OYSTERS.
He brought them up out of the sea.--_Isaiah._
And his mouth was opened immediately.--_Luke_ i. 64.
BEAN SOUP.
"Jacob gave Esau bread and pottage of lentils."
FISH, STRIPED BASS.
We remember the fish we did eat freely.--_Numbers._
These with many stripes.--_Deuteronomy._
STEINBERGER CABINET.
Thou hast kept the good wine until now.--_John_ ii. 10.
BOILED CAPON.
Accept it always and in all places.--Acts xxiv. 3.
PIGEON BRAISE.
Pigeons such as he could get.--_Leviticus._
SUCCOTASH.
They brought corn and beans.--_Samuel._
QUAIL LARDED.
Even quail came.--_Exodus._
Abundantly moistened with fat.--_Isaiah._
LETTUCE SALAD.
A pleasant plant, green before the sun.--_Isaiah._
Pour oil upon it, pure oil, olive.--_Leviticus._
Oil and salt, without prescribing how much.--_Ezra_ vii. 22.
ICE CREAM.
Ice like morsels.--_Psalms._
CHEESE.
Carry these ten cheeses unto the captain.--_Samuel._
FRUITS.
All kind of fruits.--_Eccles._
COFFEE.
Last of all.--_Matthew_ xxi. 37.
They had made an end of eating.--_Amos_ vii. 2.
CIGARS.
Am become like dust and ashes.--_Job_ xxx. 19.
And so on. Written conundrums are good stimulants to conversation, and
dinner cards might be greatly historical, not too learned. A legend of
the day, as Lady Day, or Michaelmas, is not a bad promoter of talk. Or
one might allude to the calendar of dead kings and queens, or other
celebrities, or ask your preferences, or quote something from a
memoir, to find out that it is a birthday of Rossini or Goethe. All
these might be written on a dinner card, and will open the flood gates
of a frozen conversation.
Let each dinner giver weave a net out of the gossamer threads of her
own thoughts. It will be the web of the Lady of Shalott, and will bid
the shadows of pleasant memory to remain, not float "forever adown the
river," even toward "towered Camelot" where they may be lost.
Some opulent dinner giver once made the dinner card the vehicle of a
present, but this became rather burdensome. It was trying and
embarrassing to carry the gifts home, and the poorer entertainer
hesitated at the expense. The outlay had better come out of one's
brain, and the piquing of curiosity with a contradiction like this
take its place:--
"A lady gave me a gift which she had not,
And I received the gift, which I took not,
And if she take it back I grieve not."
But there is something more required to form the intellectual
components of a dinner than these instruments to stimulate curiosity
and give a fillip to thought. We must have variety.
Mrs. Jameson, the accomplished author of the "Legends of the Madonna"
gives the following description of an out-of-door dinner, which should
embolden the young American hostess to go and do likewise:--
"Yesterday we dined _al fresco_ in the Pamfili Gardens, in Rome, and
although our party was rather too large, it was well assorted, and the
day went off admirably. The queen of our feast was in high good humour
and irresistibly charming, Frattino very fascinating, T. caustic and
witty, W. lively and clever, J. mild, intelligent and elegant, V. as
usual quiet, sensible, and self-complacent, L. as absurd and assiduous
as ever.
"Everybody played their part well, each by a tacit convention
sacrificing to the _amour propre_ of his neighbour, each individual
really occupied with his own peculiar _rôle_, but all apparently happy
and mutually pleased. Vanity and selfishness, indifference and _ennui_
were veiled under a general mask of good humour and good breeding, and
the flowery bonds of politeness and gallantry held together those who
knew no common tie of thought or interest.
"Our luxurious dinner, washed down by a competent proportion of
Malvoisie and champagne, was spread upon the grass, which was
literally the flowery turf, being covered with violets, iris, and
anemones of every dye.
"For my own peculiar taste there were too many servants, too many
luxuries, too much fuss; but considering the style and number of our
party, it was all consistently and admirably managed. The grouping of
the company, picturesque because unpremeditated, the scenery around,
the arcades and bowers and columns and fountains had an air altogether
poetical and romantic, and put me in mind of some of Watteau's
beautiful garden pieces."
Now in this exquisite description Mrs. Jameson seems to me to have
given the intellectual components of a dinner. "The hostess,
good-humoured and charming, Frattino very fascinating, T. caustic and
witty, W. lively and clever, J. mild, intelligent, and elegant, V. as
usual quiet, sensible, and self-complacent, L. as absurd and as
assiduous as ever."
There was variety for you, and the three last were undoubtedly
listeners. In the next paragraph she covers more ground, and this is
most important:--
"Each by a tacit convention sacrificing to the _amour propre_ of his
neighbour."
That is an immortal phrase, for there can be no pleasant dinner when
this unselfishness is not shown. It was said by a witty Boston hostess
that she could never invite two well-known diners-out to the same
dinner, for each always silenced the other. You must not have too many
good talkers. The listeners, the receptive listeners, should outnumber
the talkers.
In England, the land of dinners, they have, of course, no end of
public, semi-official, and annual dinners,--as those of the Royal
Literary Fund, the Old Rugbians, the Artists Benevolent Fund, the
Regimental dinners, the banquets at the Liberal and the Cobden Club,
and the nice little dinners at the Star and Garter, winding up with
the annual fish dinner.
Now of all these the most popular and sought after is the annual
dinner of the Royal Academy. Few gratifications are more desired by
mortals than an invitation to this dinner. The president, Sir Frederic
Leighton, is handsome and popular. The dinner is representative in
character; one or more members of the Royal Family are present; the
Church, the Senate, the Bar, Medicine, Literature and Science, the
Army, the Navy, the City,--all these have their representatives in the
company.
Who would not say that this would be the most amusing dinner in
London? Intellect at its highest water mark is present. The _menu_ is
splendid. But I have heard one distinguished guest say that the thing
is over-freighted, the ship is too full, and the crowd of good things
makes a surfeit.
Dinners at the Lord Mayor's are said to be pleasant and fine specimens
of civic cheer, but the grand nights at the Middle Temple and others
of the Inns of Court are occasions of pleasant festivity.
We have nothing to do with these, however, except to read of them, and
to draw our conclusions. I know of no better use to which we can put
them than the same rereading which we gave Mrs. Jameson's
well-considered _menu_: "Each individual really occupied with his own
_rôle_, but all apparently happy and mutually pleased. Variety and
selfishness or indifference or _ennui_ well veiled under a general
mask of good humour and good breeding, and the flowery bands of
politeness and gallantry holding together those who knew no common tie
of thought and interest." It requires very civilized people to veil
their indifference and _ennui_ under a general mask of good humour.
To have unity, one must first have units; and to make an agreeable
dinner-party the hostess should invite agreeable people, and her
husband should be a good host; and here we must again compliment
England. An Englishman is churlish and distant, self-conscious and
prejudiced everywhere else but at his own table. He is a model host,
and a most agreeable guest. He is the most genial of creatures after
the soup and sherry. Indeed the English dinner is the keynote to all
that is best in the English character. An Englishman wishes to eat in
company.
How unlike the Spaniard, who never asks you to dinner. However
courtly and hospitable he may be at other times and other hours of the
day, he likes to drag his bone into a corner and gnaw it by himself.
The Frenchman, elegant, _soigné_, and economical, invites you to the
best-cooked dinner in the world, but there is not much of it. He
prefers to entertain you at a café. Country life in France is
delightful, but there is not that luxurious, open-handed entertaining
which obtains in England.
In Italy one is seldom admitted to the privacy of the family dinner.
It is a patriarchal affair. But when one is admitted one finds much
that is _simpatica_. The cookery is good, the service is perfect, the
dinner is short, the conversation gay and easy.
In making up a dinner with a view to its intellectual components,
avoid those tedious talkers who, having a theme, a system, or a fad to
air, always contrive to drag the conversation around to their view,
with the intention of concentrating the whole attention upon
themselves. One such man, called appropriately the Bore Constrictor of
conversation in a certain city, really drove people away from every
house to which he was invited; for they grew tired of hearing him talk
of that particular science in which he was an expert. Such a talker
could make the planet Jupiter a bore, and if the talker were of the
feminine gender how one would shun her verbosity.
"I called on Mrs. Marjoribanks yesterday," said a free lance once,
"and we had a little gossip about Copernicus." We do not care to have
anything quite so erudite, for if people are really very intimate with
Copernicus they do not mention it at dinner.
It is as impossible to say what makes the model diner-out as to
describe the soil which shall grow the best grapes. We feel it and we
enjoy it, but we can give no receipt for the production of the same.
As history, with exemplary truthfulness, has always painted man as
throwing off all the trouble of giving a dinner on his wife, why have
not our clever women appreciated the power of dinner-giving in
politics? Why are not our women greater politicians? Where is our Lady
Jersey, our Lady Palmerston, our Princess Belgioso? The Princess
Lieven, wife of the Russian Ambassador in London, was said to have
held the peace of Europe in the conduct of her _entrées_; and a
country-woman of our own is to-day supposed to influence the policy of
Germany largely by her dinners. From the polished and versatile
memoirs of the Grammonts, Walpoles, D'Azelios, Sydney Smith, and Lord
Houghton, how many an anecdote hinges on the efficacy of a dinner in
reconciling foes, and in the making of friends. How many a conspiracy
was hatched, no doubt, behind an aspic of plover's eggs or a _vol au
vent de volaille_. How many a budding ministry, according to Lord
Lammington, was brought to full power over a well-ordered table-cloth.
How many a war cloud dispelled by the proper temperature of the
Burgundy. It is related of Lord Lyndhurst that when somebody asked him
how to succeed in life, he answered, "Give good wine." A French
statesman would have answered, "Give good dinners." Talleyrand kept
the most renowned table of his day, quite as much for political as
hygienic reasons. At eighty years of age he still spent an hour every
morning with his _chef_, discussing the dishes to be served at dinner.
The Emperor Napoleon, who was no epicure, nor even a connoisseur, was
nevertheless pleased with Talleyrand's luxurious and refined
hospitality, in consequence of the impression it made on those who
were so fortunate as to partake of it. On the other hand, one
hesitates to contemplate the indigestions and bad English cooking
which must have hatched an Oliver Cromwell, or still earlier that
decadence of Italian cookery which made a Borgia possible.
Social leaders in all ages and countries have thus studied the tastes
and the intellectual aptitudes and capabilities of those whom they
have gathered about their boards; and Mythology would suggest that the
_petits soupers_ on high Olympus, enlivened by the "inextinguishable
laughter of the gods," had much to do with the politics of the Greek
heaven under Jupiter. Reading the Northern Saga in the same
connection, may not the vague and awful conceptions of cookery which
seem to have filled the Northern mind have had something to do with
the opera of Siegfried? Even the music of Wagner seems to have been
inspired by a draught from the skull of his enemy. It has the
fascination of clanging steel, and the mighty rustling of armour. The
wind sighs through the forest, and the ice-blast freezes the hearer.
The chasms of earth seem to open before us. But it has also the terror
of an indigestion, and the brooding horror of a nightmare from
drinking metheglia and eating half-roasted kid. The political aspect
of a Scandinavian heaven was always stormy. Listen to the Trilogy.
In America a hostess sure of her soups and her _entrées_, with such
talkers as she could command, could influence American political
movements--she might influence its music--by her dinners, and become
an enviable Lady Palmerston.
Old people are apt to say that there is a decay in the art of
conversation, that it is one of the lost arts. No doubt this is in a
measure true all over the world. A French _salon_ would be to-day an
impossibility for that very reason. It is no longer the fashion to
tell anecdotes, to try to be amusing. A person is considered a prig
who sits up to amuse the company. All this is bad; it is reactionary
after the drone of the Bore Constrictor. It is going on all over the
world. It is part of that hurry which has made us talk slang, the
jelly of speech, speech condensed and boiled down, easily transported,
and warranted to keep in all climates.
But there is a very pleasant _juste milieu_ between the stately,
perhaps starchy, anecdotist of the past and the easy and witty talker
of to-day, who may occasionally drop into slang, and what is more, may
permit a certain slovenliness of speech. There are certain mistakes in
English, made soberly, advisedly, and without fear of Lindley Murray,
which make one sigh for the proprieties of the past. The trouble is we
have no standard. Writers are always at work at the English language,
and yet many people say that it is at present the most irregular and
least understood of all languages.
The intellectual components of a successful dinner, should, if we may
quote Hawthorne, be illuminated with intellect, and softened by the
kindest emotions of the heart. To quote Mrs. Jameson, they must
combine the caustic and the witty, the lively and the clever, and even
the absurd, and the assiduous above all. Everybody must be unselfish
enough not to yawn, and never seem bored. They must be self-sacrificing,
but all apparently well-pleased. The intellectual components of a
dinner, like the condiments of a salad, must be of the best; and it is
for the hostess to mix them with the unerring tact and fine
discrimination of an American woman.