should like to give
here and now the recipe of a salad which I have found most soothing
and comforting in hot weather. I may, perhaps, be permitted to act as
godfather and christen it “Vanity Fair Salad.” It is quite simple and
wholesome and toothsome. Here followeth the recipe.
VANITY FAIR SALAD.--Take eight to ten cold cooked artichoke
bottoms (_fonds d’artichauts_), fresh, not preserved, and
the yellow hearts of two young healthy lettuces (_cœurs
de laitue_). Break them into pieces with a silver fork or
your fingers (on no account let them be touched by steel);
add a not too thinly sliced cucumber, peeled; toss these
together. Let them stand for half an hour; then drain
off all the water. Now add two or three tablespoonfuls
of pickled red cabbage, minus all vinegar, and a dozen
sliced-up radishes. Add the dressing. As to this I prefer
not to dogmatize. My own mixture is three and a half
tablespoonfuls of the very best Nice olive oil to one of
wine vinegar and one-half of tarragon, with salt, pepper,
French mustard, and three drops of Tabasco sauce. But this
is a matter of opinion, and I insist on nothing except the
total avoidance of that horrible furniture-polish mixture
sold in quaint convoluted bottles, and humorously dubbed
“salad sauce.” Just before serving sprinkle the salad with
chopped chervil and a suspicion of chives.
Our great-grandmothers had various and curious recipes for the
assuagement of summer fevers and megrims of that nature. From an old
volume of “The Lady’s Companion, or an infallible Guide to the Fair
Sex,” published anonymously in 1743, I cull the following recipe for
“Gascoign Powder.”
Take prepar’d Crabs’ Eyes, Red Coral, White Amber, very
finely powdered, of each half an Ounce; burnt Hartshorn,
half an Ounce; Pearls very finely powdered, and Oriental
Bezoar, an Ounce of each; of the black Tops of Crabs’
Claws, finely powdered, four Ounces. Grind all these on a
Marble Stone, till they cast a greenish Colour; then make
it into Balls with Jelly made of English Vipers Skins,
which may be made, and will jelly like Hartshorn.
Of course, this was never meant to be taken seriously, but the
old cookery-book compilers always thought that a few of these
pseudo-medieval recipes, assumed to have been compounded by the wise
men of old, added a certain dignity to their otherwise quite harmless
volumes.
The late Sir Henry Thompson recommends that the host or hostess should
mix the salad, because not many servants can be trusted to execute the
simple details.
Mixing one saltspoon of salt and half that quantity of
pepper in a tablespoon which is to be filled three times
consecutively with the best fresh olive oil, stirring each
briskly until the condiments have been thoroughly mixed and
at the same time distributed over the salad, this is next
to be tossed thoroughly but lightly, until every portion
glistens, scattering meantime a little finely chopped fresh
tarragon and chervil, with a few atoms of chives over the
whole, so that sparkling green particles spot, as with a
pattern, every portion of the leafy surface. Lastly, but
only immediately before serving, one small tablespoonful of
mild French, or better still, Italian red-wine vinegar, is
to be sprinkled over all, followed by another tossing of
the salad.
“La Salade de la Grande Jeanne” is a pretty child’s story by the
prolific writer, P. J. Stahl (really P. J. Hetzel), telling of the
friendship of a tiny tot named Marie and a cow named Jeanne. They were
born on the same day, but the calf grew to a big cow long before Marie
became a big girl, but they remained firm friends, and Marie always
took Jeanne to the pasture and Jeanne in return took care of Marie.
One day Marie’s little brother Jacques had a brilliant idea. He pitied
poor Jeanne having always to eat her grass just plain without any
dressing. How much better she would enjoy her food if it were properly
mixed into a salad. So Jacques borrowed a big salad-bowl from his
mother, and mixed a bundle of grass with oil and vinegar and pepper and
salt. He put the bowl before Jeanne, who, being a polite cow, tasted
the strange dish. Hardly had her great tongue plunged into the grass
than she withdrew it with a melancholy moo, and swinging her tail in an
expostulatory manner, she trotted off to the brook to take a long drink
of water.
The moral is very trite. “The simple cuisine of nature suits cows
better than that of man.”
[Illustration: CHAPTER V
MRS. GLASSE AND HER HARE]
“Every individual, who is not perfectly imbecile
and void of understanding, is an epicure in
his way; the epicures in boiling potatoes are
innumerable. The perfection of all enjoyments
depends on the perfection of the faculties of the
mind and body; the temperate man is the greatest
epicure, and the only true voluptuary.”
DR. KITCHINER.
Old myths die hard. Nevertheless, as we grow older and wiser and saner
and duller, we drop the illusions of our youth, and one by one our
cherished beliefs fall from us, argued away by force of circumstance,
lack of substantiation, or sheer proof to the contrary.
In this last category we must perforce reckon the excellent Mrs. Hannah
Glasse and her immortal saying, “First catch your hare, then cook it.”
Alas and alack, Mrs. Glasse never existed--“there never was no sich
person”--and, moreover, the cookery book bearing her name, in none of
its many editions, contains the oft-quoted words.
The actual facts, although, indeed, these are open to a certain amount
of dubiety, appear to be as follows. In Boswell’s “Johnson” there are
several references to one Edward Dilly, who with his brother Charles
carried on a flourishing book-shop in the Poultry. Dr. Johnson often
dined with these estimable men, and at their table met most of the
wits and scholars of the day. The great lexicographer referred to the
brothers as his “worthy friends.” It is on record that Edward Dilly, in
the presence of Boswell, Mayo, Miss Seward, and the Duke of Bedford’s
tutor, the Rev. Mr. Beresford, said to Dr. Johnson, “Mrs. Glasse’s
‘Cookery,’ which is the best, was written by Dr. Hill. Half the trade
knows this.”
Now this Dr. John Hill (not Aaron Hill, as assumed by Mr. Waller) was
a rather interesting personality. He was a brilliant man in many
directions, who misused his talents, and devoted his energies to so
many various professions that it is not surprising to learn that he
succeeded permanently in none. It is known of him that he was at
different times apothecary, actor, pamphleteer, journalist, novelist,
dramatist, herbalist, naturalist, and quack-doctor. He took a degree at
St. Andrews, and his nickname was “Dr. Atall.” He married the sister
of the then Lord Ranelagh, and by some manner of means got himself
decorated with the Swedish order of the Polar Star, on the strength of
which he paraded himself as Sir John Hill. No one, however, appears to
have taken him at his own appraisement, for he was the general butt of
wits, epigrammatists, and lampoonists. His death was attributed to the
use of his own gout remedy, and these lines to him still survive:--
For physic and farces
His equal there scarce is;
His farces are physic,
His physic a farce is.
Well, this same John Hill, in his earlier and more obscure days, was
doing hack-work for the booksellers, and also following the business
of an apothecary in St. Martin’s Lane. This must have been in the year
1744 or 1745. He was struck (as who might not have been) by the ease
with which a new cookery book might be compiled by extracting the best
recipes from scores of old ones, and rehashing them with original
remarks and new settings. He had plenty of material to work upon. The
best-known cookery books prior to that date were, according to Dr.
Kitchiner (who wrongly dates Mrs. Glasse 1757), Sarah Jackson’s “Cook’s
Director,” La Chapelle’s “Modern Cook,” Kidder’s “Receipts,” Harrison’s
“Family Cook,” “Adam’s Luxury and Eve’s Cookery,” “The Accomplish’d
Housewife,” “Lemery on Food,” Arnaud’s “Alarm to all Persons touching
their Health and Lives,” Smith’s “Cookery,” Hall’s “Royal Cookery,” Dr.
Salmon’s “Cookery,” “The Compleat Cook,” and many more.
Hill accordingly made up his book, and his introduction was certainly
ingenuous and modest; one phrase will prove this: “If I had not
wrote in the high polite style, I hope I shall be forgiven; for my
intention is to instruct the lower sort.” The sly dog knew his public,
and this is further proved by his not putting his book to the world
through a bookseller, but publishing it himself, and evolving an
entirely new method of distribution. Among his friends he numbered the
ingenious Mrs. Ashburn, or Ashburner, as it is spelt in some of the
later editions. This good lady kept a glass and china shop in Fleet
Street, hard by Temple Bar, and her customers came from the fashionable
squares of Bloomsbury and St. James. Hill made an arrangement with Mrs.
Ashburn, whereby she sold his book over her counter and recommended it
warmly to all the ladies who called at her shop.
In order to make the illusion of authorship more complete, a female
name was wanted for the title page. What could be more simple than
“Mrs. Glasse,” seeing that Mrs. Ashburn kept a glass shop? The exact
title of the _magnum opus_ ran, “The Art of Cookery made Plain and
Easy, which far exceeds anything yet published. By a Lady. Printed
for the author and sold at Mrs. Ashburn’s, a china shop, the corner of
Fleet Ditch, 1745.” The actual name of Mrs. Glasse did not, however,
appear on the title page until the issue of the third edition, for
the book was a great success from the first; every one came to Mrs.
Ashburn’s to buy it, and its popularity vastly helped the glass and
china trade.
About fourteen years ago a lively discussion as to the authentic
authorship of Mrs. Glasse filled several columns in the newspapers, the
principal correspondents being Mr. W. F. Waller and Mr. G. A. Sala. It
was suggested that “first catch your hare” was a misprint for “first
_case_ your hare.” Mr. Waller proved that neither of these passages
occurred in any known edition of the book, although _case_, meaning “to
skin,” would have been entirely legitimate and in place.
Shakespeare says in “All’s Well That Ends Well”:--
We’ll make you some sport with the fox ere we case him
And a reference to Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Love’s Pilgrimage” gives
the lines--
Some of them knew me,
Else had they cased me like a coney.
The actual phrase used is “First cast your hare,” or, in another
edition, “Take your hare, and when it is cast.” This simply means
flayed or skinned, and was commonly used at the time. The verb “to
scotch” or “to scatch” is East Anglian, and has the same meaning. So
much for the authenticity of the quotation.
Curiously enough, in the newspaper controversy above referred to,
George Augustus Sala strongly supported the claims of Mrs. Glasse
herself as the real author, and there certainly appears to be some
circumstantial evidence as to a lady of that name who was “habit-maker
to the Royal family” about that period, although her connexion with
the culinary art is not to be traced. Incidentally Sala mentions a
receipt from a cookery book written by “An ingenious Gaul” towards the
middle of the seventeenth century, which begins with what he terms “A
Culinary Truism,” since changed into “A proverbial platitude”--namely,
the words “_pour faire un civet, prenez un lièvre_.” This is, however,
of course merely a commonplace of the kitchen, and, according to the
learned authority of Dr. Thudichum, the imperative of _prendre_ has not
the _catching_ meaning apparently attached to it by Sala.
Abraham Hayward, Q.C., whose “Art of Dining,” a reprint of certain
“Quarterly Review” articles, must always remain one of the greatest
classics of English gastronomical literature, says that Mrs. Glasse’s
cookery book was written by Dr. Hunter, of York. This is, of course,
an egregious error. Dr. Hunter was the author of “Culina Famulatrix
Medicinæ; or, Receipts in Modern Cookery” (1804, fourth edition),
with the delightful dedication, “To those gentlemen who freely give
two guineas for a Turtle Dinner at the Tavern, when they might have
a more wholesome one at Home for Ten Shillings, this work is humbly
dedicated”; and an exquisite frontispiece of a pig, by Carr, headed
“Transmigration”; but he was in no way responsible for Mrs. Glasse.
[Illustration: LES AUDIENCES D’UN GOURMAND
(A. B. L. Grimod de la Reynière inv. 1804)
[To face page 89]
The case is very fairly summed up by Mrs. Joseph Pennell in “My Cookery
Books.” She says, speaking of Mrs. Glasse: “Her fame is due, not to
her genius, for she really had none, but to the fact that her own
generation believed there was no such person, and after generations
believed in her as the author of a phrase she never wrote.” There
really seems no more to be said on the matter.
It matters little, after all, whether Mrs. Glasse really existed or
not; anyhow, some of her precepts are excellent and endure to this day.
She preached thorough mastication as a primary rule for good digestion.
This is thoroughly sound and praiseworthy.
“Most men dig their graves with their teeth,” so says an old Chinese
proverb, meaning, no doubt, that we all eat too much, and too fast,
and too often, and too promiscuously. The propriety of eating slowly
ought always to be remembered. Mr. Gladstone’s thirty-two bites are
historical. Napoleon was a terribly fast eater, and this habit is
supposed to have paralysed him on two of the most critical occasions
of his life, the battles of Leipzig and Borodino, which he might
have converted into decisive and influential victories by pushing his
advantages as he was wont. On each of these occasions he was known to
have been suffering from indigestion. On the third day at Dresden, too,
the German novelist Hoffmann, who was present in the town, asserts that
the Emperor would have done much more than he did but for the effects
of a shoulder of mutton stuffed with onions.
It is a certain fact, although difficult to prove by statistics, that
a large proportion of the drink consumed by the working-classes is
directly due to the bad cooking which they have to endure in their
homes. Improve the workman’s cuisine, and you will automatically
lessen the drink bill. This is a point of view which philanthropists
and temperance folk might adopt with immense advantage, and with
practically immediate results.
Dr. Max Einhorn has recently written on the subject of correct
eating, which he divides into three distinct headings: Tachyphagia,
Bradyphagia, and Euphagia. The first of these is the common evil
of hasty eating, in which the food is not sufficiently masticated,
and hence enters the stomach without being properly insalivated and
comminuted. Besides the deleterious mechanical effect, tachyphagia also
encourages the taking of large quantities of food in too short a time,
as well as its consumption too hot or too cold.
The rising generation is going to fight tachyphagia tooth and
nail--especially tooth. It is being taught wisely and well by the
disciples of the Cookery and Food Association how to improve the family
digestion, and there is an old saying to the effect that digestion is
the business of the cook, indigestion that of the doctor. It cannot be
too often or too forcibly impressed upon the so-called working-classes,
and upon a good many other classes of society also, that good cooking
does not mean waste and extravagance, but, on the contrary, that
it connotes economy and frugality. A daughter who can cook well is
tantamount to possessing a Savings-Bank account.
Are you a Euphagist? Perhaps, like the immortal M. Jourdain, of
Molière, you may have been one all your life--and never knew it.
Anyhow, it is a question which is being bandied about at dinners just
now a good deal, and as very few people know what a Euphagist really
is, it may be as well to explain. Briefly then, Euphagists are the
modern exponents of the old adage, “Laugh and grow fat.” As a sect, or
a race, or a cult, or whatever they may please to call themselves, they
refuse to take anything seriously at meal-times, which is an entirely
sound and philosophical theory.
The learned German professor above referred to is the inventor, or
discoverer, or resuscitator of the idea, and his doctrine is summed up
in the brief instruction: Bite everything twenty times, don’t worry
whilst eating, laugh at everything--and acquire sound health. After
all, it is a tried truism that there is no digestive as efficacious as
hearty laughter. A solemn diner, especially if he dine often alone, is
almost invariably dyspeptic; whereas a bright, cheery man or woman, who
has a keen sense of humour, and sees the comic side of most things, is
rarely a sufferer from indigestion. “Even our digestion is governed
by angels,” said William Blake, the artist-poet, and (if you will but
resist the trivial inclination to substitute “bad angels”) is there
really any greater mystery than the process by which beef is turned
into brains, and jam into beauty?
Of course we do not laugh enough--at the utmost we giggle unmusically.
Listen to the conversation in general at any restaurant, or even any
dinner party; you will rarely hear a really hearty laugh. It is as
extinct as silver épergnes or peacock-pie.
It is told of an American dining at the Carlton one night that, struck
by the comparative silence of all the diners, he asked one of the
waiters: “Say, does nobody ever laugh here?” The reply came pat enough:
“Yes, sir, I believe there have been one or two complaints about it
lately.” Are we too solemn, or too dull, or too afraid of shocking our
neighbours?
It was not always so. According to that delightful work, “The Household
of Sir Thomas More”: “What rare sport we had with a mummery we called
‘The Triall of Feasting.’ Dinner and Supper were brought up before
my Lord Chief Justice, charg’d with Murder. Their accomplices were
Plum-pudding, Mince-Pye, Drunkenness, and such-like. Being condemned
to hang by ye neck, I, who was Supper, stuft out with I cannot tell
you how manie pillows, began to call lustilie for a confessor, and on
his stepping forthe, commenct a list of all ye fitts, convulsions,
spasms, payns in ye head, and so forthe, I had inflicted on this one
and t’other.”
In those days, no doubt, they did not require to adopt the tenets of
Euphagism, they were well enough without it. To-day, however, as a
change, and a delightful one too, from the hundred and one food-fads
which abound, a general adoption of Euphagism would seem to promise
brighter meals, more fun, and better health.
Among other aids to digestion which are flagrantly neglected is the
taking of one’s food in the open air whenever the thermometrical
conditions of our somewhat erratic climate render it possible.
Just exactly why we take every opportunity of dining in the open air
when we are abroad, and carefully fight shy of it, under more or less
similar circumstances, when we are at home, is one of those questions
which are unsolved, and apparently unsolvable. Our distaste for British
coal may be one answer to the conundrum, and another may be not
unconnected with our national shyness at being seen eating our meals in
public by our fellow-countrymen. Foreigners, of course, don’t count.
Opportunity is not lacking, in London at any rate, for open-air dining.
It can be done at several of the hotels, and in the summer there is
Earl’s Court, where, despite certain obvious drawbacks of access and
other things, it can be enjoyed without much discomfort.
But these are, after all, only town delights, and not comparable to
a dinner on a July evening in the open air in the country. One such
lingers most pleasantly in my memory. It was at a charming house in
Hampshire. We dined on a marble terrace, on which soft rugs had been
placed. The night was still enough for the candles on the table to
burn without guttering. Below the terrace was a rose-garden, full of
bloom, and in a shrubbery, not too close to the house, a Hungarian band
played discreetly. The dinner, according to my recollection, was not
extraordinarily good, but whatever it may have been, the surroundings,
the _mise en scène_, were such that almost anything would have been
appetizing and delightful. Why cannot more of this sort of thing
be done? We cannot all possess marble terraces, rose-gardens, and
Hungarian bands; but the permutations of the idea are innumerable, and
I beg to present it to summer hostesses for development and improvement.
Exigencies of climate will probably never permit us to realize the al
fresco meals suggested by a Watteau, a Boucher, or a Fragonard, and it
is, indeed, more than questionable whether the French cuisine, which
was flourishing round and about that period, was ever designed for the
_dîner sur l’herbe_, which is, and was, an essentially bourgeois meal.
At any rate, a curious old book in four volumes, “Les Soupers de la
Cour; ou L’Art de Travailler toutes sortes d’Alimens,” by Menon, which
was published in Paris _au Lys d’Or_ in 1755, contains many appallingly
long menus, some comprising five services and forty or more dishes,
expressly designed to be eaten out of doors. No less an authority
than Carême, however, says that these menus (and they are certainly
extraordinarily elaborate) were the result of pure imagination on the
part of _feu_ M. Menon, and were never actually carried out.
In our days even our shooting lunches tend to greater extent than can
usefully be accommodated on the grass; and we are accordingly bidden to
a farm-house, a tent, or sometimes a garnished barn. The lunch under
a hedge, unloaded from the pony and spread temptingly on the grass,
is almost a thing of the past, which, according to some old-fashioned
fogies, is a pity.
Be that as it may, there is one open-air lunch which can never be
altogether improved away. That is the river lunch, either in a punt or
a skiff, with a table deftly made of the sculls and the stretchers.
Moreover, it has this inestimable advantage: it is practically
impossible for more than two to partake of a boat lunch with comfort.
It can, of course, be done, but at a sacrifice of leg room--and other
things. Of course the more dignified motor-launch lunches, served at a
real table, do not count, for are they not the same as those eaten on
dry land?
It was, I think, the late Sir William Vernon Harcourt who once remarked
that “we are all Socialists now.” By the same token we may say to-day,
“We are all motorists now,” and really, taking it by and large, the
luncheon part of a motor trip is by no means the least interesting.
That British hotels, with very few exceptions, leave much to be desired
is the tritest of truisms. Bad cookery, shocking attendance, and
old-fashioned appointments, combined with disproportionate expense,
are almost universal, and a big fortune awaits any Boniface who, with
a good house on a much-frequented road, instals a really good cook,
preferably a Frenchman and his wife, not necessarily a high-priced
individual, and makes a speciality of well-cooked, daintily served,
appetizing lunches and dinners.
We have all met, only too frequently, the miserable sham lamb, which
is mere mutton saucily disguised with mint; the nearly raw cold beef;
the maltreated chop; the apologetic steak; the absurd parody of a
salad; the sad and heavy apple tart; and the anything but real Cheddar
cheese. All these things are absurd and quite unnecessary.
It is really just as easy to cook a good dinner as a bad one. _Experto
crede._
The usual alternative for the foregoing bill of fare is a cheap and
nasty imitation of a French menu, where nothing is true to name, and
only the frills on the cutlets are what they pretend to be. It really
should not be difficult to give a well-cooked fillet of sole, a tender
chicken, an omelet _aux fines herbes_, and a dish of vegetables in
season, _sautés au beurre_; but if you asked for a lunch of this sort
at a wayside British inn you would be put down at once as a lunatic.
Why?
The question of packing a motor lunch is one of some difficulty
and niceness. Personally, I do not for one moment believe in those
elaborate ready-fitted baskets, of which the makers are so inordinately
proud. Such a basket seldom fits the lunch, and I find by experience
that a good-sized empty basket of convenient shape is far more
practical.
The cutlery, glass, and china may be fixed, as a matter of convenience,
although I do not consider even that to be necessary, for in packing
up one is always trying to fit a table-knife into the place made for a
teaspoon.
My ideal basket or hamper is quite bare inside (to begin with), and the
cates, bottles, knives, forks, and spoons are packed therein, tightly
and carefully, so as to prevent shaking and rattling.
A good method of keeping a salad fresh and crisp, by the way, is to
hollow out a loaf of bread, cut off a slice at the top in the form of a
lid, and pack the salad inside. Japanese paper serviettes are useful;
little and big cardboard plates and dishes are to be bought for a
trifle; fruit travels best if surrounded with green leaves; Devonshire
cream in pots is an appreciable luxury; coffee can be made in the
_cafetière gourmet_, if boiling water be handy. And, lastly, don’t
forget the corkscrew!
According to the calendar, spring begins officially on 21 March. But
the _restaurateurs_ can beat Dame Nature, who, presumably, edits the
calendar (another lady’s paper!), by at least six weeks. For the season
of _primeurs_ commences six weeks earlier, and coming before their
time, they are appreciated all the more for their vernal suggestion
of the flavour of the real thing, arriving in due season when all the
world and his wife may eat thereof.
Early green peas, for instance, which have hitherto been imported from
Algiers, come from Nice, also the famous _Lauris_ giant asparagus,
white and succulent. This earliest open-air asparagus, of indubitable
excellence, is to be had at about thirty-eight to forty-five shillings
per bundle of fifty heads. It is worth the price.
Now too is the time to eat the real Pauillac lamb, reared on the salt
marshes of Pauillac, young, fat, white, and so luscious that it melts
in the mouth. The whole young lamb barely weighs fourteen pounds, and a
cut of this veritable _pré salé_, so often badly imitated and misnamed,
is worth a king’s ransom.
But perpend when you order the dish at a restaurant. The _maître
d’hôtel_ will recommend a leg, because it has the better appearance;
the knowledgeable diner, however, will inevitably prefer the shoulder,
which is the quintessence of delicacy.
According to M. Roche, of Duke Street, Adelphi, the greatest authority
on _primeurs_ in London, early spring is the time beyond all others to
indulge in the toothsome _crêtes de coq_, or cockscombs, without which
no self-respecting dish _à la financière_ is complete. The _haricots
verts gris_, from Spain, are also in excellent condition. They are not
much to look at, but the flavour is just exquisite. They cost about
three shillings a pound.
The far-famed _poulet du Mans_ and equally attractive _poularde de
Bresse_ are on the market at about twelve and sixpence each, but there
is, I regret to say, a deal of fiction attending the appearance of
these plump and pleasing birds on the usual London restaurant bill of
fare. Either of them forms an imposing line on the menu, but see that
you get the _real_ French bird, and not the ordinary Surrey barn-door
fowl, which, however good in its way--and I should be the last to
underrate the product of my own county--is of distinctly inferior
flavour compared with its better-bred Gallic cousin.
The timely _primeurs_ in the way of salads are numerous: the _mâche_
is in excellent condition, and so is the _barbe de capucin_, duly
blanched in cellars; the _Chicorée de Bruxelles_ is a welcome change;
and although the _romaine_ at one and sixpence each are expensive, they
are large-hearted and good of their kind.
The craze, however, for early vegetables may easily be overdone. A
rather well-known gourmet, who has a place in the country, grows all
his “early-out-of-the-season” stuff under glass. He was entertaining
some friends in the month of May, and gave them very excellent new
potatoes, boasting the while of their rarity. “My good man,” said a
guest, “there is really nothing at all extraordinary in getting new
potatoes in May, one can eat them anywhere.” But he had reckoned
without his host. “Of course you can,” was the reply, “if you want
_ordinary_ new potatoes. These of mine are early potatoes of _next_
season but one!”
“If I drink any more,” said Lady Coventry at Lord Hertford’s table, “if
I drink any more, I shall be _muckibus_.”
“Lord!” said Lady Mary Coke, “what is that?”
“Oh,” was the reply, “it is Irish for _sentimental_.”
This was dinner-table conversation one hundred and fifty years ago,
_teste_ Horace Walpole. They were franker in those days.
“This wine,” said a notable host to one Mr. Pocock of Bristol, “costs
me six shillings a bottle.”
“Does it,” asked the guest, with a quaint look of gay reproof; “then
pass it round, and let me have another six penn’orth!”
In the eighteenth century, Sir Walter Besant tells us, people
habitually ate and drank too much; citizens and aldermen grew
portentously fat; well-bred people would gnaw bones with their fingers
at public banquets; an imperial quart of ale was a day’s ordinary
allowance, and a man would drink his six bottles of port at a
sitting. Another illustration of a lusty appetite may be quoted from
the Memoirs of Sir Walter Scott. He and his friend, Mr. Shortreed,
on one of those Liddesdale raids when he was so brisk-hearted and
jovial, rode over one morning from Clenchhead to breakfast with Thomas
Elliott of Tuzzliehope. Before starting at six o’clock, just to lay
their stomachs, they had a couple of ducks and some London porter, and
were, nevertheless, well disposed on their arrival at Tuzzliehope for
a substantial breakfast, with copious libations of whisky punch, which
did not in any degree incapacitate them, for they were able to pursue
their journey, picking up fragments of border minstrelsy as they went
along. And it was not only on country excursions that meat and drink
were consumed _ad libitum_; the ordinary diet of the men of the period
was what we would call redundant, and their feasts were Gargantuan. A
dinner given by James Ballantyne on the birth-eve of a novel is thus
described:--
The feast was gorgeous, an aldermanic display of turtles and venison
with the suitable accompaniments of iced punch, potent ale, and
generous Madeira. When the cloth had been drawn and many toasts had
been honoured and songs sung, the claret and olives made way for
broiled bones and a mighty bowl of punch, and when a few glasses of
the hot beverage had restored their powers, the guests were ready to
listen to the new romance, read aloud by Ballantyne _ore rotundo_. A
novel, under these circumstances, especially if of the somewhat lengthy
and descriptive nature current at that period, must have been at once
stimulating, satisfying, and soporific.
There is authority and to spare as to the comparative plethora of
food which was piled on the table to incite, provoke and assuage
the decidedly healthy appetites of our forbears. In No. 148 of “The
Tatler,” Addison writes:--
“At last I discovered, with some joy, a pig at the lower end of the
table, and begged a gentleman that was near to cut me a piece of it.
Upon which the gentleman of the house said with real civility: ‘I am
sure you will like the pig, for it was whipt to death.’”
In those days a sucking-pig was supposed to acquire greater succulence
through flagellation. What with burning down a house (although only a
Chinese one) to make roast pork, and flogging a baby, the pigs must
have had rather a hard time. An eighteenth-century pig underwent
various vicissitudes from which a twentieth-century pig is exempt.
Goethe has a story in his “Campaign in France” that, after a long and
tiring fight, some of Prince Louis Ferdinand’s soldiers looted a heavy
locked-up kitchen-dresser, in which they heard something heavy rolling
about. They concluded it was food, and as they were well-nigh famished
they took it out to the camp and broke it open. To their horror and
disgust, all it contained was a weighty cookery book. However, they
made the best of a bad job, and as they had no supper, they sat round
the camp fire and one man after the other read out a succulent receipt
from the book, and thus they tried to pretend that they were enjoying
a gorgeous supper. This is, indeed, the true spirit of appreciative
gastronomy, and the table-manners of these hungry but easily appeased
warriors must have been the quintessence of simplicity and good
taste. For, after all, a dinner in its diurnal regularity is the most
perennial of delights. Bulwer Lytton, in “Pelham,” says:--
“A buried friend may be replaced, a lost mistress renewed, a slandered
character be recovered, even a broken constitution restored; but a
dinner once lost is irremediable; that day is for ever departed; an
appetite once thrown away can never, till the cruel prolixity of the
gastric agent is over, be regained. _Il y a tant de maîtresses_ (says
the admirable Corneille), _il n’y a qu’un diner_.”
Speaking of the close of the Tudor period, William Harrison, a
contemporary historian, writes:--
“I might here talke somewhat of the great silence that is used at the
tables of the honourable and wiser sorte generallie over all the realme
(albeit that too much deserveth no commendation, for it belongeth to
guests to be neither muti nor loquaces) likewise the moderate eating
and drinking that is dailie seene, and finallie of the regard that
each hath to keepe himselfe from note of surfetting and drunkenesse
(for which cause salt meat, except beefe, bacon, and porke, are not
anie whit esteemed, and yet these three may be much powdered); but
as in the rehearsal thereof I should commend the nobleman, merchant,
and frugall artificer, so I could not cleare the meaner sort of
husbandman of verie much bobbling (except it be here and there some odd
yeoman) with whom he is thought to be merriest that talketh of most
ribaldrie....”
Very similar were the precepts taught to our remoter forefathers.
In the “Accomplish’d Lady Rich’s Closet of Rareties, or Ingenious
Gentlewoman’s Delightful Companion” (1653) ladies are told when
carving at their own table to “distribute the best pieces first, and
it will appear very comely and decent to use a fork.” The lady is also
requested to sit at table “with a straight body,” and “_even though
she were an aunt_,” to refrain from resting her elbows upon the table.
She must not “by ravenous gesture display a voracious appetite,”
and if “she talked with her mouth full, or smacked her lips like a
pig, or swallowed spoon meat so hot that tears came to her eyes, she
would be taken for an underbred person, even if she were really an
Earl’s daughter.” But folk were almost exaggeratedly delicate in those
days. It is related by the worthy Dr. Walker in his “Sufferings of
the Clergy” that a pious parish priest was ejected from his cure by
the Commonwealth Puritans because he was formally accused of “eating
custard scandalously.” But the etiquette of the table dates back to the
very earliest ages. Of the five hundred and sixty-five Chinese books
on Behaviour, catalogued by a learned mandarin, no fewer than three
hundred and sixty-one refer directly to the ceremonial of the Chinese
dinner-table. It is remarkable too that among the Sybarites it was
customary to invite ladies to dinner a year beforehand, ostensibly to
give them time to beautify themselves.
In the year 1557 one Seager published his “Schoole of Vertue, a booke
of good Nourture for Children,” wherein the following instructions are
set forth in rhyme.
When thy parentes downe to the table shall syt,
In place be ready for the purpose most fyt;
With sober countenance, lookynge them in the face,
Thy hands holding up, thus begin Grace;
“Geve thankes to God with one accorde
For that shall be set on this borde,”
And be not careful what to eate,
To eche thynge lyvynge the Lord sends meate;
For foode he wyll not se you peryshe,
But wyll you fede, foster and cheryshe;
Take well in worth what he hath sent
At thys time be therwith content
Praysinge God!
So treatablie speakynge as possibly thou can,
That the hearers thereof may thee understan,
Grace beynge said, low cursie make thou,
Sayinge “much good may it do you.”
Finally, the following epitaph on a gourmand, written by an unknown
poet, seems to sum up the true inwardness of the gastronomic ideal:--
Ci-gît un gourmand insigne
Dont l’exercice le plus digne
Fût de manger à tout propos.
Se voyant réduit à l’extrême,
Il aurait mangé la mort même;
Mais il n’y trouva que des os.
[Illustration: CHAPTER VI
MENUS]
“I hope you’ll have all you’re thinkin’ you’re
havin’ an’ more too,--but less if you’d like it.”
The Lunatic Lady in
FRANK STOCKTON’S “Rudder Grange.”
According to the old Greek authorities, the original Seven Sages of
the kitchen were: Agris of Rhodes, who first taught the bone method of
dressing fish; Nereus of Corinth, who made the conger a dish for the
gods; Orion, who invented white sauce; Chariades, who achieved yellow
sauce; Lampriadas, who discovered brown sauce; Atlantus, who made
the most perfect restorative; and Euthynus, who cooked vegetables so
exquisitely that he was named Lentillus.
These several gentlemen, combined into one, would not be all too
learned in the niceties of gastronomy to be able to put together a
modern dinner menu. Nowadays we want something more than mere quantity.
The Gargantuan repasts of our forefathers are not for us. In those
days, maybe (or perhaps not), unlimited exercise, hunting, and the like
made these gross meals comparatively digestible; but we live in more
delicate times, and want our viands fewer in number and more carefully
cooked, with less added flavour and more of their own natural juices.
It is very true that one-half of the world does not know how the other
half dines. We follow one another in sheep-like fashion round the few
better-known restaurants, eating the same dinners, drinking the same
wines, and seeing the same people week after week, in a dull monotony
of sameness.
And yet there are a few quite nice, respectable, meetable sort of folk,
who, with the cosmopolitan habit strong upon them, know their London
well enough to be able to dine every night in a different country, and
remain all the time within a shilling cab-fare of Piccadilly.
How is it done, you will ask? It is really very simple.
Say you want a French dinner, light, delicate, and appetizing, go to
Kettner, in Church Street, Soho, or to Dieudonné, in Ryder Street, and
you will find _un petit diner très-fin_, as good as you will obtain
anywhere in Paris. If you patronize the former very old and very quaint
establishment, ask to look over the kitchens; they are as neat and
clean as those in a painting by an old Dutch master. As to the menu,
you cannot do better than leave yourself in the hands of the _maître
d’hôtel_.
If you are inclined to dine _à l’Italienne_, go to Pagani’s, in Great
Portland Street, and order _Minestrone_; _Sôle à la Pagani_; _Pollio
alla Contrabandista_, and macaroni; take plenty of Parmesan cheese with
everything, and imagine yourself in Florence. Do not forget to drink
the special _Lacrima Christi_, and inspect the “autograph-room” on the
second floor.
Again, suppose you desire to spend a Teutonic evening and regale
yourself on German delicacies. Hie then to the old Gambrinus, in Regent
Street, run by the excellent Oddenino of the Imperial. Call the _Ober
Kellner_ and _bestell_ yourself _Fleisch Brühe_, _Karpfe in Bier_,
_Kalbskotlette mit Celeri salat_, and _Dampfnudeln_. As the American
critic remarked: “If you like that sort of thing that’s just the sort
of thing you’ll like.”
I have lunched Turkishly in the City off _Kabobs_, kid stuffed with
pistachio, and most excellent rice-milk and cinnamon. There used to
be a Spanish restaurant in Soho, where they gave you _Escudella_,
_Estofado_, and the world-renowned _Gaspacho_; but I rather think that
this place came to an untimely end, owing to lack of patronage. Many
Russian dishes, such as _Bortsch_, _Blinis_, _Koulbiac_, and _Shtshi_,
are to be met with on the ordinary menus of the best restaurants; and
the Swedish _Smorgasbord_, or exaggerated _Zakouska_ of the Russians,
is occasionally put before one as _hors d’œuvre à la Suédoise_, which
is, of course, quite wrong, because the real thing ought to be eaten
standing up at a side-table, and not sitting down at the dinner-table.
However, these are the necessary tributes to convention.
“_Œufs à la coque!_ Of course not! I want hens’ eggs, ordinary
barn-door fowls’. What silly people these foreigners are!”
The average Englishman travelling abroad has really not got much beyond
that stage of insular and ignorant prejudice. But why should he go
abroad at all, when here in his native London he can, if he so desires,
get a dinner cooked after (sometimes very much after) the fashion of
almost any country in the world?
A dining tour in London, covering the cuisines of a score of different
nationalities, is not difficult, and, moreover, it is vastly
instructing. Properly approached, the cooks will be found to be only
too glad to show what they can do in serving dishes of their own
homeland. They appreciate the compliment of being asked to illustrate
their national bill of fare, and, as practically everything can be
procured in London, it is an interesting experiment to spend ten days
in dining in foreign countries--and going home to one’s own bed every
night.
Do you wish to cross that ridiculously disappointing ocean called the
Atlantic and try an American dinner? Come with me to the Criterion and
instruct the American chef to prepare the dinner on the lines shown
below:--
Chicken Okra. Clam Broth.
Salt Cod and Hash. Oyster Fritters.
Mixed Turkey and Corn.
Stuffed Red Peppers.
Terrapin Maryland. Chipped Beef.
Scalloped Sweet Potatoes. Cold Slaw.
Graham Pudding.
New England Indian Pudding.
Temperance Punch.
This programme calls for little explanation. The okra cooked with the
chicken gives it a peculiar and quite delicious flavour. The clam is a
dulcet combination of the oyster, the mussel, and the scallop.
One of the most valuable products of the United States (gastronomically
speaking), the terrapin must be eaten to be believed. It must also be
specially imported. It is a species of turtle--but even more so--and
quite exquisite in its subtlety. New England Indian pudding, according
to the recipe of Mrs. Henry W. Blair, wife of the now or former Senator
for New Hampshire, is compounded as follows:--
Two quarts of milk, one cup of meal, one cup of molasses,
half a cup of sugar, one teaspoonful of salt, one teaspoon
of cinnamon or ginger, two eggs. Heat one quart of milk,
milk-warm, then slowly stir in the meal, and keep stirring
gently until it thickens, but does not quite boil. Remove
from the stove and add the molasses, sugar, salt, and
spice. Then beat the eggs well and stir them in. Pour
into the pudding-dish, remove the mixing-spoon, and turn
the second quart of milk in. Send immediately to the oven
without mixing, and cook steadily for five hours.
There are a dozen Chinese restaurants in London, but they are in the
East--the very far East--and you must make paradoxically for the West
India Dock Road and then inquire of a policeman--who probably will not
know. This Chinese menu given is a typical one.
MENU
Bow Ha Mai. (Boiled Prawns in Oil.)
Chow Chop Suey. (Bits of Pork Chops.)
Ham ob Dan.
(Preserved Eggs with Ducks’ Gizzards.)
Ob Gan Bow Vo Toway.
(Ducks’ Livers and Boiled Ham.)
Chow Ju Aw. (Boiled Pork.)
Bow Ny Gwei. (Cuttle Fish.)
Yen Wo Gong.
(Pigeon Eggs and Birds’ Nest Soup.)
Bow Hai. (Boiled Crabs.)
Yuen Tsyai. (Rice Cakes.)
Bow Ob. (Duck Tongues and Mushrooms.)
Ju Tow Ny Gow.
(Fried Roofs of the Mouths of Pigs.)
Chow ob Jun. (Ducks’ Feet.)
Lein Chi Gong. (Lily-seed Soup.)
Hong Yin Gong. (Almond Soup.)
Dein Som. (Sweetmeats.)
Yueh Biung. (Mincemeat.)
Gwoy Zoo. (Fruits.)
Kwoh Zuh. (Seeds.)
Cha Sam Soo. (Tea and Rice Whisky.)
From China to Japan is not a far cry, but I fear you cannot dine
Japanesily in the East; you must come West, and even then engage a
special cook from the Legation or the Japanese Club. Still it is to be
done, and this menu gives a series of titbits which are in themselves
most appetizing. You may feel inclined afterwards to go elsewhere and
eat a chop, but that is not the fault of the Japanese cuisine, but of
your own large appetite.
MENU
Luimano. (Fish Soup.)
Shira. (Bean Soup.)
Ohira. (Vegetable Soup.)
Sashimi. (Raw Sliced Fish.)
Nizakana. (Boiled Fish.)
Teriyaki. (Roast Fish.)
Shiwoyaki. (Roast Fish.)
Muchitori. (Vegetables.)
Umani. (Fish and Vegetables.)
Trubonomoni. (Vegetables.)
Gozen. (Rice.)
Tsukemono. (Pickles.)
Shoyu. (Sauce.)
Saki.
In Scandinavian restaurants, which are to be found in the neighbourhood
of the docks, where Danes, Swedes, and Norwegian sailors mostly
congregate, the food is quite excellent. Simple, well cooked, and
very toothsome. The Swedish menu which I have given is not, of course,
the sort of dinner that a Dalarne peasant would get, but the sort of
thing that, if you give proper notice, can be prepared for you by a
knowledgeable Scandinavian cook.
MENU
Kraftor. (Crayfish.)
Korvel Soppa. (Chervil Soup.)
Kokt Halmstad Lax. (Boiled Salmon.)
Stekt Sjotunga. (Roasted Soles.)
Kalfbrass Arter.
(Stewed Veal and Peas.)
Brytbonor. (Broad Beans.)
Farska Carotter. (Fresh Carrots.)
Kyckling. (Chicken.)
Ungorre.
Tomatsallad.
Blandad Fruvt. (Fruit Salad.)
Jordgubbar. (Strawberries.)
Glacemarenger. (Ice Pudding.)
For those who do not object to oil and garlic there is much that is
attractive in the Spanish cuisine. There is only one place--as yet--in
London where a real Spanish dinner is to be had, and then it must
be specially ordered; but there are several Spanish chefs who, on
persuasion, can be bribed to cook a dinner on the lines indicated.
MENU
Entremeses variados. (Hors d’œuvre.)
Sopa. (Soup.)
Ostras a la Espanola. (Oysters.)
Pescado Chambord. (Fish.)
Pichones a la Provenzal.
Jamon y Pavo con Jalea de Grosellas.
(Ham and Gooseberry Jelly.)
Salomillo de ternera con trufas.
Ensalada. (Salad.)
Esparragos. (Asparagus.)
Quesos Variados. (Sweets.)
The Italian style of cookery must not be judged by the examples of it
in the thousands of cheap restaurants scattered throughout London. As
a matter of fact they are mostly run by Swiss, either French-Swiss,
German-Swiss, Italian-Swiss, or Swiss-Swiss. The real Italian style
of feeding is quite excellent, and at most of the best West End
restaurants they have at least one Italian cook, who, if the dinner be
intelligently ordered, will be only too delighted to show his skill.
MENU
Antipasto.
Vermicelli al Brodo.
Minestrone alla Milanaise.
Rombo, salsa Olandese.
Gnocchi alla Piemontese.
Medaglione di Manso all’ Italiana.
Patate Novelle.
Anitra arrosto.
Insalata.
Pere al Nebiolo.
Gelato alla Vaniglia.
There is an Indian restaurant in Stafford Street which appeals to all
Anglo-Indians--and to many others who appreciate a real curry, either
dry or wet, Madras, Ceylon, Bombay, or any other style. The menu as
follows can be cooked to perfection, and it is quite quaint to be
greeted by white-robed, blue-turbaned attendants with a polite “Salaam,
sahib!” They make good waiters, too; silent, quick, and deft.
MENU
Bhurta. (Hors d’œuvre.)
Shorwa. (Soup.)
Muchee Salna. (Fish Curry.)
Hulvan Kabbab. (Lamb Cutlets.)
Teeter Pallow. (Partridge Pilaff.)
Subzie Chichkey. (Vegetable Curry.)
Mithau. (Sweets.)
Meva. (Fruit.)
Kava. (Coffee.)
Where so many are good it would be invidious to say which is the best
German restaurant in London, and it would also be a gross mistake to
imagine that a German dinner is all sauerkraut and sausage. On the
contrary, good German cookery (whether north or south) is as good
as in any other part of Europe, and in some respects better. It can
be sampled in several German restaurants in London. I would advise
all visitors at a German restaurant to try the Prinz Pückler, an
ice-pudding, which may be singled out as being especially worthy of
imitation.
About French cookery there is nothing new to be said, because every
one knows--or ought to know--that when it is good it is very good
indeed, and when it is bad--it is horrid. In London it is not difficult
to obtain examples both of the good and the horrid French styles. The
horrid will not be needed twice! The real cuisine bourgeoise, which
does not attempt to disguise the true flavour of the meats with unholy
sauces, is nearly the very best in the world.
Last, but not least, of all, in all probability best of all, is a real
English menu, and it is really difficult to say where it may best be
ordered, for the _maître d’hôtel_ of a big restaurant looks askance at
a bill of fare without one single French word in it, not even an _à la_.
A dear lady whose wit was better than her French pronunciation once
said at a little dinner, “It is not so much the menu that matters, as
the men you sit next to.” And really the programme is not by any means
as important as the cooking thereof.
Old-fashioned Christmas cookery was, no doubt, of a heavier and more
serious nature than ours of to-day, although the compounding of the
historic plum-pudding seems to have been much the same. Here is the
recipe of Mr. Richard Briggs, “many years cook at the Globe Tavern,
the White Hart, and now at the Temple Coffee House.” It appears in his
“English Art of Cookery,” published in 1788:--
Take a pound of flour, and mix it into batter with half a
pint of milk; beat up the yolks of eight and the whites
of four eggs, a pound of beef suet shred fine, a pound of
raisins picked, a pound of currants, washed and picked,
half a nutmeg grated, a teaspoonful of beaten ginger,
a little moist sugar, a glass of brandy, and a little
lemon-peel shred fine. Mix it well together, tie it up in
a cloth, and boil it four hours. When it is done, turn it
out into a dish, and garnish with powder sugar, with melted
butter, sweet wine and sugar, mixed in a boat.
This is a curious recipe, which, I think, might work out very well. My
copy of this old book bears the following quaint inscription on the
fly-leaf: “The gift of Andrew Newton, Esquire, to the Dean and Chapter
of Lichfield for the use of the Library of that Cathedral.” What _can_
the Dean and Chapter have wanted with a cookery book?
“You can’t please everybody,” as the old fisherman remarked to the
grumbling angler who brought up a red-herring at the end of his line,
and there are doubtless some--many, maybe--who prefer a less seasonable
dinner than the stereotyped Christmas meal. For such this dainty and
simple menu is humbly suggested:--
Potage poule au pot Henri IV.
Merlans à la Bretonne.
Filet de Bœuf à la Provençale.
Chapons du Mans rôtis.
Ragout de truffes.
Fonds d’Artichauts demi-glace.
Bombe Chantilly.
As a matter of fact, this was the dinner given a short while ago in
Paris by the _Société des Amis des Livres_, who know as much about
cookery as they do about bookery. It is worthy of record for its
simplicity and completeness.
For those who like to be thoroughly conventional, and yet at the same
time to let sweet reasonableness attend their feasts, let me recommend
a Christmas dinner fashioned on somewhat the following lines:--
Consommé with Italian paste.
Oyster soup.
Turbot, Hollandaise sauce with capers.
Brill and Tartare sauce.
Turkey stuffed with chestnuts or fresh truffles.
Fillet of beef, horse-radish sauce.
Soufflé of fowl.
Westphalian goose breast with winter spinach.
Stewed celery.
Plum pudding, brandy sauce.
Mince pies.
Chartreuse of oranges.
Welsh rabbit.
Devilled biscuit.
This is a special Christmas dinner prepared by the late Sir Henry
Thompson, whose views on food and feeding are well known. It is
most certainly a very happy combination of the necessities and the
delicacies of the season, and as such needs no further recommendation.
It is perhaps especially applicable to country-house parties, where
both sexes are wont to have a pretty appetite.
“Science can analyse a pork chop, and say how much of it is phosphorus
and how much is protein, but science cannot analyse any man’s wish for
a pork chop, and say how much of it is hunger, how much nervous fancy,
how much a haunting love of the beautiful. The man’s desire for the
pork chop remains literally as mystical and ethereal as his desire for
heaven.” Now, who wrote that ingenuous passage? _Je vous le donne en
trois._ Charles Lamb? No. G. A. Sala? No. Mr. Lecky? Certainly not! It
is by that inimitable humorist, G. K. Chesterton. And it’s quite true.
There is a most delectable little part of the turkey which the French
euphoniously call _le sot l’y laisse_. Grimod de la Reynière, the
celebrated gourmet, was wont to say that it was the most exquisite
morsel of flesh in the world.
Travelling one day some miles from his country-seat, he pulled up at
a roadside inn for dinner. The host regretted that he had nothing to
offer the stranger. “But,” said the latter, “I see five turkeys hanging
up there. Why not give me one of them?” The innkeeper was sorry, but
they were all ordered by a gentleman staying in the house. “Surely he
cannot want them all himself. Ask him to permit me to share his meal.”
Again the innkeeper had to refuse. The gentleman in question was very
particular. He only ate one tiny little piece from each bird--_le sot
l’y laisse_, in fact. More anxious than ever to know who this rival
gourmet was who had the same tastes as himself, de la Reynière insisted
on making his acquaintance. He found it was his own son.
This is the menu of the Queen’s Guard Dinner, St. James’s Palace, for
Friday, 23 March, 1855. Considering that it is only fifty years old,
and therefore well within the memory of many living men, it makes
curiously quaint reading.
MENU
Les Huîtres.
Potage à la Crécy aux croûtons.
Potage de Macaroni au consommé.
La Merluche sauce aux œufs.
Les truites grillées à la Tartare.
Saddle of Mutton.
Les Poulets garnis d’une langue.
Les Côtelettes de mouton à la Soubise.
Le vol au vent aux écrévisses.
Les Kromeskys de ris de veau.
Les filets de bœuf piqués sauce poivrade.
Les pigeons and la pintade piquée.
Les Pommes au riz.
Les fondus en caisses.
La gelée au noyeau.
Les meringues à la Chantilly.
Les Epinards au jus.
La moëlle aux croûtons.
Such a deal of fine, confused feeding would be deemed vulgar and
ostentatious to-day. The dinner could not have been served and eaten in
less than a couple of hours, and there is an appalling ponderosity of
substantials which must have tried the mid-Victorian digestion to the
uttermost.
In pleasing contrast to the foregoing, I will quote a charming
little dinner given in Paris by a hostess who understands the art of
menu-fashioning in the highest degree.
MENU
Huîtres de Marennes.
Potage Bonne Femme.
Filets de Soles Joinville.
Selle d’agneau bouquetière.
Salmis de bécasses aux truffes.
Foie gras à la Souwaroff.
Poulardes à la Parisienne.
Cœurs de laitues à la Russe.
Pointes d’asperges à la crème.
Glace Lavallière.
Gauffrettes.
Few people know why an extra thick fillet of beef is called a
_Chateaubriand_, and fewer still know how it ought to be cooked. You
may ask all the chefs in town, and it is about thirty-three to one
against your getting any historically precise information on the
subject.
The story of the matter is briefly this. The dish was first cooked in
the year 1802 at Champeaux Restaurant, in the Place de la Bourse. It
was just at the period when Chateaubriand published his most brilliant
work, “Le Génie du Christianisme.” “The profane wits of the kitchen”
thought that a good steak sent to the fire between two malefactor
steaks was a fair parody of the title of the book. The fillet or steak
was cut so thick that by the ordinary method of cooking it might be
burned on the surface whilst quite raw inside, and therefore--although
the original and authentic method is ignored nowadays--it was put upon
the fire between two other slices of beef, which, if burned, could be
thrown away. Thus only is the Chateaubriand properly cooked.
The title has really nothing to do with the garnishing or the
sauce, although the average _maître d’hôtel_ will insist otherwise.
Nevertheless the true story is as above. Chateaubriand was French
Ambassador at the Court of St. James in 1822.
It may be of interest to put on record here His Majesty the King’s
Derby Day dinner at Buckingham Palace to the members of the Jockey
Club. Here it is:--
MENU
Tortue Claire.
Crême de Pois Comtesse.
Whitebait au Naturel et à la Diable.
Suprêmes de Truites à la Valenciennes.
Zéphires de Cailles à la Montagne.
Hanches de Venaison, Sauce Aigredoux.
Selle d’Agneau froide à la Niçoise.
Pommes de Terre à la Jaucourt.
Ortolans Rôtis.
Poussins sur Canapés.
Salade de Cœurs de Romaines.
Asperges d’Argenteuil, Sauce Mousseline.
Pêches à la Reine Alexandra.
Patisseries à la Parisienne.
Cassolettes à la Jockey Club.
Petites Glaces Printanières.
Friandises.
Dessert.
From trustworthy accounts I am constrained to believe that royal
banquets are like many other mundane things. They look well, they read
well, possibly they taste well, but there is inevitably the sub-acid
flavour of Dead Sea apples, and the thoughtful observer may echo
Talleyrand’s remark that whenever he perused a royal menu his thoughts
involuntarily turned to _pot-au-feu_.
[Illustration: LES RÊVES D’UN GOURMAND
(A. B. L. Grimod de la Reynière inv. 1808)
[To face page 135]
Although some kings (and queens too) were undoubtedly valiant
trenchermen (and women), yet it is an ascertained fact that the more
luxury appears on the bill of fare, the more frugal is the repast of
majesty. The third Napoleon, towards the end of his reign, was forced
to be so abstemious that, when the most tempting _plats_ jostled one
another on his table, he found himself obliged to dine off a cutlet and
a cup of rice.
Nowadays it is said that guests at a royal banquet refuse the most
artistic creations, and ask boldly for a cut of mutton.
However this may be, it can be taken for granted that royal banquets
are much like other meals in so far as anticipation, appetite,
realization, and digestion are concerned. The great Carême resigned his
position as _Maître de Bouche_ to George IV, after only a few weeks’
service, and at an honorarium of one thousand guineas a year (guineas,
mark you, there speaks the artist!), because His Majesty showed no
appreciation of his finest efforts, but was continually asking for
boiled beef.
Nevertheless, the royal cooks always rise to the occasion, as the
following interesting document will show. The chef at Windsor in 1858
was M. Pierre Mouret. This is the menu of the wedding dinner of the
(then) Crown Prince of Prussia, father of the present Kaiser, to our
own Princess Royal, given by Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle on 18
January, 1858.
MENU
HER MAJESTY’S DINNER
_Potages_.
A la Tortue. A la Jardinière.
Crème de riz à la Reine.
_Poissons._
Saumons bouillis. Turbots bouillis.
Filets de sole frits.
_Relevés._
Pièces de Bœuf braisées, garnies de légumes.
Chapons truffés à la Périgueux.
_Entrées._
Kromeskis de Crevettes.
Ris de Veau piqués à la Macédoine.
Timbales de Macaroni à la Milanaise.
Côtelettes de Mouton à la purée de haricots.
Petites Croustades à la purée de volaille.
Côtelettes de Poulets à la Tartare.
Perdreaux à la financière.
Quenelles de Lièvre garnies d’escalopes.
_Contre-flancs._
Poulets à la royale.
_Rôts._
Bécasses. Poulardes.
_Relevés._
Gâteaux de Compiègne. Poires au riz.
Puddings de gingembre.
_Entremets._
Epinards au velouté. Œufs brouillés aux truffes.
Salade de Volaille. Aspic de Galantine.
Biscuits et plombière.
Dauphines à la fleur d’orange.
Gelée de Vanille. Blanc-manger rubané.
_Buffet._
Sirloins of Beef. Saddles of Mutton.
Haunches of Venison.
Among the cleverest and most _spirituel_ of _menus d’occasion_ is
that of a French-Italian _déjeuner_ at the Carlton Hotel, composed,
arranged, and designed by M. Escoffier.
MENU
L’ITALIE ET LA FRANCE À TABLE
F ritot d’œufs à la Verd I
R ouget de roche à la Loube T
A mourettes a’agneau à la Tosc A
N onnettes de poulet Agnès Sore L
C èpes à la Rossin I
E ugénie crême Italienn E
The double acrostic is most skilfully introduced, and the lunch, as
such, is quite a little work of art.
In the columns of the “Academy,” some little while ago, an ingenious
contributor elaborated a menu without the use of a single French word.
It is doubtful, however, whether it will ever come into the realms of
practical gastronomic usage. It ran thus:--
MENU BILL OF FARE
(Old style, obsolete) (New style)
Hors d’œuvres. Raw Bits.
Pot au Feu. Pot on the Fire.
Purée de petits pois. Mash of Little Peas.
Bouchées aux Huîtres. Mouthfuls of Oysters.
Chaud-froid de Saumon. Hot-cold of Salmon.
Vol-au-vent de Volaille. Fowl Fly-to-Wind.
Petits Filets mignons à la “Ducksy” little Fillets
Maître d’Hotel. to the Butler.
Noix de Veau à la Nut of Veal in the way
Jardinière. of the Gardener’s wife.
Pommes de terre sautées. Jumped Potatoes.
Asperges en branches: Asparagus in branches;
Sauce Mousseline. Muslin Sauce.
Timbales de Fruits. Mugs of Fruit.
Crème renversée. Turned-up Cream.
Petits Soufflés de Foie gras Little Blow-outs of fat Liver.
Such a meal as this, to be thoroughly appreciated, would no doubt have
to be prepared by a Chief or a Blue Cord.
A purely English dinner, however, is not so difficult to describe
in plain straight-forward language. Such a one, for instance, as
the Festival Dinner of the Royal Society of St. George, which ran
thuswise:--
Appetizers.
Imperial “Clear” Soup.
Boiled Hampshire Salmon and Cucumber.
Thames Whitebait devilled.
Norfolk Sweetbreads
and Truffles.
THE ROAST BEEF OF OLD ENGLAND
(Devon Baron).
Yorkshire Pudding.
English New Potatoes and Beans.
Royal Navy Iced Punch.
Roast Buckinghamshire Duckling and
Apple Sauce.
Peas. Lettuce Salad.
Colchester Asparagus.
Braised Berkshire Ham.
Trafalgar Pudding.
Colonial Ice Pudding.
Dessert.
Coffee.
The menu of a Japanese luncheon given by the Mikado at Tokio makes
curious reading, although I am assured that its purely local features
are assuaged by a leaven of European delicacies.
MENU
Suimono (Soup).
Night Heron and Shimeji (a species of Champignon).
Kuchitori (Hors d’Œuvres).
Wild Duck.
Awabi (Haliotis, etc.).
Iashami (uncooked Fish).
Tai, Kawatsukuri and Arai (two modes of preparing uncooked Fish).
Sunomono (Mixed Salad).
Iced Whale and Mustard Sauce.
Yakimono (Entrées).
Baked Ai Fish (chawaninushi Eel Soup).
Fried Chicken and String Beans.
Anago and Imo (a species of Eel and Potato).
Rice Soup and Quail.
Pickles. Cake.
Fruit.
A friend has sent me a curiosity from Havana in the shape of a menu,
into the composition of every dish of which the banana entered in some
shape or form. As a triumph of skill and ingenuity I respect the menu,
but am thankful that I was not invited to partake of the repast. Here
it is.
MENU
Soupe à la Banane avec Croûtons de Banane.
Crèpes de Banane avec Gelée de Banane.
Poulets à l’Etuvée avec Bananes Ciselées.
Poulets Rôtis avec Bananes Dressées.
Rôti de Bœuf avec Gelée de Banane.
Gâteau à la Gelée de Banane.
Galettes de Bananes.
Gâteau de Banane aux Fruits.
Café de Banane.
The subjoined menu is a quaint attempt to please adult lovers of “Alice
in Wonderland,” and deserves notice in that it really does contain a
number of references, more or less apt, to that perennially delightful
work.
MENU
_Hors d’œuvres._
Huîtres, Larmes Amères.
Snickersnacks.
_Potages._
Manxommé.
Jabberwock’s-tail.
_Poisson._
Walrus à la Charpentier.
Snark, sauce Boojumoise.
_Entrées._
Momerath de lait.
Tweedledum aux Tum-tumatoes
_Roti._
Aloyau de Jabberwock.
Selle de Gryphon.
_Volaille._
Bandersnatch, sauce évitée.
Jubjub sauté.
Salade: Feuilles de Tumtum tulgeuses.
_Entremets._
Crême au Jour Frabjoise.
Omelette Whifflée.
Glace à la Duchesse.
_Savory._
Œufs de Borogove Gimblées.
The following menu is that of a dinner given in Paris by Prince Léon
Galitzine, and deserves to be placed on record as an example of a real
_diner fin_, elaborate, but not too elaborate, cleverly designed, and
thoroughly well executed.
MENU
Bisque d’écrevisse et Exly frais à la Russe.
Melon glacé. Crevettes de Dieppe.
Hareng frais de Hollande.
Soles à la Maréchale.
Noisettes d’agneau avec crème d’Argenteuil.
Foie gras à la Rossini.
Quenelles d’esturgeon à la Joinville.
Sorbets au Porto blanc.
Granite grande fine Champagne.
Canetons de Rouen flanqués d’ortolans en brochettes.
Chaudfroid de Paons en Bellevue.
Flageolets nouveaux au beurre.
Pois à la Française.
Ecrevisses de la Meuse au vin de Saumur.
Bombe Galitzine.
Poires Cressanes.
Dessert.
This is really a rather noble dinner. Observe the dignity of the
sturgeon and the peacock. There is very good precedent for the serving
of the _hors d_’_œuvre_ after the soup. It is done at many of the best
French tables.
There are two or three interesting points about the following Savoy
Hotel menu which are worth consideration.
MENU DU DINER
Hors d’Œuvres.
Melon Cantaloup Rafraîchi.
Poule-au-Pot Henri IV.
Crême Santé.
Truite d’Ecosse à la Nantua.
Filets de sole en Goujon.
Cailles en Terrines aux petits pois.
Selle de Pré-Salé à la Favorite.
Haricots verts au Beurre.
Mousse de Volaille en Bellevue.
Caneton de Rouen à la Rouennaise.
Salade Victoria. Aubergines Parisiennes.
Bombe Pralinée. Pêches Cardinal.
Canapés Pompadour.
The _poule-au-pot Henri IV_ recalls, of course, one of the most
charming kings in history, who wished that every one of his subjects
might have a fowl in his pot every Sunday all the year round. The
fillets of sole _en goujon_ are a clever variation of the same thing
_en blanchailles_ to which one is somewhat accustomed. They are rather
larger, but equally crisp and succulent. The _cailles en terrines_
are very seasonable, and contrast remarkably well with the following
saddle of mutton.
There has been much discussion lately in France as to the healthiness
or otherwise of the hitherto justly esteemed and much-eaten _Canard
à la Rouennaise_. Certain it is that some little while ago a few
people became very ill after eating it; but, on the other hand, the
preparation of the bird is so simple that there hardly seems room for
anything deleterious.
Anyhow, the matter has been set at rest once and for all by the
appointment under the auspices of _La Société Scientifique d’Hygiène
Alimentaire et de l’Alimentation Rationnelle de l’Homme_ (heavens,
what a name!) of a committee which thoroughly tested and examined the
question of the delinquent duck. This committee consisted of M. A.
Dastre, _membre de l’Institut_; M. Lapicque, _maître de Conférences à
la Sorbonne_, M. S. de Raczkowski, _chémiste principal au Laboratoire
Municipal_, and M. E. Kohn-Abrest, _du Laboratoire de Toxicologie_.
These eminent authorities were well able to give a definite and
reassuring reply.
Those who are interested in the duck question may remember a delightful
little sketch by the brilliant Alfred Capus, entitled “Emile,” in
which a _Canard à la Rouennaise_ and a solemn _maître d’hôtel_ played
prominent parts.
The following menu of a ball supper which was served quite recently at
a London dance is all that a self-respecting ball supper need be. It
seems to me to be excellently designed and thought out, for it provides
for all tastes and palates, and appeals to the débutante as well as the
sapient middle-aged supper eater.
MENU DU SOUPER
Consommé de Volaille.
Suprême Truite Alexandra.
Médaillons de Homard Moscovite.
Côtelettes d’Agneau Princesse.
Chaudfroid de Mauviettes Carême.
Aspic de Foie Gras Lucullus.
Cailles à la Jeannette.
Galantine Volaille Périgourdine.
Bœuf Braisé à la Moderne.
Poularde du Mans à l’Andalouse.
Jambon d’York.
Langue à l’Ecarlate.
Salade Impériale.
Gelée Orientale. Charlotte Souveraine.
Crême Victoria.
Macédoine de Fruits aux Liqueurs.
Gâteau Fédora. Pâtisserie Parisienne.
Glaces Bouquetières. Friandises.
Dessert.
We all know, in a vague sort of way, that the best, in fact the only
real _pâté de foie gras_ comes from Strasburg. This succulent if
somewhat dyspeptic dish claimed as inventor for a long time a certain
Mathieu, chef in the Prince Bishop of Strasburg’s household (Cardinal
Rohan). But this is an error. The real originator was one Close, chef
to the Maréchal Saxe, who came to Strasburg in the train of his famous
master and took up his permanent abode there, marrying Mathieu’s widow.
It was he and none other who started the goose-liver tureen business
in a small shop in the Meisengasse, where, according to comparatively
recent reports, it is still carried on. His imitators, of course, are
numberless, and some of them very good.
This menu from the Carlton Hotel practically explains itself. If it
err at all, which is doubtful, it is on the right side, namely, that of
lightness and digestibility:--
Royal Natives, Caviar, Blinis.
Stchi Germiny.
Mousseline de Merlans aux Ecrevisses.
Cailles au Nid.
Selle de Chevreuil à l’Allemande.
Haricots Verts.
Volaille Truffée.
Salade.
Asperges Vertes Sauce Hollandaise.
Biscuit Glaçé aux Perles des Alpes.
Dessert.
The _Blinis_ served with the Caviar is annexed from the Russian
cuisine, and is a kind of light sponge or yeast mixture, technically
known as a “savarin” without sugar, baked in small pans, and sent to
table hot with a sauce of sour cream. _Stchi_, or _Tschi_, is also
Russian. It is primarily an army soup, or broth, made of beef, slightly
thickened with a brown _roux_ and flavoured with sour cream. It is
usually served with small, fried _choux_ paste-balls.
It is not usual to write the menu of a banquet in the language of
ancient Rome, but it appears the practice survives in Bavaria. Witness
the following in “Latin de Cuisine”:--
Epulum
paratum die Consecrationis
A.R.D. Baronis de Ow
Episcopi auxil. Ratisbonnensis in aula
Episcopali.
Sorbitio cum globulis jecoralibus et lucanicis,
Jes ex linguis bovinis factum cum panificio.
Caro bovina cum brassica capitata.
Assum vitulinum cum lactuca.
Coffea.
Potabimus cerevisiam ex hordeo bavarico coctam
in officina cerevisiae Episcopali.
Sit saluti!
This formidable-looking legend, on being translated, reads:--
Banquet prepared on the day of the consecration of the
Right Reverend Baron von Ow, Suffragan Bishop of
Regensburg in the episcopal palace.
Soup with liver and sausage.
Ox-tongue broth with bread.
Beef and cabbage.
Roast veal and lettuce.
Coffee.
We shall drink Bavarian barley beer
brewed in the episcopal brewery.
May it do us good!
It is not on record, I think, who the original inventor of picnics was;
nor does it much matter. There may be mention of them in Shakespeare,
and certainly Nebuchadnezzar would seem to be one of the earliest
picnickers in history; but whosoever may first have suggested the
unpacking of a heterogeneous collection of cold cates on a greensward,
under a summer sun, must have had a good digestion, a pair of knees
that bent both ways, and (it is to be hoped) a positive passion for
washing up.
Anyhow, it behoves me to make one or two diffident suggestions as to
how the usual monotony of the convivial basket may be varied. Take the
conventional pigeon pie, for instance--a truly good thing in its way,
but capable of improvement. Angel Pie, according to Mr. Gubbins, is an
agreeable change, and his recipe in “Cakes and Ale” may very well be
followed. Eliza Acton’s pigeon pie is very good too; and it is quite
worth the trouble to note the directions carefully.
But picnics need not be all pigeon pie. Let me recommend a
toothsome _Chaudfroid de Foie-gras en caisses_, which is just round
or oval-shaped slices of _foie gras_ masked with white or fawn
_chaudfroid_ sauce, set in _soufflé_ cases, and decorated with slices
of truffle. After the First, a _Ballotine de Perdreau Souvaroff_ is a
pleasant change. The dainty bird is stuffed with goose-liver farce and
truffles, done up like galantine, and braised, pressed, and glazed.
Although personally I am of those who prefer the unadulterated
partridge, there are many quite worthy folk who do not, and for such I
quote the above. Other suitable picnic dishes, rather out of the usual
run, are _Cuisses de Volaille Belle Alliance_ (or Waterloo, if you will
have it so); _Filets de Bœuf en Chaudfroid_; _Pain de Volaille aux
Truffes_; and _Ris d’Agneau à l’Amiral_, which is lamb’s sweetbread
in oval slices, masked with white sauce, decorated with slices of
truffles, and dressed on a vegetable aspic border, with salad in the
centre.
A new salad always adds lustre to the dullest picnic. Try this:
Potatoes, cold, in slices, plentifully besprinkled with peas and a few
broad beans. Or, again, red cabbage with cucumber. In either case the
mixture must be carried separately in a bottle, and only poured out
at the last moment; then “fatigue” the salad thoroughly, and see that
all the liquid is absorbed from the bottom of the bowl. The following
picnic menu is put up by Fortnum and Mason in convenient baskets,
and when unpacked may be guaranteed to assuage the cravings of the
hungriest.
MENU
Saumon, Salade de Concombres.
Homard à la Parisienne.
Chaudfroid de Mauviettes à la Chasseur.
Poularde à l’Ivoire.
Pigeon Pie.
Jambon d’York.
Pressed Beef. Tongues.
Salade Panachée de Haricots Verts et Tomates.
Gâteaux Parisiennes.
Dessert.
Café.
Glaces Variées.
In addition to all these nice things, the baskets contain the necessary
materials for tea, such as bread, butter, _petits fours_, cakes, and
such-like.
The following menu is one of a dinner at Prince’s Restaurant, and calls
for no special remark, save perhaps to emphasize the deft juxtaposition
of the entrée, roast, and bird, which lead up to one another, so to
say, in a subtle succession of delicately contrasted flavours.
MENU
Hors d’œuvre à la Parisienne.
Potage Bortsch à la Czarine.
Suprême de Saumon Crême d’anchois.
Aiguillette de Volaille des Bacchantes.
Noisette d’Agneau Edouard VII.
Pommes Nouvelles à la Menthe.
Bécasse rôtie à la Broche.
Salad Mimosa.
Salsifis à la Poulette.
Bombe glacée. Diable Rose.
Corbeille de Friandises.
Canapé Princesse.
Dessert.
Café.
One of our French friends who came over here to enjoy _l’entente
cordiale_--and British hospitality--was returning to France with
an English acquaintance. On landing at Dieppe, after rather a rough
crossing, John Bull asked Jacques Bonhomme, “Well, did you lunch on
board?” “_Non, mon ami_,” was the reply, “_tout au contraire!_”
One may always trust the cuisine at the Savoy. There is a thoroughness
of conception about every specially ordered dinner which bespeaks the
eye, the hand, the brain of the master. Take the following menu, for
example, which, charmingly printed on a graceful little silk Japanese
fan, formed an exquisite meal of some originality.
MENU
Melon Cantaloup. Petite Marmite.
Crême Portugaise. Truite à la Saatz.
Whitebait Diablé.
Caille Bridget. Medaillon de Béhague à l’Estragon.
Petits Pois à la Française. Pommes Savoyarde.
Soufflé de Jambon à la Hongroise. Neige au Kirsch.
Caneton au Sang.
Haricots verts et tomates en salade.
Fonds d’artichauts à l’Italienne.
Framboises glacées à la Vanille. Friandises.
Pailles de Parmesan. Corbeille de Fruits.
Note the graceful juxtaposition of the Hungarian ham and the Kirsch,
followed by duck and French beans. It is touches such as these which in
their poetic elegance and subtlety force one to recognize what the high
art of cookery really means.
To whom hath it not fallen to take the female faddist in to dinner?--I
speak, of course, from the masculine point of view. The plethoric dame,
for instance, who says, “Thank you, I only eat toast, and I prefer
it _very_ crisp”; or the earnest spinster who talks for miles about
proteids and other abominable scientific non-gastronomics; or the
materfamilias who laments the absence of Benger from the dinner-party
menu? Like the poor, such as these are always with us.
There are fashions in these things, as in everything else. Now and
again one comes across a real Fletcherite, who chews his or her food
eighty-seven times and allows it to disappear by a slow process of
gradual deglutition. Mr. Horace Fletcher himself is, I am given to
understand, a man of irreproachable morality, and the possessor,
moreover, of a beautiful _Palazzo_ on the Grand Canal at Venice; but,
whether for good or ill, he has introduced a deal of dullness into the
modern dinner party. It is obviously impossible to keep up a ready flow
of brilliant conversation when every mouthful has to be masticated unto
seventy times seven times. Such a salutary procedure puts a damper on
prandial discourse, and makes a dinner only one degree less lively than
a funeral. It would seem preferable to suffer tortures of indigestion
rather than act as a dinner-party wet-blanket.
A former generation suffered from the Andrew Clark regime, and I can
even remember a dinner menu divided into halves, one of which was
headed “Clarkists,” and was confined to the dishes prescribed by that
eminent medico, and the other half labelled “Just ordinary folk”--and
it was much the better programme of the two. A little later one met the
weird folk who produced from hidden recesses mysterious little silver
boxes, from which they extracted little white pilules “to be taken
between each course”--but I have noticed that these people usually ate
a remarkably hearty dinner, despite, or perhaps because, of these same
pilules.
One comes across, too, the Stokerites, with their peculiar antipathies,
the “Natural Feeders,” the “Little Grangers,” and the _maigre tous
les jours_ sort of folk. As for the vegetarians, there is little to
be said for or against them. They are, of course, fully justified
in their opinions, but they do give a lot of bother at an ordinary
dinner party. I may be unfortunate in my vegetarian friends, but it
always appears to me that after a time they seem to assimilate certain
characteristics of the food they eat, and eventually become very like
their favourite vegetables; so much so that they might almost be
accused of cannibalism. Certain it is that I can spot a carrot-eating
man by his hair, an onion-lover by his breath, and a Brussels-sprout
devotee by his whiskers.
Take it, however, by and large, the food faddist, be it a he or a she,
is rarely a pleasant table-companion, and in these times of strenuous
dining he, she, or it, is usually a poor conversationalist and a poorer
critic; which is a pity.
It is quite a mistake to imagine that a good dinner can afford to
despise the adjuncts of a well-decorated table. Nothing could be more
fallacious. One’s sense of taste should not alone be titillated. One’s
palate-gusto is distinctly enhanced by something pleasant to look upon,
by something artistic to accompany the mere mechanism of mastication,
by a general sense of beauty and non-flamboyant restfulness.
We have gone far in this direction during the past two or three
decades. There are many happily still surviving among us who remember
vividly, and not without a certain amount of awe, the vast erections
which appeared on the dinner-tables of our forbears. The silver branch
candelabra, the epergnes, the great piles of fruit, the towering
“set-pieces,” the bushy and umbrageous plants and flowers, the plates
of mixed biscuits, and the various impossible dishes of confectionery
which nobody was expected to eat.
But all this has disappeared, and one is no longer obliged to talk to
one’s opposite neighbour through a jungle of horticulture. Flowers
are best shown in low bowls, either china or silver, there are no
useless impedimenta, the tiresome trails of smilax have long since been
relegated to Peckham dinner-tables, and we have at last arrived at an
era of plenty of elbow-room, discreet floral decoration, and a clean
sweep of ridiculous encumbrances.
Some hostesses, indeed, cultivate the Japanese grammar of the
arrangement of flowers, which gives a particular and especial value
to each leaf, branch, and stalk. Others again will have merely half a
dozen blooms, all told, on the table, but each bloom perfect of its
kind, and displayed to the best advantage. High vases are as obsolete
as the dodo, and people are gradually becoming alive to the fact that
four or five exquisite roses in a big flat Hawthorn dish are more
decorative than all the miserable little white china cupids in Regent
Street.
The choice of odours, too, is an important consideration. No hostess
with any consideration for the olfactory nerves of her guests would put
strongly perfumed flowers on the dinner-table. They would only destroy
the flavour of the cates, and cause annoyance rather than pleasure.
Even the lovely syringa, which a good lady once described as “a
respectable gardenia,” is too strong, and at the most a purely neutral
scent is permissible.
In the height of summer I have met a single water-lily floating in a
copper dish in the middle of the table; the lily was so perfect in
itself that any other decoration would have seemed superfluous and
impertinent. The stalks of flowers seen through clear glass are as
beautiful as the blooms, and an arrangement of green leaves only,
with no flower at all, is, if rightly understood and designed, very
difficult to beat.
Only recently, dining in an artist’s studio, I was delighted with a
few sprays of medlar blossom on the table, and a mass of hydrangea on
the sideboard, immediately below a shelf of old pewter. The harmony
was wonderfully beautiful. Such touches of taste entirely alter the
character of a dinner, and from a mere feeding party it becomes an
artistic pleasure. For, after all, the mere act of eating is not in
itself beautiful.
Reverting to the food-faddist, there are some who, quite apart from
doctors’ reasons, have the most peculiar likes and dislikes. Some never
touch soup; others positively like boiled veal; and it is on record
that Dr. Johnson poured lobster sauce over his plum-pudding. It is
not easy to understand this extraordinary combination of the great
lexicographer, but the story has good authority.
Some folk, quite worthy folk too, like cold meat and pickles, even
when abroad; others make a point of drinking the wine of the country.
It is told of the great Duke of Wellington that when journeying
through France with Alava, in 1814, on being asked at what time they
should start next day, he invariably replied “At daybreak.” And to the
question what they should have for dinner, he always answered, “Cold
meat.” “_Je les ai eu en horreur, à la fin_,” Alava declared, “_ces
deux mots-là_--‘daybreak’ _et_ ‘cold meat.’”
The menu of a good summer dinner is always interesting. Here is one
which should amply satisfy the most fastidious. It was cooked by
one of the best chefs in London, and seems to me to contain some
particularly interesting features.
MENU DU DINER
Zakuska.
Potage à la Dauphine.
Purée d’asperges à la St. Georges.
Filets de Sole Bagration.
Saumon froid à la Doria.
Ris de Veau en Caisses à la Périgueux.
Petites Croustades Glacés à la Montglas.
Selle de Mouton froid.
Courges farcies.
Cannetons Sautés. Sauce Bigarade.
Salade de Choux Rouges.
Maïs à l’Américaine.
Macédoine de Fruits.
Bombe de Juillet.
Glace de Crème aux Truffes.
Another hot-weather menu is a comparatively simple luncheon, and is
principally remarkable for the fact that it is entirely cold, from
the prawns to the coffee. We have all of us, of course, had many cold
lunches, racing, motoring, at Henley, or elsewhere, but as a rule
these casual meals lack character and homogeneity; they are of a
“chucked-together” sort of nature, and whilst serving a useful purpose
of their own, can hardly be called perfect pictures of their kind. No
such objection can, I think, be made to the subjoined.
MENU DU DÉJEUNER
Crevettes Roses.
Consommé en Gelée.
Salade de Poisson.
Truite froide. Sauce Rémoulade.
Filet de Bœuf aux Légumes Glacés.
Poulet Provençale.
Salade Miladi.
Pêches Daisy Miller.
Coupe Jacques.
Café Glacé.
The following little story from Mr. G. W. E. Russell’s “Londoner’s
Logbook” has a delightful gastronomical moral, which might be
adopted, with advantage, by many hosts of to-day: “‘Come and dine
at eight--pot-luck, you know. Don’t dress.’ That hospitable formula
recalls a genial knight who dwelt in Berkeley Square, and, applying
his whole mind to the subject of dinners, attained to high perfection
in the art of giving them. Two benevolent practices of his invention
linger pleasantly in the memory. He caused each course to begin at
a different point at the table, so that every guest in turn got the
first chance at a dish. He dealt out the asparagus like cards, an equal
number of pieces to each guest; and if on completion of the deal he saw
that any one had got smaller pieces than his neighbours, he used the
residue to redress the inequality. Surely such are those actions of the
just which smell sweet and blossom in the dust.”
[Illustration]
[Illustration: CHAPTER VII
OYSTERS]
“Tom, whom to-day no noise stirs,
Lies buried in these cloisters;
If at the last trump
He does not quickly jump;
Only cry ‘Oysters!’”
_Epitaph on a Colchester Man’s Grave_
If you have eaten an oyster at Colchester or Faversham, in August,
fresh from the sea; or a melting native at Milton, the best oyster
in the world, in October; a Helford native in Cornwall; Whispered
Pandores and Aberdours at Edinburgh, on the “Feast of Shells,” one
hundred for a shilling, dripping in Prestonpans sea-water; Carlingfords
and Powldoodies, of Burran, at Dublin; or even a Jersey oyster at St.
Heliers, you know what an oyster should be.
These are the words of wisdom, written some thirty years ago by
Herbert Byng Hall, a gastronomic writer of some eminence, who had made
a special study of the Oyster, and wrote thereon learnedly and _con
amore_.
Somehow or other there is something persuasively and personally
intimate in one’s relations with an oyster, or with a couple of dozen
oysters, for that matter. One does not feel the same sentimental regard
for the pig that provides one with one’s morning rasher of bacon
that one does for the merest preprandial oyster. And this feeling of
friendship, almost intimacy, is always to be found in the writings of
those who dilate upon “the breedy creatures,” as Christopher North
called our illustrious bivalves in the “Noctes Ambrosianæ.”
Dr. Kitchiner, for instance, says: “Those who wish to enjoy this
delicious restorative in its utmost perfection must eat it at the
moment it is opened, with its own gravy in the undershell; if not eaten
absolutely alive, its flavour and spirit are lost. The true lover of an
oyster will have some regard for the feelings of his little favourite,
and contrive to detach the fish from the shell so dexterously that the
oyster is hardly conscious he has been ejected from his lodging till he
feels the teeth of the piscivorous gourmet tickling him to death.”
There are other instances innumerable of a certain dainty touch in
dealing with oysters. Contact with them seems to engender humour, good
nature, and a tricksey spirit. Huxley called oysters “a delicious flash
of gustatory lightning”; and there is a story told of the great master,
G. F. Watts, who was challenged by Millais and Leighton to produce a
humorous picture, whereupon he painted a primitive man and woman on the
seashore. The woman is looking with awestruck admiration at the man who
has just swallowed an oyster. The man himself appears very doubtful as
to the result. The picture was called “B.C. The First Oyster.”
It was originally said in a very old number of the “North British
Review,” that “he must have been a very bold man who first swallowed
an oyster.” An old legend assigns the first act of oyster-eating to a
very natural cause. It is related that a man walking by the sea one day
picked up an oyster, just as it was in the act of gaping. Observing
the extreme smoothness of the interior of the shell, he insinuated his
finger between them that he might feel their shining surface, when
suddenly they closed upon the exploring digit, with a sensation less
pleasurable than he anticipated. The prompt withdrawal of his finger
was scarcely a more natural movement than its transfer to his mouth. It
is not very clear why people (including babies) when they hurt their
fingers put them into their mouths; but it is very certain that they
do, and in this case the result was most fortunate. The owner of the
finger tasted oyster juice for the first time, as Elia’s Chinaman,
having burned his finger, first tasted crackling. The savour was
delicious; he had made a great discovery; so he picked up the oysters,
forced open the shells, banqueted upon the contents, and soon brought
oyster-eating into fashion.
That tender personal regard for the innocent oyster, which I have
just referred to, is very manifest in one of the most widely known
poems in the English language. I mean Lewis Carroll’s “Walrus and the
Carpenter.”
“O Oysters, come and walk with us!”
The Walrus did beseech.
“A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,
Along the briny beach;
We cannot do with more than four,
To give a hand to each.”
* * * * *
“O Oysters,” said the Carpenter,
“You’ve had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?”
But answer came there none.
And this was scarcely odd, because
They’d eaten every one.
The kindly regard for the susceptibilities of the oysters is kept up
even until the dire _dénoûment_ of the drama. Again we are touched by
a fragment by the same author, of which, alas, we shall never know the
full purport. It runs thus:--
I passed by his garden and marked, with one eye,
How the owl and the oyster were sharing a pie.
(_Cætera desunt._)
Mr. Thomas Hardy did not, I am sure, in the title of his novel, “The
Return of the Native,” intend to celebrate the coming of oysters into
the dinner menu, but it seems to sum up in a brief and pithy phrase
one of the great events of the autumn. The old convention that oysters
are only eatable in those months which are spelled with an “r” has, of
course, much to be said for it; at any rate, so far as British oysters
are concerned.
Abroad it is different, and the _parcs aux huîtres_ at French
watering-places give quite excellent oysters in August, and even in
July. The _huîtres de Marennes_, _huîtres d’Ostende_, and the tiny
little green ones are by no means to be despised, although they do
not, perhaps, quite come up in lusciousness of flavour to the real
Whitstable native.
We are somewhat oyster-spoiled in this country, and particularly in
London. We go to Scott’s, Sweeting’s, Driver’s, Hampton’s, Rule’s, or
any first-class oyster shops, and we get, as we know we shall get, the
very best brand of the very best oyster in the world; fresh, clean,
untainted, and uncontaminated, which, after all is said and done,
cannot be vouched for in the case of second-rate hotels and caterers.
Whether to drink champagne, Chablis, stout, or nothing with oysters
is a nice point which has not as yet been authoritatively decided. Of
course, champagne and Chablis go far to assimilate the oyster, but at
the same time there are those (and--dare I confess it?--I am amongst
the number) who are venturesome enough to assert that the oyster, pure
and simple, requires no alcoholic addition. Drink Chablis, or a light
hock, _after_ the oyster feast, by all means; but when eating your two
or three dozen on the deep shell (always order them on the deep shell)
imbibe their own liquor only, and be thankful.
“Un voyageur anglais, transi de froid, arrive dans une hôtellerie de
village où il n’y avait d’autre feu que celui de la cuisine, dont
la cheminée était gardée par un grand nombre de voyageurs arrivées
avant lui. Pour se faire faire place, il usa d’un stratagème assez
original. Il avait aperçu en entrant quelques cloyères d’huîtres.
Il dit au maître de la maison, ‘Monsieur, avez-vous des huîtres?’
‘Oui, Monsieur, et de très-fraîches.’ ‘Faites-en porter une cloyère
à mon cheval.’ ‘Comment, Monsieur, est-ce que votre cheval mange des
huîtres?’ ‘Oui, Monsieur; au surplus, faites ce que je dis; s’il ne les
mange pas, d’autres les mangeront.’
“Le maître obéit, et les voyageurs allaient voir un cheval manger
des huîtres--qu’il ne mangea pas. Pendant ce temps, le nouvel arrivé
prend place au feu. Le maître de retour lui dit, ‘Monsieur, je savais
bien que votre cheval ne mangeait pas d’huîtres.’ ‘Eh bien, non,’ dit
l’Anglais, ‘je les mangerai; ces messieurs ont quitté leur place, je la
garderai; ainsi à tout cela, il n’y aura rien de perdu.’ Et, en effet,
il vida la cloyère sans quitter le coin du feu.”
This is a quotation, apt enough, I think, from “La Gastronomie pour
Rire, ou Anecdotes, Réflexions, Maximes, et Folies Gourmandes,” par
César Gardeton, auteur du “Directeur des Estomacs,” Paris, 1827.
As a useful recipe for oysters, I should like to refer to an extract
from a letter from Swift to Stella; it runs thuswise:--
Lord Masham made me go home with him to eat boiled oysters.
Take oysters, wash them clean; that is, wash their shells
clean; then put your oysters in an earthen pot, with their
hollow side down; then put this pot, covered, into a great
kettle with water, and so let them boil. Your oysters are
boiled in their own liquor, and do not mix water.
If oysters have to be cooked at all, which is a doctrine I do not
support, then the above seems as good a way as any other. Really
good oysters are, anyhow, too precious to be cooked, but should be
degustated _in puris naturalibus_.
A story which I venture to think apocryphal is quoted by W. R. Hare
in a curious little book, “On the Search for a Dinner,” published
in London in 1857. Speaking of dining in Paris, he refers to the
celebrated restaurant the _Rocher du Cancale_, and relates how an
English “Milord” drove up to the establishment and ordered (and ate)
a hearty meal of twenty-nine dozen oysters; after which Milord died
suddenly--and no wonder! They carried him down with great difficulty
to the carriage. The groom, on seeing his master’s body arrive,
exclaimed, with great coolness, “It is the third time that Milord gives
himself the pleasure of dying of indigestion.” “He will not die a
fourth time,” answered the _patron_, with sorrow. Milord was buried at
Père-la-Chaise. His facetious friends deposit every year by the remains
of the defunct an enormous quantity of oyster-shells. The tomb is about
five-and-twenty yards from that of Héloise and Abélard. On a slab of
black marble the following epitaph is inscribed: “Here lies ----, dead
for the third time in a duel with the oysters of the Rocher du Cancale.”
I confess that I have not had the curiosity to verify the tombstone.
Brillat-Savarin has an oyster anecdote to the effect that he was at
Versailles in the year 1798 as Commissary of the Directory, and had
frequently to meet the Registrar of the Tribunal, M. Laperte. The
latter was so fond of oysters that he used to grumble about never
having had enough to satisfy him. Being determined to procure him
that satisfaction, Brillat-Savarin asked Laperte to dinner, and the
latter accepted. “I kept up with him,” says the host, “to the third
dozen, letting him then go on by himself. He went on steadily to the
thirty-second dozen--that is to say, for more than an hour, as they
were opened but slowly--and as in the meantime I had nothing else to
do--a state quite unbearable at table--I stopped him just as he was
beginning to show more appetite than ever. My dear friend,” I said, “it
must be some other day that you have enough to satisfy you; let us now
have some dinner.” We took dinner, and he showed all the vigour and
hunger of a man who had been fasting.
These oyster-gorges are, however, mere epitomes of vulgar gluttony.
There is no more gastronomic satisfaction to be got out of thirty-three
dozen than out of the conventional two dozen. In fact, doctors rarely
prescribe more than one dozen at a time.
Horace, Martial, and Juvenal, Cicero and Seneca, Pliny, Ætius, and
the old Greek doctor Oribasius, whom Julian the Apostate delighted to
honour, have all enlarged upon the virtues of the oyster. It would be
easy to add to the list and to quote corroborative passages, but the
thing has been done so often and so copiously, that it would certainly
be supererogatory and tedious. The _Tabella Cibaria_ has been referred
to by every culinary scribe, and we really know more about the oyster
habits of the Romans than we do about those of the inhabitants of the
Hebrides; which is absurd.
G. A. Sala says that the Pontiffs of Pagan Rome caused oysters to be
served at every repast; but the delicacy must have been very expensive,
since a basket of oysters cost the equivalent of nine pounds sterling.
They were served raw and were dexterously opened by a slave at a
side-table at the beginning of the dinner.
There is a story told of an astute Roman epicure named Fulvius Hirpinus
who constructed on his estate, close to the seashore, a fish-pond where
he stored or “parked” oysters, which he fattened with paste and cooked
wine, worked to the consistency of honey. He was certainly astute
because besides regaling himself and his friends on these artificially
fattened oysters, he drove a roaring trade in selling them wholesale
and retail to the nobility and gentry of Rome.
The same authority goes on to say that, oddly enough, in a
comparatively modern cookery book, that of Will Rabisha, there is a
direction, a rather ferocious one, that while oysters are undergoing
the process of broiling they should be fed with white wine and grated
bread. Of course many ways were adopted in those days for the feeding
of oysters; but a paste of oatmeal and water seems to have been the
staple of the sustenance given to the creatures before they were
considered to be fit for the table.
The Greeks, according to Athenæus, boiled and fried their oysters,
finding them, however, best of all when roasted in the coals till the
shells opened.
As early as the seventeenth century the French prepared them _en
etuvée_ and _en fricasée_. Both recipes appear in the “Délices de
la Campagne” (1654), a book of extreme interest and full of quaint
information; but not, it would seem, strictly reliable as a record of
the cookery of the time.
[Illustration: Frontispiece to “Des Magens Vertheidigung der edlen
Austern” Prague, 1731
[To face page 178]
We are so accustomed nowadays to pay half a crown, three and sixpence,
and even more for our dozen oysters, that it seems almost incredible
that our fathers regaled themselves thereon at the common or general
price of sixpence a dozen. An old poem on the subject says:--
Happy the man, who, void of care and strife,
In silken or in leathern purse retains
A splendid shilling: he nor hears with pain
New oysters cried, nor sighs for cheerful ale.
This is from “The Splendid Shilling,” by John Philip, which, according
to Steele in the “Tatler,” was “the finest burlesque poem in the
English language.”
Just exactly why the price of oysters should have increased so
enormously in recent years has never been satisfactorily explained.
Many ridiculous reasons have been given, but they seem either
impertinent, or inadequate, or both. We need only refer to the pages of
the “Pickwick Papers” for confirmation.
“Before proceeding to the Legacy Duty Office about proving the will
of his late wife, Mr. Weller, senior, and his fellow-coachmen, as
witnesses, bethought themselves of having a drop of beer, and a little
cold beef, or an oyster. These viands were promptly produced, and the
luncheon was done ample justice to. If one individual evinced greater
powers than another it was the coachman with the hoarse voice, who took
an imperial pint of vinegar with his oysters, and did not betray the
least emotion.”
Another and more striking illustration.
“It’s a very remarkable circumstance, sir,” said Sam Weller, “that
poverty and oysters always seem to go together; the poorer a place
is the greater call there seems to be for oysters. Look here, sir!
blest if I don’t think that ven a man’s wery poor he rushes out of his
lodgings, and eats oysters for regular desperation.”
The Colchester Oyster Feast is an annual function which is usually
graced by the presence and assistance of political and other
notabilities. The Mayor and Corporation open the proceedings by
“sizing” the oysters, eating a large number at luncheon, and
following the luncheon with prescribed draughts of gin and slices of
gingerbread. This historic repast seems, on the face of it, to be of a
somewhat incongruous nature; but it is said by those who have survived
it, and their number is very large, that the cates and beverage go well
together, and never quarrel among themselves.
Until comparatively recent times, another annual Oyster Feast took
place at Edinburgh, with a kind of civic ceremonial, known as the Feast
of Shells. A voyage was made by Provosts and Bailiffs to the oyster
beds in the Firth of Forth, and “though the solemnity of wedding the
Frith formed no part of the Chief Magistrate’s office, as wedding the
Adriatic with a gold ring did that of the Doge of Venice,” three cheers
were given by all present as the first “dredge” was hoisted on to the
deck of the civic barge.
There is an old fisherman’s song, now almost forgotten, one verse of
which runs:--
The Herring loves the merry moonlight,
The Mackerel loves the wind,
But the Oyster loves the dredger’s song,
For he comes of a gentle kind.
Many years ago a sort of popular belief was current to the absurd
effect that Oysters could be trained to sing. It is impossible to says
whence the superstition arose, but it was helped by a noted exhibition,
in London, of a “Whistling Oyster” which was supposed to emit certain
sibilant sounds. Thousands flocked to hear it, but it was more or less
conclusively proved, however, that it was a trick of ventriloquism on
the part of the showman.
In Tom Hood’s “Miss Kilmansegg and her Golden Leg,” there is an apt
reference to a Colchester Oyster, when they were very much cheaper than
they are to-day, and, as before mentioned, were practically poor men’s
food.
What different fates our stars accord!
One babe is welcomed, and wooed as a lord,
Another is shunned like a leper;
One to the world’s wine, and honey, and corn,
Another, like Colchester native, is born
To its vinegar only, and pepper.
The Americans always seem to do things on a larger scale than we,
in our effete little island, are able to do. They excel even in
the fecundity of their oysters. The British mollusc _Ostrea edulis_
produces about a million young in a season. One of the American
variety, _Ostrea Virginiana_, about ten times as many.
There is a great Oyster cult in the United States, and the different
manners of cooking, preparing, and serving the oyster are manifold.
A book might be written on the pros and cons of cooking an oyster at
all, and opinions as to its legitimacy differ, even among the erudite
on the subject. Be that as it may, the Americans certainly owe much
of their nerve-strength, hustlesomeness, and vigour to their enormous
oyster consumption. It is the ideal food to replace and restore nerve
power. It is hardly too much to say that the oyster is the foundation
of America’s commercial success.
Oliver Wendell Holmes says somewhere that two immense oysters should
be carved in marble and placed on top of the Washington monument in
Baltimore, instead of the statue of the immortal George. “I am not in
favour of removing the Father of his Country from off his imposing
pedestal, but should like to compromise matters by making him sit on a
pile of oyster-shells in lieu of a curule chair.”
When Thackeray went to Boston in 1852 he had some trouble with the
very large American oyster. “He first selected the smallest one of the
half-dozen (rejecting a larger one because, as he said, it resembled
the High Priest’s servant’s ear that Peter cut off), and then bowed his
head as though he were saying Grace. Opening his mouth very wide, he
struggled for a moment, after which all was over. I shall never forget
the comic look of despair he cast upon the other five over-occupied
shells. I asked him how he felt. ‘Profoundly grateful,’ he said, ‘as if
I had swallowed a small baby.’”
But Thackeray was not an authority, for he ranked “the dear little
juicy green oysters of France” above the “great white flaccid natives
in England that look as if they had been fed on pork.” This is
ungenerous.
The poet Gay wrote in praise of Oysters when Fleet Ditch, now turned
into the Farringdon Street sewer, was still a London eyesore. It
appears to have been a centre of London Oyster hucksters.
If where Fleet Ditch with muddy current flows
You chance to roam, where oyster tubs in rows
Are ranged beside the posts, there stay thy haste,
And with the savoury fish indulge thy taste.
Oysters are not unconnected with Pearls, although a real Oyster-lover
must necessarily regret that a large number of his darling food is
sacrificed for the trivial purpose of feminine adornment. It seems such
waste! It were well to cast pearls before swine, if the molluscs were
reserved for the pig-keepers. The pearls, by the by, which are used in
heraldry to denote the gradations of rank in the coronets of peers, are
the produce of the _Pinna marina_, the large pearl-oyster of the East
Indies.
A curious pearl case came before the law courts in Hamburg recently.
A merchant and his wife, dining at a local restaurant, began their
dinner, as right-minded folk always should, with oysters. In one
of the shells they found quite a considerable-sized and admirably
formed pearl. They were about to carry it off in triumph, when the
restaurant-keeper interfered and claimed it as his property. This was
disputed, and the matter taken to law, the pearl in question being
valued by experts at one hundred and fifty pounds. Eventually the
decision was given against the restaurant proprietor, the judge holding
that by purchasing the oysters the guest was entitled to anything found
in them. A just and upright judge!
Between 1775 and 1818 there lived and flourished (more or less) in
Malta, Naples, Paris, and elsewhere, a notable composer, Nicolo
Isouard, more generally known as Nicolo. He wrote many operas, all of
which are now forgotten. Having lived in Naples he was a great macaroni
eater, and prepared the dish himself in a somewhat original manner. He
stuffed each tube of macaroni with a mixture of marrow, _pâté de foie
gras_, chopped truffles, and cut-up oysters. He then heated up the
preparation, and ate it with his left hand covering up his eyes, for
he asserted that he could not afford to allow the beautiful thoughts
engendered by such exquisite food to be disturbed by any extraneous
mundane sights. No wonder he died young.
There is a Russian story, averagely true I opine, of the emancipation
of a serf through the agency of oysters. One of the ancestors of
the banking firm of Sjalouschine was originally a serf of Prince
Cheremeteff. The serf, by dealing in corn and cattle, had become very
well-to-do, and he asked the Prince again and again to set him free,
even offering him large sums of money as the price of his emancipation.
But the Prince always refused, as he was rather tickled by the idea of
owning a serf who was comparatively a rich man.
In the beginning of one September the serf went to St. Petersburg on
business, and brought back with him a barrel of oysters, the first of
the season. When he returned he asked to see the Prince, but was told
that His Highness was in a terribly bad temper because his chef had
forgotten to order any oysters. Whereupon the serf went straight to
the Prince and offered him his barrel of oysters in exchange for his
freedom. The Prince being, as aforesaid, of a humorous disposition,
and besides, wanting the oysters badly, was taken by the notion. He
agreed to the bargain, and clenched it by saying, “We will now lunch
together on the oysters.”
The family of Sjalouschine is said to bear oysters on their
coat-of-arms in memory of the emancipation.
At a dinner-party where there were twelve covers, one of the courses
consisted of scalloped oysters in silver shells. The set of shells
was broken--there were only eleven. The mistress, therefore, told the
butler that she would not eat any oysters. When the oyster course came,
he placed before his mistress one of the shells. To his horror she
did not decline it. She took up her fork and was about to plunge into
it, when the man flew to her side. “Pardon me, madam,” he murmured,
“but you said I was to remind you that the doctor forbade your eating
oysters on any account.”
[Illustration: CHAPTER VIII
WAITERS AND SNAILS]
“Will you walk a little faster?” said the Whiting to the Snail;
“There’s a lobster close behind me and he’s treading on my tail.”
LEWIS CARROLL
The collocation of Waiters and Snails under one chapter-heading is not
entirely fortuitous. The remote connexion which may fairly be said to
exist between the two is not perhaps as marked to-day as it was some
time ago, for waiters are improving rapidly, and snails--well, snails
are remaining very much where they used to be. The advent of the
well-trained foreign waiter has done much to improve our restaurant
dinner-table, and, incidentally, the temper of the average diner. Of
the expert, deft, and _sober_ British waiter there is also nothing but
good to be said. The snail has no family relationship with either of
these classes.
Unfortunately, however, there are others, many others, who are slow,
dirty, ignorant, and only occasionally sober. It is such as these who
degrade waiterdom, and to whom the snail is a fit comparison--save that
the waiter is not edible. Nothing could be smarter than a good English
waiter with a knowledge of foreign dishes, or a good foreign waiter
with a knowledge of English; and thanks to the interest now taken in
everything appertaining to dining in public places, neither is now as
uncommon as he used to be.
One P. Z. Didsbury, an American deipnosophist, once said in his wisdom:
“In a restaurant when a waiter offers you turbot, ask for salmon, and
when he offers you a sole, order a mackerel; as language to men, so
fish has been given to the waiter to disguise his thoughts.”
This maligns the individual waiter, of course; the man who is used
to attending on you, who knows your likes and dislikes, and takes a
personal interest in your contentment, but it is fairly typical of the
average restaurant waiter who sees you for the first time and thinks
you just one of the ordinary mob. For the casual customer is the facile
dupe of the waiter. He comes, he orders his dinner, or preferably,
permits it to be ordered for him, pays his bill, and goes away. Eating
with him partakes of the stoking process, and he recks little of the
particular _à la_ offered to him, if it be toothsome, and saucily
disguised.
In the best restaurants, as well in England as on the Continent,
deception, fraud, and trickery are comparatively rare. They would not
pay. But in nearly every restaurant below the class of the best some
one or other or all of the traditional time-honoured wiles of the
waiter are practised on the more or less unsuspecting customer.
There is, for instance, the well-known trick of “Putting the change to
bed.” It is preferably employed when a man is dining with a lady who,
to the cynical and experienced eye of the waiter, is obviously not his
wife. This is the very simple _modus operandi._ Your bill, we will say,
as presented to you, discreetly folded in half on a plate, comes to
one pound fifteen shillings. You place a couple of sovereigns under the
upper fold of the bill. The waiter returns with the change. If you are
careless you do not count it. You see half a crown on the bill, and
say nonchalantly “All right.” Whereupon the waiter is exceeding glad,
for you have given him five shillings. If, on the other hand, you are
observant, accurate, and careful, you will say, “The change is not
right.” The waiter, who has carefully concealed the second half-crown
between the bill and the plate, will semi-indignantly say, “I beg your
pardon, sir!” and drawing away the bill, the two half-crowns will be
exposed to view. After having doubted his word, you cannot do less
than give the poor man the two coins. So the waiter scores either way.
“Putting the change to bed” rarely fails.
Mr. Pinero illustrated this trick very neatly in his delightful farce,
“The Magistrate,” some years ago at the Old Court Theatre.
It is said that some of the most famous conjurers of to-day began life
as restaurant waiters, and certainly the knack of palming the cork of
the wine you ordered, and serving you with an inferior quality thereof,
meanwhile gravely depositing the palmed cork next to the bottle, in
its cradle, is a very old and usually successful trick. It is as well,
too, to see that the label on the wine bottle is dry and stuck fast,
because, unless you have ordered the man “just to take the chill off,”
he may have helped himself from the common stock of red or white wine,
and affixed the label of your particular vintage as he came upstairs.
It is quite extraordinary how many men who pride themselves on knowing
a good bottle of wine are deceived in this way. There is an old story
of three men dining together at a cheap restaurant. One ordered a pint
of Pontet Canet, another a pint of Medoc, and the third a pint of
Beaune. The waiter went to a speaking-tube, and shouted down it, “Three
small reds!”
The question of the substitution of corks has many and quaint
developments. An enormous trade is done at third- and fourth-rate
restaurants with “faked” champagne, which it were mere flattery to
call even “sparkling petrol.” The _restaurateurs_, foreigners it is to
be hoped to a man, import a thoroughly innocuous thin white wine, and
then bottle and aerate it, just as they would soda-water. The corks are
replaced (after being drawn) by genuine corks of well-known brands, and
there is a large market for good, sound, used champagne corks. This
market is supplied by the waiters at good-class restaurants, where
wines correct to designation are served. If the diner does not happen
to collect champagne corks (and few of us have this weakness), the
waiter carefully gathers them when clearing the table for dessert.
This is a genuine letter addressed by such a waiter to a reputable
firm of champagne importers: “I beg to send you a hundred corks of the
well-known brands of ---- and ----. They may be useful to you. I am
waiter at ----, and am often asked by customers to recommend a wine.
Awaiting your favourable reply, I am, etc.”
[Illustration: LES BOISSONS: PAR BERTALL
[To face page 194]
Another kind of waiter, neither as sharp nor as business-like as the
foregoing, on being asked what liqueur brandies they had, replied,
“Two, sir; one’s 1854 and the other’s a shilling.” That kind of waiter,
however, is more fool than thief.
A very pretty dodge, and one, moreover, which the continental waiter
finds very remunerative, is to add the date of the month to the
amount of the bill. If you are dining on 24 June, and the addition
comes to thirty-five francs, it is very easy to combine the two sums,
particularly if the date be somewhat carelessly inscribed at the head
of the account. The foreign waiter is a rare judge of character, and
can usually (though not always) tell beforehand whether or no it be
safe to try any of his little games.
A favourite _truc_ in foreign cafés, and one for which one should
always be on the look out, is the giving of bad silver in the way of
change, as many foreign coinages are now obsolete, and one cannot be
too careful in this respect. It is usually a matter of date. The coin
is not a bad coin, but simply not current. The Swiss two-franc piece,
for instance, is all right if Madame Helvetia is depicted sitting
down, but all wrong if she be standing up. Then the Greek, Roumanian,
and Turkish coins are non-admissible, and certain Italian cart-wheels
or five-lire pieces no longer acceptable. It requires some experience
to recognize at a glance in a handful of silver how many coins are
right and how many wrong.
A fraud of this kind was defeated, and met with its own just reward,
only last summer at a French casino, a notorious haunt of the “slim”
waiter. An Englishman having had _consommations_ to the amount of two
francs, paid with a louis, and received eighteen francs change. Of
this change he subsequently found that seven francs, a five-franc and
a two-franc piece, were useless. He returned the next night with some
friends, found out the same waiter, ordered sundry refreshment, and
when paying-time came, settled the bill with the useless coins he had
received the night before. The waiter refused to accept them, the guest
refused on his part to pay in any other coin. The matter was referred
to an official of the casino, the matter explained, and the English
guest was supported. For once, therefore, the waiter was hoist with his
own petard.
It is common knowledge that the waiters among themselves have a regular
trade in these coins; they change hands at about one-third of their
face value, and the dupe is, nine times out of ten, the British tourist.
It would be unfair to suggest that all waiters are guilty of these or
similar wiles. There are hundreds of good, trustworthy waiters who
would disdain them, and who know by experience, precept, or intuition
that honesty is the best policy in the dining as in other worlds.
At a first-class waiters’ training school or college, such as the
well-known Radunski’s, at Frankfort-on-the-Main, or one or other of the
Swiss establishments, all such tricks are sternly discouraged, and the
budding _maître d’hôtel_ is strongly impressed with the golden rule
that it does not pay, in the long run, to cheat clients in any shape or
form.
This is especially true of the highest class of restaurant, for waiters
travel about Europe a great deal, and the man who waits on you at the
Carlton to-night may turn up at the Ritz in Paris next week, at Monte
Carlo next month, and at Homburg next year. If he has cheated you
badly, you will remember him (though not in the time-honoured waiter’s
sense), and his good name will be gone once and for all.
I referred just now to the foreign schools for waiters where they
are systematically, and one might almost say scientifically, trained
for their profession, which is neither an easy nor, in the end, an
unremunerative one. Many sons of well-to-do German, Swiss, and Italian
hotel and restaurant proprietors, lads who have been to good schools
and received a first-class education, are content to begin at the very
bottom of the ladder, even as _piccolo_ or boy attendant, and gradually
to work their way through all the ranks even to that of _maître
d’hôtel_.
A German lad who wishes to become a waiter goes, first to Radunski, at
Frankfort, or to some other regular training school for waiters. At the
end of two years’ hard work, if he has gained his certificate, he goes
to an hotel or restaurant as an improver, without salary, for two years
or more.
Then he comes to London, and, for the sake of learning English, enters
an English family at a very small wage. Having mastered English, he is
off to France to learn French on similar terms.
Finally, he returns to London as an “aid” waiter, and by attending to
business he can rise to be a superintendent or a manager.
But the Englishman wants to undertake skilled labour and earn full
money without a proper training. Look, on the other hand, at the case
of the English butler. He is renowned throughout the world, but then
he was content to begin as a page and pass through the second stage of
footman.
A well-known restaurant manager once said to me: “Though we are
patriotic, we cannot allow patriotism to stand in the way of
efficiency. We must, for our customers’ sakes, employ the best men
we can get, irrespective of nationality, although we should prefer
Englishmen, of course.”
Some attempt has been made, is being made in fact, to establish a
training school for British waiters, but its success is, I fear,
problematical. And this for various reasons. Few, if any, professional
men would dream of their boys being trained to be waiters; it would be
beneath their shoddy suburban dignity. Also, the class from which the
average British waiter is drawn seems to be constitutionally incapable
of acquiring even the merest smattering of a foreign language. He
despises any tongue but his own.
The British Waiters’ Association has done excellent work on the right
lines, but very much remains still to be accomplished.
The average British waiter at the ordinary railway refreshment-room is
usually a terribly slow and untidy individual. True, one has learned
not to expect too much at a railway station. _A la gare, comme à la
gare!_
Mr. Jerome K. Jerome has an amusing tirade on the subject. He says:
“The slowest waiter I know is the British railway refreshment-room
waiter. His very breathing, regular, harmonious, penetrating,
instinct as it is with all the better attributes of a well-preserved
grandfather’s clock, conveys suggestion of dignity and peace. He is
a huge, impressive person. There emanates from him an atmosphere of
Lotusland. The otherwise unattractive room becomes an oasis of repose
amid the turmoil of a fretful world.”
Of course the waiter’s life is a trying and arduous one. There is much
worry by thoughtless clients. There are disappointments, and swindlers,
and rogues. Then the actual pedestrian exercise is not little. A
waiter in a restaurant in Christiania one day provided himself with
a pedometer before starting his work. According to his calculations
he took rather under 100,000 steps, covering some thirty-seven miles,
between 8 a.m. and 12.30 a.m. Working and walking four days a week, he
calculated that he covered more than 7000 miles in a year.
Another danger is threatened by the waiter’s serviette. In the
_Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift_ Professor Kron inaugurated a
crusade against the napkin which the waiter flourishes as a sign of
his profession, but which, in the Professor’s opinion, is a deplorably
unhygienic piece of linen and should be summarily abolished in all
civilized countries.
Dr. Kron notices how waiters carry this thing, now in their hands, now
in their trousers pockets, and sometimes under their arm. They wipe
table-tops with it, wipe glasses, knives, forks with it, wipe the manly
perspiration from their brows and the beer froth from their lips. No
civilized man should tolerate its presence, and the Professor closes
his article with the war-cry, “Away with the waiter’s napkin!” The
Professor, it will be noticed, refers to the “rough” waiter only, and
not to the civilized kind. He also fails to suggest a substitute for
the serviette.
In a book entitled “Trouble in the Balkans” Mr. J. L. C. Booth says of
Athenian waiters: “Robbery among the Greeks is not a cultivated art; it
is a gift. They are all born with it. There is only one known method of
getting square with an Athenian waiter, and that is to dine twice at
the same place, near the door. You pay the first night.”
Enough of Waiters, however; let us to a more congenial, if allied
topic, the edible Snail.
It is surely quite superfluous to enter upon any defence of Snails as
an article of food. If you like them, well, you like them. If you do
not, then you probably detest them. No one ever just tolerated snails.
There is good historical precedent, as shall be shown hereafter, for
their systematic cultivation. They are most nutritious, containing, it
is alleged, twice the amount of proteid possessed by the oyster. Be
that as it may, they have been a desirable article of food for many
centuries past.
Paris, according to the “Figaro,” consumes eight hundred thousand
kilogrammes of snails annually. High though this figure is, it will
probably be exceeded, for, after having been in disgrace for some time,
the _escargot_ has reconquered the favour of the gourmets.
Burgundy and the two departments of Savoy are the great sources of
supply. There they are bought for 8 fr. or 9 fr. the thousand. The
interesting molluscs are first sent to Auxerre, whence they are resold
to Paris as coming from the vines of Macon and Dijon.
A number of intelligent speculators also practise the breeding of
snails, which they place in parks enclosed in fences made of smoothly
planed planks covered with tar to prevent their climbing out and
escaping.
Snails, too, play a very important part in our ordinary daily food,
although the snail-hater would scoff at the idea. But it is even so.
What think you imparts to South Down and Dartmoor mutton its fine
flavour and highly nutritive properties? Snails! The grass upon which
they feed teems with small snails of the _Helix caperata_ species, and
these, with or without the will of the sheep, form part of the diet of
the latter, taken with the grass.
The Burgundy snail, however, has become more and more scarce during
the past few seasons. The Council General of the Department of the
Côte d’Or seriously took up the question, and asked the Prefect of the
department to authorize a close time for snails between 15 April and 15
June. The Prefect replied that he had no power to make such an order,
as the snail was not game. The Council thereupon voted a protest, and
expressed the hope that the snail might rank in the category of game,
and be accorded a close time.
The French sportsman’s category of game is tolerably wide, and includes
birds which we do not rightly understand under that generic title.
Still, to include snails as game seems a trifle--well, far-fetched. It
would be difficult to shoot snails, save with a pop-gun at perhaps six
feet. It might be easier to stalk them. After all, we have a close time
for oysters, which are not much more game-like than snails. The point
for France surely is not whether snails should rank as reptiles or
insects, vermin or cattle, but whether they are worth preserving. And
the Burgundy snail is.
In the time of Pliny, we are told, a concoction of snails beaten up
in warm water was recommended for coughs. The Romans were very fond
of snails, which they fattened in special “cochlearia,” feeding them
with bran soaked in wine until they attained quite large dimensions.
Charles the Fifth of Spain died of indigestion brought on by eating
immoderately of snails.
Mrs. Delaney, writing in 1758, says: “Two or three Snails should be
boiled in the barley-water which Mary takes, who coughs at night. She
must know nothing of it. They give no manner of taste.”
The first importation of Snails into England has been attributed to
Sir Kenelm Digby (1645) for his wife. Also the apple snail was brought
to the South Downs of Surrey and Sussex, as well as to Box Hill in the
sixteenth century, by one of the Earls of Arundel for his Countess, who
dressed and ate them to promote the cure of consumption, from which she
suffered.
Snails did not really come into French vogue until the return of Louis
XVIII, in 1814, on which occasion the Bishop of Autun entertained
the Emperor Alexander of Russia. The popular host, who was a famous
gastronome, had in his service a most accomplished cook, the best in
Paris at that time; they put their heads together and hit upon Snails
as the most suitable novelty for presenting to the imperial guest.
Together with this dish, which was handed round, there appeared on the
card under the heading _Escargots à la Bourgignonne_ a description of
the delicious seasoning with which each shell was filled up.
In 1854, M. de la Marr, of Paris, set forth the virtues of _Helicin_ as
a glutinous extract obtained from snails, and which had long been given
in broth as a successful domestic remedy for pulmonary phthisis.
Gipsies are great snail eaters, but they first starve these
gasteropods, which are given to devour poisonous plants, and must be
rendered free from the same, for it is certain that Snails retain for a
time the flavour and odour of the vegetables on which they feed.
The above most interesting particulars may be read, at greater length,
in a compendious and reliable work, entitled “Meals Medicinal,” by Dr.
W. T. Fernie.
There is an increasing export of Snails from England to America. As
many as ten thousand are packed in a cask, of which hundreds are
shipped annually. But there is and always has been a large home
consumption, particularly in certain counties. In some Gloucestershire
towns they quite outclass whelks and winkles as a snack to accompany
a glass of beer, and they are commonly hawked by the basket, cooked
ready for eating, round the public-houses. Snail broth or stewed snails
is a well-known and thoroughly approved rural remedy for consumption,
and indeed all chest complaints. In Hampshire, to help weak eyes,
snails are made into a poultice with soaked breadcrusts. The glass men
at Newcastle have a Snail Feast once a year. They collect the snails
in the fields and hedgerows on the Sunday before the anniversary,
and their wives wash, clean, and stuff them according to established
tradition. According to the authority of Mr. F. H. Elsey, librarian of
the Surrey Archæological Society, the edible snail, _Helix pomatia_,
was most probably introduced into this country by the Romans from Gaul.
It is not peculiar to Surrey, for it is found in Kent; and Sowerby, in
his “Illustrated Index of British Shells,” gives the southern chalky
districts. It is no doubt confined to these by the large size of its
shell, requiring the secretion of lime for its formation. This snail
hibernates from October to April in a subterranean burrow.
It has been said this snail was brought to this country from Italy
by Thomas, Earl of Arundel (Earl Marshal). “His lady,” says Salmon,
“delighting in such food.” Evelyn remarks that “this huge and fleshy
snail was had in delicus by the Earl himself.” Mr. Elsey entirely
agrees with Lieut.-Col. Godwin-Austen, the well-known authority upon
mollusca, that the snail was here long before the Earl of Arundel’s
time.
Two very fine shells of this snail, one measuring 1¾ in. long, 1⅛ in.
broad, and 1⅛ in. high, can be seen in the Surrey Archæological Museum,
Castle Arch, Guildford. These two specimens were found by Mr. Elsey
a few years ago just below where Mr. W. P. Trench’s house is built
adjoining the Echo Pits, Guildford, in a hedge now grubbed up.
There is a suggestion in Spenser that the edible snail is the poor
man’s oyster, and Dr. Yeo confirms this. Some little while ago Canon
Horsley strongly recommended the more general adoption of snails as an
article of food, although he naively admitted that he had never eaten
one himself. Thereupon the “Lancet” said: “There is nothing to be said
against the proposal from a dietetic point of view; the snail is both
nutritious and tasty.” The professional journal goes on to say:--
“The snail has been called ‘the poor man’s oyster,’ though we do not
remember to have seen it eaten raw. We know, however, that it makes an
excellent fish sauce, and may be used for the same purpose as oyster
sauce. Possibly also a few snails in a steak-and-kidney pudding would
increase the tastiness of this popular food.
“Care must be exercised in the choice of the snail for food purposes,
as it is well known that snails feed on poisonous plants, and it is the
custom in France to allow a few days to elapse after they have been
taken from their feeding ground, in order that any poisonous matters
may be eliminated.
“According to analysis, very nearly 90 per cent of the solid matter
of the snail is proteid matter, available directly for repairing the
tissues of the body.
“Besides this, there is about 6 per cent of fat and 4 per cent of
mineral matter, including phosphates.”
According to an excellent gastronomic authority, the best snails
in Paris are to be found at Prunier’s, in the Rue Duphot, near the
Madeleine. He boils his snails in a liquid which is partly composed of
good white wine, with a little garlic and bay leaves, thyme, onions,
and carrots in it. The snails are served in small silver bowls, and the
weapon of offence is a two-pronged silver fork. The first time that one
holds a long black steaming thing on a fork, and hesitates whether to
put it into one’s mouth or not, is rather a strange moment.
Most people who try the experiment of snail-eating take the snail out
of their mouths quicker than they put it in. Burgundy is the correct
wine to drink with your snails.
The Hungarian manner of cooking snails is, after the boiling and
cleaning, to cut them small, mix them with chopped-up anchovies,
and to serve them hot on hot toast, a squeeze of lemon and a dash of
red pepper giving the dish its final touches. The curiosity of the
Hungarian method of cooking and serving the snails is that no man,
unless he was told, would know what he was eating.
Francatelli, in his “Modern Cook,” strongly recommends snails, and
gives a method of cooking them, nearly akin to the usual French way. In
fact, nearly all foreign cookery books give one or more recipes, either
as broth, stew, or _à la Bourgignon_.
The “London Gazette” of 23 March, 1739, tells us that “Mrs. Joanna
Stephens received from the Government five thousand pounds for
revealing the secret of her famous cure for stone in the bladder. This
consisted chiefly of egg shells and Snails, mixed with Soap, Honey, and
Herbs.” Rather earlier than this date “Lady Honeywood’s Snail Water”
was much used for complaints of the chest.
Defoe, writing in 1722, described a cookshop “where you may bespeak a
dinner for four or five shillings a head up to a guinea or what sum
you will”; one of the items being “a ragout of fatted snails.”
Has any literary critic ever noticed the curious similarity between a
verse of Sir John Suckling and Robert Herrick, who were, of course,
contemporaries? I am reminded of it because _Snails_ are used by the
latter where _Mice_ are referred to by the former.
In Sir John Suckling’s “Ballad upon a Wedding,” everybody knows the
lines:--
Her feet beneath her petticoat
Like little mice stole in and out.
In Robert Herrick’s poem, “On Her Feet,” occurs this verse:--
Her pretty feet like snails, did creep
A little out, and then
As if they played at bo-peep,
Did soon draw in again.
The comparison is interesting.
Quite recently a case brought under the Workmen’s Compensation Act in
Paris revealed the existence of a hitherto unknown industry. This was
none other than the manufacture of artificial snails.
The evidence showed that a workman had had a finger broken by a machine
whose object was to cut boiled calves’ lights into portions shaped like
a small corkscrew for insertion into the empty shells of snails which
had been thrown into dustbins after their contents had been consumed,
and thence gathered by the _chiffonniers_, or ragpickers, and sold to
the proprietor of the factory. The revelation caused a sensation of
horror among the Parisian population, for whom the succulent snail is
a delicious delicacy partaken of on all occasions of festivity, and
purchased at prices ranging from 6d. to 8d. per dozen. It was stated
by the injured workman that by the substitution of calves’ lights the
fabricated “snails” could be sold at the factory at 2d. a dozen.
The small horticultural speculator in Germany has of late years been
taking a leaf from the book of his neighbours, and become an ardent
cultivator of the luscious edible snail, a delicacy Hans is now as
assiduous in tending for ultimate sale in the market as ever was
Jacques Bonhomme. July is considered the best month for collecting
this gasteropodous mollusc prior to fattening him for his final
appearance in the shape of a dainty parsley-and-butter-bespattered
_bonne bouche_ for some “good liver” in Berlin or elsewhere.
These large white snails come from the vineyards principally about the
Rhine and the Moselle; the breeder for gastronomic purposes, however,
confines his little flock, when once secured from amid the umbrageous
vines, to a special little “run” of their own, where henceforth their
whole duty consists in “doing themselves well.” The “run” is fixed up
on a sunny stretch of lawn, hemmed in with boards upon which is smeared
clay mixed with vinegar and salt and water--so as to prevent any
crawling out of bounds.
In the United States edible snails are frequently to be seen exposed
for sale; but they are not raised in that country, and those on sale
have been shipped to America alive from Europe.
In Vienna, again, during Lent there is a snail market, the snails
coming in barrels from Swabia. The great centre for the consumption
of snails, however, is Paris and some of the French provinces. There
is, indeed, a very large trade in this commodity in France, the large
white snail being in special demand in Paris, while the garden and wood
snails are in common use among poorer consumers in all parts of France.
The collecting of snails is carried on in the French provinces all day
long by men, women, and children, who with iron hooks search for them
at the foot of thorn hedges and under ivy, and in winter in old walls.
If lucky, a good searcher will collect from one thousand to fifteen
hundred snails. These are paid for according to their weight, about a
thousand snails averaging ten kilogrammes, and the payment varies with
the prices current in the Paris market, but it usually ranges from
twenty to forty centimes per kilo. The work, therefore, cannot be said
to be well paid.
A curious superstition existed for many years with regard to the Snail
in Southern Germany. Practically all snail shells have their volutes
or spirals (_Helix_--a snail--a screw--a spiral) twisting from right
to left. Once in about twenty thousand snails the twist is found to be
from left to right. This snail was then dubbed “The Snail King,” and
was sold at a fancy price as an amulet or luck-bringer. It would be
curious to know whether this custom has been noticed elsewhere.
In a biography of Adam Smith, by Francis W. Hirst, a nice snail story
is told of Professors Black and Hutton, the fathers of the modern
sciences of modern chemistry and modern geology.
It so chanced that Black and Hutton had held some discourse together
upon the folly of abstaining from feeding on the crustaceous creatures
of the land, when those of the sea were considered as delicacies.
Snails were known to be nutritious and wholesome, even “sanative” in
some cases. The epicures of ancient Rome enumerated the snails of Lucca
among the richest and rarest delicacies, and the modern Italians still
held them in esteem. So a gastronomic experiment was resolved on. The
snails were procured, dieted for a time, then stewed.
“A huge dish of snails was placed before them; but philosophers are but
men after all; and the stomachs of both doctors began to revolt against
the proposed experiment. Nevertheless, if they looked with disgust
on the snails, they retained their awe for each other; so that each,
conceiving the symptoms of internal revolt peculiar to himself, began
with infinite exertion to swallow in very small quantities the mess
which he loathed. Dr. Black at length ‘showed the white feather,’ but
in a very delicate manner, as if to sound the opinion of his messmate.
‘Doctor,’ he said, in his precise and quiet style, ‘Doctor, do you not
think that they taste a little--a very little green?’ ‘D----d green,
d----d green indeed! Tak’ them awa’--tak’ them awa!’ vociferated
Dr. Hutton, starting up from the table and giving full vent to his
feelings.”
As a final tribute to the usefulness of the Snail, it may not be
generally known that they are matchless as window cleaners.
An old coloured woman selling snails occasionally makes her appearance
in certain streets in Philadelphia. She carries an old basket in which
the snails repose on freshly sprinkled leaves. These are not sold as
food, but for cleaning the outside of windowpanes. The snail is damped
and placed upon the glass, where it at once moves around and devours
all insects and foreign matter, leaving the pane as bright and clear
as crystal. There are old-established business places in Philadelphia
where the upper windows, when cleaned at all, are always cleaned by
snails. There is also a fine market for snails among the owners of
aquariums, as they keep the glass clean and bright.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: CHAPTER IX
DISHES OF HISTORY]
“Only a pomegranate is he who, when he gapes his
mouth, displays the contents of his heart.”
JAPANESE PROVERB.
History and cookery are linked together so closely that a study of the
one science implies, or should imply, a study of the other. For the
best part of a century and a half the notable names of contemporary
history are allied to dishes which perpetuated their glory and have
come down to us as ornaments alike of the monarchy and the menu.
The period is of course that of the fourteenth and fifteenth Louis of
France, and for several (mainly esoteric) reasons that brilliant and
fascinating age produced most of the classic dishes of high cookery,
dishes which have become, so to say, _standardized_, and which every
chef who respects the traditions of his art serves, or ought to serve,
in precisely the same manner in which they were designed by their
original inventors.
The average diner, when he sees on the menu of his Masonic banquet,
his annual Mansion House dinner, or his City Company feast, the name
of some historic celebrity tacked on to the roast, the entrée or the
sweet, recks little of its origin and inner meaning. To him it is
just something to be eaten, nothing more or less. And yet, if the
chef be competent, properly trained, and alive to his educational
responsibilities, these dishes have each their own story, their own
interest, and their own special and peculiar virtue.
Take as an instance _Côtelettes de Mouton à la Maintenon_. These
succulent dainties perpetuate for all time the memory of a lady,
who, whatsoever her faults, was at least charming, interesting,
and something more than passing fair. When the _Grand Monarque_
became queasy and past his prime, Madame invented, out of her own
powdered head, these cutlets, which in their envelopes of paper (_en
papillotes_) guarded the royal digestion against the evils of too much
grease. Again, _Cailles à la Mirepoix_ owe their origin to the Marshal
of that name; _Poulardes à la Montmorency_ were actually first cooked
by the Duke de Montmorency; _Petites Bouchées à la Reine_ are called
after Maria Leczinska, wife of Louis Quinze; and _filets de Volaille à
la Bellevue_ were evolved for the King by the Pompadour, who excelled
in the dainty manipulation of her silver _batterie de cuisine_.
The Regent Orleans is responsible for _pain à la d’Orléans_, a very
light and digestible form of bread; and his daughter, the Duchesse de
Berri, first conceived and executed those delightful morsels _filets
de lapereau à la Berri_. The Duchess de Villeroy, afterwards Maréchale
de Luxembourg, a brilliant light of the Court of the fifteenth Louis,
thought out, cooked, and christened the _poulets à la Villeroy_, which
remain, and deservedly so, a toothsome and delightful dish, even unto
this day. The _Chartreuse à la Mauconseil_ is called after the Marquise
of that name; and the _Vol-au-Vent à la Nesle_, which is still often
met with, though not always classically cooked, derives its name from
the Marquis de Nesle (not he of the Tower), who refused a peerage “to
remain premier marquis of France.”
In rather earlier days the Marquis de Béchamel invented a cream sauce
for turbot and cod which still, if somewhat perverted, perpetuates his
name. _Gigot à la Mailly_ was the result of profound study on the part
of the first mistress of Louis XV, who by her culinary art attempted,
and succeeded, in alienating the royal affection from her own sister,
who was an undesirable rival. _Soupe à la Condé_ was, in later years,
called after the famous cousin of Louis XVIII; and the Prince de
Soubise, notorious under Louis XV for giving great dinners, and paying
nobody but his cooks and the young ladies of the opera, lent his name,
through his cook, Bertrand, to the onion sauce which we still hold dear.
French cooks of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who did
honour to their employers by christening magnificent creations after
them only copied previous Apician artists, who, according to the “De
Opsoniis,” named their inventions after Varro, Julius Matius, Julius
Fronto, Celsinius, Vitellius, Commodus, and Didius Julianus. But the
chefs of the golden age of cookery also delighted to honour men of
comparatively humble station who took a keen and semi-professional
interest in the art of _la gueule_, as Montaigne calls it.
There was, for instance, a certain _petit abbé_, _le père Douillet_,
to whom much honour is done in those four delightful volumes of
cook-lore entitled “Les Soupers de la Cour.” They were published in
1755, and were written or compiled by one Manon, a literary cook of
the period to whom reference has already been made. The _abbé_ appears
to have been much appreciated by the author, for his books contain
delectable recipes for _Poulets_, _Brochet_, _Merlans_, _Cailles_, and
_Champignons_, all _au Père Douillet_, not, it will be noticed, _à la
(manière de) Père Douillet_, but just _au Père Douillet_, a rare and
great distinction.
The best-known official cooks of Louis XV were Moustier and Vincent
de la Chapelle. The latter is responsible for a very serious and
noteworthy cookery book which has never lacked honour in its own and
other countries. De la Gorse mentions a dinner given by the King, at
St. Hubert, where all the dishes were prepared by the distinguished
guests, such as the Prince de Beaufremont, the Marquis de Polignac, the
Duke de Goutant, the Duke d’Ayen, the Duke de Coigny, and the Duke de
la Vallière; the King himself contributed a _Poularde au Basilic_.
Such a famous gourmet as Richelieu naturally has left his mark in
culinary literature. We have the _Chartreuse à la Cardinal_, _Boudin
de poulet à la Richelieu_, _Gigot à la Richelieu_, and many more. The
rather famous _potage à la Camerani_, a most excellent concoction, is
called after a notability of that name, to whom Grimod de la Reynière
dedicated volume one of his immortal “Almanach des Gourmands,” as “one
of the most erudite epicures of France.”
King Stanislas Leszcnyski of Poland invented the _Baba_ to make amends
for the harshness of his own name, which the French tongue found hard
to pronounce. Its original ingredients were German yeast, flour,
butter, eggs, cream, sugar, saffron, candied peel, raisins, currants,
and Madeira, Malaga, or rum. According to Brillat-Savarin, the _Baba_
is especially beloved by women; “it renders her more plastic, and man
more expansive--only to look at it the eyes laugh and the heart sings.”
Who thinks nowadays of the battle when he degustates _Poulet à la
Marengo_? And yet nothing is more authentic than its inception on
that memorable occasion. The battle occurred, it may be remembered,
on 14 June, 1800. Napoleon had, naturally, a somewhat hurried meal.
There was no butter in camp, but plenty of sound olive oil. So the
_casserole_ was bottomed with oil, to which was added the garlic
and the mignonette. The fowl was then moistened with white wine and
garnished with sippets of toast, mushrooms, and morels, in default of
truffles. The result was pronounced to be exquisite. Nowadays we omit
the mignonette and substitute a bay leaf, thyme, and parsley; garlic
is thought to be too strong, so we use shalot; the mushrooms are still
permitted, but we ignore the morels. And so we have the _Poulet à la
Marengo_.
Literature has been honoured by Carême in his _Soupe à la Lamartine_,
history in _Potage à la Dumesnil_, philosophy in _Purée Buffon_, and
just before the death of the great artist he invented a vegetable soup
which he christened _Soupe à la Victor Hugo_. This same cook paid the
doctor who cured him of indigestion by dedicating to him his _Perche
à la Gaubert_. In rather later years we find a _Poularde à la George
Sand_ invented by Azèma, formerly chef at Prince’s. It is stewed in
white wine, flavoured with crayfish, butter and tails, truffles and
olives, with a garnishing of _feuilletage_.
The stage is ever prominent in gastronomic annals; it must suffice to
mention _Filets de Sole à la Belle Otèro_, _Pêche Melba_, _Croustades à
la Coquelin_, _Salade Rachel_, and _Consommé Sarah Bernhardt_, all of
which are nowadays fairly standard dishes.
Although no man was ever more susceptible to flattery and adulation
than Alexandre Dumas (_père_), yet there were marked degrees in the way
in which he accepted such complimentary tribute and homage, varying
from the mere _merci, mon cher_, in reply to congratulations on a
recently published book, to a cordial embrace and the swearing of an
everlasting friendship to the man who praised his cooking.
Dumas’s partiality for travelling and hunting developed his culinary
instincts, and he has related in his “Journey through Spain” how dire
necessity suggested to him the excellence of salad mixed without oil or
vinegar. References to cookery are scattered here and there all through
his works, particularly in his “Impressions de Voyage,” and again in
his “Propos d’Art et de Cuisine,” wherein occurs the famous “Causerie
Culinaire,” embodying the recipe for “macaroncello” and the delightful
address to his readers, “Je prie Dieu qu’il vous tienne en bon appétit,
vous conserve en bon estomac, et vous garde de faire de la littérature.”
The author of “An Englishman in Paris” describes how he watched Dumas
cook a whole dinner, consisting of “soupe aux choux,” a wonderful carp,
“ragout de mouton à la hongroise,” “rôti de faisans,” and a “salade
japonaise.” He adds: “I never dined like that before or after--not even
a week later, when Dr. Véron and Sophie made the _amende honorable_ in
the Rue Taitbout.”
In the kitchen, as in the theatre, the great novelist was master of all
difficulties. He delighted to make a triumph of an opportunity of which
others would only have made a failure. For himself he would have been
content with a couple of eggs; but if, as he wrote, he heard the cook
complaining, “What shall I do? There are twenty to dinner this evening,
and I have only three tomatoes left for my sauce! It is impossible!”
then the master would lift his head and cry, “Let me see what I can do!”
So saying, he would rush headlong into the kitchen just as he was in
his usual working dress, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up above his
elbows, and calling everybody in the place round him to watch his
prowess, he would labour among the stewpans for a good hour, ordering
all those who had followed him to the kitchen to different menial
tasks--one to slice the carrots, one to peel potatoes, one to chop up
herbs--turning them all into scullions in fact.
The blustering, boisterous genius as easily dominated the kitchen as
he did the literary world of the time. His cooking was energy and
bustle personified. Meat and butter were mingled with fine wines in the
saucepans, half a dozen sauces were being watched in the _bain-marie_,
and all the while he was cracking jokes and laughing at them most
loudly himself.
It was a wonderful and inspiring sight, and, as may be imagined, Dumas
seasoned the conversation as well as the dishes with the spice of his
wit and humour. No matter how serious his thoughts had been a few
moments before, it seemed as if the atmosphere of the kitchen had the
power to dissipate them. He forgot all his ever-present cares, and was
radiant with grease and hilarity.
Then suddenly, without the slightest warning, he would utter a
melodramatic scream and rush out of the kitchen to his study. He had
remembered the final _dénoûment_ of a scene he had left unfinished. He
would reinstate himself at his writing-table and take up the thread of
the story as if no interruption whatever had occurred. Many a dish that
delighted his guests was cooked in this extraordinary fashion, between
two thrilling chapters, and the wonderful part about his culinary work
was that the very dishes and ingredients seemed in some unaccountable
way to accommodate themselves to his casual and erratic manner. What
would have been utterly ruined under any other chef seemed to succeed
even extra well under his neglect.
Lacroix (_le bibliophile Jacob_) said of him: “Assuredly it is a great
attainment to be a romancist, but it is by no means a mediocre glory to
be a cook. Romancist or cook, Dumas is a chef, and the two vocations
appear in him to go hand in hand, or, rather, to be joined in one.”
Dumas often said, “When I have time I shall write a cookery book.” This
was to be the crowning work of his literary career. He was constantly
enumerating the vast sums which he alleged had been offered to him by
various publishing houses for the right to produce this _magnum opus_.
It is not generally known that in the agreement which he made with the
brothers Michael Lévy, in connexion with the rights of reproduction of
his works already written and those that he had contracted to write
in the future, he made the single exception of the famous forthcoming
cookery book.
The great work “La Grande Dictionnaire de la Cuisine,” of 1152 pages,
was eventually written in 1869; the manuscript was delivered to the
publisher, Alphonse Lemerre, in 1870, and whilst the book was in the
press the author died and the Franco-Prussian War broke out.
Its publication was therefore delayed until 1873, when it appeared with
a dedication to D. J. Vuillemot, a noted _hôtelier_, who had managed
the Café de la France, and had then opened on his own account, in
1862, a restaurant near the Madeleine, which proved a most disastrous
failure. He had been previously the proprietor of the Hôtel de la
Cloche et de la Bouteille at Compiègne. Dumas had made his acquaintance
when hunting in the vicinity, and was afterwards in the habit of taking
refuge with him when he wanted to be undisturbed in his literary work.
The arrest of some of the personages in “Monte Cristo” takes place at
Vuillemot’s hotel, and Dumas christened after him the famous _Lapin
à la Vuillemot_, which, he says, “You must absolutely have killed
yourself.”
The great dictionary is perhaps something of a disappointment. It is
laboured, unspontaneous, and, save in the characteristic preface,
hardly worthy of its illustrious author. Nevertheless it is vast in its
comprehensiveness, for, besides every imaginable dish, old and new, of
the so-called legitimate cuisine, it includes receipts for lambs’ tails
_glacées à la chicorée_, elephants’ feet, fillets of kangaroo flesh,
snails _à la Provençale_, and directions as to the right treatment of
the _babiroussa_, or wild Asian pig.
Contrary to his usual custom elsewhere, Dumas gives full credit to the
other culinary authors whom he quotes, and he includes recipes from
such acknowledged authorities as Brébant, Grimod de la Reynière, Magny,
Grignon, Carême, Véfour, and others.
He gives thirty-one methods of cooking carp, and sixteen for treating
artichokes. There is to be found also the Javanese formula for cooking
halcyons’ nests, and an elaborate essay on the hocco.
The appendix consists of the celebrated “Etude sur la Moutarde,” which
is a most flagrant _réclame_ of _la maison Bornibus_, but is amusing
for its sheer effrontery and impudence. There was always something
colossal about the man, even when he wrote about mustard.
In Molière’s “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme” (Act iv. sc. 1), in the scene
between Dorante and Dorimène, we find this delightful passage:--
“Si Damis s’en était mêlé, tout serait dans les règles; il y aurait
partout de l’élégance et de l’érudition, et il ne manquerait pas de
vous exagérer lui-même toutes les pièces du repas qu’il vous donnerait,
et de vous faire tomber d’accord de sa haute capacité dans la science
des bons morceaux; de vous parler d’un pain de rive à biseau doré,
relevé de croûte partout, croquant tendrement sous la dent; d’un vin à
séve veloutée, armé d’un verre qui n’est point trop commandant; d’un
carré de mouton gourmandé de persil; d’une longe de veau de rivière,
longue comme cela, blanche, délicate, et qui, sous les dents, est une
vraie pâte d’amande; de perdrix relevées d’un fumet surprenant; et
pour son opéra, d’une soupe à bouillon perlé, soutenue d’un jeune gros
dindon, cantonnée de pigeonneaux et couronée d’oignons mariés avec de
la chicorée.”
From this dinner-programme the taste of the day may fairly be gauged,
and it will not be forgotten that it is in this immortal play that the
famous line occurs:--
Je vis de bonne soupe, et non de beau langage;
which is so often quoted and misquoted.
But cooks are a trying and troublesome race, with extraordinarily
perverse traditions of their own, a frequent antipathy to learn
anything new, and an absolutely ridiculous partiality to “improve”
old-fashioned dishes according to their own ideas. There ought to
be condign punishment meted out to any cook who makes any so-called
alteration or improvement to any well-known standardized dish, of which
the composition, flavour, and artistic completeness have been settled
once and for all, and to touch which is something akin to sacrilege.
Really good, intelligent, careful cooks get on in their profession, and
often end up by opening establishments of their own. Many a restaurant
proprietor has qualified as a first-class chef.
Does any one, by the way, know the origin of the word “restaurant”?
You may search your encyclopædia in vain; but the matter is really as
simple as shelling peas. The first public eating-house, as distinct
from the _rôtisseur_, who cooked food “to be eaten off the premises,”
was opened in Paris by a cook called Boulanger in 1750. Over his shop
he displayed a sign bearing this inscription in kitchen Latin: “Venite
omnes qui stomacho laboretis, et ego restaurabo vos.” This was taken
up, gallicized, and passed into common parlance. Hence our modern use
of the term, which, after all, is only a hundred and fifty years old.
In rereading an old book by the never-to-be-forgotten Guy de Maupassant
I came across a delightful passage which so aptly describes the
feelings of a true gourmet that I am tempted to transcribe it here for
the benefit of all who belong to that noble fraternity. “To be wanting
in the sense of taste is to have a stupid mouth, just as one may have
a stupid mind. A man who cannot distinguish between a langouste and a
lobster, between a herring--that admirable fish that carries within it
all the savours and aromas of the sea--and a mackerel or a whiting, is
comparable only to a man who could confound Balzac with Eugène Sue,
and a symphony by Beethoven with a military march composed by some
regimental bandmaster.”
This delicacy of taste was obviously denied to Mr. G. Bernard Shaw’s
Uncle James in “Man and Superman,” of whom it is written:--
“Uncle James had a first-rate cook; he couldn’t digest anything except
what she cooked. Well, the poor man was shy and hated society. But his
cook was proud of her skill, and wanted to serve up dinners to princes
and ambassadors. To prevent her from leaving him, that poor old man had
to give a big dinner twice a month, and suffer agonies of awkwardness.”
Another writer of to-day, of quite peculiar charm and knowledge, Mr. E.
H. Cooper, in his novel “A Fool’s Year,” has a delightful description
of a modern London dinner-party, of the sort too often met with in the
houses of those who ought to know so much better.
“Mr. Hopper’s dinner was a thing to be remembered rather than eaten.
‘The things ought to be put into a museum of curiosities,’ said St.
Ives, looking round him wearily; ‘not on a decent English dinner-table.
I’ve had some turtle-soup and a bit of tongue smothered in jam, and now
I’m hungry. Would there be a row if I sent for some bread and cheese?
Strawberries as big as peaches, and peaches as big as young footballs,
may be very remarkable to look at, but I’m not going to eat them. That
waiter looks kind; I’m going to ask him to bring me a piece of Stilton
hidden between two biscuits. Don’t give me away, Lady Merton. I’ll do
you a good turn when I find you starving at a banquet of this kind. But
you know better than to come to one without eating a couple of muffins
and half a pound of plum-cake first.’”
The clamour as to the inefficiency of the typical “plain cook” is
incessant and fully justified. The remedies suggested are usually
futile or inexpedient. Nothing is more difficult than to get a simple
meal well cooked. Nothing is more easy, in London at any rate, than to
get a misdescribed semi-French dinner evilly cooked. Is there no way
out of this quandary? Yes. It consists in the training and apprenticing
of British-born boys to the profession of cookery.
For many years past all the leading men-cooks in clubs, restaurants,
and large private establishments have been, practically without
exception, foreigners, whether French, Swiss, or Italian.
In Braithwaite’s “Rules and Orders for the Government of the House of
an Earl,” published in the seventeenth century, the author writes: “In
ancient times noblemen contented themselves to be served with such as
had been bred in their own houses, but of late times none could please
some but Italians and Frenchmen.”
It is much the same in our own day. The profession of cookery among
Britons has died out, and, as a result, we are fed, outside our own
homes, by scores of intelligent, well-educated, practised foreign
cooks, who do their work, for the most part, excellently, but who could
be replaced in time by the genuine home-trained article.
Although France, and particularly the Midi, has produced the greatest
cooks, there is no reason why England should lag behind. It is certain
that many purely insular dishes, such as Irish stew, roast beef and
Yorkshire pudding, tripe and onions, and such-like, can never be
properly cooked by foreigners. They have not the tradition, and are too
anxious to impart their own personal touch to the dish.
It is quite true that a really great chef is as rare as a really
great poet or a really great general. But there is a lesser grade
of thoroughly competent chef who may most certainly be evolved from
the well-educated middle-class boy of to-day. The efforts of the Food
and Cookery Association of London towards this end should be actively
supported by all those who are interested in the nationalization of the
kitchen and the reform of our digestion.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: CHAPTER X
LENTEN FARE
_Festina lente_]
The most strenuous Lenten faster on record was, I venture to think, St.
Macarius, who was annually in the habit of passing forty days and forty
nights in a standing position with no more substantial support than a
few raw cabbage-leaves on each recurring Sunday.
Simeon Stylites was even more abstemious, for he ate nothing from the
beginning to the end of Lent, passing his time in praying and bowing
from his columnar elevation. An admiring monk has placed it upon record
that, possibly by way of assuaging the pangs of hunger, Simeon made on
one day twelve hundred and forty-four separate and distinct bows.
It is doubtless an excellent thing to have the strength of mind and
body to be able to act up to one’s convictions. We should find it
difficult to realize the idea of a Bishop of London never breaking his
fast till the evening, and then being satisfied with a solitary egg,
an inch of bread, and a cup of milk and water; such, however, was the
daily Lenten fare of St. Cedd, a predecessor of Dr. Winnington Ingram
in the Metropolitan diocese.
It is told of St. Francis of Assisi that he ate nothing dressed by
fire, unless he were very ill, and even then he caused it to be covered
with ashes, or dipped into cold water. His common daily food was dry
bread strewn with ashes, but--the historian adds--he did not condemn
his followers to the rigorous diet which he himself observed. “Brother
Ass,” as he familiarly called that self, was, in his own opinion,
worthy of no better fare.
But there is another and lighter side to the picture. The Roman
Catholic Church, especially the upper classes thereof, in long bygone
times, did not always submit patiently to the stricter ethics of
fasting. Kings and princes used to send medical and theological
certificates to the Pope, begging humbly to be allowed to eat meat. The
Holy Father was even begged to adjudicate on individual dishes. Pope
Zacharias forbade roast hare. Under Pope John XXII the Franciscans were
much vexed as to whether they really owned the soup that they ate, or
whether they only had the bare _usufruct_ thereof. As only three or
four of them were burned as martyrs, and no thrones were overset nor
provinces ravaged, Voltaire termed these debates about niceties of diet
_des sottises paisibles_.
In the reign of Henry VIII the minutes of the Lenten dinner included
such fish as: a whole ling, great jowls of salt salmon, great salt
eels, great jowls of salt sturgeon, fresh ling, fresh turbot, great
pike, great jowls of fresh salmon, great rudds, baked turbots, salmon
chines, roasted lampreys and roasted lamprons, great burbutts,
and--when the fishing season was favourable--porpoise, sea-wolf,
grampus, and whale.
A fairly compendious epitome of fish-food, but information is lacking
as to the modes of preparation.
The most sensible remark on the fasting question was probably made by
Erasmus, who said, when he was asked why he did not fast: “My mind is
Catholic, but my stomach is Lutheran.” But then Erasmus was a very
broad-minded sort of person. It is only necessary to read the finest
novel in the English language, Charles Reade’s “Cloister and the
Hearth,” to realize that fact.
For the dozenth time I was rereading “Eothen” the other day, and
came upon a curious passage. Speaking of Smyrna, Kinglake says: “The
number of murders committed during Lent is greater, I am told, than
at any other time of the year. A man under the influence of a bean
dietary (for this is the principal food of the Greeks during their
fasts) will be in an apt humour for enriching the shrine of his saint,
and passing a knife through his next-door neighbour.” _Que Messieurs
les végéteriens commencent!_ What do they say to this? Do they feel
especially bloodthirsty during Lent, or--being all-the-year-round
vegetarians--do they lust after gore with any peculiar avidity?
It is curious to note that our favourite Lenten fare, salted cod and
egg-sauce, to wit, is, strictly speaking, quite wrong. Eggs are not
permissible food, and the orthodox eschew them altogether during their
_jejunium_.
In Spain, during the crusades and the war with the Moors, a
practice arose of permitting, in certain cases, the substitution
of a contribution to the holy war for the observance of the Lenten
abstinence, and although the object has long since ceased, the
composition is still permitted under the same title of _Cruzada_.
In the seventh century a Council sitting at Toledo declared those
who ate meat during Lent to be sinners unworthy to take part in the
Resurrection. From that time until the eleventh century, when a gradual
reaction set in, the laws of fasting and the punishments inflicted
upon the transgressors became more and more strict; interdict and
excommunication were among the penalties.
By degrees these became so numerous and different in kind that they
were divided into
_Jejunium generale_--a fast binding for all.
_Consuetudinarium_--local fast.
_Penitentiale_--atonement for all transgressions.
_Votivum_--consequent upon a vow.
_Voluntare_--for the better carrying out of an undertaking.
These again were kept as
_Jejunium naturale_--an entire abstinence from food or drink.
_Abstinentia_--certain food only, but several times a day.
_Jejunium cum abstinentia_--the same food, but only once a day.
_Jejunium sine abstinentia_--all kinds of food, but only once a day.
The prohibited food on partial fast days included, during certain
periods, not only the flesh of quadrupeds, fowl, and fish, but also the
_lacticinia_, which means all that comes from quadrupeds and birds,
such as eggs, milk, butter, and the like.
There are many allusions in old plays to those folk who do not fast
through Lent. For instance, in Skelton’s “Colin Clout” (1500) is the
following passage:--
Men call you thereforr prophanes,
Ye pieke no shrimps nor pranes;
Salt fish, stockfish, nor herring,
It is not for your wearing.
Nor in holy Lenten season,
Ye will neither Beanes nor Peasen,
But ye look to be let loose,
To a pigge or to a goose.
There is comparatively little strictness now as to Lenten food, but it
is always an excuse for excellent _maigre_ dining, and the cook who
cannot prepare a thoroughly good appetising and satisfying _maigre_
menu is unworthy of his calling.
One Good Friday I was dining at a very excellent French provincial
hotel, the Hôtel du Chapeau-Rouge at Dunkirk, and the following most
cleverly fashioned menu confronted me at dinner:--
MENU
Huîtres.
Potage Longchamps.
Bouchées Dunkerquoises.
Barbue, Sauce d’Isigny.
Pommes Nouvelles.
Petit Pois à la Française.
Salade Primeur.
Saumon à la Russe.
Ecrevisses de la Meuse.
Gâteau Pitheviers.
Fruits.
Here is another Lenten dinner, quite different in conception, but
equally good in execution. It is a very artistic little production.
MENU
Caviar d’Astrackan.
Bisque d’Ecrevisses.
Truite braisée au Clicquot.
Sarcelle Rôtie.
Salade.
Petits Pois nouveaux à la Française.
Coupe Petit Duc.
Corbeille de Friandises.
Dessert.
A few years ago a noted French gourmet was taunted with the alleged
fact that it was quite impossible to order a really expensive _maigre_
dinner; he retorted, as any sane gourmet naturally would, that it was
the easiest thing in the world. He was given _carte blanche_, and the
following was the result:--
Caviar frais.
Huîtres (Natives).
Œufs Grand-Duc.
Bouchées Joinville.
Truite saumonée au Chambertin.
Sarcelles rôties.
Salade Espérance.
Aspic de homard en Bellevue.
Asperges sauce Mousseline.
Soufflé au kirsch.
Corbeilles de fruits.
Café.
VINS.
Eau-de-vie russe.
Chablis, 1890.
Johannisberg, 1886.
Château-Léoville Poyferré, 1878.
Romanée-Conti, 1865.
Champagne frappé Baïkal (extra-dry), ’84.
Château-Yquem, 1869.
Grande fine-champagne Napoléon, 1800.
The dinner for four was exquisite, and the wines extraordinary. The
total cost was just over twenty-five pounds.
In that delightful book, “Mrs. Brookfield and Her Circle,” by Charles
and Frances Brookfield, there is this postscript to a letter written
by the husband to his wife: “On the carte of the Carlton Club the day
before yesterday (the General Fast) was to be seen these words: ‘The
Committee, taking into consideration that the observance of a General
Fast has been ordained, have directed that the coffee-room dinner shall
be confined strictly to--Two Soups. Fish. Plain Joints. Spring Tarts.
Omelettes. Cheese.’”
Another story from the same book, which although it has nothing
whatever to do with Lent, has, perhaps, with food and feeding, runs as
follows: “The new bishop of New Zealand, in a farewell and pathetic
interview with his mother, after his appointment, was thus addressed by
her in such sequence as sobs and tears would permit: ‘I suppose they
will eat you, my dear--I try to think otherwise, but I suppose they
will. Well!--We must leave it in the hands of Providence. But if they
do--mind, my dear, and disagree with them.’”
That some at least of the less abstinent monks made very hearty meals
and were quite valiant trenchermen, whether it were fast day or no,
is a matter of history. At a splendid dinner given by the Legate of
Avignon to the Prior of Chartreux, a superb fish, cooked to perfection
and likely to have tempted the Pope himself had he been present, was
handed to the Prior. He helped himself and was on the eve of eating,
when one of the brothers said to him: “My father, do not touch that, it
is not _maigre_. I went into the kitchen, and I saw things that would
make you shudder; the sauce that you fancy is made from carrots and
onions is made from ham and rabbits.” “My brother, you talk too much
and are too curious,” replied the father; “the kitchen is not your
place, and curiosity is a grievous sin.”
Beckford of “Vathek” fame gives a glowing account of the monastery of
Alcobaça, and particularly of the kitchen thereof: “Through the centre
of the immense and groined hall, not less than sixty feet in diameter,
ran a brisk rivulet of the clearest water, flowing through pierced
wooden reservoirs, containing every sort and size of the finest river
fish. On one side loads of game and venison were heaped up; on the
other vegetables and fruit in endless variety. Beyond a long line of
stores, extended a row of ovens, and close to them hillocks of wheaten
flour, whiter than snow, rocks of sugar, jars of the purest oil, and
pastry in vast abundance, which a numerous tribe of lay-brothers
and their attendants were rolling out and puffing up into a hundred
different shapes, singing all the while as blithely as larks in a
cornfield.” After describing the elaborate composition of the daily
banquet of the monks, the author describes “a certain truffle cream
which was so exquisite that the Lord Abbot piously gave thanks for it.”
A famous London character in the time of “Frazer’s Magazine” was
Serjeant Murphy, M.P. for Cork. An acquaintance of Murphy’s was
constantly addicted to boasting of his aristocratic friends. At a
dinner-party where there were several Roman Catholics present,
conversation centred round the subject of fasting, when the serjeant’s
friend struck in: “It is very strange how little the highest ranks
regard fast days. I was dining at the Duke of Norfolk’s on a fast
day three weeks ago, and there was not a bit of fish at dinner.” “I
suppose,” said Murphy, in the midst of the deep silence that followed,
“that they had eaten it all in the dining-room.”
Chaucer writes of a man who
Full many a patrich had he in mewe,
And many a breme and many a luce in stew.
The stew was, of course, the monkish fish-pond, which has almost
disappeared since the Reformation. The luce is the jack or pike of the
fishermen, and is often found as a pun upon the family name of Lucy,
which bears the pike as a charge. Richard de Lucie, who defended the
castle of Falaise against Geoffry of Anjou, was Lord Diss in Norfolk;
he was also Sheriff of Essex in the reign of Henry II, and built the
castle of Ongar. Sir Richard Lucy, Lord Chief Justice of England,
founded Lesnes Priory, near Erith, and dying in 1179, was buried within
its walls. An antiquary named Weever, who had seen his tomb in 1630,
states that upon the belt of the figure of the knight the fleur-de-lis,
or fleur-de-luce, the rebus or name device of the Lucys, was sculptured
in many places. The fleur-de-lis was here used in a doubly figurative
sense for a pike or spear, to the head of which it bears some
resemblance.
This is more particularly shown in the Cantelupe arms, gules, a fess
vaire between three leopards’ heads jessant fleur-de-lis. The arms of
Lucy are also among the quarterings borne by the family of Lowther, the
head of which is, of course, Lord Lonsdale.
Certain fish, evidently intended for pike or luces, in the pavement
of the Chapter House at Westminster may possibly allude to the early
tradition that St. Peter’s Church was first built by King Lucius.
The ged and the pike are synonymous in North Britain, whence the Scots
family of Ged bear for arms, azure, three geds, or pike, hauriant
argent; Sir Walter Scott alludes to this play upon the name in Red
Gauntlet. “The heralds,” he says, “who make graven images of fish,
fowls, and beasts, assigned the ged for their device and escutcheon,
and hewed it over their chimneys, and placed above their tombs the fish
called a jack, pike, or luce, and in our tongue, a ged.”
Of this family was William Ged, an Edinburgh printer, who employed
a stereotyping process as early as 1725. The Geddes, a very ancient
family of Tweeddale, bear for arms, gules, an escutcheon between three
luces’ heads couped argent.
Much of the good purpose of a close adherence to strict Lenten fare has
no doubt been lost by our continued neglect of the manifold uses of
herbs.
Amid all the talking and writing about vegetarianism very little
attention seems to have been paid to the undoubted importance of the
herb garden.
Our forefathers believed implicitly in the virtues of herbs, and
extolled them in prose and verse. According to one of the old
Roxburghe Ballads:--
Here’s pennyroyal and marygolds,
Come, buy my nettle-tops.
Here’s water-cresses and scurvy-grass,
Come, buy my sage of virtue, ho!
Come, buy my wormwood and mugworts.
Here’s all fine herbs of every sort;
Here’s southernwood that’s very good,
Dandelion and horseleek.
Here’s dragon’s-tongue and wood-sorrel,
With bear’s-foot and horehound.
Let none despise the merry, merry cries
Of famous London Town!
Most of these formerly well-known herbs, each having its own peculiar
curative quality, are nowadays practically unknown, but a reference
to old John Parkinson, or the herbals of Gerard or Turner, or the
“Acetaria” of John Evelyn, would readily show that they were good
for the various ills to which flesh is heir. The very earliest
medicaments were largely composed of herbs, and even to-day the learned
prescription of a Harley Street two-guinea specialist usually contains
at least one ingredient which, under a more formal Latin name, is
neither more nor less than a “garden simple” or herb.
The common marigold, for instance, which Gerard calls “the
Jackanapes-on-Horseback,” was at one time much used for soups or
“pottages.” In Miss Edgeworth’s story of “Simple Susan” she explains
how the petals of marigolds were added, as the last touch, to the broth
made for an invalid mother. Evelyn compares the common bugloss to the
nepenthe of Homer, but adds that what we now call bugloss was not that
of the ancients, but rather borage, “for the like virtue named corrago.”
Smallage was, of course, simply wild celery, which Parkinson says is
“somewhat like parsley, but greater, greener, and more bitter.” Sweet
cicely, or sweet chervil, is a kind of myrrh--“it adds a marvellous
good relish to a sallet,” and the roots may be preserved or candied.
The genial Culpepper, in his “English Physician Enlarged” (1565), has
much to say as to the astrological virtues of the different herbs, and
although his ascription of plants to their respective planets must be
taken _cum grano salis_, yet he is wonderfully near the mark in many
instances which he quotes as to the effect of the herb if taken as a
medicine. This, for instance, is what he has to say about balm: “It is
a herb of Jupiter and under Cancer, and strengthens nature much in all
its actions. It causeth the mind and heart to become merry and reviveth
the heart, especially of such who are overtaken in sleep, and driveth
away all troublesome cares and thoughts out of the mind arising from
melancholy or black choler.”
Nowadays we certainly neglect herbs, although here and there an
old-fashioned gardener plants his herbs from year to year. There are
still quaint old herb shops in Covent Garden, where the “simples” of
our grandmothers may be bought; and there are curious customs at the
Guildhall and the Old Bailey of the presentation of bunches of herbs to
the presiding justices as a reminiscence of the time when their perfume
was supposed to counteract the germs of plague.
It is easy to cultivate a herb garden, and amid modern “improvements”
of flowers of all sorts it imparts a delightful old-world fragrance
to the completeness of the pleasaunce. Moreover, herbs make the most
exquisite addition to nearly every form of cookery.
Reverting to Lent and its customs, it is notable, according to old John
Selden’s “Table Talk” (1689), that “our meats and our sports, much
of them, have relation to Church works. The coffin of our Christmas
pies in shape long, is in imitation of the cratch; our choosing
kings and queens on Twelfth-night hath reference to the three kings.
So, likewise, our eating of fritters, whipping of tops, roasting of
herrings, Jack of Lents, etc.--they are all in imitation of Church
works, emblems of martyrdom. Our tansies at Easter have reference to
the bitter herbs; though at the same time, it was always the fashion
for a man to have a gammon of bacon to show himself to be no Jew.”
We have it (on perhaps somewhat doubtful authority) that the most
ingenious method of fasting is that recorded in the “Mappemonde
Papistique,” wherein it appears that a Venetian saint had certain
boxes made like mass books, and these book-boxes were filled, some
with Malmsey wine, and some with the fleshiest parts of capons and
partridges. These were supposed to be books of devotion, and the saint
is said to have lived long and grown fat on them.
A peculiarly villainous form of torture was invented by Galeazzo
Visconti (1355), which was known as Galeazzo’s Lent, because it was
guaranteed to prolong the life of the unfortunate victim for forty
days. This seems to have been one of the few traits of inherited family
cruelty in a man who otherwise was a sort of Mæcenas of his time. He
was a friend and patron of Petrarch, founded, under his direction, the
University of Pavia, and brought together a considerable library.
According to Walsh, it is not generally known that the use of flesh,
meat, eggs, and milk during Lent was forbidden in England, not only by
ecclesiastical but also by statute law, even into the time of William
III. Any violation of the law was followed by dire penalties. There
is the case of the landlady of the Rose Tavern, St. Catherine’s Tower,
London, in whose house during the Lent of 1563 was found a quantity of
raw and cooked meat. She and four other women who were proved to have
partaken of the forbidden viands were put in the stocks all night. In
1570 was passed a statute making the penalties for violating the Lenten
laws sixty shillings and three months imprisonment.
Finally, as an apposite curiosity, I will quote a curious dispensation
granted two hundred and seventy-six years ago and formally recorded in
the parish register of Wakefield.
“To all people to whom these presents shall come, James Lister, Vicar
of Wakefield, and preacher of God’s word, sendeth greeting: Whereas
Alice Lister wife of Richard Lister Clerke who now soiourneth with
her sonne Willm Paulden of Wakefield, by reason of her old age & many
years & state, and long-contynued sickness is become so weake, and her
stomack so colde, not able to digest colde meates and fish, who by
the counsell of Physicions is advised to absteine from and to forbeare
the eateng of all manner of fruits, fish and milk meates: Know yee
therefoor for the causes aforesaide and for the better strengthening &
recovery of her health, I the saide James Lister do hereby give & grant
libertie and licence to her the saide Alice Lister att her will and
pleasure att all tymes, as well during the tyme of Lent, as upon other
fasting daies and fish daies (exhibiting by the laws to eate flesh)
to dresse and eate such kind of fleshe as shal be best agreing to her
stomach & weake appetite. In witnes hereof I the saide James Lister
have hereunto sett my hand the eight day of ffebuary in the sixt year
of the Reine of our Soveraigne Lord Charles by the Grace of God King of
England Scotland ffrance and Ireland Defender of the Faith &c and in
the yeare of our Lord god 1630 James Lister.”
INDEX
A
Aberdour oysters, 166
Abstinence, 247
“Academy” menu, 139
“Accomplish’d Housewife,” 84
“Accomplish’d Lady Rich’s Closet,” 109
“Acetaria,” 64, 257
Acrostic dinner, 138
Acton, Eliza, 151
“Adam’s Luxury and Eve’s Cookery,” 84
Addison, 106
Ætius, 176
Agris of Rhodes, 112
“Alarm to all Persons,” 84
“Alchemist, The,” 39
“Alice in Wonderland” menu, 142
“All’s Well That Ends Well,” 86
“Almanach des Gourmands,” 44, 225
America and snails, 207
American dinner, 117
„ oysters, 183
Amory, Blanche, 23
Angel pie, 151
Anthony, Saint, 63
Apprenticeship of cooks, 239
“Archidipno,” 71
“Art of Cookery made Plain and Easy,” 85
“Art of Dining,” 88
Artificial snails, 213
Arundel, Earl of, 206, 209
Ashburn (or Ashburner), Mrs., 85
“Atall, Dr.,” 83
Athanasius, Saint, 63
Athenæus, 39, 178
Athenian waiters, 201
Atlantus, 112
Austen, Jane, 22, 27
Austrian snails, 215
Autun, Bishop of, 206
Avignon, Legate of, 252
Ayen, Duc d’, 225
Azèma, 227
B
Baba, 226
Babiroussa, 233
Ball-supper menu, 147
“Ballade of Simpson’s,” 53
Ballantyne, James, 105
_Ballotine de Perdreau Souvaroff_, 152
Banana menu, 142
Banks, Sir Joseph, 71
Banville, Th. de, 42
_Barbe de Capucin_, 103
Barlow on hasty pudding, 43
Baskets, Luncheon, 99
Bavarian menu, 150
“B.C. The First Oyster,” 168
Beans as incentive to murder, 245
Beaufremont, Prince de, 225
Beaumont and Fletcher, 87
Béchamel, Marquis de, 223
Beckford, 252
Beef, Corned, 37
Beef Steaks, Society of, 57
_Béhague_, 12, 13
Bell, Peter, 32
Benger, 156
Bennett, Mrs., 27
Béranger, 42
Berchoux, J., 46, 48
Beresford, Rev. Mr., 82
Berkeley Hotel, 25
Berri, Duchesse de, 222
Bertrand, 223
Besant, Sir Walter, 104
_Bibliophile, Jacob le_, 231
Bill of fare, 139
Bingley, 27
Birch of Cornhill, 31
Black, Professor, 217
Blair, Mrs. Hy. W., 118
Blake, Wm., 93
_Blinis_, 115, 149
Blue Posts, Cork Street, 31
“Book of Menus,” 16
“Book without a Name,” 3
“Book of the Table,” 14
Booth, J. L. C., 202
Borodino, Battle of, 90
_Bortsch_, 22, 115
Boswell, 82
_Boudin de Poulet à la Richelieu_, 225
_Bouillabaisse_, 42
Boulanger, 236
“Bourgeois Gentilhomme,” 234
Bradyphagia, 90
Braithwaite, 239
Brallaghan, 45
Briggs, Richard, 126
Brillat-Savarin, 11, 23, 175, 226
Bristol Waters, 40
“British Birds,” 45, 60, 72
British boy cooks, 239
British Waiters’ Association, 200
Brookfield, Chas., 75, 251
“Brookfield, Mrs., and Her Circle,” 251
Browne, Sir Thomas, 62
Browning, 42
Burke, Edmund, 7
Burns, 42
Byron, Lord, 62, 68
C
Cade, Jack, 63
Cadmus, 15
Café de la France, 232
_Cailles à la Mirepoix_, 222
“Cakes and Ale,” 151
_Canard à la Rouennaise_, 146, 147
Capus, Alfred, 147
Caraffa, Cardinal, 68
Carême, 5, 97, 135, 227, 234
Carlingford oysters, 166
Carlton Club, 251
„ Hotel, 22, 93, 138, 149
Carr, 88
Carroll, Lewis, 170, 189
“Causerie Culinaire,” 228
C. C. R., 61
Cecil, Hotel, 26
Cedd, Saint, 243
Celsinius, 224
Cervantes, 29
Champeaux’ Restaurant, 132
Chapelle, Vincent de la, 225
Chaptal, 70
Chariades, 112
Charles V of Spain, 206
_Chartreuse à la Cardinal_, 225
_Chartreuse à la Mauconseil_, 223
Chartreux, Prior of, 252
Chateaubriand, Origin of, 132
Chatillon-Plessis, 47
Chaucer, 62
Cheese recipe, 52
Cheremetoff, Prince, 187
“Cheshire Cheese,” Fleet Street, 31, 46
Chesterton, G. K., 129
_Chicorée de Bruxelles_, 103
Chinese Books on Behaviour, 110
„ menu, 119
„ restaurant, 118
Christmas cookery, 125
„ dinner, 128
„ menus, 127, 128
Cicero, 176
Clams, 117
Clark, Sir Andrew, 157
Cleopatra, 63
“Clinker, Humphry,” 6, 40
Close, 148
Clough, Arthur Henry, 43
Cochin, 49
Cogan, 67
Coigny, Duc de, 225
“Cloister and the Hearth,” 245
Colchester epitaph, 166
„ Oyster Feast, 180
Coleridge, S., 42
“Colin Clout,” 248
Collins, Mortimer, 45, 59, 72
Commodus, 224
“Compleat Cook,” 84
_Consommé Sarah Bernhardt_, 227
“Cook Book, The Poetical,” 43
“Cookery, Art of,” 44
Cookery and Food Association, 90
Cookery of snails, 211
„ Roman, 40
“Cook-maid’s Garland,” 54
“Cook’s Director,” 84
Cooper, E. H., 238
_Cordon Bleu_, 3
Corks, 193
Corned Beef, 37
Corneille, 108
_Cornez le diner_, 37
Cosmopolitan dining in London, 113, 117
_Côtelettes de Mouton à la Maintenon_, 221
Coventry, Lady, 104
“Coy Cook Maid, The,” 55
Crabbe, 42
“Cranford,” 28
_Crêtes de Coq_, 102
Criterion Restaurant, 34
_Croustades à la Coquelin_, 227
_Cruzada_, 246
_Cuisinière Poétique, la_, 42
“Culina Famulatrix Medicinæ,” 88
Culpepper, 258
“Cupboard Papers,” 16
Curry, 123
D
D’Albignac, 71
Dallas, E. S., 11, 14
_Dampfnudeln_, 115
Dartmoor mutton, 204
D’Aubigné, 71
Decoration of dinner-table, 159, 161
Defoe, Daniel, 212
“Deipnosophists, The,” 45
Delaney, Mrs., 206
“Délices de la Campagne,” 178
_Demi-deuil_, 23
“De Opsoniis,” 224
Derby-day dinner, 134
„ menu, 134
Desvergers, 75
“Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift,” 201
Dickens, Charles, 179, 180
Didius Julianus, 224
Didsbury, P. Z., 190
Dieting, 157
Dieudonné’s Restaurant, 114
Digestion, 92
Dilly, Edward and Charles, 82
_Diner, Le_, 43
Dining fads, 157
Dining in the open air, 95
Dinner, American, 117
„ Christmas, 128
„ Derby-day, 134
„ French, 114
„ German, 115
„ Indian, 124
„ Italian, 114, 123
„ Japanese, 141
„ King Edward’s, 134
„ Parisian, 132
„ Queen’s Guard, 130
„ Royal Wedding, 136
Dionysius, 39
Dipsychus, 43
“Dr. Salmon’s Cookery,” 84
Dodsley on butter, 43
Doran, Dr., 71
Douillet, Le Père, 224
Dresden, Battle of, 90
Driver’s oyster house, 171
Dryden, 42
Dumas, Alex., fils, 74
„ „ père, 4, 42, 228
E
Earl’s Court Exhibition, 95
Eating songs, 41
Echo Pits, Guildford, 209
Edgeworth, Miss, 258
Edinburgh Oyster Feast, 181
Einhorn, Dr. Max, 90
Elephants’ feet, 233
Elliott, Thos., of Tuzzliehope, 105
Elsey, F. H., 208, 209
_Emigré_ salad maker, 71
“English Art of Cookery,” 126
English Menu, 139
“English Physician Enlarged,” 258
“Englishman, An, in Paris,” 228
“Eothen,” 245
“Epicure’s Almanack,” 31
“Epicure’s Year Book,” 16
Epicureanism, 45
Epitaph on Colchester man, 166
Erasmus, 245
Escoffier, 138
_Escudella_, 115
_Estofado_, 115
_Etude sur la Moutarde_, 234
Euphagia, 90, 91
Euthymus, 112
Evans’s, Covent Garden, 34
Evelyn, John, 64, 209, 257
F
Faddism, 156
“Family Cook,” 84
Fasts: different kinds, 247
Feast of Shells, Edinburgh, 181
„ Oysters, Colchester, 180
Fernie, Dr. W. T., 207
_Filets de Lapereau à la Berri_, 222
_Filets de Sole à la Belle Otèro_, 227
_Filets de Sole en Goujon_, 145
_Filets de Volaille à la Bellevue_, 222
Fillets of kangaroo, 233
Fin Bec, 16
First oyster, 168, 169
_Fleisch Brühe_, 115
Fletcher, Horace, 156
Flowers, Japanese grammar of, 160
Food and Cookery Association, 241
“Fool’s Year, A,” 238
Fortnum and Mason, 153
Fourcroy, 70
Francatelli, 212
“Francillon,” 74
Francis of Assisi, St., 243
“Frazer’s Magazine,” 253
French dinner, 114
Fronto, Julius, 224
Fulvius Hirpinus, 177
G
Galen, 65
Galeazzo’s Lent, 261
Galitzine, Prince Léon, 143
Gallienne, R. de, 41
Gambrinus Restaurant, 115
Gardeton, César, 173
Garum, 40
Gascoign Powder, 78
Gaskell, Mrs., 28
_Gaspacho_, 115
“Gastronome, La,” 48
Gastronomes, Réunion des, 17
“Gastronomie pour rire,” 173
Gaudet, 71
Gautier, Th., 42
Gay, 42, 184
Ged, Wm., 255, 256
“Génie, Le, du Christianisme,” 133
Graham, Cunninghame, 29
Grammar of flowers, Japanese, 160
Grand International Hotel, Chicago, 53
“Grand Dictionnaire de la Cuisine,” 232
Gravelot, 49
Green peas from Algiers, 101
Greville Memoirs, 38
Grignon, 234
Gubbins, Mr., 151
Guildford, 209
Gunter’s, 31
“Gentlewoman’s Delight,” 67
George III, 10
„ IV, 57, 135
Gerard’s Herbal, 257
German dinner, 115
„ snails, 214
_Gigot à la Mailly_, 223
_Gigot à la Richelieu_, 225
Gilly-flowers, 66
Gipsies and snails, 207
Gladstone, Mr., 89
Globe Tavern, 126
Gloucestershire snails, 208
Godwin-Austen, Lt.-Col., 209
Goethe, 42, 106
Golden Cross Hotel, 31
Gorse, De la, 225
Gourmands, Almanach des, 44, 225
Gourmets, Female, 23
Goutant, Duc de, 225
H
Halcyons’ nests, 234
Hall, Herbert Byng, 167
Hampshire snails, 208
Hampton’s oyster house, 171
Hardy, Thomas, 170
Hare, W. R., 174
_Haricots verts gris_, 102
Harrison, Wm., 108
Hatchett’s Restaurant, 31
Havana, 141
“Haven of Health,” 67
Hayward, Abraham, q.c., 88
Hearn, Lafcadio, 57
Heine, 42
Helford natives, 166
_Helicin_, 207
_Helix caperata_, 204
„ _pomatia_, 208
Héloise and Abélard, 175
Henry VIII, 244
Heraldic fish, 254
Herbs, 256
Herb shops, 259
Hertford, Lord, 104
Herrick, Robert, 213
Hetzel, P. J., 80
Hieronymus, Saint, 63
Hill, Dr. John, 82
„ Miss, 9
Hirst, Francis W., 217
Hocco, 234
Hoffmann, 90
Holborn Restaurant, 34
Holbrook, Mr., 28
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 183
_Homard à l’Americaine_, 53
Honours, Musical, 36
Hood, Tom, 182
Horace, 176
Horsley, Canon, 209
Hôtel Chapeau Rouge, Dunkirk, 248
Hôtel de la Cloche et de la Bouteille, 233
Hotels, British, 98
Hot-weather dining, 77, 163, 164
Hot-weather menus, 163, 164
“Household of Sir Thomas More,” 93
“Housekeeper’s Oracle,” 6
_Huîtres de Marennes_, 171
„ _d’Ostende_, 171
Hunter, Dr., 88
Hutton, Professor, 217
Huxley, Professor, 168
I
“Illustrated Index of British Shells,” 208
“Impressions de Voyage,” 228
Indian dinner, 124
„ restaurant, 123
Isouard, Nicolo, 186
Italian dinner, 114
„ menu, 123
„ snails, 209
“Italie et la France,” 138
J
Jackanapes-on-horseback, 258
Japanese dinner, 141
„ grammar of flowers, 160
„ menu, 120, 141
„ salad, 74
Jaucourt, M. de, 9
Jenner, Dr., 52
Jerome K. Jerome, 200
Jerrold, Blanchard, 16
Jersey oysters, 166
John XXII, Pope, 244
Johnson, Dr., 82, 162
Jongmanns, Herr, 34
Joseph, 18, 38
“Jubber’s,” Bond Street, 31
June, Sonnet to, 60
Juniper Hall, 9
Juvenal, 176
K
Kabobs, 115
_Kalbskotlette_, 115
Kangaroo fillets, 233
_Karpfe in Bier_, 115
Keech, G., 51
Kenealy, Dr., 45
Kenelm, Sir Digby, 206
Kentish snails, 208
“Kettner’s Book of the Table,” 14
Kettner’s Restaurant, 114
“Kidder’s Receipts,” 84
“Killmansegg, Miss, and Her Golden Leg,” 182
King, Dr. Wm., 43, 68
King Edward’s dinner, 134
Kinglake, 245
King of snails, 217
Kitchen, Language of, 14
Kitchiner, Dr., 6, 81, 167
_Kokoro_, 57
_Koulbiac_, 115
Kron, Professor, 201
L
Lacroix, 231
_Lacticinia_, 247
Lady Honeywood’s snail water, 212
“Lady’s Companion,” 78
Lampriadas, 112
“Lancet, The,” 210
Landor, W. S., 42
Laperte, M., 175
Laroche, 74
_Latin de Cuisine_, 150
Latin menu, 150
Laughing at dinner, 92, 93
Laurens, 10
_Lauris_ asparagus, 101
“Lawyer’s Fortune, The,” 68
Leczinska, Marian, 222
Leczinski, King Stanislas, 225
Leighton, Lord, 168
Leipzig, Battle of, 90
“Lemery on Food,” 84
Lent menus, 249, 250
„ Galeazzo’s, 261
„ murders, 245
Lentillus, 112
Lettuce, 65
“Life is but a Melancholy Flower,” 50
Ligne, Prince de, 7
Lister, Dr., 44
Littré, 70
“Londoner’s Logbook,” 164
“London Gazette,” 212
London Tavern, 31
Long’s Hotel, Bond Street, 31
Louis XIV, 220
„ XV, 220
„ XVIII, 223
“Love’s Pilgrimage,” 87
Luce, 254
Luncheon baskets, 99
Lytton, Bulwer, 108
M
Macaroncello, 228
Macarius, Saint, 242
_Mâche_, 103
“Magistrate, The,” 192
Magny, 234
_Maigre_ menus, 249, 250
Maintenon, Madame de, 221
Mammon, Sir Epicure, 39
“Man and Superman,” 237
“Mappemonde Papistique,” 261
Maréchal Saxe, 148
Marie, 3
Markham, Gervase, 66
Marr, M. de la, 207
Martial, 176
Massonio, Salvatore, 70
Mathieu, 148
Matius, Julius, 224
Maupassant, Guy de, 237
Mayo, 82
Mayonnaise, 55
“Meals Medicinal,” 207
Melford, Miss Lydia, 40
Ménager, M., 5
Menon, 97, 224
Menu, “Academy,” 139
„ Acrostic, 138
„ “Alice in Wonderland,” 142
„ Ball-supper, 147
„ Banana, 142
„ Bavarian, 150
„ Carlton Hotel, 149
„ Chinese, 119
„ Christmas, 127, 128
„ Derby-day, 134
„ English, 139, 140
„ Galitzine, Prince, 144
„ Hot-weather, 163, 164
„ Indian, 124
„ Italian, 123
„ Japanese, 120, 141
„ Latin, 150
„ literal translation, 139
„ Parisian, 132
„ Picnic, 153
„ Prince’s Restaurant, 154
„ Queen’s Guard, 130
„ Royal Society of St. George, 140
„ Savoy Hotel, 145, 155
„ Spanish, 122
„ Swedish, 121
„ Windsor Castle, 136
Menus, 16, 17, 24
“Menus, Book of,” 16
“Menus for Lent,” 249, 250
„ _maigres_, 249, 250
Méry, 42
_Meyerbeer, Œufs à la_, 27
Millais, Sir J. E., 168
_Minestrone_, 114
“Minora Carmina,” 60
Mirabolant, 23
“Miscellanies: a Variety,” 1
“Modern Cook,” V. la Chapelle, 84, 212
Molière, 58, 91, 234
Monselet, Charles, 42
Monsiau, 49
Montaigne, 67
“Monte Cristo,” 233
Moore, Thomas, 42
Morgan, Lady, 3
Morris, Captain Charles, 57
Motor luncheons, 99
Mouret, Pierre, 136
Moustier, 225
Murders in Lent, 245
Murphy, Serjeant, 253
Murray, Grenville, 71
Music at restaurants, 31
Mutton, Boiled, 27
„ Dartmoor, 204
„ South Down, 204
“My Cookery Books,” 89
N
Napoleon, 89, 135, 226
“Nearly Seven,” 75
Nereus of Corinth, 112
Nesle, Marquis de, 223
Newcastle Snail Feast, 208
New England Indian pudding, 118
Nicolo, Isouard, 186
“Noctes Ambrosianæ,” 167
Norfolk, Duke of, 254
“North British Review,” 168
North, Christopher, 167
“Nunc est Cœnandum,” 61
O
Oddenino, 115
Okra, 117
“On the Search for a Dinner,” 174
Open-air dining, 95
Oribasius, 176
Onions, 112
Ow, Baron von, 150
Owenson, Sidney, 3
Oysters, American, 183
„ appropriate drinks, 172
„ Boiled, 174
„ Feast, Colchester, 180
„ „ Edinburgh, 181
„ Poor man’s, 209
„ whistling, 181
P
Pagani’s Restaurant, 114
_Pain à la d’Orléans_, 222
Palais Royal, 75
Parkinson, John, 257
Parisian menu, 132
_Pâté de Foie Gras_, 148
Pauillac lamb, 101
Pearls, 185
_Pêche Melba_, 227
“Pelham,” 108
Pennell, Mrs. Joseph, 89
_Perche à la Gaubert_, 227
Père-la-Chaise, 175
_Petites Bouchées à la Reine_, 222
Petrarch, 261
Philip, John, 179
“Pickwick Papers,” 179, 180
Picnic menu, 153
Picnics, 151
Pike, 254
Pinero, A. W., 192
_Pinna marina_, 185
“Plebeian Polished, The,” 6
Pliny, 176, 205
Plum pudding, 126
“Poems of Good Cheer,” 48
“Poetical Cook Book,” 43
Polignac, Marquis de, 225
_Pollio alla Contrabandista_, 114
Pompadour, 222
Poor man’s oyster, 209
_Potage à la Camerani_, 225
„ „ _Dumesnil_, 227
_Poularde à la Georges Sand_, 227
„ „ _Basilic_, 225
„ _de Bresse_, 102
_Poularde à la Montmorency_, 222
_Poule-au-pot Henri IV_, 145
_Poulet du Mans_, 102
„ _à la Marengo_, 226
„ „ _Villeroy_, 222
Powldoodies, 166
_Pré Salé_, 101
_Primeurs_, 101, 103
Prince’s Restaurant, 24, 154, 227
_Prinz Pückler_, 124
“Propos d’Art et de Cuisine,” 228
Prunier’s Restaurant, 211
Pryor, 42
_Purée Buffon_, 227
“Putting the change to bed,” 191
Q
“Quadragesimal Spirituel, Le,” 63
“Quarterly Review,” 88
Queen’s Guard dinner, 130
Queen Victoria, 136
Quixote, Don, 29
R
Rabelais, 70
Rabisha, Will, 178
Radunski, 197
Reade, Charles, 245
“Redgauntlet,” 256
Reform Club, 49
Reichemberg, 74
“Religio Medici,” 62
Restaurant, Chinese, 118
„ Indian, 123
„ manners, 29
„ music, 31
„ Origin of, 236
“Return of the Native,” 170
_Réunion des Gastronomes_, 17
Reynière, Grimod de la, 11, 44, 129, 225, 234
Rhys, C. C., 61
Richard II, 66
Richelieu, Cardinal, 225
_Ris d’Agneau à l’Amiral_, 152
Roche, M., 102
Rocher du Cancale, 174
Rogers, S., 42
Rohan, Cardinal, 148
_Romaine_, 103
Roman cookery, 40
Roqueplan, Nestor, 20
Rossini, 37
Rousseau, 70
Roxburghe Ballads, 54, 84, 257
Royal Society of St. George, 140
„ Wedding dinner, 136
“Rudder Grange,” 112
“Rules and Orders for Government,” 239
Rule’s oyster house, 171
Russell, G. W. E., 164
S
Saint Anthony, 63
„ Athanasius, 63
„ Cedd, 243
„ Francis of Assisi, 243
„ Hieronymus, 63
„ Macarius, 242
Sala, G. A., 11, 33, 86, 87, 177
“Salade d’Oranges,” 75
_Salade Rachel_, 227
Salad, 153
„ Laureateship, 72
„ to keep fresh, 100
„ _de la Grande Jeanne_, 79
„ _Japonaise_, 74
„ Thompson, Sir Henry, 79
„ “Vanity Fair,” 77
Sallets, 64, 67, 258
Sauce mayonnaise, 55
„ _à la Soubise_, 223
Savoy Hotel, 18, 145, 155
Saxe, Maréchal, 148
Scholl, Aurélien, 42
“Schoole of Vertue,” 110
Schools for waiters, 197
Schütze, Dr. J. F., 69
Scott, Sir Walter, 105, 256
Scott’s oyster house, 171
Seager, 110
Seiden, John, 260
“Select Conversations with an Uncle,” 10
Seneca, 176
Seven Sages of the Kitchen, 112
Seward, Miss, 82
Shakespeare, 42, 63, 86
Shaw, G. Bernard, 237
Ship Tavern, Charing Cross, 31
Shortreed, Mr., 105
Sidon, King of, 15
Simeon Stylites, 242
“Simple Susan,” 258
Sims, Geo. R., 53
Sixtus the Fifth, Pope, 69
Sjalouschine, 187
Skelton, 248
Smallage, 258
Smith, Adam, 217
Smith, Sydney, 43, 45
“Smith’s Cookery,” 84
_Smorgasbord_, 115
Snail Feast at Newcastle, 208
„ spirals, 217
Snails, 203
„ Artificial, 213
„ for America, 207
„ in Austria, 215
„ Close time for, 204
„ Cooking of, 211
„ first brought to England, 206
„ French, 203
„ in Germany, 214
„ in Gloucestershire, 208
„ from Italy, 209
„ in Hampshire, 208
„ in Kent, 208
„ King of, 217
„ Paris consumption, 203
„ _à la Provençale_, 233
„ in Surrey, 206
„ in Sussex, 206
„ as window-cleaners, 218
_Société des Amis des Livres_, 127
_Société Scientifique d’Hygiène, La_, 146
Society of Beef Steaks, 57
Society of St. George, 140
_Sole à la Pagani_, 114
Sonnet sequence, 60
“Sophie,” 4, 229
_Sot (Le) l’y laisse_, 129
Soubise, Prince de, 223
_Soupe à la Condé_, 223
„ „ _Lamartine_, 227
„ „ _Victor Hugo_, 227
“Soupers de la Cour, Les,” 96, 224
South Down mutton, 204
Sowerby, 208
Soyer, Alexis, 40, 49
Spanish menu, 122
Spenser, Edmund, 209
Spirals on snails, 217
“Splendid Shilling, The,” 179
Stahl, P. J., 80
Stella, 173
Stephens, Mrs. Joanna, 212
Stockton, Frank, 112
Strasburg, 148
Stschi, 115, 149
Stylites, Simeon, 242
Sublime Society of Beef Steaks, 57
“Sufferings of the Clergy,” 110
Suckling, Sir John, 46, 213
_Sullivan, Œufs à la_, 38
Surrey Archæological Museum, 209
Surrey Archæological Society, 208
Surrey snails, 206
Sussex snails, 206
Swan, to roast, 51
Swan Hotel, Weymouth, 51
Swedish menu, 121
Sweeting’s oyster house, 171
„ Rents, 31
Swift, Dean, 173
Sybarites, 110
T
“Tabella Cibaria,” 177
Table decoration, 159
“Table Talk,” 260
“Table Traits,” 71
Tachyphagia, 90
Talleyrand, 134
“Tatler, The,” 106, 179
Temple Coffee House, 126
Terrapin, 117
Thackeray, W. M., 23, 42, 46, 184
_Théâtre Français_, 74
Thompson, Sir Henry, 2, 38, 79, 128
Thudichum, Dr., 88
Toledo Council, 246
“Transmigration,” 88
“Triall of Feasting,” 93
“Trouble in the Balkans,” 202
Tschi, 149
Tsiganes, 35
“Turner’s Herbal,” 257
Turkey, Cookery of, 45
U
“Use and Abuse of Salads,” 69
Uzanne, Achille, 47
V
Vacchi, Allessandro, 5
Vaerst, Baron von, 63
Vallière, Duc de la, 225
“Vanity Fair” salad, 77
Varin, 75
Varro, 224
Vathek, 252
Véfour, 234
Vegetarians, 158
Véron, Dr., 4, 229
Villeroy, Duchesse de, 222
Villon, 42
Visconti, Galeazzo, 261
Vitellius, 224
_Vol-au-vent à la Nesle_, 223
Voltaire, 244
Vuillemot, D. J., 232
W
Wadsworth, J. H., 46
_Wagner, Œufs à la_, 37
Waiters, Athenian, 201
„ British Association of, 200
Waiters’ Schools, 197
Walker, Thomas, 11
„ Dr., 110
Waller, W. F., 82, 86
Walpole, Horace, 104
“Walrus and the Carpenter,” 170
Waring, Henry, 1
Washington, George, 183
Watts, G. F. (R.A.), 168
Weever, 255
Weller, Sam, 180
„ Mr., senior, 180
Wellington, Duke of, 162
Wells, H. G., 10
Westminster Chapter House, 255
Whipping a pig to death, 106
Whispered Pandores, 166
Whistling oyster, 181
White Hart Tavern, 126
Windsor Castle, 136
Window-cleaning snails, 218
Women at dinner, 20
Woodhouse, Emma, 28
Wordsworth, 32
Workmen’s Compensation Act, 213
Y
Yates, Edmund, 17
Yeo, Dr., 209
Z
Zacharias, Pope, 244
_Zakuska_, 115
PLYMOUTH: W. BRENDON AND SON, LTD., PRINTERS
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
_Crown 8vo. Price 3s. 6d. net._
THE CULT OF THE
CHAFING DISH
_CONTENTS._
I. THE CHAFING DISH.
II. PRELIMINARIES.
III. SOUPS.
IV. FISH.
V. FLESH AND FOWL.
VI. VEGETABLES AND SALADS.
VII. EGGS AND SAVOURIES.
VIII. SAUCES.
IX. SWEETS AND ODDMENTS.
X. AMENITIES OF THE TABLE.
INDEX.
LONDON: GAY & BIRD,
22 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND.
Transcriber’s Note:
Words and phrases in italics are surrounded by underscores, _like
this_. Words may have multiple spelling variations or inconsistent
hyphenation. Obsolete and alternative spellings were not unchanged.
Eight misspelled words were corrected. Final stops missing at the end
of sentences and abbreviations were added. Diacritics were adjusted, as
appropriate.
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