SOUPS AND STEWS
In another chapter of this book the change that has come over London
feeding has already been indicated. The times when respectability
edicted that one should eat only within the family circle, when all
that could be obtained abroad was a stodgy meal of bread and cheese at
a coffee-house, or the lightest refreshment at Vauxhall or Cremorne,
are long gone by; to-day, almost as many meals are consumed at
restaurants as under homely roofs. It was a long battle the restaurants
waged under the early banners of Hatchett’s or the Café Royal and,
strange to say, the Grand Hotel. Yes, once upon a time the Grand Hotel,
that ancestor, was the latest thing; in the eighties it was ‘the thing’
to lunch or stay at the Grand Hotel. But, in those days, ‘the thing’
was rather a scandalous thing, and if one lunched or dined away from
home one felt dissipated; one had to choose one’s company when taking
a meal thus, for the worst was easily thought of one in 1880, while
to-day, the best is hoped for. (There is, perhaps, no great difference
between the two attitudes.)
In those days the home was a British institution; it figured in the
solemn list which numbered suet pudding, the royal family, bustles,
Tennyson, the evangelical attitude, and chenille decoration of
mantelpieces. The home had its rights; indeed, it had all rights;
it was the place where you ought to want to be, and far from which
you would naturally feel remorse; it was the thing you had to ‘keep
together,’ the thing you had to ‘make,’ to ‘save’; your self-abnegation
should have told you that you had no rights except to add the pillar
of your person to those of the porch. It has gone, this Victorian
rectitude; it has gone the way of Dundreary whiskers and of weepers
round the hat; I suspect that the restaurant habit, as it is called,
has turned some of the sods for its grave. There is something relaxing
in a restaurant, at least to a people such as ours, afflicted with a
considerable sense of private licence and of public dignity. Restaurant
dining outrages in us a sort of modesty, and, like most Puritans, we
rather enjoy having our modesty outraged; it is the revenge of the
flesh, and it pleases us godly men to discover in ourselves a streak of
the devil. We feel this rather more in the foreign restaurants than in
the British; in the British eating-houses, where there is no menu, but
only a bill of fare, where understandable things, such as mock-turtle
soup, boiled mutton with caper sauce, and roly-poly are offered us,
we know too well where we are; we eat, instead of giving way to
greediness; by avoiding that temptation we avoid one of the cardinal
sins, and more’s the pity. In foreign restaurants, however, where
neither the name of the dish nor the form it assumes is understandable,
we can develop a sense of sin; we can do this because our feet are set
on foreign ways, all of which lead to Babylon. Foreign waiters address
us, and there is no virtue in their eyes; they look like assassins,
and it is thrilling to think that they may be assassins, or nihilists,
or grand-dukes. Foreigners dine at the tables; their women are too
smart to be good; the yellow-backed novels they bring in must surely be
undesirable; they are poorly clad, which proves that they lead sinful
lives; they are richly dressed, which points to evil courses. They are
foreign. Is not the Drury Lane villain foreign?
[Illustration:
SOHO MARKET]
From this sense of sin arose in the beginning the popularity of the
Soho restaurants. I do not know when they began to be popular. Some,
such as the Restaurant d’Italie, the Monico, the Villa Villa, are old
stagers, but when I first came to town their customers were mostly
men; if couples came they generally included a man who did not care
to take his womenkind to such places, but did not mind taking other
people’s womenkind. (Thus it worked out just the same in the end.)
The growth of London, which compelled men to live farther and farther
out, favoured the restaurants, for distant dormitories drive men to
proximate refectories. The Soho restaurant grew in numbers, together
with the Cabins, the Lyons’s, the J.P.’s, and others, but at the
same time, because they provided pleasant fare at low prices, they
gained advertisement from the men who first frequented them. Thus
the women heard of them, and they liked them immensely, for the Soho
restaurant provides exactly the sort of meal that many women want:
next to nothing, pleasantly served. So, in the last dozen years, they
have prospered enormously; the early ones, such as Brice’s, Le Diner
Français, Au Petit Riche, found many rivals such as the Moulin d’Or,
the Mont Blanc, Chantecler, Maxim’s, the Rendezvous, etc. Their career
has been curiously uniform. Nearly all have been started by a chef, a
waiter who had saved up a small working capital or married well. Being
foreigners, the proprietors liked good cooking, and in the beginning
every Soho restaurant offered a good meal. To-day there are still
a few where the proprietor circulates among the tables, asking you
whether you are satisfied, and naïvely begs congratulation, but that
state of mind is rare. So long as the customers were mainly foreign,
the standard was kept up: small, important, subtle things were done,
such as steaming vegetables instead of boiling them, such as putting
in salt while the meat cooked. But the Englishmen who came to lunch,
having advertised their wonderful find, grew very proud of it, began to
bring their friends, their sisters, and, nowadays, even their aunts.
They came in increasing numbers, and the proprietors discovered three
things: that there were in London more Londoners than foreigners; that
the Londoners were willing to pay more than the foreigners; that they
either didn’t know what they ate, or that they didn’t care. As very few
of the proprietors were in business as artists; as, moreover, they grew
discouraged when they went round the tables and asked people whether
they had enjoyed the stuffed mushrooms and were asked: ‘Were they
stuffed?’ they ceased to take pains. They found out what the English
customer wanted: paper flowers on the tables, Japanese fans, and dishes
with incomprehensible names. So, one after the other, they began to
cater for a purely English clientèle; a good many have discovered that
the English customers expect made-up meats instead of, say, roast beef,
and are willing to take those meats on trust; so the wise proprietor,
in many cases, makes up his menu from the dishes left over from the
night before at the Carlton or the Ritz. After all, he gives them what
they want: a dissipated atmosphere. Not long ago, I watched four school
mistresses in a state of considerable dissipation. They sat in the
little restaurant, laughing rather more shrilly than they would have at
Simpson’s, as if excited by the rather excessive effect of prettiness,
the mauve walls, the blue and yellow curtains, the pretty fringed
shades. Oh, how one understood Sally Bishop! How the mellow spirit of
Mr Temple Thurston brooded with folded wings over the little place! The
school mistresses listened hungrily for French, which was being spoken
by the attendants, and they kept a wary eye upon their fellow lunchers:
sober couples drinking claret; young men and women, the latter
unpowdered, the former oppressed by sartorial self-righteousness. There
was nothing against the lunch; it was a nice, ordinary little lunch;
the sort of well-cooked little lunch that could be turned out by the
gross, out of a machine, all the year round, every little lunch alike,
for ever and ever. But my school mistresses were tasting dissipation
while avoiding vice.
In true cooking one does not avoid vice. One courts vice. One says:
‘Eating is a sensuality, and we shall satisfy our senses as much as we
can. We shall sing hymns to it; people have sung hymns to drinking, why
not to eating? We are not ashamed of “feasting” our eyes and our ears;
why not our palates?’ Some people understand this. Mr Anatole France
sums it up well when analysing a Castelnaudary stew:--
‘The Castelnaudary stew contains the preserved thighs of geese,
whitened beans, bacon, and a little sausage. To be good it must have
been cooked lengthily upon a gentle fire. Clemence’s stew has been
cooking for twenty years. She puts into the stew sometimes goose or
bacon, sometimes sausage or beans, but it is always the same stew. The
foundation endures; this ancient and precious foundation gives the stew
the quality that in the picture of old Venetian masters you find in the
women’s amber flesh.’
If you are a proper person you will call this disgusting; you will feel
that this is an indecent subject, and that an author who dares to head
his chapter ‘Soups and Stews’ ought in another world to be chained
for a thousand years to the ghost of Colonel Newnham Davis. That is
a legacy of the past; not more than twenty years ago it was indeed
indecent to discuss food, and if a vulgarian did so, the only thing the
lady of the house could reply was: ‘Oh, really!’ The war has altered
that, and I am inclined to hope that people who endlessly discussed the
difference between butter and margarine, the advantages to be found
in neck of mutton, will maintain these not ignoble preoccupations. I
believe they will, for they were moving that way; they had already
left far behind the Victorian lady with a wasp waist who ‘daintily
pecked at her dinner like a little bird.’ They may one day adopt
Brillat-Savarin’s dictum: ‘Let me cook your ministers’ dishes, and they
will give you good laws.’
But, leaving aside Soho, which is, after all, only the culinary
frontier, we find that the restaurant has spread over the whole
of London, carrying everywhere its gospel of satisfaction. This
gospel takes various forms, for restaurants fall into different
classes according to their locality and their prices. There are the
pompous, like the Carlton, the Savoy, the Popular Café; there are the
distinguished, such as Claridge’s, Jules’s, Dieudonné’s; there are the
fanciful, such as Pagani, Verrey’s, old Gambrinus, Bellomo’s, Gustave,
the Savoyard, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Greek; there is the
slab-of-meat class, such as Gatti’s, Simpson’s, to say nothing of the
Shepherd’s Bush Restaurant, and the Tulse Hill Hotel; above all there
is the restaurant of the Joseph Lyons civilisation, the Strand Palace
Hotel, the Regent Palace, the Strand Corner House.
They all deserve their little word, and it is difficult to say of
each of them just what should be said, because they have so much in
common, yet are so far apart, like brothers and sisters. There is a
flavour of Joseph Lyons at the Savoy, while Gatti has Reggiori for a
little relative. Yet, when one comes to know them well, they are all
so different. No one, for instance, could mistake the Carlton for
the Savoy; both have a broad spaciousness born of their size, of the
comparative expensiveness of their meats; both are lofty and white and
clean; their glass is pretty good, and their plate so-so. But while the
Carlton maintains a certain air of having selected from among the not
very select, the Savoy shows little sign of having tried that much.
To lunch at the Savoy makes one feel not so much that one is among
the rich as among the well-to-do on short leave. The Savoy is sober;
its luxury is quieter than that of the Joseph Lyons restaurant; in a
way, with its top lights, its flowers, it recalls the Joseph Lyons
civilisation; the flowers are real, but not much more so; the band
is more discreet, but it plays the same tunes. Its population, too,
is different; at the Savoy, you do not see the young clerk, but you
do see what some of the young clerks will become if they are lucky;
many foreigners in a state of gormandise and bejewelment; rather dowdy
people, too, the well-off dowdy, whose sideboards must be taken to
pieces before they can be got into country cottages. The business
element is strong. Somehow, one tells a business man fairly easily;
he wears good clothes that nearly fit him; his hair is well cut, his
cheek is well shaved, but a consciousness of the barber’s art hangs
about his head; his elegance is not a natural product, it is one of the
goods which he produces; he misses ‘the line’ which some sediment of
aristocracy or musical-comedy upstart achieves better than will ever
the business man’s solidities. There is too much meat upon his cheeks;
you feel that he is a little too rich, just as his eyes are a little
too bright; he is like a very new knife that has not yet learned to cut.
[Illustration:
THE SAVOY]
Others, too, Americans, who are happier in those big hotels than any
of the English, because hotel-life is, in many of them, an acquired
characteristic. They are interesting, those Savoy Americans, abundant
women, exquisite girls made of beautifully tinted steel-plate, those
men with the square shoulders, square chins, square heads, cubic
cheeks; you know, without being told, that they are connected with the
cinema trade, or that they are producing a play by Mr Montague Glass
or Mr Bayard Veiller, or that they are selling many motor-cars, or
something like that. (The American who comes to Europe for the purpose
of exporting art to Pittsburg is not found at the Savoy; he goes to
Chelsea and Fitzroy Square.) And yet it is not a disagreeable place;
its breadth, the airy width of plate-glass that looks out upon the
Thames, the cheapness and the adequacy of its food, all these are part
of the new restaurant of the new civilisation, which has replaced the
little taverns in the little corners of the town. It is no use being
sentimental over the little restaurant, or, indeed, over anything
little: there are too many of us for anything little to be much more
than a survival. If restaurants did not feed us a thousand at a time,
they would never manage to feed us all.
One thinks of that in the small restaurants that have survived, such as
Verrey’s. To many people it seems a queer thing to lunch at Verrey’s;
it seems rather out of date, and, indeed, when one approaches that
frontage, painted a sort of faded 1850 blue and provided with coloured
glass, one has a sense of antiquity. Inside antiquity is still more
striking, for the big, square room under the skylight manages at the
same time to be drab in colour and Moorish Gothic in architecture. It
still has the many mirrors of the ’fifties, an air of being comfortably
off enough to afford to be dowdy. Rakish and dowdy! Can anything better
translate the amusements of two generations ago? To-day, Verrey’s
gives you a fair lunch, and at its café tables, which are somehow more
substantial than the café tables of Paris, you understand what England
thought the Continent must be like in the days of the Grand Tour.
There are other places, fanciful as Verrey’s. There is Bellomo’s, in
Jermyn Street, a modest, pleasant little place, a long, narrow back
room filled with agreeable young couples. Bellomo’s is rather like a
young-old man, with its panelled wainscoting, its wallpaper of faded
gold, and its moulded, early Victorian frieze. There is something solid
about its dumb waiters; Bellomo’s is somehow benevolent.
But then Verrey’s and Bellomo’s are within limited flights of fancy.
The curious gastronome will, in London, easily find queerer places and
foods. At Pagani’s he can come to understand that risotto may well be
eaten in Valhalla; at Gambrinus’s, the Regent Street one, of course,
he could, before the war, when it was German, find unexpected delight
in liver-sausage sandwiches, with perfectly sour gherkins, and, heaven
of heavens, really cold beer. In those days it was decorated with
antlers, enormous fanciful jugs, out of which you enormously drank the
frozen gold of that beer. I think it has become Belgian since the war;
I am not quite sure, for I went there only once after the transfer.
But the truly curious go not to foreigners like Pagani or Gambrinus,
or even to Gustave, where the foods are truly French, or to the
Savoyard, where they are French and eatable under the eye of strange
pictures; the truly curious go not to the foreigner, but to the
professional foreigner, to restaurants such as the Greek, the Chinese,
or the Japanese. Of these the Chinese is the most attractive. I mean
the Cathay, next door to the Monico, not the Chinese restaurants
in Limehouse, where nothing is eatable, and nothing is tragic, and
nothing is coloured, let Mr Thomas Burke say what he likes. A lunch
at the Chinese restaurant is really an adventure, for nearly all the
dishes are made of the same things, and yet they all taste different.
There is an admirable dish, hang-yang-kai-ting, made of fried chicken
with almonds and bamboo shoots. That is a simple one, and the curious
will find more profit in a dish the name of which I have forgotten,
which contains fried sliced pork, celery, beans, sprouts, mushrooms,
bamboo shoots, and green chutney. Eat that, and it is a very large,
overflowing, savoury portion; flavour it well with chop-suey (which you
can call liquid salt if you are a foreign devil). Eat it immediately
after chicken liver soup, and if you do not forget before swallowing
the bamboo shoots to chew, and chew, and chew, then a true mellowness
will be known to you. Also, do not forget the great bowl of boiled
rice, pure, white rice, perfectly dried, not sticky rice _à la A.B.C._,
but rice where every grain remembers that it has a personality. Don’t
ask for chopsticks: the best people in China do not use chopsticks;
they use forks. (There used to be a Chinese restaurant where they
provided chopsticks for the English; it was great fun watching them
pour their food down their sleeves with that conscious air of duty
that seems to overwhelm the Englishman experiencing pleasure.) And
don’t forget dessert, ginger in syrup, fire in the midst of sweetness,
like a red-haired girl; and ly-chee, large, sweet, white nuts in an
opalescent syrup, extraordinarily good.
But, in a way, all those places, the very rich and the very odd, are
running on their own ticket, and do not express the times in which
we live. Our modern times are the Strand Corner House. I should not
wonder if many of my readers had never been into the Strand Corner
House; that is, if they are incurious of life. If they repent their
acceptance of things as they are, they will find an unexpectedly
large building decorated with heavily flowered stucco mouldings,
with plate-glass, with stained glass, with panels of crimson satin.
They will find light, co-operative luxury; superposed tiers, bearing
crowds of people lunching on the top of one another’s heads, and at
the bottom of a deep well, a band that can be heard above the clatter
of twelve hundred pairs of jaws. A thousand people at a time really
eat all together at the Strand Corner House, and, in a way, no wonder.
The place is quite clean, not offensive in its appurtenances, and can
supply three courses for less than two shillings; the music is the
ordinary dance or sentimental music, the sort that makes you feel
friendly or affectionate as required. The public of the Strand Corner
House is, therefore, the world. Its variety is much greater than that
of any other place. One might think that this public would consist
exclusively of flappers and their escorts, and, indeed, the flapper
is prevalent, though she comes in threes and fours quite as much
as more ostentatiously with a ‘boy.’ Also the suburbs, middle-aged
couples, when the wife has been shopping in St Paul’s Churchyard and
has strayed down the Strand; unexpectedly you see people with an air of
modish vanity, dashing people who smoke cigarettes and drink claret,
damning both the expense and the consequences. Though very few of the
frequenters could be mistaken for members of the classes, none are
members of the masses; they seem to be in a state of social suspension;
they are, especially the girls, of a rather crystalline type. I mean
that you realise their good looks at once instead of by degrees. If
you look about you, you will not fail to find half a dozen faces that
can give you the knock ... only, if you look round the other way, you
will probably see another half a dozen faces that can give you exactly
the same knock, and when one is an old Londoner and has been getting
the knock all one’s life, well, one unfortunately comes to stand it
rather well.
These great crowds of young people with a little money in their pocket
and much zest in their hearts tend to fall into uniform types. The men
nearly all buy their collars at the Regent Street branches of city
hosiers; the girls seem to skim the lighter froth of the big West End
stores, except that Marshall’s knows them not. This produces a uniform
quality: they have to overtake the fashions, and so become a little
_outrées_.
Women, more readily than men, respond to the stratifications of
restaurants, because they are more adaptable. Their very clothes show
it; women are like cats, they have no bones, and easily suit themselves
to bell-mouthed skirt or hobble. The female form is infinitely
squashable and extensible; any fashion can transform it, and if a woman
has the wit to shun the becoming, she can always be in the fashion if
she dares. If she fails, it is because she does not dare to underline
her deficiency. If I were a woman and extraordinarily tall, I should
dress myself in vertical stripes; if I were very short and very
stout, I should insert the hoops of barrels under my skirt; I should
be hideous, but I should be It, for the essence of true fashion is
extremism. I said fashion, not elegance; that is quite another story,
but then, to be elegant you must be born as the greyhound, and if you
strive to elegance you are more likely to resemble the mouse. Fashion
is much easier.
[Illustration:
SHOPPING]
Not only in her clothes, but in herself, does the metropolitan girl
define her city. She is always the creature of the day, who heavily
overlays the creature of all time. In soups and stews she has little
part, for a woman is a poor partner at the table. She eats and drinks,
as a rule, without much science or much intentness; she eats too
little, she bolts; she does not realise that she is doing something
important and artistic. Oh, it is not that she is lifted high
above material desires, for, indeed, certain articles of food, such
as chocolates, certain drinks, such as liqueurs, make her accept the
society of the dullest and the most dreary, but such trifles are
merely the preludes and the coronals of the true soup and the true
stew. Still, she is the decoration and the charm of the table; when Mr
Lauzerte said that where there are no women there is no true elegance,
he was speaking the truth. In matters of food they care very little
what it is and very much what it looks. Also, because few of them
neglect an advantage and prove the old adage that what woman most
desires is mastery over man, they never ignore what they look upon as a
gross means of seduction. It was a woman, I think, who told another to
‘feed the brute.’ What an illusion! If you have to deal with a brute,
indeed, you can keep him quiet by feeding him, just as you mollify
Cerberus with a sop, but to keep a man quiet ... how unnecessary in the
early days of marriage! and how disastrous after! It is unconsciously,
I think, that women strive to please the palate of men, that is they
are unconscious of the effects of such a course. Unless they are very
unhappy they do not want to soothe the sullen creature; they wish to
produce in him a light and airy grace, a not very promising ambition.
For some men, who are in possession of all their senses, will feel
true gratitude, which is akin to love, to the one who knows how so to
flatter them. One of them said to me not long ago: ‘It makes the day
easier to feel that I shall go back to-night to a perfectly cooked
meal, and a perfectly dressed wife.’ I am not quite sure whether he
said that, or whether it was ‘a perfectly dressed wife, and a perfectly
cooked meal,’ but anyhow, it does not matter, for in that man’s mind
the two delights had grown mixed. That is what every woman knows, and
perhaps she is wise as well as humble in hoping to mingle with the
_potage velouté_ some of the old philtres of love.
VI
IN SEARCH OF VICE