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

LES SENS: par Bertall

[Frontispiece

THE
GREEDY BOOK

A GASTRONOMICAL ANTHOLOGY

BY

FRANK SCHLOESSER

AUTHOR OF
“THE CULT OF THE CHAFING DISH”

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

LIST OF PLATES

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

One of the most ambitious efforts in the culinary-poetic line is, undoubtedly, “La Gastronome, ou l’homme des Champs à Table; poème didactique en quatre chants, par J. Berchoux, 1804,” wherein is set forth, at some length—firstly, the history of cooking; then the order of the services; and lastly, some fugitive pieces which allude to the gay science in choice and poetic terms. The book is enriched with some exquisite copper-plate engravings by Gravelot, Cochin, and Monsiau. The lines addressed by the author to his contemporaries warning them against the “repas monstreux des Grecs et des Romains” are full of repressed dignity and good sound common sense. One puts down the book with a sense of poetical-gastronomical repletion.

The poetic afflatus has possessed most great cooks, but none with more practical application than the immortal Alexis Soyer, the hero of the Crimea and the Reform Club, who, on the death of his wife, a clever amateur artist, wrote this simple and witty epitaph, “Soyez tranquille.” Gay’s poem on a knuckle of veal is also worthy of record, and an anonymous American poet has immortalized the duck in four pregnant verses.

A very modern poet who writes over the initials of M. T. P. has four charming verses on the propriety of ladies wearing their hats whilst dining. The second and third stanzas read as follows:—

Anchovies from Norwegian shores!

Sardines from sunny southern seas!

There’s naught my simple soul adores

One half so ardently as these.

And while I munch the well-fumed sprat,

Sit thou and watch and wear thy hat.

I need no entrée, want no bird,

Nor care for joints, or boiled or roast,

But my imagination’s stirred

By titillating things on toast.

Soft roes the commissariat

Shall serve me opposite thy hat.

Some folks who are not yet very old may remember a quaint part-song or quartette for male voices, entitled “Life is but a Melancholy Flower,” which was sung alternately somewhat in this fashion:—

Life is butter!

Melon!!

Cauliflower!!!

Life is but a melancholy flower!

It had much deserved success in its day.

An old recipe for the roasting of a swan is very fairly summed up in these lines:—

TO ROAST A SWAN

• Take three pounds of beef, beat fine in a mortar,
• Put it into the swan—that is, when you’ve caught her.
• Some pepper, salt, mace, some nutmeg, an onion,
• Will heighten the flavour in Gourmand’s opinion.
• Then tie it up tight with a small piece of tape,
• That the gravy and other things may not escape.
• A meal paste (rather stiff) should be laid on the breast,
• And some “whitey brown” paper should cover the rest.
• Fifteen minutes at least ere the swan you take down,
• Pull the paste off the bird that the breast may get brown.

THE GRAVY

• To the gravy of beef (good and strong) I opine
• You’ll be right if you add half a pint of port wine;
• Pour this through the swan—yes, quite through the belly,
• Then serve the whole up with some hot currant jelly.
• N.B.—The swan must not be skinned.

This poem has been attributed to Mr. George Keech, chef of the Gloucester Hotel at Weymouth—of course a famous breeding place for swans.

The following recipe for making a “soft” cheese is said to be by Dr. Jenner:—

• Would you make a soft cheese? Then I’ll tell you how.
• Take a gallon of milk quite fresh from the cow;
• Ere the rennet is added, the dairyman’s daughter
• Must throw in a quart of the clearest spring water.
• When perfectly curdled, so white and so nice,
• You must take it all out of the dish with a slice,
• And put it ’thout breaking with care in the vat,
• With a cheese-cloth at bottom—be sure to mind that.
• This delicate matter take care not to squeeze,
• But fill as the whey passes off by degrees.
• Next day you may turn it, and do not be loth
• To wipe it quite dry with a clean linen cloth.
• This must be done you cannot well doubt,
• As long as you see the whey oozing out.
• The cheese is now finished, and nice it will be,
• If enveloped in leaves of the green ashen tree.
• Or what will do better, at least full as well,
• In nettles just plucked from the bank of the dell.

In praise of the best food in the world—plain British roast and boiled—Mr. G. R. Sims has dilated in his weekly columns; a verse from his perfectly correct and strict “Ballade of New-Time Simpson’s” is well worth quoting:—

They do not call the saddle “selle”

That you with currant jelly eat;

Boiled fowl’s not à la Béchamel.

Your eyes no foreign phrases meet

That English waiters can’t repeat,

And so to Simpson’s I repair.

The English kitchen’s bad to beat,

Plain roast and boiled are British fare.

The “Envoi,” which commences most cleverly according to traditional rule, runs as follows:—

Prince’s and Carlton, you I greet,

Savoy, I own your chef is rare;

But you with Simpson’s shall compete.

Plain roast and boiled are British fare.

To come back to recipes, here is one for the famous Homard à l’Amèricaine written by the chef of the Grand International Hotel at Chicago, who is quite annoyed with M. Rostand for his obvious plagiarism in “Cyrano de Bergerac.”

COMMENT ON FAIT LE HOMARD À L’AMÉRICAINE

Prenez un homard qu’on vend

Bien vivant;

Avant qu’il se carapate

Sans vous laisser attendrir,

Sans souffrir,

Détachez-lui chaque patte.

Faites alors revenir

Et blondir

Du beurre en la casserole;

Fourrez-y votre homard

Sans retard,

Mais avant qu’il ne rissole

Ajoutez un court-bouillon

De bouillon

A vous brûler la bedaine!

Faites cuire. Servez-le

Et c’est le

Homard à l’américaine!

Many curious old poems may be found by careful delving in the books our great-grandfathers used to read, and which we ought to read, but don’t. For instance, the Roxborough Ballads contain a delightful poem briefly entitled “The Cook-Maid’s Garland: or the out-of-the-way Devil: shewing how four highwaymen were bit by an ingenious cook-maid” (1720). There is a still older ballad in the same collection called “The Coy Cook-Maid, who was courted simultaneously by Irish, Welch, Spanish, French and Dutch, but at last was conquered by a poor English Taylor”; this is in blackletter, and is dated 1685.

A French lady with a happy knack of verse has written the following rhymed recipe for

SAUCE MAYONNAISE

Dans un grand bol en porcelaine

Un jaune d’œuf étant placé,

Sel et poivre, vinaigre à peine,

Et le travail est commencé.

On verse l’huile goutte à goutte;

La mayonnaise prend du corps,

Epaississant, sans qu’on s’en doute,

En flot luisant, jusqu’aux bords.

Quand vous jugez que l’abondance

Peut suffire à votre repas,

Au frais mettez-la par prudence....

Tout est fini; n’y touchez pas!

Under the title of “Women I have never married,” O. S. of “Punch” writes delightfully on the lady who knew too much about eating. This is one of his verses:—

She came. She passed a final word

Upon the bisque, the Mornay sole,

The poulet (said she thought the bird

Shewed at its best en casserole);

She found the parfait “quite first-rate,”

Summed up the chef as “rather handy,”

Knew the Lafitte for ’88,

And twice encored a fine old brandy.

The following couplets are by—I think—an American author.

Always have lobster sauce with salmon,

And put mint sauce your roasted lamb on.

In dressing salad mind this law,

With two hard yolks use one that’s raw.

Roast veal with rich stock gravy serve,

And pickled mushrooms, too, observe.

Roast pork, sans apple sauce, past doubt,

Is “Hamlet” with the Prince left out.

Your mutton chops with paper cover

And make them amber-brown all over.

Broil lightly your beefsteak. To fry it

Argues contempt of Christian diet.

To roast spring chickens is to spoil ’em;

Just split ’em down the back and broil ’em.

It gives true epicures the vapours