Part 11
But it must not be supposed that rich German citizens of the United States do not know how to give a good dinner. Cosmopolitan in everything else, these, the best colonists whom Europe has sent to us, make good soldiers, good statesmen, and good entertainers. They do not insist that we shall eat pig and prune sauce. No, they give us the most affluent bill of fare which the market affords. They give us a fine dining-room in which to eat it, and they offer as no other men can "a tankard of Assmanschausen."
They give us, as a nation, a valuable present in mineral water. The Apollinaris bubbling up near the Rhine seems sent by Heaven to avert that gout and rheumatism which are the terrible after-dinner penalties of those who like too well the noble Rhine wines.
THE INFLUENCE OF GOOD CHEER ON AUTHORS AND GENIUSES.
"The ancient poets and their learned rhymes We still admire in these our later times, And celebrate their fames. Thus, though they die Their names can never taste mortality. These had their helps. They wrote of gods and kings, Of temples, battles, and such gallant things. And now we ask what noble meat and drink Can help to make man work, to make him think."
"Pray, on what meat hath this our Cæsar fed?"
We should have a higher estimate of the value of a knowledge of cookery and of all the arts of entertaining, did we sufficiently realize that the style of Carlyle was owing to dyspepsia! At the age of fifteen he entered Edinburgh University in order to fit himself for the pulpit. He studied for many months to that end, but his vocation refused to be clear. The ministry grew alien to his mind. Finally he shut himself up, and as he himself says, wrestled with the Lord and all the imps of darkness. Carlyle believed in a personal Devil, not tasting food or sleeping for three days and nights, and then terminated the struggle by resolving to pursue literature. What mental revolution he underwent, he says he never could understand; all that he knew was that he came out with that "dommed dyspepsia,"--his Scotch way of pronouncing a stronger word.
Some writer says that this anecdote solves the problem of Carlyle. The force, earnestness, and eloquence of his writings were born of a fine, free intellect. Then came despondency, rage, and bitterness, springing from dyspepsia, which had been his haunting demon from the first, releasing him at intervals only to assail and torture him the "more for each surcease."
Most of his works come under the head of the Literature of Dyspepsia, and can be as plainly traced to it as to the growth of his understanding or the sincerity of his convictions. Who does not recognize, in the oddities of the trials and spiritual agonies of Herr Teufelsdröckh, the author himself under a thin disguise, and the promotings and promptings, and phenomena of censuring indigestion? All through the "Sartor Resartus" it is evident that the gastric juices of the illustrious iconoclast are insufficient; that while he is railing at humanity he is suffering from gastritis, while he is prophesying that the race will come to naught but selfishness and stupidity he is undergoing gastrodynia, or, as it is commonly called, stomachic cramp.
I do not know who wrote that masterly criticism, but evidently some man who had had a good dinner.
But Carlyle gets better and writes his noble essay on Robert Burns, the life of John Sterling, Oliver Cromwell's letters and speeches. Then he is at his best; sees man as a brother, handicapped with circumstances, riveted to temperament perhaps, but in spite of all shortcomings and neglected opportunities, still a brother, demanding respect, deserving of help. How different Carlyle would have been, as a man and as a writer, with nutritive organs capable of continually and regularly performing their functions. Dyspepsia was his worst enemy, as it has been that of many of his readers. Every mouthful he ate must have been a gastric Nemesis for sins of opinion, and of heresies against humanity. His very style is the result of indigestion,--an excess of ill-chosen, ill-prepared German fare in a British stomach, affording a strange sustenance, which, like some diseases, keep a man alive, but which pain while they sustain.
What a different genius was Prescott, who had a good dinner every day of his life, who was brought up from boyhood in a luxurious old Boston household where was the perfection of cookery!
Sydney Smith sent word to Prescott after he wrote "Ferdinand and Isabella,"--
"Tell Prescott to come here and we will drown him in turtle soup."
"Say that I can swim in those seas," was Prescott's witty rejoinder.
Mr. Prescott was fifty-three years of age when he visited England; he was extremely handsome, courteous, and very much a man of the world.
"We grow like what we eat. Bad food depresses, Good food exalts us like an inspiration."
Mr. Prescott had been inspired by good food, as any one can see who reads that noble work "Ferdinand and Isabella." In England this accomplished man was received by Lady Lyell, to whom he was much attached. The account of English hospitality which he gives throws a rosy light on the history of the art of entertaining:
"I returned last night from the Horners, Lady Lyell's parents and sisters, a very accomplished and happy family circle. They have a small house, with a pretty lawn stretching between it and the Thames, that forms a silver edging to the close-shaven green. The family gather under the old trees on the little shady carpet, which is sweet with the perfume of flowery shrubs. And you see sails gliding by and stately swans, of which there are hundreds on the river. The next Sunday, after dinner, which we took at four o'clock, we strolled through Hampton Court and its royal park. The next day we took our picnic at Box Hill. On Friday to dinner at Sir Robert Peel's and to an evening party at Lady S----'s. I went at eleven and found myself in a brilliant saloon filled with people amongst whom I did not recognize a familiar face. You may go to ten parties in London, be introduced to a score of persons in each, and on going to the eleventh not see a face that you have ever seen before, so large is the society of the great metropolis. I was soon put at my ease, however, by the cordial reception of Lord and Lady C----, who introduced me to a great number of persons."
This alone would prove how great was Prescott's popularity, for in London, people, as a rule, are not introduced.
"In the crowd I saw an old gentleman, nicely made up, stooping a good deal, covered with orders, and making his way easily along, as all, young and old, seemed to treat him with deference. It was the Duke of Wellington, the old Iron Duke. He likes the attention he receives in this social way. He wore round his neck the order of the Golden Fleece, on his coat the order of the Garter. He is, in truth, the lion of England, not to say of all Europe."
This beautiful little _genre_ picture of the Iron Duke was written in the year 1850. Forty years later General Grant was received at Apsley House by the son of the great Duke of Wellington, the second Duke, who opened the famous Waterloo room and toasted the modest American as the greatest soldier of modern times. Mr. Prescott goes on to say,--
"We had a superb dinner at Sir Robert Peel's, four and twenty guests. It was served in the long picture-gallery. The windows of the gallery look out upon the Thames, its beautiful stone bridges with lofty arches, Westminster Abbey with its towers, and the living panorama on the water. The opposite windows look on the green gardens behind the Palace of Whitehall, which were laid out by Cardinal Wolsey, and near the spot where Charles I. lived, and lost his life on the scaffold. The gallery is full of masterpieces, especially Dutch and Flemish, amongst them the famous _Chapeau de Paille_, which cost Sir Robert over five thousand pounds. In his dining-room were also superb pictures, the famous one by Wilkie, of John Knox preaching, which did not come up to the idea I had formed of it from the engraving. There was a portrait of Dr. Johnson by Reynolds, the portrait owned by Mrs. Thrale and engraved for the Dictionary; what a bijou!
"We sat at dinner looking out on the moving Thames. We dined at eight, but the twilight lingers here until half-past nine at this summer season. Sir Robert was exceedingly courteous to his guests, told some good stories, showed us his autographs, amongst which was the celebrated one written by Nelson, in which he says, 'If I die "Frigate" will be found written on my heart.'"
Mr. Prescott's letter to his daughter points out the strange difference between the life of a girl in England and a girl here.
"I think on reflection, dear Lizzy, that you did well not to come with me. Girls of your age [she was then nineteen] make no great figure in society. One never, or very rarely, meets them at dinner parties, and they are not so numerous at evening parties as with us, unless it be at balls. Six out of seven women you meet are over thirty, and many of them over forty or fifty, not to say sixty; the older they are, the more they are dressed and diamonded. Young girls dress less, and wear very little ornament indeed."
What a commentary this is on our American way of doing things,--where young girls rule society, put their mothers in the background, and wear too fine clothes.
Dr. Prescott was of course presented at Court, and his account of it is delightful:--
"Well! the presentation has come off, and I will give you some account of it before going to dine with Lord Fitzwilliam. This morning I breakfasted with Mr. Monckton Milnes, where I met Macaulay the third time this week. We had also Lord Lyttleton, an excellent scholar, Gladstone, and Lord W. Germains, a sensible and agreeable person, and two or three others. We had a lively talk, but I left early for the Court affair. I was at Mr. Abbott Lawrence's at one in my costume,--a _chapeau_ with gold lace, blue coat, and white trowsers, begilded with buttons and metal, a sword, and patent-leather-boots. I was a figure indeed! but I had enough to keep me in countenance. I spent an hour yesterday with Lady M. getting instructions for demeaning myself. The greatest danger was that I should be tripped up by my sword. On reaching St. James Place we passed upstairs through files of the Guard, beefeaters, and were shown into a large saloon richly hung with crimson silk, and with some fine portraits of the family of George III. It was amusing, as we waited there an hour, to see the arrival of the different persons, diplomatic, military, and courtiers, all men and women blazing in their stock of princely finery, and such a power of diamonds, pearls, emeralds, and laces, the trains of the ladies' dresses several yards in length. Some of the ladies wore coronets of diamonds, which covered the greater part of the head. I counted on Lady D----'s head two strings of diamonds rising gradually from the size of a fourpence to the size of an English shilling, and thick in proportion. The dress of the Duchess of D---- was studded with diamonds as large as nutmegs. The young ladies dressed very plainly. I tell this for Lizzy's especial benefit. The company were permitted to pass one by one into the presence-chamber, a room of about the same size as the other, with gorgeous canopy and throne, at the farther end of which stood the little Queen and her Consort, surrounded by her Court. She was rather simply dressed, but he was in Field-Marshal's uniform, and covered, I should think, with all the orders of Europe. He is a good-looking person, but by no means so good-looking as you are given to expect from his pictures. The Queen is better looking than you might expect. I was presented by our minister, by the order of the Chamberlain, as the historian of Ferdinand and Isabella and made my profound obeisance to her Majesty who made a dignified courtesy. I made the same low bow to his Princeship, and then bowed myself out of the circle without my sword tripping up my heels. As I was drawing off, Lord Carlisle, who was standing on the outer edge, called me to him and kept me by his side telling me the names of the different lords and ladies who, after paying their obeisance to the Queen, passed out before us."
Mr. Monckton Milnes became Lord Houghton, and I had great pleasure in knowing him well many years after this. He told me, what our American historian was too modest to tell, how well Mr. Prescott appeared in London. Lionized to death, as the English alone can lionize, Mr. Prescott never lost his modest self-possession. He was everywhere remarked for his beauty, his fine manner, and his knowledge of the usages of good society. But then, in 1887 the English went equally wild, even more so, over Buffalo Bill, and probably preferred him.
Mr. Prescott was entertained at Cuddeston Palace, the residence of Bishop Wilberforce, the famous "Soapy Sam," from the fact, as he said himself, that he "was always in hot water, and always came out cleaner than he went in." This witty and accomplished prelate was very much pleased with our American scholar, and gave him a hearty welcome. It will sound curiously enough now, that Mr. Prescott found his Episcopal views very high, and says, "The service was performed with a ceremony quite Roman Catholic." The Bishop of Oxford would, were he living now, be called low church,--so much do terms vary in different ages. Truly the world moves!
I was in my youth entertained at the house of Mr. Prescott, at Nahant, and allowed to see his workroom and the machinery with which he wrote. He gave me, and I have it still, a paper which he wrote for me with the wired plate which the blind use, for he could scarcely see at all.
He was master of the art of entertaining. How charming he was at dinner at his own house; how pleasantly he made one forget his greatness, except that a supreme simplicity seems always to accompany true greatness. He had a regularity in his habits which would in a less amiable man have interfered with his agreeability, but with him it was most fascinating, as it seemed like musical chords set to noble words.
It would be pleasant to record the triumphs of Mr Webster, Mr. Motley, Mr. Lowell, Mr. Phelps, Mr. Evarts, Mr. Depew, and many another great American in England, but that, while a subject for national pride, scarcely comes within the scope of this little book.
It would seem, however, that our orators, however fed, have compassed the accomplishment of after-dinner speaking, which is so much appreciated in England, and it is to be hoped that no "dommed dyspepsia" from badly cooked food will dim the oratory of the future.
It is quite true that a witty and full talker will be silenced if he is placed before a bad dinner, one which is palpably pretentious but not well cooked, and villanously served. It is impossible for the really conscientious diner-out, who respects his digestion, whose religion is his dinner, to talk much or laugh much, if his gormandize is wounded. Even if he wills to talk, in order not to lose his reputation, his speech will be a "muddy flood of saponaceous blather," instead of his usual brilliant flow of anecdote and repartee.
Not all great men have, however, felt the influence of food as an inspirer. Dr. Johnson was great although he was a horrible feeder; and at the other extreme was General Grant, so abstemious that he once told me that he did not know the sensation of hunger; that he could go three days without food. At the splendid banquets given to him he rarely ate much, but noticed the people and the surroundings, great hero that he was.
Thackeray, Disraeli, and Dickens have given us the most appreciative descriptions of the art of entertaining, and were men deeply sensible of the charms of a good dinner.
Charles Lamb has been the poet of the homely and the comfortable side of good eating; he records for us in immortal prose and poetry what roast pig and tobacco have done for him.
We claim boldly that a part of Webster's greatness, Prescott's charm, the genius of Motley and of Lowell, the oratory of Depew, the wit of Parke Godwin and Horace Porter, even the magnificent march of Sherman to the sea, the great genius of Bryant, the sparkling cup of Anacreon, O. W. Holmes, the masterly speech of our lawyers, and the unrivalled eloquence of our pulpit orators, are owing to that earlier style of domestic American cookery which was, and is, and always shall be, deserving of the highest praise,--when meats were cooked with all their juices, before a wood fire, when bread was light and feathery, when soups were soups, and broils were broils! Oh, vanished excellence!
BONBONS.
Do, child, go to it' grandam, child; Give grandam kingdom! and it' grandam will Give it plumb, a cherry, and a fig. KING JOHN.
They used to call a sugar-plum a plumb in Shakspeare's time. Was it on account of its weight? Few ladies, on receiving a box of bonbons from Maillards, go into the great question of their antiquity and their manufacture. Few, even now, who at a fashionable hotel, receive on Sundays after dinner a pretty little paper box filled with candied rose-leaves and violets, remember that they are only following the fashion of Lucretia Borgia in putting them in their pocket to eat in their rooms, or at the theatre. There is nothing new under the sun.
In France, in entertaining a lady, or a party of ladies, at theatre or opera, the gentleman host always carries a box of bonbons, within which is a little imitation-silver sugar-tongs by which she can help herself to a chocolate or a _marron déguisé_, without soiling her fingers. This pampered dame does not consider that France makes annually sixty million of francs' worth of bonbons; that it exports only about one fourth of this, leaving an enormous amount for home consumption.
They send over to England alone, cheap sweets manufactured by steam, to the amount of three hundred thousand English pounds a year.
The sugar-plum came from Italy, and dates no further back than the sixteenth century as an article of commerce. But the skilful confectioners in private houses knew how to manufacture not only those which were healthful, but those which were very useful in getting rid of dreaded rivals, unfaithful lovers, and troublesome friends.
The manufacture of the antique sugar-plum, the antediluvian baked almond, and the nauseous coloured abominations whose paint-poisoned surface has long been discarded in France, received, as I read in an old chronicle, its death-blow from the Aboukir almonds, during the period of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, which killed more people than the bullets. Next went down the cracker bonbons, called Cossacks, on account of the terror with which they inspired the _grandes dames_ on their first advent in 1814.
These latter, however, have come back, in the harmless detonating powder-charged bonbons which every one hears at a dinner-party, as the fringed papers are pulled. Then come the _primaveras_, a variety of sugared bomb. Then the _marquises_, _orangines_, _marron glacé_, or sugared chestnut, _cerises pralinée_, burnt cherries, _bowles_, _ananas_, _dattes au café_, dates delightfully stuffed and covered with sugar, _diables noirs_, _ganaches_, and an ephemeral but delicious candy, _bonbons fondants_, with an inscription on the box that "these must be eaten within twenty-four hours." They are sometimes fruits with a creamy sugar, raspberries, currants, strawberries, and are delicious, but quite untransportable, although transporting merchandise. Their invention made the fortune of the inventor.
Formerly the preparation of bonbons was a tedious affair. Now it is almost the work of a day, but they are perishable. If you leave a box open they will devour themselves. Kept cool and air-tight, they will last for years. About the first of December the great manufacturers in the Rue de la Paix, commence their operations for New Year's, when everybody, from President Carnot down, sends his friend a box of bonbons. They tell of one confectioner who abandoned his sugar-pots to turn playwright, about the time that Alphonse Karr forsook literature to sell bouquets. The principle remains the same. He wished to sweeten the existence of _les Parisiennes_.
In visiting one of these immense establishments one descends a stone staircase, and finds one's self in a stifling atmosphere, heavily laden with the aroma of vanilla and other essences. Around are scores of workmen, in white-paper caps and aprons, their faces red with heat, as they plunge particular fruits into large cauldrons, filled with boiling syrups. More in the shade are other stalwart men, their faces pale with the heated atmosphere, piling up almonds on huge copper vessels; and so constant is the sound of metal clashing against metal that the visitor might imagine himself in an armour smithy, instead of a sugar factory; rather with Vulcan working for the gods, or some village blacksmith pounding out horseshoes, than with a party of French _ouvriers_ making sugar-plums for children to crunch. On all sides one sees sugar, gallons of liqueurs, syrups, and essences, rum, aniseed, noyau, maraschino, pineapple, apricot, strawberry, cherry, vanilla, chocolate, coffee, and tea, with sacks of almonds, and baskets of chestnuts, pistachio nuts, and filberts being emptied into machines which bruise their husks, flay them, and blanch them, all ready to receive their saccharine coating.
Those bonbons which have liqueur in them are much appreciated by gourmets who find other bonbons disagree with them! A sugar-coated brandy cherry is relished by the wisest man. Most bonbons are made by hand; those only which are flat at the bottom are cast in moulds. In the hand-made bonbons, the sugar paste is rolled into shapes by the aid of an instrument formed of a stout piece of wire, one end of which is twisted, and the other fixed into a wooden handle. With this the paste is taken out of the cauldron, and worked into the desired form by a rapid _coup de main_. For bonbons of a particular form, such as those in imitation of various fruits, models are carved in wood.
Liqueur bonbons are formed of a mixture of some given liqueur and liquid sugar, which is poured into moulds, and then placed in a slow oven for the day. Long before they are removed a hard crust has formed on the outside, while the inside remains in its original liquid state. Bonbons are crystallized by being plunged into a syrup heated to thirty degrees Reamur; by the time they are dry the crystallization is complete and acts as a protection against the atmosphere. The bonbons can then be kept a certain time, although their flavour deteriorates.
I think sugar one of the most remarkable of all the gifts of nature. It submits itself to all sorts of plastic arts, and to see a confectioner pouring it through little funnels, to see him make a flower, even to its stamens, of this excellent juice of the cane or of the beet,--they use beet sugar almost entirely in France,--is to comprehend anew how many of the greatest of all curiosities are hidden in the kitchen.
One must go to Chambéry, in Savoy, to taste some of the most exquisite _pâtisserie_, to find the most delicious candied fruits; and at Montpellier, in the south of France, is another most celebrated manufactory of bonbons.