Part 11

It would appear that in Foote’s time Scotland was not famous for a lavish hospitality. The old actor gave some glorious dinners to the first people in the city, and his preliminary proceedings thereto were intended to be highly satirical upon what he considered Scottish parsimony. Every night, before retiring to bed, he used to paper the curls of his wig with Scotch bank-notes,--promissory paper, as he said, of no value. When his cook waited on him at breakfast-time for orders, “Sam” gravely uncurled his locks, flung the papers to the attendant, as purchase-money for the necessary provisions, and sent her to market in a sedan-chair. But the old actor was as eccentric and ostentatious at his own table in London, as he was any where. When the wines were placed on the board, he solemnly, and as it were with a shade of disgust, inquired, “If any body drank port?” As no one dared to answer in the affirmative at his table, (though the owner took it “medicinally,”) he would direct the servant to “take away the ink!”

If Foote disliked port, Bentley, on the other hand, had a contempt for claret, “which,” said he, “would be port, if it could!” The latter individual was not like Flood, the Irishman, who used to raise his glass of claret aloft, with a cry, “If this be war, may we never have peace!”

Comparatively speaking, claret is a very modern wine. Indeed, none of the Bourdeaux wines were fashionable, that is, consumed in large quantities out of the province, before the reign of Louis XV. That Sovereign is said to have asked Richelieu if Bourdeaux wines were “drinkable.” “From father to son the Bourbon race,” says Bungener, in his incomparable work, “_Trois Sermons sous Louis XIV._,” ate and drank with relish; and it was no jest that among the three talents attributed by the old song to Henri IV., (their ancestor,) was numbered that of a “good drinker.” “None of them, however, with the exception of the Regent, carried it to excess; but what was not excess for them, would have been so for many others. Louis XIV., at the summit of his glory, and Louis XVI., surrounded by his jailers, submitted equally to the laws of their imperious appetite.”

When Louis XV. asked Richelieu if Bourdeaux wines were drinkable, the Duke answered him in terms which I may cite, because of their correctness. “Sire,” he replied, “they have, what they call, ‘white Sauterne,’ which, though far from being so good as that of Monrachet, or that of the little slopes in Burgundy, is still not to be despised. There is also a certain wine from Grave, which smacks of the flint, like an old carbine. It resembles Moselle wine, but keeps better. They have besides, in Medoc and Bazadois, two or three sorts of red wine, of which they boast a great deal. It is nectar fit for the gods, if one is to believe them. Yet it is certainly not comparable to the wine of Upper Burgundy. Its flavour is not bad, however, and it has an indescribable sort of dull, saturnine acid, which is not disagreeable. Besides, one can drink as much as one will. It puts people to sleep, and that is all!” “It puts people to sleep,” said the King: “send for a pipe of it!” This is as just a description of good, healthy Bourdeaux, as was that given by Sheridan, I believe, of Champagne: “It does not enter,” he said, “and steal your reason; it simply makes a runaway knock at a man’s head, and there’s an end of it!”

But we are indulging in too much wine at dinner. Let us return to the solids. Of the self-important personages who daily cross our path, perhaps the most important circumstance of their life is, that they have dined every day of it. But it is a necessity. All men must, or should; and sorrow of the saddest sort is subdued before the anguish of appetite. As Jules Janin says, in his “_Gaietés Champêtres_,” “Nemorin takes leave of Estelle, and returns home, overcome by hunger. Don Kyrie Eleison de Montauban, after running, all day long, after Mademoiselle Blaisir de-ma-vie, goes and knocks at the door of the neighbouring _château_, and asks to be invited to supper. Niobe herself, in the ‘Iliad,’ as afflicted as woman can be, does not forget, when night comes, to take a little refreshment.” If Seneca derided such doings, it was only after dinner, when appetite failed him. Human nature is made up of sentiment and hunger; and Hood’s sentimentalist was not unnatural with his epicurean reminiscences, when he said,--

“’Twas at Christmas, I think, that I met with Miss Chase,-- Yes, for Morris had ask’d me to dine; And I thought I had never beheld such a face, Or so noble a turkey and chine.”

This conglomeration of feeling and feeding is mixed up with all the acts of most importance in our lives; and though Bacchus, Cupid, Comus, and Diana be no longer the deities or the _beati_ of the earth, the substantial worship remains; and, as M. Brillat Savarin asserts, under the most serious of all beliefs, we celebrate by repasts not only births, baptisms, and marriages, but even interments.

The last-named writer fixes the era of dinners from the time when men, ceasing to live upon fruits, took to flesh; for then the family necessarily assembled to devour what had been slain and cooked. They know the pleasures of eating, which is the satisfaction of the animal appetite; but the true, refined pleasures of the table date only from the time when Prometheus fired the soul with heavenly flame, from which sprang intellect, with a host of radiant followers in its train. A good dinner sharpens wit, while it softens the heart. A hungry man is as slow at a joke as he is at a favour.

Nelson never knew the sensation of “fear,” but when he was asked to dine with a Mayor. He had a horror of great dinners generally: and he was right; for true intellectual enjoyment is seldom there. Horace, with his modest repasts and fair wine, was something of the same opinion as Horatio. Where the wine is indifferent, the guests too numerous and ill-assorted, the spirit heavy, the time short, and the repast too eagerly consumed, there is no dinner, in the legitimate sense of the word. I never so much admired one of the most hospitable of Amphitryons, my friend M. Watier, as when he once prefaced one of his exquisite dinners by saying, with a solemn smile, “_Mes amis, ne nous pressons pas!_” I thought of Talleyrand and his advice to a too willing Secretary:--“_Surtout, pas de zèle!_” The most accomplished professor of his time has laid down, as rules for securing to their utmost degree the prandial pleasures of table, that the guests do not exceed twelve, so that the conversation be general; that they be of varied occupations, but analogous tastes; that the lighting, cheerful cleanliness, and temperature of the dining-room be carefully considered; that the viands be exquisite rather than numerous, and the wines of first quality, each in its degree; the progression of the former from the more substantial to the more light; of the latter, from the more brilliant to the more perfumed. It is further enjoined that there be no accelerated movement; all the guests are to consider themselves as fellow-travellers, bound to reach one point at the same time. The rules for the “after-dinner” in the drawing-room are those more commonly observed in this country, with the exception that “punch” expired when lemons ceased to be dear at the Peace; but the concluding rule is worth noticing:--“That no one withdraw before eleven, and that all be asleep by midnight.”

I have spoken of the aids which the French nobility have given to table enjoyment. To them may be added the innovation introduced by Talleyrand, of offering Parmesan with soup, and presenting after it a glass of dry Madeira. Talleyrand had one thing in common with St. Peter,--he was hungry at the hour of mid-day, the dinner-time of the Jews; and he would have also come under the anathema in Ecclesiastes which is levelled against the Princes who eat in the morning.

Plato was rather shocked at those people of Italy who made two substantial meals daily; and Seneca was satisfied with one meal,--a dinner of bread and figs. The Roman Priests of Mars dined jollily and sumptuously in a secret room of the temple, and they would not be disturbed. They were like Baillie de Suffren, who, being waited on in India by a deputation, just as he was sitting down to dine, sent out word that his religion would not allow of his interrupting his repast; and the delegates retired, profoundly struck by the strictness of his conscience. The original dinner hour of the mediæval ages was, as I have elsewhere stated, ten o’clock, the _dixième heure_; hence the name. It was not till the reign of Louis XIV. that so late an hour as noon was fixed for the repast. It is clear, however, that we have not so much changed the hours as changed the names of our meals. A French historian shows us how a Dauphin of France dined (at ten o’clock) in the fifteenth century:--

“As an every-day fare, the Dauphin took for his dinner rice pottage, with leeks or cabbage, a piece of beef, another of salt pork, a dish of six hens or twelve pullets, divided in two, a piece of roast pork, cheese, and fruit.” The supper was nearly as plentiful; but, on particular days, the bill of fare was varied. It is added, that the Barons of the Court had always the half of the quantity of the Dauphin; the Knights, the quarter; and the Equerries and Chaplains, the eighth. “Take pride from Priests, and nothing remains,” once remarked an Encyclopædist to Voltaire. “Umph!” said Voltaire; “do you, then, reckon gluttony for nothing?” Gluttony, at least, does not seem to have characterized the Dauphin’s Chaplains, in the fifteenth century, seeing that they took an eighth where a Baron had half.

But there was a late Prince of Bourbon, who dined after a more singular fashion than that of the Dauphins, his ancestors. I allude to the Prince mentioned by Maurepas, and whose imagination was so sick, that he fancied himself a hare, and would not allow a bell to be rung, lest it should terrify him into the woods, where he might be shot by his own game-keepers, and afterwards served up at his own table. At another time, he had a fancy that he would look well dished up; and, dreaming himself a cauliflower, he stuck his feet in the mould of his kitchen-garden, and called upon his people to come and water him! At length, he pronounced himself dead, and refused to dine at all, as an insult to his spiritual entity. He would have died, had he not been visited by two friends, who introduced themselves as his late father, and the deceased Maréchal de Luxembourg; and who solemnly invited him to descend with them to the shades, and dine with the ghost of Maréchal Turenne. The melancholy Prince accepted with alacrity, and went down with them to a cellar already prepared for the banquet of the departed; and he not only made a hearty meal, but, as long as his fancy made of himself a ghost, he insisted every day on dining with congenial shadows in the coal-cellar! In spite of this monomaniacal fantasy, he was excessively shrewd in all matters of business, especially where his own interests were concerned.

Thus much--briefly and imperfectly, I fear--for Dinner Traits. In the next chapter we will put something on them. And as we have been drawing examples from folly, let us end this section by adding a maxim full of wisdom. “Be not made a beggar,” says _Ecclesiasticus_, “by banqueting upon borrowing, when thou hast nothing in thy purse.” If this maxim were generally adopted, there might be fewer dinners given, but there would be more dinners paid for. But some people are like the ancient Belgians, who borrowed, and, indeed, lent, upon promises of repayment in the world to come! Many a dinner-giver belongs to the class of the borrowing Belgians of antiquity. After all, there was, perhaps, more intended honesty in the compact than _we_ can distinguish. A compact far less honest was made some years ago by an Irish Baronet, who had given so many dinners for which he had not paid, that he was compelled to pledge his plate in order to raise means to satisfy the most pressing of his creditors. Some time subsequently, he induced the pawnbroker to lend him the plate for one evening, on hire; the pawnbroker’s men were to wait at the dinner in livery, and convey the silver back as soon as the repast was concluded. The dinner was given and enjoyed, and the company made the attendants drunk, helped the Baronet to pack up his forks, spoons, ladles, and épergnes, with which he set off for Paris, where some of them afterwards visited him at the little dinners he used to give in the Rue de Bourbon, and laughed over the matter as a very capital jest.

I will only add here the record of the fact, that sitting at table to drink, after dinner was over, was introduced by Margaret Atheling, the Saxon Queen of Scotland. She was shocked to see the Scottish gentlemen rise from table before _grace_ could be said by her Chaplain, Turgot; and she offered a cup of choice wine to all who would remain. Thence the fashion of hard drinking following the “thanksgiving.”

THE MATERIALS FOR DINING.

“All flesh is grass;” and grass has been the foundation of all feasts, in a double sense. It was not only a part of the early repast, in some shape or another, by derivation rather than immediately, but it formed the most ancient seats occupied by primitive and pastoral guests in very remote times. Dr. Johnson approved of asparagus being called “grass.” Romulus thought grass a sacred emblem, or he would not have suddenly converted his twelve lay foster-brothers into a priesthood to look after it. When Baber had defeated the Afghans of Kohat, they approached him in despair, and, according to their custom when in extremities, with grass between their teeth, to signify, as the imperial autobiographer says, “We are your oxen.” Baber treated them worse than oxen; for the amiable savage says, “All that were taken alive were beheaded by my order, and at the next halting-place we erected a minaret of their skulls.” And the conqueror dined pleasantly in front of the monument.

My friend, Captain Lionel da Costa, tells me, that on accompanying (_en amateur_) a French force on a razzia against an Arab tribe in Algeria, he witnessed the employment of grass as an emblem of defiance rather than of submission. The French officers had assembled the Arab Chiefs, and, telling them that the foreigners had filled up their wells, carried off their cattle, and burned their dwellings, exhorted them to submission, asking them what they would do further against a country so powerful as France? The Arabs, as if impelled simultaneously, stooped to the earth, plucked some scant blades of grass there growing, and began chewing the same in angry silence: this was all their reply, and by it they intimated that they would eat what the earth gave, like the beasts that are upon it, rather than surrender. Their enemies could not refrain from admiring and feeding such adversaries; their mute eloquence was worth more than any thing uttered to tyrants by Power’s statue of the Greek Slave, which, according to Mrs. Elizabeth Browning, “thunders white silence,”--a silence that must have been akin to that in the French Tragedy, “_silence qui se fit entendre_!”

Soup, as I have remarked, is not a bad preparation for the stomach. Some one calls it the “preface of a dinner,” adding, however, that a good work needs no preface. Soup is of very ancient date. Rebecca and Jacob ate of a pottage, in which the meat was cut into small bits _before_ the muscular fibres had cooled and become hardened, and stewed in milk, thickened with meal and herbs. The famous French gastronomist, the Marquis de Cussy, was orthodox in his gastronomy, fed well, but heeded the church. His favourite soup in Lent was an onion soup, composed of a score of small bulbs, well cleaned, sliced, and put into a stew-pan, with a lump of fresh butter and a little sugar. They were turned over the fire till they became of a fine golden colour, when they were moistened with broth, and the necessary quantity of bread added. Before the soup was served, its excellence was perfected by the addition of two small glasses of very old Cognac brandy. This Lent fare was, however, only the preface to salmon and asparagus, with which the orthodox epicure mortified his appetite.

The famous Carême did with the soups he discovered, what the most famous navigators have done with the new territories on which they were the first to land; namely, give them the names of the most illustrious contemporaries then existing. Royalty was honoured in the “_Potage Condé_;” music in that of “Boieldieu;” and the medical faculty, which Carême generally despised, in the “_Soupes à la Broussais_, _Roques_, and _Segalas_;” poetry was illustrated in the “_Lamartine_;” history in the “_Dumesnil_;” and philosophy in the “_Potage Buffon_.” The last name he thus bestowed, was to his last culinary inspiration just before death, when he conferred on a vegetable soup the name of “Victor Hugo.” It was after reading the “_Messéniennes_,” that he created the “_Matelotte à la Delavigne_;” and he paid the doctor who had cured him of an indigestion, by inventing the dish of fish which he called “_Perche à la Gaubert_.” And with this record we will put the fish on our own table.

“It is only the Arabs of the desert that affect to despise fish.” This eastern proverb is tantamount to the more homely one of, “The grapes are sour;” for the Arabs only affect to despise that which they cannot readily obtain. The Jews were prohibited from eating fishes without scales or fins. The Egyptian Priests cared not for fish of any sort, but they generally allowed the people to eat with what appetite they chose, of what the priesthood declined to taste. It is said in the legend, that St. Kevin lived by the fish he caught in the Lake of Glendaloch; and that when the celebrated beauty tempted him, she did it by flattery and suggestion:--

“‘You’re a rare hand at fishing,’ says Kate, ‘It’s yourself, dear, that knows how to hook them; But, when you have caught them, agrah! Don’t you want a young woman to cook them?’”

Gatis, Queen of Spain, was something like Mr. Lover’s “Kate;” for, if her subjects caught fish well, she it was who first taught them how to cook what they caught, and how to enjoy what they cooked.

When philosophers were occupied with inquiries touching the soul of an oyster, fish was probably not a popular diet. It certainly was not so in Greece, until a comparatively late period. Then fish became fashionable: the legislature secured their freshness by decreeing that no seller should sit down until he had sold his entire stock; sages discussed their qualities, and tragic writers introduced heroes holding dialogues on the qualities of fish-sauce. There was a Greek society at that day “against cruelty to fish,” by devouring what also, allegedly, made the devourer ferocious and inhuman; but general society did not allow its appetite to be influenced thereby.

The Romans were enthusiastic for the mullet. It was for them _the_ fish, _par excellence_. It was sometimes served up six pounds in weight, and such a fish was worth £60 sterling. It was cooked on the table, for the benefit and pleasure of the guests. In a glass vessel filled with brine made from water, the blood of the mackerel, and salt, the live mullet, stripped of its scales, was enclosed; and as its fine pink colour passed through its dying gradations, until paleness and death ensued, the _convives_ looked on admiringly, and lauded the spectacle.

The turbot was next in estimation; but as, occasionally, offending slaves were flung into the turbot preserves for the fish to feed upon, some gastronomists have affected to be horror-stricken at the idea of eating a _turbot à la Romaine_; quite forgetting that so many of our sea-fish, in their own domain, feed largely on the human bodies which accident, or what men call by that name, casts into the deep. Our own early ancestors in Britain were said to have entirely abstained from fish. In later days, however, here as in France, the finny tribes were protected by royal decrees; and certain fish were named--the sturgeon was one--as to be caught for the royal table alone. In the same days porpoises and seals were devoured by the commonalty, and the latter knew not the art of the cooks of Louis XIV., who could so dress fish as to give it the taste of any flesh they pleased to fix on as an object of imitation. By this means, the King in Lent, while he obeyed the church, enjoyed the gratification of feeling as though he were cheating Heaven,--and with impunity, too!

The most curious fish of which I have ever read, were those of a lake attached to a Burgundian convent, and which were always of the same number as the monks. If one of these sickened and died, the same circumstance occurred with the fish; and if a new brother appeared in the refectory, there was also sure to be found a new denizen in the pond. These fish were, of course, piously inclined; but they did not come up, in that respect, to the parrot of Cardinal Ascanius, which could not only repeat the Creed, but could maintain a thesis! I believe that the Burgundian fish were principally perch; and they _are_ an eccentric fish. Arthur Young says, that “about the year 1760, perch first appeared in all the lakes of Ireland and in the Shannon at the same time.”

As a singularity with respect to the cooking of fish, I may mention that observed by the Romans with the _sepia_, or “cuttle-fish.” They invariably took out the eyes before boiling it. It is in allusion to this custom that Trachalion says, in the _Rudens_,--

“_Age nunc jam, Jube oculos elidere, itidem ut sepiis faciunt coqui._”

I think I have read somewhere, that the cuttle-fish was esteemed a fitting sacrifice to the gods; but I do not know if pious people had their pet _sepiæ_, as they had their pet lambs and pigs, (“_Sunt domi agni et porci sacres_,” says the orthodox husband in the _Rudens_,) reared for the purpose of being offered at the altars.

The sturgeon is at this day, in China, reserved for the imperial table. At those of Greece it was introduced by sound of trumpet, and it was almost as esteemed a subject at those of Rome, until Vespasian condescended not to care for it, and to bring other fish into fashion. “It is _caviare_ to the general,” is a proverb which Shakspeare has popularized. The _caviare_ is the roe of the sturgeon dried; that of the larger sturgeon, which produces hundredweights of eggs, and tons of oil, is _caviare_ for the general, and is not worth eating. The delicate white _caviare_ is the produce of the smaller sturgeon, and it is highly esteemed by gastronomists. It forms a great portion of the food taken by the Greeks during their long Lent.