FOOD
The subject of diet--he prefers to call it diet--is apparently one of
unlimited interest to the Englishman. Meet him where you will, he is
ever ready to discuss, first, the weather, and then the things--that
is to say, the kinds of food--that agree with him. Indeed, you could
almost stake your life on extracting from any strange Englishman you
happen to come across some such statement as, "I can't abide eggs,"
or, "Veal always makes me bilious," within ten minutes of opening
up a conversation with him. The Englishman's house, we are told, is
his castle; and the Englishman's hobby, surely, is his digestion. In
point of fact, ninety-nine per cent. of adolescent and adult English
people suffer from chronic indigestion in a more or less severe form.
Flatulence, heartburn, colic, and "liver" are the Englishman's mortal
heritage. He is invariably troubled with some of them, and quite
commonly with all. If you relieved him of them he would scarcely thank
you, because he has nursed them from his youth up, and what he really
wants is amelioration, and not cure. Probably this is the reason why in
the midst of his wails and his unholy talk about diet he continues to
feed in precisely the grossest, greasiest, and least rational manner
that generations of bad feeders have been able to develop.
Of mornings, if you sojourn with an English family, you will be invited
to breakfast at half-past eight. Promptly at that hour they serve a
sort of sickly oatmeal soup, compounded apparently of milk and sugar,
which they call porridge. Then follow thick and piping-hot coffee with
'am and eggs, fish, or a chop, and bread and butter and marmalade as
a sort of wind-up. The man who tackles this menu goes to business
belching like a torn balloon. By eleven o'clock, however, he is ready
for a little snack--oysters and chablis, prawns on toast, a mouthful
of bread and cheese and a bottle of Bass, or something of that kind.
Then at half-past one there is lunch, practically a dinner of several
courses, or a cut from the joint, accompanied by what the English
euphoniously term "two veg." At tea-time your Englishman must needs
lave himself in a dish of Orange-Pekoe or Bohea, to the accompaniment
of lumps of cake. And at long and last comes dinner, the crowning
guzzle of the Englishman's day, and a function usually spread over a
couple of hours. It will be perceived that this gustatory programme or
routine has been copied from the French. The French put away two good
meals per diem, one at noon and the other in the evening, and there
is no reason why the English should not do the same. When you come to
think of it, dinner in the middle of the day is a low, under-bred,
undistinguished arrangement; also not to dine at night is to run the
risk of not losing one's figure, and of having the neighbours say that
one cannot afford it.
The French programme would be all very well if it were carried out
on French lines all through. But it is not. When you say "soup" in a
French restaurant, it means that you will be served with half a dozen
table-spoonfuls of _consomme_, or _petite marmite_, or _bisque_, as the
case may be. When the Englishman says "soup," he means enough thick
stock to wash a bus down. What is more, he gets it and swallows it. And
it is so all down the menu--too much of everything, and don't you think
you can put me off with your blooming homoeopathic portions. A liberal
table, no stint, good food, and plenty of it, is one of the bulwarks of
English respectability. That bad digestion and talks about diet follow
is nobody's fault.
This profusion--this overfood, as it were--has been brought to its
noblest expression by the English aristocracy, whose tables literally
groan with costly viands, whose spits are always turning, and whose
scullions and kitchen wenches are as an army. It is related that when
a certain duke found it necessary to retrench, and was advised by his
family solicitor to get rid of his fifth, sixth, and seventh cooks,
his grace remarked, "But ----, So-and-so, a man must have a biscuit!"
And the English middle class of course faithfully imitates to the best
of its powers the English upper class, and so on through the grades.
Among all classes there is a rooted prejudice against food that happens
to be cheap. To this day people who eat escallops are rather looked
down upon, for no other reason than that oysters run you into half a
crown a dozen, while you can get excellent escallops at ninepence. So
the herring, the whiting, and other kinds of cheap fish are considered
little better than offal by persons who can afford to pay for sole
and salmon. Turtle soup is infinitely to be preferred to any other
soup in the world because it is dearer, and champagne is drunk, not
because people like it, but because it looks swagger and testifies to
the possession of means. These gustatory idiosyncrasies are purely
English, and obviously they are the offspring of the English love of
display and superfluity.
Among the lower classes the general feeding, though cheaper, is just
as wasteful and just as gross. Excluding bread, it consists chiefly
of inferior cuts of butcher's meat with _charcuterie_ and dried fish
thrown in. It has been complained against the Scot that he is none
too clean a feeder, delighting hugely in inferior meats. Haggis is
held forth as a great exemplar in point. But it cannot be denied that
throughout England the one kind of emporium for the sale of comestibles
which flourishes and is unfailingly popular is the pork or ham-and-beef
shop. And here what do you obtain? Why, exactly the meats which
gentlemen of the type of Mr. Henley describe as offal. They include, in
addition to pork in and out of season, pig's feet, pig's heads, pig's
liver and kidneys, pig's blood sausages, the "savoury duck" or mess of
seasoned remnants, tripe boiled and raw, and chitterlings. So that
the haggis of Scotland is fairly well balanced. I am not suggesting
for a moment that the English display other than a proper judgment in
devouring these dainties. But if they will favour the pork shop and its
contents, they can scarcely expect to be set down for an angel-bread
and manna-eating people.
Perhaps the chief scandal about English feeding lies in the condition
of the English hotels. On the Continent an hotel is an establishment
for the accommodation of travellers requiring food and rest. In England
an hotel is an establishment for the accommodation of landlords and
waiters. "High class cuisine," says the tariff card, also "wines and
spirits of the best selected quality." Yet one's experience tells one
that, though the bill will be heavy, neither the cuisine nor the wines
will be more than passable, much less high class. A menu which is the
same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, bad cooking, careless service,
and a general lack of finish, are the things one may expect at an
English hotel with the tolerable certainty of not being disappointed.
To complain is to draw forth the ill-disguised contempt of bibulous
head-waiters and the stiff apologies of haughty proprietors. But
beyond that mortal man will never get, because the English hotel is an
immemorial and conservative institution, and as wise in its own conceit
as the ancient sphinx. Of late and in London attempts have been made to
organise hotels adapted to the best kind of requirement. So far as I am
aware, only two of them have really succeeded, and the charges at both
places are quite prohibitive.
Closely identified, one might almost say affiliated, to the English
hotel is the English railway-buffet, of which so much has been said
in song and story. The sheer horribleness of the "refreshments" here
provided has passed into a proverb. The English themselves admit that
if you wish to know the worst about refreshments, you should drink
the railway-buffet tea and partake of the railway-buffet sandwich.
They also admit that for abominations in the way of aerated waters,
milk, beer, and whisky, pastry, cakes, hard-boiled eggs, cold meats,
boiled chicken and ham, and chops and steaks from the grill, the
railway-buffet takes the palm; and they admit further that the Hebes
who dispense these comestibles to the hungry and howling mob have the
manners of duchesses. Yet the English without their railway-buffets
would be an utterly woebegone and miserable people. Put an Englishman
down at a strange railway-station with a half-hour wait before him.
He has but one resort: he inquires right off for the buffet, and
there he gorges and swizzles till the warning bell advises him of the
departure of his train. If there is no buffet, he becomes a dejected,
pallid man, and threatens to write to the newspapers. So long as the
railway-buffets continue to exist, the English digestion can never
aspire to perfection, even though English feeding and cooking outside
railway-stations became ideal; for a single "meal" of railway-buffet
viands would permanently disorganise the digestive capabilities of the
most ostrichy ostrich that ever walked on two legs.