CHAPTER II

BYWAYS OF GASTRONOMY

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

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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.”

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:—

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.”