Part 5

It is a certain fact, although difficult to prove by statistics, that a large proportion of the drink consumed by the working-classes is directly due to the bad cooking which they have to endure in their homes. Improve the workman’s cuisine, and you will automatically lessen the drink bill. This is a point of view which philanthropists and temperance folk might adopt with immense advantage, and with practically immediate results.

Dr. Max Einhorn has recently written on the subject of correct eating, which he divides into three distinct headings: Tachyphagia, Bradyphagia, and Euphagia. The first of these is the common evil of hasty eating, in which the food is not sufficiently masticated, and hence enters the stomach without being properly insalivated and comminuted. Besides the deleterious mechanical effect, tachyphagia also encourages the taking of large quantities of food in too short a time, as well as its consumption too hot or too cold.

The rising generation is going to fight tachyphagia tooth and nail--especially tooth. It is being taught wisely and well by the disciples of the Cookery and Food Association how to improve the family digestion, and there is an old saying to the effect that digestion is the business of the cook, indigestion that of the doctor. It cannot be too often or too forcibly impressed upon the so-called working-classes, and upon a good many other classes of society also, that good cooking does not mean waste and extravagance, but, on the contrary, that it connotes economy and frugality. A daughter who can cook well is tantamount to possessing a Savings-Bank account.

Are you a Euphagist? Perhaps, like the immortal M. Jourdain, of Molière, you may have been one all your life--and never knew it. Anyhow, it is a question which is being bandied about at dinners just now a good deal, and as very few people know what a Euphagist really is, it may be as well to explain. Briefly then, Euphagists are the modern exponents of the old adage, “Laugh and grow fat.” As a sect, or a race, or a cult, or whatever they may please to call themselves, they refuse to take anything seriously at meal-times, which is an entirely sound and philosophical theory.

The learned German professor above referred to is the inventor, or discoverer, or resuscitator of the idea, and his doctrine is summed up in the brief instruction: Bite everything twenty times, don’t worry whilst eating, laugh at everything--and acquire sound health. After all, it is a tried truism that there is no digestive as efficacious as hearty laughter. A solemn diner, especially if he dine often alone, is almost invariably dyspeptic; whereas a bright, cheery man or woman, who has a keen sense of humour, and sees the comic side of most things, is rarely a sufferer from indigestion. “Even our digestion is governed by angels,” said William Blake, the artist-poet, and (if you will but resist the trivial inclination to substitute “bad angels”) is there really any greater mystery than the process by which beef is turned into brains, and jam into beauty?

Of course we do not laugh enough--at the utmost we giggle unmusically. Listen to the conversation in general at any restaurant, or even any dinner party; you will rarely hear a really hearty laugh. It is as extinct as silver épergnes or peacock-pie.

It is told of an American dining at the Carlton one night that, struck by the comparative silence of all the diners, he asked one of the waiters: “Say, does nobody ever laugh here?” The reply came pat enough: “Yes, sir, I believe there have been one or two complaints about it lately.” Are we too solemn, or too dull, or too afraid of shocking our neighbours?

It was not always so. According to that delightful work, “The Household of Sir Thomas More”: “What rare sport we had with a mummery we called ‘The Triall of Feasting.’ Dinner and Supper were brought up before my Lord Chief Justice, charg’d with Murder. Their accomplices were Plum-pudding, Mince-Pye, Drunkenness, and such-like. Being condemned to hang by ye neck, I, who was Supper, stuft out with I cannot tell you how manie pillows, began to call lustilie for a confessor, and on his stepping forthe, commenct a list of all ye fitts, convulsions, spasms, payns in ye head, and so forthe, I had inflicted on this one and t’other.”

In those days, no doubt, they did not require to adopt the tenets of Euphagism, they were well enough without it. To-day, however, as a change, and a delightful one too, from the hundred and one food-fads which abound, a general adoption of Euphagism would seem to promise brighter meals, more fun, and better health.

Among other aids to digestion which are flagrantly neglected is the taking of one’s food in the open air whenever the thermometrical conditions of our somewhat erratic climate render it possible.

Just exactly why we take every opportunity of dining in the open air when we are abroad, and carefully fight shy of it, under more or less similar circumstances, when we are at home, is one of those questions which are unsolved, and apparently unsolvable. Our distaste for British coal may be one answer to the conundrum, and another may be not unconnected with our national shyness at being seen eating our meals in public by our fellow-countrymen. Foreigners, of course, don’t count. Opportunity is not lacking, in London at any rate, for open-air dining. It can be done at several of the hotels, and in the summer there is Earl’s Court, where, despite certain obvious drawbacks of access and other things, it can be enjoyed without much discomfort.

But these are, after all, only town delights, and not comparable to a dinner on a July evening in the open air in the country. One such lingers most pleasantly in my memory. It was at a charming house in Hampshire. We dined on a marble terrace, on which soft rugs had been placed. The night was still enough for the candles on the table to burn without guttering. Below the terrace was a rose-garden, full of bloom, and in a shrubbery, not too close to the house, a Hungarian band played discreetly. The dinner, according to my recollection, was not extraordinarily good, but whatever it may have been, the surroundings, the _mise en scène_, were such that almost anything would have been appetizing and delightful. Why cannot more of this sort of thing be done? We cannot all possess marble terraces, rose-gardens, and Hungarian bands; but the permutations of the idea are innumerable, and I beg to present it to summer hostesses for development and improvement.

Exigencies of climate will probably never permit us to realize the al fresco meals suggested by a Watteau, a Boucher, or a Fragonard, and it is, indeed, more than questionable whether the French cuisine, which was flourishing round and about that period, was ever designed for the _dîner sur l’herbe_, which is, and was, an essentially bourgeois meal.

At any rate, a curious old book in four volumes, “Les Soupers de la Cour; ou L’Art de Travailler toutes sortes d’Alimens,” by Menon, which was published in Paris _au Lys d’Or_ in 1755, contains many appallingly long menus, some comprising five services and forty or more dishes, expressly designed to be eaten out of doors. No less an authority than Carême, however, says that these menus (and they are certainly extraordinarily elaborate) were the result of pure imagination on the part of _feu_ M. Menon, and were never actually carried out.

In our days even our shooting lunches tend to greater extent than can usefully be accommodated on the grass; and we are accordingly bidden to a farm-house, a tent, or sometimes a garnished barn. The lunch under a hedge, unloaded from the pony and spread temptingly on the grass, is almost a thing of the past, which, according to some old-fashioned fogies, is a pity.

Be that as it may, there is one open-air lunch which can never be altogether improved away. That is the river lunch, either in a punt or a skiff, with a table deftly made of the sculls and the stretchers. Moreover, it has this inestimable advantage: it is practically impossible for more than two to partake of a boat lunch with comfort. It can, of course, be done, but at a sacrifice of leg room--and other things. Of course the more dignified motor-launch lunches, served at a real table, do not count, for are they not the same as those eaten on dry land?

It was, I think, the late Sir William Vernon Harcourt who once remarked that “we are all Socialists now.” By the same token we may say to-day, “We are all motorists now,” and really, taking it by and large, the luncheon part of a motor trip is by no means the least interesting.

That British hotels, with very few exceptions, leave much to be desired is the tritest of truisms. Bad cookery, shocking attendance, and old-fashioned appointments, combined with disproportionate expense, are almost universal, and a big fortune awaits any Boniface who, with a good house on a much-frequented road, instals a really good cook, preferably a Frenchman and his wife, not necessarily a high-priced individual, and makes a speciality of well-cooked, daintily served, appetizing lunches and dinners.

We have all met, only too frequently, the miserable sham lamb, which is mere mutton saucily disguised with mint; the nearly raw cold beef; the maltreated chop; the apologetic steak; the absurd parody of a salad; the sad and heavy apple tart; and the anything but real Cheddar cheese. All these things are absurd and quite unnecessary.

It is really just as easy to cook a good dinner as a bad one. _Experto crede._

The usual alternative for the foregoing bill of fare is a cheap and nasty imitation of a French menu, where nothing is true to name, and only the frills on the cutlets are what they pretend to be. It really should not be difficult to give a well-cooked fillet of sole, a tender chicken, an omelet _aux fines herbes_, and a dish of vegetables in season, _sautés au beurre_; but if you asked for a lunch of this sort at a wayside British inn you would be put down at once as a lunatic. Why?

The question of packing a motor lunch is one of some difficulty and niceness. Personally, I do not for one moment believe in those elaborate ready-fitted baskets, of which the makers are so inordinately proud. Such a basket seldom fits the lunch, and I find by experience that a good-sized empty basket of convenient shape is far more practical.

The cutlery, glass, and china may be fixed, as a matter of convenience, although I do not consider even that to be necessary, for in packing up one is always trying to fit a table-knife into the place made for a teaspoon.

My ideal basket or hamper is quite bare inside (to begin with), and the cates, bottles, knives, forks, and spoons are packed therein, tightly and carefully, so as to prevent shaking and rattling.

A good method of keeping a salad fresh and crisp, by the way, is to hollow out a loaf of bread, cut off a slice at the top in the form of a lid, and pack the salad inside. Japanese paper serviettes are useful; little and big cardboard plates and dishes are to be bought for a trifle; fruit travels best if surrounded with green leaves; Devonshire cream in pots is an appreciable luxury; coffee can be made in the _cafetière gourmet_, if boiling water be handy. And, lastly, don’t forget the corkscrew!

According to the calendar, spring begins officially on 21 March. But the _restaurateurs_ can beat Dame Nature, who, presumably, edits the calendar (another lady’s paper!), by at least six weeks. For the season of _primeurs_ commences six weeks earlier, and coming before their time, they are appreciated all the more for their vernal suggestion of the flavour of the real thing, arriving in due season when all the world and his wife may eat thereof.

Early green peas, for instance, which have hitherto been imported from Algiers, come from Nice, also the famous _Lauris_ giant asparagus, white and succulent. This earliest open-air asparagus, of indubitable excellence, is to be had at about thirty-eight to forty-five shillings per bundle of fifty heads. It is worth the price.

Now too is the time to eat the real Pauillac lamb, reared on the salt marshes of Pauillac, young, fat, white, and so luscious that it melts in the mouth. The whole young lamb barely weighs fourteen pounds, and a cut of this veritable _pré salé_, so often badly imitated and misnamed, is worth a king’s ransom.

But perpend when you order the dish at a restaurant. The _maître d’hôtel_ will recommend a leg, because it has the better appearance; the knowledgeable diner, however, will inevitably prefer the shoulder, which is the quintessence of delicacy.

According to M. Roche, of Duke Street, Adelphi, the greatest authority on _primeurs_ in London, early spring is the time beyond all others to indulge in the toothsome _crêtes de coq_, or cockscombs, without which no self-respecting dish _à la financière_ is complete. The _haricots verts gris_, from Spain, are also in excellent condition. They are not much to look at, but the flavour is just exquisite. They cost about three shillings a pound.

The far-famed _poulet du Mans_ and equally attractive _poularde de Bresse_ are on the market at about twelve and sixpence each, but there is, I regret to say, a deal of fiction attending the appearance of these plump and pleasing birds on the usual London restaurant bill of fare. Either of them forms an imposing line on the menu, but see that you get the _real_ French bird, and not the ordinary Surrey barn-door fowl, which, however good in its way--and I should be the last to underrate the product of my own county--is of distinctly inferior flavour compared with its better-bred Gallic cousin.

The timely _primeurs_ in the way of salads are numerous: the _mâche_ is in excellent condition, and so is the _barbe de capucin_, duly blanched in cellars; the _Chicorée de Bruxelles_ is a welcome change; and although the _romaine_ at one and sixpence each are expensive, they are large-hearted and good of their kind.

The craze, however, for early vegetables may easily be overdone. A rather well-known gourmet, who has a place in the country, grows all his “early-out-of-the-season” stuff under glass. He was entertaining some friends in the month of May, and gave them very excellent new potatoes, boasting the while of their rarity. “My good man,” said a guest, “there is really nothing at all extraordinary in getting new potatoes in May, one can eat them anywhere.” But he had reckoned without his host. “Of course you can,” was the reply, “if you want _ordinary_ new potatoes. These of mine are early potatoes of _next_ season but one!”

“If I drink any more,” said Lady Coventry at Lord Hertford’s table, “if I drink any more, I shall be _muckibus_.”

“Lord!” said Lady Mary Coke, “what is that?”

“Oh,” was the reply, “it is Irish for _sentimental_.”

This was dinner-table conversation one hundred and fifty years ago, _teste_ Horace Walpole. They were franker in those days.

“This wine,” said a notable host to one Mr. Pocock of Bristol, “costs me six shillings a bottle.”

“Does it,” asked the guest, with a quaint look of gay reproof; “then pass it round, and let me have another six penn’orth!”

In the eighteenth century, Sir Walter Besant tells us, people habitually ate and drank too much; citizens and aldermen grew portentously fat; well-bred people would gnaw bones with their fingers at public banquets; an imperial quart of ale was a day’s ordinary allowance, and a man would drink his six bottles of port at a sitting. Another illustration of a lusty appetite may be quoted from the Memoirs of Sir Walter Scott. He and his friend, Mr. Shortreed, on one of those Liddesdale raids when he was so brisk-hearted and jovial, rode over one morning from Clenchhead to breakfast with Thomas Elliott of Tuzzliehope. Before starting at six o’clock, just to lay their stomachs, they had a couple of ducks and some London porter, and were, nevertheless, well disposed on their arrival at Tuzzliehope for a substantial breakfast, with copious libations of whisky punch, which did not in any degree incapacitate them, for they were able to pursue their journey, picking up fragments of border minstrelsy as they went along. And it was not only on country excursions that meat and drink were consumed _ad libitum_; the ordinary diet of the men of the period was what we would call redundant, and their feasts were Gargantuan. A dinner given by James Ballantyne on the birth-eve of a novel is thus described:--

The feast was gorgeous, an aldermanic display of turtles and venison with the suitable accompaniments of iced punch, potent ale, and generous Madeira. When the cloth had been drawn and many toasts had been honoured and songs sung, the claret and olives made way for broiled bones and a mighty bowl of punch, and when a few glasses of the hot beverage had restored their powers, the guests were ready to listen to the new romance, read aloud by Ballantyne _ore rotundo_. A novel, under these circumstances, especially if of the somewhat lengthy and descriptive nature current at that period, must have been at once stimulating, satisfying, and soporific.

There is authority and to spare as to the comparative plethora of food which was piled on the table to incite, provoke and assuage the decidedly healthy appetites of our forbears. In No. 148 of “The Tatler,” Addison writes:--

“At last I discovered, with some joy, a pig at the lower end of the table, and begged a gentleman that was near to cut me a piece of it. Upon which the gentleman of the house said with real civility: ‘I am sure you will like the pig, for it was whipt to death.’”

In those days a sucking-pig was supposed to acquire greater succulence through flagellation. What with burning down a house (although only a Chinese one) to make roast pork, and flogging a baby, the pigs must have had rather a hard time. An eighteenth-century pig underwent various vicissitudes from which a twentieth-century pig is exempt.

Goethe has a story in his “Campaign in France” that, after a long and tiring fight, some of Prince Louis Ferdinand’s soldiers looted a heavy locked-up kitchen-dresser, in which they heard something heavy rolling about. They concluded it was food, and as they were well-nigh famished they took it out to the camp and broke it open. To their horror and disgust, all it contained was a weighty cookery book. However, they made the best of a bad job, and as they had no supper, they sat round the camp fire and one man after the other read out a succulent receipt from the book, and thus they tried to pretend that they were enjoying a gorgeous supper. This is, indeed, the true spirit of appreciative gastronomy, and the table-manners of these hungry but easily appeased warriors must have been the quintessence of simplicity and good taste. For, after all, a dinner in its diurnal regularity is the most perennial of delights. Bulwer Lytton, in “Pelham,” says:--

“A buried friend may be replaced, a lost mistress renewed, a slandered character be recovered, even a broken constitution restored; but a dinner once lost is irremediable; that day is for ever departed; an appetite once thrown away can never, till the cruel prolixity of the gastric agent is over, be regained. _Il y a tant de maîtresses_ (says the admirable Corneille), _il n’y a qu’un diner_.”

Speaking of the close of the Tudor period, William Harrison, a contemporary historian, writes:--

“I might here talke somewhat of the great silence that is used at the tables of the honourable and wiser sorte generallie over all the realme (albeit that too much deserveth no commendation, for it belongeth to guests to be neither muti nor loquaces) likewise the moderate eating and drinking that is dailie seene, and finallie of the regard that each hath to keepe himselfe from note of surfetting and drunkenesse (for which cause salt meat, except beefe, bacon, and porke, are not anie whit esteemed, and yet these three may be much powdered); but as in the rehearsal thereof I should commend the nobleman, merchant, and frugall artificer, so I could not cleare the meaner sort of husbandman of verie much bobbling (except it be here and there some odd yeoman) with whom he is thought to be merriest that talketh of most ribaldrie....”

Very similar were the precepts taught to our remoter forefathers. In the “Accomplish’d Lady Rich’s Closet of Rareties, or Ingenious Gentlewoman’s Delightful Companion” (1653) ladies are told when carving at their own table to “distribute the best pieces first, and it will appear very comely and decent to use a fork.” The lady is also requested to sit at table “with a straight body,” and “_even though she were an aunt_,” to refrain from resting her elbows upon the table. She must not “by ravenous gesture display a voracious appetite,” and if “she talked with her mouth full, or smacked her lips like a pig, or swallowed spoon meat so hot that tears came to her eyes, she would be taken for an underbred person, even if she were really an Earl’s daughter.” But folk were almost exaggeratedly delicate in those days. It is related by the worthy Dr. Walker in his “Sufferings of the Clergy” that a pious parish priest was ejected from his cure by the Commonwealth Puritans because he was formally accused of “eating custard scandalously.” But the etiquette of the table dates back to the very earliest ages. Of the five hundred and sixty-five Chinese books on Behaviour, catalogued by a learned mandarin, no fewer than three hundred and sixty-one refer directly to the ceremonial of the Chinese dinner-table. It is remarkable too that among the Sybarites it was customary to invite ladies to dinner a year beforehand, ostensibly to give them time to beautify themselves.

In the year 1557 one Seager published his “Schoole of Vertue, a booke of good Nourture for Children,” wherein the following instructions are set forth in rhyme.

When thy parentes downe to the table shall syt, In place be ready for the purpose most fyt; With sober countenance, lookynge them in the face, Thy hands holding up, thus begin Grace; “Geve thankes to God with one accorde For that shall be set on this borde,” And be not careful what to eate, To eche thynge lyvynge the Lord sends meate; For foode he wyll not se you peryshe, But wyll you fede, foster and cheryshe; Take well in worth what he hath sent At thys time be therwith content Praysinge God! So treatablie speakynge as possibly thou can, That the hearers thereof may thee understan, Grace beynge said, low cursie make thou, Sayinge “much good may it do you.”

Finally, the following epitaph on a gourmand, written by an unknown poet, seems to sum up the true inwardness of the gastronomic ideal:--

Ci-gît un gourmand insigne Dont l’exercice le plus digne Fût de manger à tout propos. Se voyant réduit à l’extrême, Il aurait mangé la mort même; Mais il n’y trouva que des os.

“I hope you’ll have all you’re thinkin’ you’re havin’ an’ more too,--but less if you’d like it.”

The Lunatic Lady in FRANK STOCKTON’S “Rudder Grange.”

According to the old Greek authorities, the original Seven Sages of the kitchen were: Agris of Rhodes, who first taught the bone method of dressing fish; Nereus of Corinth, who made the conger a dish for the gods; Orion, who invented white sauce; Chariades, who achieved yellow sauce; Lampriadas, who discovered brown sauce; Atlantus, who made the most perfect restorative; and Euthynus, who cooked vegetables so exquisitely that he was named Lentillus.