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.