In America the art of entertaining as compared with the same art in
England, in France, in Italy and in Germany may be said to be in its
infancy. But if it is, it is a very vigorous infant, perhaps a little
overfed. There is no such prodigality of food anywhere nor a more
genuinely hospitable people in the world than those descendants of the
Pilgrims and the Cavaliers who peopled the North and South of what we
are privileged to call the United States. Exiles from Fatherland
taught the Indians the words "Welcome!" and "What Cheer?"--a beautiful
and a noble prophecy. Well might it be the motto for our national
shield. We, who welcome to our broad garden-lands the hungry and the
needy of an overcrowded old world, can well appropriate the legend.
No stories of that old Biblical world of the patriarchs who lived in
tents have been forgotten in the New World. The Western settler who
placed before his hungry guest the last morsel of jerked meat, or
whose pale, overworked wife broiled the fish or the bird which had
just fallen before his unerring gun,--these people had mastered in
their way the first principle in the art of entertaining. They have
the hospitality of the heart. From that meal to a Newport dinner what
an infinite series of gradations!
Perhaps we may help those on the lower rungs of the ladder to mount
from one to the other. Perhaps we may hint at the poetry, the romance,
the history, the literature of entertaining; perhaps with practical
hints of how to feed our guests we may suggest where meat faileth to
feed the soul, and where intellect, wit, and taste come in.
American dinners are pronounced by foreign critics as overdone. The
great _too much_ is urged against us. We are a wasteful people as to
food; we should learn an elegant and a wise economy. In a French
family, eggs and lumps of sugar are counted. Economy is a part of the
art of entertaining; if judiciously studied it is far from
niggardliness. Such economy leads to judicious selection.
One has but to read the Odes of Horace to learn how much of the mind
can be appropriately devoted to the art of entertaining. Milton does
not disdain, in Paradise Lost, to give us the _menu_ of Eve's dinner
to the Angel. We find in all great poets and historians stories of
great feasts. And with us in the nineteenth century, dinner is not
alone a thing of twelve courses, it is the bright consummate flower of
the day, which brings us all together from our various fields of work.
It is the open sesame of the soul, the hour of repose, of amusement,
of innocent hilarity,--the hour which knits up the ravelled sleeve of
care. The body is carefully apparelled, the mind swept and garnished,
the brain prepared for fresh impress. It is said that no important
political movement was ever inaugurated without a dinner, and we may
fancifully state that no great poem, no novel, no philosophical
treatise, but has been made or marred by a dinner.
There is much entertaining, however, which is not eating. We do not
gorge ourselves, as in the days of Dr. Johnson, until the veins in the
forehead swell to bursting, but perhaps we are just as far from those
banquets which Horace describes,--a glass of Falernian, a kid roasted,
a bunch of grapes, and a rose, with good talk afterward. We have not
mingled enough of the honey of Hymettus with our cookery.
Lady Morgan described years ago a dinner at Baron Rothschild's in
Paris where the fineness of the napery, the beauty of the porcelain
and china, the light, digestible French dishes, seemed to her a great
improvement on the heaviness of an English dinner. That one paper is
said to have altered the whole fabric of English dinner-giving.
English dinners of to-day are superlatively good and agreeable in the
best houses, and although national English cookery is not equal to
that on the other side of the Channel, perhaps we could not have a
better model to follow. We can compass an "all round" mastery of the
art of entertaining if we choose.
It is not alone the wealth of America which can assist us, although
wealth is a good thing. It is our boundless resource, and the
capability, spirit, and generosity of our people. Venice alone at one
imperial moment of her success had such a chance as we have; she was
free, she was industrious, she was commercial, she was rich, she was
artistic. All the world paid her tribute. And we see on her walls
to-day, fixed there by the pencils of Tintoretto and Titian, what was
her idea of the art of entertaining. Poetry, painting, and music were
the hand-maidens of plenty; they wait upon those Godlike men and those
beautiful women. It is a saturnalia of colour, an apotheosis of plenty
with no vulgar excess, with no slumberous repletion. "'Tis but the
fool who loves excess," says our American Horace in his "Ode to an Old
Punch Bowl."
When we read Charles Lamb's "Essay on Roast Pig," Brillat Savarin's
grave and witty "Physiologie du Gout," Thackeray's "Fitz Boodle's
Professions," Sydney Smith's poetical recipe for a salad; when we read
Disraeli's description of dinners, or the immortal recipes for good
cheer which Dickens has scattered through his books, we learn how much
the better part of dinner is that which we do not eat, but only think
about. What a liberal education to hear the late Samuel Ward talk
about good dinners! Variety not vegetables, manners not meat, was his
motto. He invested the whole subject with a sort of classic elegance
and a humorous sense of responsibility. Anacreon and Charles Delmonico
seemed to mingle in his brain, and one would gladly now be able to
dine with him and Longfellow at their yearly Christmas dinner.
Cookery books, receipts, and _menus_ are apt to be of little use to
young housekeepers before they have mastered the great art of
entertaining. Then they are like the system of logarithms to the
mariner. Almost all young housekeepers are at sea without a chart. A
great, turbulent ocean of butchers, bakers and Irish servants swim
before their eyes. How grapple with that important question, "How
shall I give a dinner?" Who can help them? Shall we try?