IX

A CONFUSION OF TONGUES

Russia, France, Germany, and England

In every kind of feast written about in Russia during the nineteenth century, there is much the same feeling of timelessness as in Chinese gastronomy. It does not matter what author describes what feast: you know that poor people ate one way, the age-old way of bread and soup, when they ate at all, and that in the fat kitchens of the landowners the only variations on the rich exotic theme were caused by political problems of importation, so that at one time it might be chic to serve German hocks, while at another nothing but French champagnes would do.

That is why I think it is all right to skip nonchalantly forward and back and forward again in this part of the book, although I shall begin it properly in 1804 with excerpts from The Russian Journals of Martha and Catherine Wilmot.

They were English girls who visited Moscow, and wrote voluminous ungainly letters and notes about their life there which prove them to be astonishingly healthy young creatures, if not particularly sensitive to anything but the food and drink and bustle of the moment:

From The Russian Journals of Martha and Catherine Wilmot, 1804

Yesterday we went at twelve o’clock to Count Ostrowman’s. . . . Immediately on entering we were led to a table where what is called a Breakfast was displayed—that is little odds and ends of dried fish, or Caviar, of Cheese, Bread, etc., and eau de vie were presented to us to give an appetite for dinner which was announced almost immediately. We assembled in the Hall, surrounded by a sort of gallery which was filled with Men, Women, Dwarfs, children, Fools, and enraged musicians who sang and played with such powerful effect as to deafen those whom Heaven had spared. . . .

A Trumpet sounded and “blew a blast so loud and dread” that every tongue was silenced. A crystal vase filled with champagne was presented to the Master of the Castle. He stood up and quaffed the sparkling draft to the health of the Lady of the feast. The Trumpet sounded a second time, the Goblet was presented to Princess Dashkaw who went thro’ the same ceremony. A third time the Trumpet sounded and a third person quaffed from the same crystal vase to the same toast. In short the ceremony was repeated for every individual, and as there were a party of 46 you may judge the time which the parade and pomp took up.

Many a bad dinner I made from the mere fatigue of being offered fifty or sixty different dishes by servants who come out one after the other and flourish ready carv’d fish, flesh, fowl, Vegetables, fruits, soups of fish, etc., before your eyes, wines, Liqueurs, etc., in their turn. Seriously the profusion is beyond anything I ever saw. . . .

Yesterday we dined at Mr. Kissilof’s where the only thing worth telling you about was a little Calmuck boy from the confines of China. He was brought in together with a little Circassian and an Indian to amuse the company, each dressed according to the fashion of his country. The two latter were not very remarkable, but the little Chineese was critically like the figures on old Indian serenes, cups and saucers, fans etc.. . . His dress was trousers of white Indian calico, a shawl sewed for shirt waistcoat, and all the rest of his dress, except a little spencer of scarlet cashimere, edged with silver spangles. . . . ’Tis here quite the custom to bring in men, or women or children, or fools, or anything that can amuse the company.

At a very agreeable sledging party . . . which was given nominally for the Princess (Dashkaw) we were a few minutes late, and could scarcely gain admittance for the number of Traineaus that were in the court and afterwards for the number of guests that were in the apartments. Soon after chocolate and cakes were handed, and then breakfast opened on our astonished optics in another room, which consisted of hot and cold soups, meat, fish, fowls, Ices, fruits, etc. The dessert was in another room, dry’d fruits, Cakes, and eau de vie. At length forty Traineaus, each drawn by six horses at least, quitted the House. In each Traineau were four people, two ladies and two gentlemen attended by two footmen and two or three postillions etc. The coup d’oeil was superb. We drove like lightning round the Town, each animating his coachman to unheard of exertions to pass the Traineau which was before him. . . . We were dressed in all our best array; but don’t figure to yourself fur caps, etc.—not at all—white satin on some, pink on others, etc.—black beaver on a few, and amongst that number was your humble servant. Shawls and pelisses protected us from the cold, which, however, was not very intense that day. After parading with indefatigable speed for two hours and a half we returned to M. Kumberline’s, arranged our Dresses as well as we could, drank tea, and then danced to conclude the evening. . . .

It is easy enough to talk of “sad, black Russia” and to find countless quotations by her writers to prove, even gastronomically, how black and sad she was in those far past days.

A typical one, from Yama by Alexander Kuprin, tells of the feast eaten by little Yerka, who has escaped from the brothel with her silly weak lover. He is about to be arrested for stealing government funds, so they decide to die together, and “although he had in his pockets only eleven kopecks, all in all, he gave orders sweepingly, like a habitual, downright prodigal; he ordered sturgeon stew, double snipes, and fruits; and, in addition to all this, coffee, liqueurs, and two bottles of frosted champagne.”

And then, of course, after they have dined well in the expensive hotel-room, and he has killed the loving Yerka, this “hypocrite, coward, and blackguard” loses his nerve and fakes a wound upon the skin over his quaking ribs. . . .

Oh, sad black Russia!

It is good to turn to Gogol’s monumental laughter, to his impious, unflinching mockery of everything weak and limited about the people of this country. He wrote Dead Souls in 1842, ten years before he died.

He meant to write two more parts of it, but a mystical remorse overwhelmed him in his last years, a feeling that he had betrayed Russia by laughing at her. He destroyed what he had completed of the second part of the book, but the first one was enough to influence many great writers since then, with its humanity and realism, and its clear-eyed irony.

From Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol, 1809–1852

“Well, my love, shall we go in to dinner?” said Madame Sobakevitch to her husband.

“Please!” said Sobakevitch. Whereupon the two gentlemen, going up to the table which was laid with savouries, duly drank a glass of vodka each; they took a preliminary snack as is done all over the vast expanse of Russia, throughout the towns and villages, that is, tasted various salt dishes and other stimulating dainties; then all proceeded to the diningroom; the hostess sailed in at their head like a goose swimming. The small table was laid for four. In the fourth place there very shortly appeared—it is hard to say definitely who—whether a married lady, or a girl, a relation, a housekeeper or simply someone living in the house—a thing without a cap, about thirty years of age, in a bright-coloured handkerchief. There are persons who exist in the world not as primary objects but as incidental spots or specks on objects. They sit in the same place and hold their head immovably; one is almost tempted to take them for furniture and imagine that no word has ever issued from those lips; but in some remote region, in the maids’ quarters or the storeroom, it is quite another story!

“The cabbage soup is particularly good today,” said Sobakevitch, taking spoonfuls of the soup and helping himself to an immense portion of a well-known delicacy which is served with cabbage soup and consists of sheep’s stomach, stuffed with buckwheat, brains, and sheep’s trotters. “You won’t find a dish like this in town,” he went on, addressing Tchitchikov, “the devil only knows what they give you there!”

“The governor keeps a good table, however,” said Tchitchikov.

“But do you know what it is all made of ? You won’t eat it when you do know.”

“I don’t know how the dishes were cooked, I can’t judge of that; but the pork chops and the stewed fish were excellent.”

“You fancy so. You see I know what they buy at the market. That scoundrelly cook who has been trained in France buys a cat and skins it and sends it up to the table for a hare.”

“Faugh, what unpleasant things you say!” said his wife.

“Well, my love! That’s how they do things; it’s not my fault, that’s how they do things, all of them. All the refuse that our Alkulka throws, if I may be permitted to say so, into the rubbish pail, they put into the soup, yes, into the soup! In it goes!”

“You always talk about such things at table,” his wife protested again.

“Well, my love,” said Sobakevitch, “if I did the same myself, you might complain, but I tell you straight that I am not going to eat filth. If you sprinkle frogs with sugar I wouldn’t put them into my mouth, and I wouldn’t taste oysters, either: I know what oysters are like. Take some mutton,” he went on, addressing Tchitchikov. “This is saddle of mutton with grain, not the fricassees that they make in gentlemen’s kitchens out of mutton which has been lying about in the market-place for days. The French and German doctors have invented all that; I’d have them all hanged for it. They have invented a treatment too, the hunger cure! Because they have a thin-blooded German constitution, they fancy they can treat the Russian stomach too. No, it’s all wrong, it’s all their fancies, it’s all . . .” Here Sobakevitch shook his head wrathfully. “They talk of enlightenment, enlightenment, and this enlightenment is . . . faugh! I might use another word for it but it would be improper at the dinner table. It is not like that in my house. If we have pork we put the whole pig on the table, if it’s mutton, we bring in the whole sheep, if it’s a goose, the whole goose! I had rather eat only two dishes, and eat my fill of them.” Sobakevitch confirmed this in practice; he put half a saddle of mutton on his plate and ate it all, gnawing and sucking every little bone.

“Yes,” thought Tchitchikov, “the man knows what’s what.”

“It’s not like that in my house,” said Sobakevitch, wiping his fingers on a dinner napkin, “I don’t do things like a Plyushkin: he has eight hundred souls and he dines and sups worse than any shepherd.”

“Who is this Plyushkin?” inquired Tchitchikov.

“A scoundrel,” answered Sobakevitch. “You can’t fancy what a miser he is. The convicts in prison are better fed than he is: he has starved all his servants to death . . .”

“Really,” Tchitchikov put in with interest. “And do you actually mean that his serfs have died in considerable numbers?”

“They die off like flies.”

“Really, like flies? Allow me to ask how far away does he live?”

“Four miles.”

“Four miles!” exclaimed Tchitchikov and was even aware of a slight palpitation of the heart. “But when one drives out of your gate, is it to the right or to the left?”

“I don’t advise you even to learn the road to that cur’s,” said Sobakevitch. “There is more excuse for visiting the lowest haunt than visiting him.”

“Oh, I did not ask for any special . . . but simply because I am interested in knowing all about the locality,” Tchitchikov replied.

The saddle of mutton was followed by curd cheese-cakes, each one of which was much larger than a plate, then a turkey as big as a calf, stuffed with all sorts of good things: eggs, rice, kidneys, and goodness knows what. With this the dinner ended, but when they had risen from the table Tchitchikov felt as though he were two or three stones heavier. They went into the drawing-room, where they found a saucer of jam already awaiting them—not a pear, nor a plum, nor any kind of berry—and neither of the gentlemen touched it. The lady of the house went out of the room to put out some more on other saucers.

Taking advantage of her absence, Tchitchikov turned to Sobakevitch, who, lying in an easy-chair, was merely gasping after his ample repast and emitting from his throat undefinable sounds while he crossed himself and continually put his hand before his mouth.

Tchitchikov addressed him as follows: “I should like to have a few words with you about a little matter of business.”

“Here is some more jam,” said the lady of the house, returning with a saucer, “it’s very choice, made with honey!”

“We will have some of it later on,” said Sobakevitch. “You go to your own room now. Pavel Ivanitch and I will take off our coats and have a little nap.”

The lady began suggesting that she should send for feather beds and pillows, but her husband said, “There’s no need, we can doze in our easy- chairs,” and she withdrew.

Sobakevitch bent his head slightly, and prepared to hear what the business might be.

And then Tchitchikov proceeded to outline to Sobakevitch his astounding scheme for buying up the tax-rights on all the serfs who, since the last census, were, as he discreetly phrased it, “nonexistent”: the dead souls of Russia.

It was a proposition couched in the most altruistic language, and could have been made only by a Tchitchikov, who, Gogol said, he had “taken as a type to show forth the vices and failings, rather than the merits and virtues, of the commonplace Russian individual; and the characters which revolve around him have also been selected for the purpose of demonstrating our national weaknesses and shortcomings.”

The steady overeating of the rich country people in Dead Souls grows tiresome, but I cannot resist giving two more examples of it, at the risk of being repetitive as far as digestive snores may go. In both of them Tchitchikov is staying with Piotr Petrovitch, a fat generous man who loves company. He serves a noonday dinner, to chase away the habitual boredom of one of the company, and then after they have awakened from the stupor it throws them into he takes them for a boat-ride. He swims naked like a great fish in the chilly water, and develops a fine appetite for tea, while the others watch him enviously . . . and then they go home across the waters, in an unforgettably beautiful moment, and pick up their forks again.

From Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol, l809–1852

. . . “Run quickly to the kitchen, Alexasha, and tell the cook to send in the fish pies as soon as she can. But where’s that sluggard Emelyan and that thief Antoshka? Why don’t they bring the savouries?”

But the door opened. The sluggard Emelyan and the thief Antoshka made their appearance with table napkins, laid the table, set a tray with six decanters of various coloured homemade wines; soon round the trays and decanters there was a necklace of plates—caviare, cheese, salted mushrooms of different kinds, and something was brought in from the kitchen covered with a plate, under which could be heard the hissing of butter. The sluggard Emelyan and the thief Antoshka were quick and excellent fellows. Their master gave them those titles because to address them without nicknames seemed tame and flat, and he did not like anything to be so; he was a kind-hearted man, but liked to use words of strong flavour. His servants did not resent it, however.

The savouries were followed by dinner. The good-hearted fat gentleman showed himself now a regular ruffian. As soon as he saw one piece on a visitor’s plate he would put a second piece beside it, saying: “It is not good for man or bird to live alone.” If the visitor finished the two pieces, he would foist a third on him, saying: “What’s the good of two, God loves a trinity.” If the guest devoured all three he would say: “Where’s the cart with three wheels? Who built a three-cornered hut?” For four he had another saying and for five, too.

Tchitchikov ate nearly a dozen slices of something and thought: “Well, our host won’t force anything more upon me.” But he was wrong; without a word the master of the house laid upon his plate a piece of ribs of veal roasted on a spit, the best piece of all with the kidney, and what veal it was!

“We kept that calf for two years on milk,” said the fat gentleman. “I looked after him as if he were my son!”

“I can’t,” said Tchitchikov.

“You try it, and after that say you can’t!”

“It won’t go in, there’s no room for it.”

“Well, you know, there was no room in the church, but when the mayor arrived, room was made; and yet there was such a crush that an apple couldn’t have fallen to the floor. You just try it: that morsel’s like the mayor.”

Tchitchikov did try it, it certainly might be compared with the mayor; room was made for it though it had seemed that it could not have been got in.

It was the same thing with the wines. When he had received the money from the mortgage of his estate Pyotr Petrovitch had laid in a supply of wine for the next ten years. He kept on filling up the glasses; what the guests would not drink he poured out for Alexasha and Nikolasha, who simply tossed off one glass after another, and yet got up from the table as though nothing had happened, as though they had only drunk a glass of water. It was not the same with the visitors. They could hardly drag themselves to the verandah, and were only just able to sink into armchairs; as soon as the master of the house had settled himself in his, an armchair that would have held four, he dropped asleep. His corpulent person was transformed into a blacksmith’s bellows: from his open mouth and from his nose he began to emit sounds such as are not found even in the newest music. All the instruments were represented, the drum, the flute, and a strange abrupt note, like the yap of a dog. . . .

. . . The sun had set; the sky remained clear and tranparent. There was the sound of shouting. In place of the fishermen there were groups of boys bathing on the banks; splashing and laughter echoed in the distance. The oarsmen, after plying their twenty-four oars in unison, suddenly raised them all at once into the air and the long-boat, light as a bird, darted of itself over the motionless, mirror-like surface. A fresh-looking sturdy lad, the third from the stern, began singing in a clear voice; five others caught it up, and the other six joined in and the song flowed on, endless as Russia; and putting their hands to their ears the singers themselves seemed lost in its endlessness. Listening to it one felt free and at ease, and Tchitchikov thought: “Ah, I really shall have a country place of my own one day.” . . .

It was dusk as they returned. In the dark the oars struck the water which no longer reflected the sky. Lights were faintly visible on both sides of the river. The moon rose just as they were touching the bank. On all sides fishermen were boiling soups of perch and still quivering fish on tripods. Everything was at home. The geese, the cows, and the goats had been driven home long before, and the very dust raised by them was laid again by now, and the herdsmen who had driven them were standing by the gates waiting for a jug of milk and an invitation to partake of fish soup. Here and there came the sound of talk and the hum of voices, the loud barking of the dogs of their village and of other villages far away. The moon had risen and had begun to light up the darkness; and at last everything was bathed in light—the lake and the huts; the light of the fires was paler; the smoke from the chimneys could be seen silvery in the moonlight. Alexasha and Nikolasha flew by them, racing after each other on spirited horses; they raised as much dust as a flock of sheep.

“Oh, I really will have an estate of my own one day!” thought Tchitchikov. A buxom wife and little Tchitchikovs rose before his imagination again. Whose heart would not have been warmed by such an evening!

At supper they over-ate themselves again. When Pavel Ivanovitch had retired to the room assigned to him, and had got into bed, he felt his stomach: “It’s as tight as a drum!” he said; “no mayor could possibly get in.” As luck would have it, his host’s room was the other side of the wall; the wall was a thin one and everything that was said was audible. On the pretence of an early lunch he was giving the cook directions for a regular dinner, and what directions! It was enough to give a dead man an appetite. He licked and smacked his lips. There were continually such phrases as: “But roast it well, let it soak well.” While the cook kept saying in a thin high voice: “Yes sir, I can, I can do that too.”

“And make a four-cornered fish pasty; in one corner put a sturgeon’s cheeks and the jelly from its back, in another put buckwheat mush, mushrooms and onions and sweet roe, and brains and something else—you know . . .”

“Yes sir, I can do it like that.”

“And let it be just a little coloured on one side, you know, and let it be a little less done on the other. And bake the underpart, you understand, that it may be all crumbling, all soaked in juice, so that it will melt in the mouth like snow.”

“Confound him,” thought Tchitchikov, turning over on the other side, “he won’t let me sleep.”

“Make me a haggis and put a piece of ice in the middle, so that it may swell up properly. And let the garnishing for the sturgeon be rich. Garnish it with crayfish and little fried fish, with a stuffing of little smelts, add fine mince, horse radish and mushrooms and turnips, and carrots and beans, and is there any other root?”

“I might put in kohlrabi and beetroot cut in stars,” said the cook.

“Yes, put in kohlrabi, and beetroot, and I’ll tell you what garnish to serve with the roast . . .”

“I shall never get to sleep,” said Tchitchikov. Turning over on the other side, he buried his head in the pillow and pulled the quilt up over it, that he might hear nothing, but through the quilt he heard unceasingly: “And roast it well,” and “Bake it thoroughly.” He fell asleep over a turkey.

Next day the guests over-ate themselves to such a degree that Platonov could not ride home; his horse was taken back by one of Pyetuh’s stable boys. They got into the carriage: Platonov’s dog Yarb followed the carriage lazily, he too had over-eaten himself.

“No, it is really too much,” said Tchitchikov, as soon as the carriage had driven out of the yard. “It’s positively piggish. Aren’t you uncomfortable, Platon Mihailitch? The carriage was so very comfortable and now it seems uncomfortable all at once. Petrushka, I suppose you have been stupidly rearranging the luggage? There seem to be baskets sticking up everywhere!”

Platonov laughed. “I can explain that,” he said, “Pyotr Petrovitch stuffed them in for the journey.”

“To be sure,” said Petrushka, turning round from the box. “I was told to put them all in the carriage—pasties and pies.”

“Yes indeed, Pavel Ivanovitch,” said Selifan, looking round from the box in high good humour. “A most worthy gentleman, and most hospitable! He sent us out a glass of champagne each, and bade them let us have the dishes from the table, very fine dishes, most delicate flavour. There never was such a worthy gentleman.”

I should have liked to print here, among many more things, the whole chapter called “Dinner at the Rostovs’ ” from War and Peace: it is charming and complex and serene, a picture of a world that is forever gone. But I have compromised between space and my own wishes by limiting myself to parts of two other chapters, perhaps more significant ones.

The first is a description of a dinner arranged by old Count llya Rostov in honor of the great hero Bagration, and the second, in good contrast to it, is about the gay, fresh, unplanned evening of the young hunters with “Uncle” in the country:

From War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, 1828–1910

At the beginning of March, old Count Ilya Rostov was very busy arranging a dinner in honor of Prince Bagration at the English club.

The count walked up and down the hall in his dressing gown, giving orders to the club steward and to the famous Feoktist, the Club’s head cook, about asparagus, fresh cucumbers, strawberries, veal, and fish for this dinner. The count had been a member and on the committee of the Club from the day it was founded. To him the Club entrusted the arrangement of the festival in honor of Bagration, for few men knew so well how to arrange a feast on an openhanded, hospitable scale, and still fewer men would be so well able and willing to make up out of their own resources what might be needed for the success of the fete. The club cook and the steward listened to the count’s orders with pleased faces, for they knew that under no other management could they so easily extract a good profit for themselves from a dinner costing several thousand rubles.

“Well then, mind and have cock’s combs in the turtle soup, you know!”

“Shall we have three cold dishes then?” asked the cook.

The count considered.

“We can’t have less—yes, three . . . the mayonnaise, that’s one,” said he, bending down a finger.

“Then am I to order those large sterlets?” asked the steward.

“Yes, it can’t be helped if they won’t take less. Ah, dear me! I was forgetting. We must have another entree. Ah, goodness gracious!” he clutched at his head. “Who is going to get me the flowers? Dmitri! Eh, Dmitri! Gallop off to our Moscow estate,” he said to the factotum who appeared at his call. “Hurry off and tell Maksim, the gardener, to set the serfs to work. Say that everything out of the hothouses must be brought here well wrapped up in felt. I must have two hundred pots here on Friday.”

Having given several more orders, he was about to go to his “little countess” to have a rest, but remembering something else of importance, he returned again, called back the cook and the club steward, and again began giving orders. A light footstep and the clinking of spurs were heard at the door, and the young count, handsome, rosy, with a dark little mustache, evidently rested and made sleeker by his easy life in Moscow, entered the room.

“Ah, my boy, my head’s in a whirl!” said the old man with a smile, as if he felt a little confused before his son. “Now, if you would only help a bit! I must have singers too. I shall have my own orchestra, but shouldn’t we get the gypsy singers as well? You military men like that sort of thing.”

“Really, Papa, I believe Prince Bagration worried himself less before the battle of Schön Grabern than you do now,” said his son with a smile.

The old count pretended to be angry.

“Yes, you talk, but try it yourself!”

And the count turned to the cook, who, with a shrewd and respectful expression, looked observantly and sympathetically at the father and son.

“What have the young people come to nowadays, eh, Feoktist?” said he. “Laughing at us old fellows!”

“That’s so, your excellency, all they have to do is to eat a good dinner, but providing it and serving it all up, that’s not their business!”

“That’s it, that’s it!” exclaimed the count, and gaily seizing his son by both hands, he cried, “Now I’ve got you, so take the sleigh and pair at once, and go to Bezukhov’s, and tell him ‘Count llya has sent you to ask for strawberries and fresh pineapples.’ We can’t get them from anyone else. He’s not there himself, so you’ll have to go in and ask the princesses; and from there go on to the Rasgulyay—the coachman Ipatka knows—and look up the gypsy Ilyushka, the one who danced at Count Orlov’s, you remember, in a white Cossack coat, and bring him along to me.”

“And am I to bring the gypsy girls along with him?” asked Nicholas, laughing. “Dear, dear!” . . .

On that third of March, all the rooms in the English Club were filled with a hum of conversation, like the hum of bees swarming in springtime. The members and guests of the Club wandered hither and thither, sat, stood, met and separated, some in uniform and some in evening dress, and a few here and there with powdered hair and in Russian kaftans. Powdered footmen, in livery with buckled shoes and smart stockings, stood at every door anxiously noting the visitors’ every movement in order to offer their services. Most of those present were elderly, respected men with broad, self-confident faces, fat fingers, and resolute gestures and voices. This class of guests and members sat in certain habitual places and met in certain habitual groups. A minority of those present were casual guests—chiefly young men, among whom were Denisov, Rostov, and Dolokhov, who was now again an officer in the Semenov regiment. The faces of these young people, especially those who were military men, bore that expression of condescending respect for their elders which seems to say to the older generation, “We are prepared to respect and honor you, but all the same remember that the future belongs to us.” . . .

Count llya Rostov, hurried and preoccupied, went about in his soft boots between the dining and drawing rooms, hastily greeting the important and unimportant, all of whom he knew, as if they were all equals, while his eyes occasionally sought out his fine well-set-up young son, resting on him and winking joyfully at him. Young Rostov stood at a window with Dolokhov, whose acquaintance he had lately made and highly valued. The old count came up to them and pressed Dolokhov’s hand.

“Please come and visit us . . . you know my brave boy . . . been together out there . . . both playing the hero . . . Ah, Vasili Ignatovich . . . How d’ye do, old fellow?” he said, turning to an old man who was passing, but before he had finished his greeting there was a general stir, and a footman who had run in announced, with a frightened face: “He’s arrived!”

Bells rang, the stewards rushed forward, and—like rye shaken together in a shovel—the guests who had been scattered about in different rooms came together and crowded in the large drawing room by the door of the ballroom.

Bagration appeared in the doorway of the anteroom without hat or sword, which, in accord with the Club custom, he had given up to the hall porter. He had no lambskin cap on his head, nor had he a loaded whip over his shoulder, as when Rostov had seen him on the eve of the battle of Austerlitz, but wore a tight new uniform with Russian and foreign Orders, and the Star of St. George on his left breast. Evidently just before coming to the dinner he had had his hair and whiskers trimmed, which changed his appearance for the worse. There was something naively festive in his air, which, in conjunction with his firm and virile features, gave him a rather comical expression. . . .

It was at first impossible to enter the drawing-room door for the crowd of members and guests jostling one another and trying to get a good look at Bagration over each other’s shoulders, as if he were some rare animal. Count llya Rostov, laughing and repeating the words, “Make way, dear boy! Make way, make way!” pushed through the crowd more energetically than anyone, led the guests into the drawing room, and seated them on the center sofa. The bigwigs, the most respected members of the Club, beset the new arrivals. Count llya, again thrusting his way through the crowd, went out of the drawing room and reappeared a minute later with another committeeman, carrying a large silver salver which he presented to Prince Bagration. On the salver lay some verses composed and printed in the hero’s honor. Bagration, on seeing the salver, glanced around in dismay, as though seeking help. But all eyes demanded that he should submit. Feeling himself in their power, he resolutely took the salver with both hands and looked sternly and reproachfully at the count who had presented it to him. Someone obligingly took the dish from Bagration (or he would, it seemed, have held it till evening and have gone in to dinner with it) and drew his attention to the verses.

“Well, I will read them, then!” Bagration seemed to say, and, fixing his weary eyes on the paper, began to read them with a fixed and serious expression. But the author himself took the verses and began reading them aloud. Bagration bowed his head and listened:

Bring glory then to Alexander’s reign

And on the throne our Titus shield.

A dreaded foe be thou, kindhearted as a man,

A Rhipheus at home, a Caesar in the field!

E’en fortunate Napoleon

Knows by experience, now, Bagration,

And dare not Herculean Russians trouble. . . .

But before he had finished reading, a stentorian major-domo announced that dinner was ready! The door opened, and from the dining room came the resounding strains of the polonaise:

Conquest’s joyful thunder waken,

Triumph, valiant Russians, now! . . .

and Count Rostov, glancing angrily at the author, who went on reading his verses, bowed to Bagration. Everyone rose, feeling that dinner was more important than verses, and Bagration, again preceding all the rest, went in to dinner. He was seated in the place of honor between two Alexanders—Bekleshev and Naryshkin—which was a significant allusion to the name of the sovereign. Three hundred persons took their seats in the dining room, according to their rank and importance: the more important nearer to the honored guest, as naturally as water flows deepest where the land lies lowest. . . .

Count llya Rostov with the other members of the committee sat facing Bagration and, as the very personification of Moscow hospitality, did the honors to the prince.

His efforts had not been in vain. The dinner, both the lenten and the other fare, was splendid, yet he could not feel quite at ease till the end of the meal. He winked at the butler, whispered directions to the footmen, and awaited each expected dish with some anxiety. Everything was excellent. With the second course, a gigantic sterlet (at sight of which llya Rostov blushed with self-conscious pleasure), the footmen began popping corks and filling the champagne glasses. After the fish, which made a certain sensation, the count exchanged glances with the other committeemen. “There will be many toasts, it’s time to begin,” he whispered, and taking up his glass, he rose. All were silent, waiting for what he would say.

“To the health of our Sovereign, the Emperor!” he cried, and at the same moment his kindly eyes grew moist with tears of joy and enthusiasm. The band immediately struck up “Conquest’s joyful thunder waken . . .” All rose and cried “Hurrah!” Bagration also rose and shouted “Hurrah!” in exactly the same voice in which he had shouted it on the field at Schön Grabern. Young Rostov’s ecstatic voice could be heard above the three hundred others. He nearly wept. “To the health of our Sovereign, the Emperor!” he roared, “Hurrah!” and emptying his glass at one gulp he dashed it to the floor. Many followed his example, and the loud shouting continued for a long time. When the voices subsided, the footmen cleared away the broken glass and everybody sat down again, smiling at the noise they had made and exchanging remarks. The old count rose once more, glanced at a note lying beside his plate, and proposed a toast, “To the health of the hero of our last campaign, Prince Peter Ivanovich Bagration!” and again his blue eyes grew moist. “Hurrah!” cried the three hundred voices again, but instead of the band a choir began singing a cantata composed by Paul Ivanovich Kutuzov:

Russians! O’er all barriers on!

Courage conquest guarantees;

Have we not Bagration?

He brings foemen to their knees, . . . etc.

As soon as the singing was over, another and another toast was proposed and Count llya Rostov became more and more moved, more glass was smashed, and the shouting grew louder. They drank to Bekleshev, Naryshkin, Uvarov, Dolgorukov, Apraksin, Valuev, to the committee, to all the Club members and to all the Club guests, and finally to Count llya Rostov separately, as the organizer of the banquet. At that toast, the count took out his handkerchief and, covering his face, wept outright.

Toward evening [Nicholas found] they were so far from home that he accepted “Uncle’s” offer that the hunting party should spend the night in his little village of Mikhaylovna.

“And if you put up at my house that will be better still. That’s it, come on!” said “Uncle.” “You see it’s damp weather, and you could rest, and the little countess could be driven home in a trap.”

“Uncle’s” offer was accepted. A huntsman was sent to Otradnoe for a trap, while Nicholas rode with Natasha and Petya to “Uncle’s” house.

Some five male domestic serfs, big and little, rushed out to the front porch to meet their master. A score of women serfs, old and voung, as well as children, popped out from the back entrance to have a look at the hunters who were arriving. The presence of Natasha—a woman, a lady, and on horseback—raised the curiosity of the serfs to such a degree that many of them came up to her, stared her in the face, and unabashed by her presence made remarks about her as though she were some prodigy on show and not a human being able to hear or understand what was said about her.

“Arinka! Look, she sits sideways! There she sits and her skirt dangles. . . . See, she’s got a little hunting horn!”

“Goodness gracious! See her knife? . . .”

“Isn’t she a Tartar!”

“How is it you didn’t go head over heels?” asked the boldest of all, addressing Natasha directly.

“Uncle” dismounted at the porch of his little wooden house which stood in the midst of an overgrown garden and, after a glance at his retainers, shouted authoritatively that the superfluous ones should take themselves off and that all necessary preparations should be made to receive the guests and the visitors.

The serfs all dispersed. “Uncle” lifted Natasha off her horse and taking her hand led her up the rickety wooden steps of the porch. The house, with its bare, unplastered log walls, was not overclean—it did not seem that those living in it aimed at keeping it spotless—but neither was it noticeably neglected. In the entry there was a smell of fresh apples, and wolf and fox skins hung about.

“Uncle” led the visitors through the anteroom into a small hall with a folding table and red chairs, then into the drawing room, with a round birchwood table and a sofa, and finally into his private room, where there was a tattered sofa, a worn carpet, and portraits of Suvorov, of the host’s father and mother, and of himself in military uniform. The study smelt strongly of tobacco and dogs. “Uncle” asked his visitors to sit down and make themselves at home, and then went out of the room. Rugay [the dog], his back still muddy, came into the room and lay down on the sofa, cleaning himself with his tongue and teeth. Leading from the study was a passage in which a partition with ragged curtains could be seen. From behind this came women’s laughter and whispers. Natasha, Nicholas, and Petya took off their wraps and sat down on the sofa. Petya, leaning on his elbow, fell asleep at once. Natasha and Nicholas were silent. Their faces glowed, they were hungry and very cheerful. ‘They looked at one another (now that the hunt was over and they were in the house, Nicholas no longer considered it necessary to show his manly superiority over his sister), Natasha gave him a wink, and neither refrained long from bursting into a peal of ringing laughter even before they had a pretext ready to account for it.

After a while “Uncle” came in, in a Cossack coat, blue trousers, and small top boots. And Natasha felt that this costume, the very one she had regarded with surprise and amusement at Otradnoe, was just the right thing and not at all worse than a swallowtail or frock coat. “Uncle” too was in high spirits and, far from being offended by the brother’s and sister’s laughter (it could never enter his head that they might be laughing at his way of life), he himself joined in the merriment.

“That’s right, young countess, that’s it, come on! I never saw anyone like her!” said he, offering Nicholas a pipe with a long stem and, with a practiced motion of three fingers, taking down another that had been cut short. “She’s ridden all day like a man, and is as fresh as ever!”

Soon after “Uncle’s” reappearance the door was opened, evidently from the sound by a barefooted girl, and a stout, rosy, good-looking woman of about forty, with a double chin and full red lips, entered carrying a large loaded tray. With hospitable dignity and cordiality in her glance and in every motion, she looked at the visitors and, with a pleasant smile, bowed respectfully. In spite of her exceptional stoutness, which caused her to protrude her chest and stomach and throw back her head, this woman (who was “Uncle’s” housekeeper) trod very lightly. She went to the table, set down the tray, and with her plump white hands deftly took from it the bottles and various hors-d’oeuvres and dishes and arranged them on the table. When she had finished, she stepped aside and stopped at the door with a smile on her face. “Here I am. I am she! Now do you understand ‘Uncle’?” her expression said to Rostov. How could one help understanding? Not only Nicholas, but even Natasha, understood the meaning of his puckered brow and the happy complacent smile that slightly puckered his lips when Anisya Fedorovna entered. On the tray was a bottle of herb wine, different kinds of vodka, pickled mushrooms, rye cakes made with buttermilk, honey in the comb, still mead and sparkling mead, apples, nuts (raw and roasted), and nut-and-honey sweets. Afterwards she brought a freshly roasted chicken, ham, preserves made with honey, and preserves made with sugar.

All this was the fruit of Anisya Fedorovna’s housekeeping, gathered and prepared by her. The smell and taste of it all had a smack of Anisya Fedorovna herself: a savor of juiciness, cleanliness, whiteness, and pleasant smiles.

“Take this, little Lady-Countess!” she kept saying, as she offered Natasha first one thing and then another.

Natasha ate of everything and thought she had never seen or eaten such buttermilk cakes, such aromatic jam, such honey-and-nut sweets, or such a chicken anywhere. Anisya Fedorovna left the room.

After supper, over their cherry brandy, Rostov and “Uncle” talked of past and future hunts, of Rugay and Ilagin’s dogs, while Natasha sat upright on the sofa and listened with sparkling eyes. She tried several times to wake Petya that he might eat something, but he only muttered incoherent words without waking up. Natasha felt so lighthearted and happy in these novel surroundings that she only feared the trap would come for her too soon. After a casual pause, such as often occurs when receiving friends for the first time in one’s own house, “Uncle,” answering a thought that was in his visitors’ minds, said:

“This, you see, is how I am finishing my days. . . . Death will come. That’s it, come on! Nothing will remain. Then why harm anyone?”

“Uncle’s” face was very significant and even handsome as he said this. Involuntarily Rostov recalled all the good he had heard about him from his father and the neighbors. Throughout the whole province “Uncle” had the reputation of being the most honorable and disinterested of cranks. They called him in to decide family disputes, chose him as executor, confided secrets to him, elected him to be a justice and to other posts; but he always persistently refused public appointments, passing the autumn and spring in the fields on his bay gelding, sitting at home in winter, and lying in his overgrown garden in summer.

“Why don’t you enter the service, Uncle?”

“I did once, but gave it up. I am not fit for it. That’s it, come on! I can’t make head or tail of it. That’s for you—I haven’t brains enough. Now, hunting is another matter—that’s it, come on! Open the door, there!” he shouted. “Why have you shut it?”

The door at the end of the passage led to the huntsmen’s room, as they called the room for the hunt servants.

There was a rapid patter of bare feet, and an unseen hand opened the door into the huntsmen’s room, from which came the clear sounds of a balalayka on which someone, who was evidently a master of the art, was playing. Natasha had been listening to those strains for some time and now went out into the passage to hear better.

“That’s Mitka, my coachman. . . . I have got him a good balalayka. I’m fond of it,” said “Uncle.”

It was the custom for Mitka to play the balalayka in the huntsmen’s room when “Uncle” returned from the chase. “Uncle” was fond of such music.

“How good! Really very good!” said Nicholas with some unintentional superciliousness, as if ashamed to confess that the sounds pleased him very much.

“Very good?” said Natasha reproachfully, noticing her brother’s tone. “Not ‘very good’—it’s simply delicious!”

Just as “Uncle’s” pickled mushrooms, honey, and cherry brandy had seemed to her the best in the world, so also that song, at that moment, seemed to her the acme of musical delight.

“More, please, more!” cried Natasha at the door as soon as the balalayka ceased.

I am a valiant flea indeed, thus to have nipped at the lion Tolstoy! And I shall make one more small nibble, and copy here a prayer l can never forget. It is the one simple Platon the soldier said every night, before he turned over and fell peacefully asleep, whether at home or on the battlefield:

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy and

save me! Let me lie down like a stone,

O God, and rise up like new bread.

It is inevitable that morsels from Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology of Taste be scattered through this or any other book about feasting and the pleasures of the table. His collection of gastronomical anecdotes and observations took perhaps twenty-five years to write, at the peaceful pace he chose after long wanderings as a political refugee from France, but it is probable that in ten times that many years, or a hundred, it will still do much to feed men’s intellectual hunger. It is elegant, witty, subtly sly, the kind of writing that clears fustiness from the tongue of the mind like dry champagne.

Brillat-Savarin himself, in the last third of his life, became a legend of mild eccentricity in the law-courts and salons of Paris. Wits of the period who frequented the drawing room of his cousins the Récamiers found him “amiable, delicate, highly fashionable.” The Marquis de Cussy, a gastronomical rival, wrote of him that “he ate copiously and ill; he chose little, talked dully, had no vivacity in his looks, and was absorbed at the end of a repast.” His colleagues at the Court of Cassation shunned him more than once for the smell of the game that he carried in his warm coat-pockets to get high! He was, it is safe to guess even in the face of the Marquis, a charming, gay old man . . . he had, one of his friends said, “a stylish mind and stomach.”

It is hard to choose any special morsel from his book, but there follows one which seems to hold everything that is delicious about them: a teasing, satirical pedantry in the first part, wisdom, and a smooth, light, almost affectionate artfulness in the little story at the end:

From The Physiology of Taste by Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, 1755–1826

But, the impatient reader may exclaim, how can one possibly assemble, in this year of grace 1825, a meal which will meet all the conditions necessary to attain the ultimate in the pleasures of the table?

I am about to answer that question. Draw near, Reader, and pay heed: it is Gasterea, the loveliest of the muses, who inspires me; I shall speak more clearly than an oracle, and my precepts will live throughout the centuries.

“Let the number of guests be no more than twelve, so that conversation may always remain general;

“Let them be so chosen that their professions will be varied, their tastes analogous, and that there be such points of contact that the odious formality of introductions will not be needed;

“Let the dining room be more than amply lighted, the linen of dazzling cleanliness, and the temperature maintained at from sixty to sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit;

“Let the gentlemen be witty without pretension, and the ladies charming without too much coquetry;

“Let the dishes be of exquisite quality, but limited in their number, and the wines of the first rank also, each according to its degree;

“Let the progression of the former be from the most substantial to the lightest, and of the latter from the simplest wines to the headiest;

“Let the tempo of eating be moderate, the dinner being the last affair of the day: the guests should behave like travellers who must arrive together at the same destination;

“Let the coffee be piping hot, and the liqueurs of the host’s especial choice;

“Let the drawing room which awaits the diners be large enough to hold a card table for those who cannot do without it, with enough space left for after-dinner conversations;

“Let the guests be disciplined by the restraints of polite society and animated by the hope that the evening will not pass without its rewarding pleasures;

“Let the tea be not too strong, the toast artfully buttered, and the punch made with care;

“Let the leavetakings not begin before eleven o’clock, but by midnight let every guest be home and abed.”

If anyone has attended a party combining all these virtues, he can boast that he has known perfection, and for each one of them which has been forgotten or ignored he will have experienced the less delight.

I have already said that the pleasures of the table, as I conceive of them, can go on for a rather long period of time; I am going to prove this now by giving a detailed and faithful account of the lengthiest meal I ever ate in my life; it is a little bonbon which I shall pop into my reader’s mouth as a reward for having read me thus far with such agreeable politeness. Here it is:

I used to have, at the end of the Rue du Bac, a family of cousins composed of the following: Doctor Dubois, seventy-eight years old; the captain, seventy-six; their sister Jeannette, who was seventy-four. I went now and then to pay them a visit, and they always received me very graciously.

“By George!” the doctor said one day to me, standing on tiptoe to slap me on the shoulder. “For a long time now you’ve been boasting of your fondues (eggs scrambled with cheese), and you always manage to keep our mouths watering. It’s time to stop all this. The captain and I are coming soon to have breakfast with you, to see what it’s all about.” (It was, I believe, in 1801 that he thus teased me.)

“Gladly,” I replied. “You’ll taste it in all its glory, for I myself will make it. Your idea is completely delightful to me. So . . . tomorrow at ten sharp, military style!”

At the appointed hour I saw my guests arrive, freshly shaved, their hair carefully arranged and well-powdered: two little old men who were still spry and healthy.

They smiled with pleasure when they saw the table ready, spread with white linen, three places laid, and at each of them two dozen oysters and a gleaming golden lemon.

At both ends of the table rose up bottles of Sauterne, carefully wiped clean except for the corks, which indicated in no uncertain way that it was a long time that the wine had rested there.

Alas, in my life-span I have almost seen the last of those oyster breakfasts, so frequent and so gay in the old days, where the molluscs were swallowed by the thousands! They have disappeared with the abbés, who never ate less than a gross apiece, and with the chevaliers, who went on eating them forever. I regret them, in a philosophical way: if time can change governments, how much more influence has it over our simple customs!

After the oysters, which were found to be deliciously fresh, grilled skewered kidneys were served, a deep pastry shell of truffled foie gras, and finally the fondue.

All its ingredients had been mixed in a casserole, which was brought to the table with an alcohol lamp. I performed on this battlefield, and my cousins did not miss a single one of my gestures.

They exclaimed with delight on the charms of the whole procedure, and asked for my recipe, which I promised to give them, the while I told the two anecdotes on the subject which my reader will perhaps find further on.

After the fondue came seasonable fresh fruits and sweetmeats, a cup of real Mocha made à la Dubelloy, a method which was then beginning to be known, and finally two kinds of liqueurs, one sharp for refreshing the palate and the other oily for soothing it.

The breakfast being well-ended, I suggested to my guests that we take a little exercise, and that it consist of inspecting my apartment, quarters which are far from elegant but which are spacious and comfortable, and which pleased my company especially since the ceilings and gildings date from the middle of the reign of Louis XV.

I showed them the clay original of the bust of my lovely cousin Mme. Récamier by Chinard, and her portrait in miniature by Augustin; they were so delighted by these that the doctor kissed the portrait with his full fleshy lips, and the captain permitted himself to take such liberty with the statue that I slapped him away; for if all the admirers of the original did likewise, that breast so voluptuously shaped would soon be in the same state as the big toe of Saint Peter in Rome, which pilgrims have worn to a nubbin with their kisses.

Then I showed them a few casts from the works of the best antique sculptors, some paintings which were not without merit, my guns, my musical instruments, and a few fine first editions, as many of them French as foreign.

In this little excursion into such varied arts they did not forget my kitchen. I showed them my economical stockpot, my roastingshell, my clockwork spit, and my steamcooker. They inspected everything with the most finicky curiosity, and were all the more astonished since in their own kitchens everything was still done as it had been during the Regency.

At the very moment we re-entered my drawing room, the clock struck two. “Bother!” the doctor exclaimed. “Here it is dinner time, and sister Jeannette will be waiting for us! We must hurry back to her. I must confess I feel no real hunger, but still I must have my bowl of soup. It is an old habit with me, and when I go for a day without taking it I have to say with Titus, Diem perdidi.”

“My dear doctor,” I said to him, “why go so far for what is right here at hand? I’ll send someone to the kitchen to give warning that you will stay awhile longer with me, and that you will give me the great pleasure of accepting a dinner toward which I know you will be charitable, since it will not have all the finish of such a meal prepared with more leisure.”

A kind of oculary consultation took place at this point between the two brothers, followed by a formal acceptance. I then sent a messenger posthaste to the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and exchanged a word or two with my master cook; and after a remarkably short interval, and thanks partly to his own resources and partly to the help of neighboring restaurants, he served us a very neatly turned out little dinner, and a delectable one to boot.

It gave me deep satisfaction to observe the poise and aplomb with which my two friends seated themselves, pulled nearer to the table, spread out their napkins, and prepared for action.

They were subjected to two surprises which I myself had not intended for them; for first I served them Parmesan cheese with the soup, and then I offered them a glass of dry Madeira. These were novelties but lately imported by Prince Talleyrand, the leader of all our diplomats, to whom we owe so many witticisms, so many epigrams and profundities, and the man so long followed by the public’s devout attention, whether in the days of his power or of his retirement.

Dinner went off very well in both its accessory and its main parts, and my cousins reflected as much pleasure as gaiety.

Afterwards I suggested a game of piquet, which they refused; they preferred the sweet siesta, the far niente, of the Italians, the captain told me; and therefore we made a little circle close to the hearth.

In spite of the delights of a postprandial doze, I have always felt that nothing lends more calm pleasure to the conversation than an occupation of whatever kind, so long as it does not absorb the attention. Therefore I proposed a cup of tea.

Tea in itself was an innovation to the old die-hard patriots. Nevertheless it was accepted. I made it before their eyes, and they drank down several cups of it with all the more pleasure since they had always before considered it a remedy.

Long practice has taught me that one pleasure leads to another, and that once headed along this path a man loses the power of refusal. Therefore it was that in an almost imperative voice I spoke of finishing the afternoon with a bowl of punch.

“But you will kill us!” the doctor said.

“Or at least make us tipsy!” the captain added.

To all this I replied only by calling vociferously for lemons, for sugar, for rum.

I concocted the punch then, and while I was busy with it, I had made for me some beautifully thin, delicately buttered, and perfectly salted slices of zwiebach (TOAST).

This time there was a little protest. My cousins assured me that they had already eaten very well indeed, and that they would not touch another thing; but since I am acquainted with the temptations of this completely simple dish, I replied with only one remark, that I hoped I had made enough of it. And sure enough, soon afterwards the captain took the last slice, and I caught him peeking to see if there were still a little more or if it was really the last. I ordered another plateful immediately.

During all this, time had passed, and my watch showed me it was past eight o’clock.

“We must get out of here!” my guests exclaimed. “We are absolutely obliged to go home and eat at least a bit of salad with our poor sister, who has not set eyes on us today!”

I had no real objection to this; faithful to the duties of hospitality when it is concerned with two such delightful old fellows, I accompanied them to their carriage, and watched them be driven away.

Someone may ask if boredom did not show itself now and then in such a long séance.

I shall reply in the negative: the attention of my guests was fixed by my making the fondue, by the little trip around the apartment, by a few things which were new to them in the dinner, by the tea, and above all by the punch, which they had never before tasted.

Moreover the doctor knew the genealogy and the bits of gossip of all Paris; the captain had passed part of his life in Italy, both as a soldier and as an envoy to the Parman court; I myself have traveled a great deal; we chatted without affectation, and listened to one another with delight. Not even that much is needed to make time pass with grace and rapidity.

The next morning I received a letter from the doctor; he wished to inform me that the little debauch of the night before had done them no harm at all; quite to the contrary, after the sweetest of sleeps, the two old men had arisen refreshed, feeling both able and eager to begin anew.

One of the most entertaining characters in nineteenth-century French literature is Doctor Gasterini, the fabulous Parisian gourmet who wanders in and out of several novels by Eugène Sue. It is a pity that the books themselves are so labored and ridiculous: the idea of making a cynical society-doctor into a kind of Robin Hood of the morals of the period is amusing, and in spite of the ridiculous plots his adventures, especially with the fat clergy, are fun to read. The novel I have chosen to cut into for this present collection is, for obvious reasons, Gluttony, one of Sue’s “exposés” of the seven cardinal sins.

In it he manages to prove, in an ingenious and lively way, that intelligent gourmandizing can be a virtue rather than a sin . . . and that virtue, as always, will triumph!

The story is one of the silliest ever written, probably. Doctor Gasterini rescues a beautiful Spanish girl from a convent and his handsome sea-captain nephew from prison and sees them properly blessed by the dastardly and conniving priests, all to the tune of the sardonic blackmailing of a gluttonous old canon who has arranged the whole foul plot in order to get his lovely ward’s money into the hands of the Church, and so on and so on and so on.

The canon, who for the first time in his life has lost his appetite, is tortured by Gasterini disguised as a cook. The poor priest eats one miraculous meal and then is given nothing but ordinary food until, desperate, he promises to release the beautiful señorita from the convent and give her his holiest blessing. All is well, and Gasterini, unmasked and sardonically virtuous, cooks another incredibly delicious meal for the hungry old pig.

Here is the first one, just for fun:

From Gluttony by Eugène Sue, 1804–1857

There was a resignation full of doubt, of curiosity, of anguish, and of vague hope, in the accent with which Dom Diégo uttered the words, “I am waiting.”

Soon the major-domo reappeared.

He walked with a solemn air, bearing on a tray a little chafing-dish of silver, the size of a plate, surmounted with its stew-pan. On the side of the tray was a small crystal flagon, filled with a limpid liquid, the colour of burnt topaz.

Pablo, as he approached, several times held his nose to the edge of the stew-pan to inhale the appetising exhalations which escaped from it; finally, he placed on the table the little chafing-dish, the flagon, and a small card.

“Pablo,” asked the canon, pointing to the chafing-dish, surmounted with its pan, “what is that silver plate?”

“It belongs to M. Appetite, sir; under this pan is a dish with a double bottom, filled with boiling water, because this great man says the food must be eaten burning hot.”

“And that flagon, Pablo?”

“Its use is marked on the card, sir, which informs you of all the dishes you are going to eat.”

“Let me see this card,” said the canon, and he read:

“ ‘Guinea fowl eggs fried in the fat of quails, relieved with a gravy of crabs.

“ ‘N. B. Eat burning hot, make only one mouthful of each egg, after having softened it well with the gravy.

“ ‘Masticate pianissimo.

“ ‘Drink after each egg two fingers of Madeira wine of 1807, which has made five voyages from Rio Janeiro to Calcutta. (It is needless to say that certain wines are vastly improved by long voyages.)

“ ‘Drink this wine with meditation.

“ ‘It is impossible for me not to take the liberty to accompany each dish which I have the honour of serving Lord Dom Diégo with a flagon of wine appropriate to the particular character of the aforesaid dish.’ ”. . .

The canon, whose agitation was increasing, lifted the top of the silver dish with a trembling hand.

Suddenly a delicious odour spread itself through the atmosphere. Pablo clasped his hands, dilating his wide nostrils and looking at the dish with a greedy eye.

In the middle of the silver dish, half steeped in an unctuous, velvety gravy of a beautiful rosy hue, the major-domo saw four little round soft eggs, that seemed still to tremble with their smoking, golden frying.

The canon, struck like his major-domo with the delicious fragrance of the dish, literally ate it with his eyes, and for the first time in two months a sudden desire of appetite tickled his palate. Nevertheless, he still doubted, believing in the deceitful illusion of a false hunger. Taking in a spoon one of the little eggs, well impregnated with gravy, he shovelled it into his large mouth.

“Masticate pianissimo, my lord!” cried Pablo, who followed every motion of his master with a beating heart. “Masticate slowly, the magician said, and afterwards drink this, according to the directions.”

And Pablo poured out two fingers of the Madeira wine of 1807, in a glass as thin as the peel of an onion, and presented it to Dom Diégo.

Oh, wonder! Oh, marvel! Oh, miracle! The second movement of the mastication pianissimo was hardly accomplished when the canon threw his head gently back, and, half shutting his eyes in a sort of ecstasy, crossed his two hands on his breast, still holding in one hand the spoon with which he had just served himself. . . .

Each service was accompanied with an “order,” as Pablo called it, and a new flagon of wine, drawn, no doubt, from the cellar of this wonderful cook.

A collection of these culinary bulletins will give an idea of the varied delights enjoyed by Dom Diégo.

After the note which announced the Guinea fowl eggs, the following menu was served, in the order in which we present it:

“Trout from the lake of Geneva with Montpellier butter, preserved in ice.

“Envelope each mouthful of this exquisite fish, hermetically, in a layer of this highly spiced seasoning.

“Masticate allegro.

“Drink two glasses of this Bordeaux wine, Sauterne of 1834, which has made the voyage from the Indies three times.

“This wine should be meditated.”

“A painter or a poet would have made an enchanting picture of this trout with Montpellier butter preserved in ice,” said the canon to Pablo. “See there, this charming little trout, with flesh the colour of a rose, and a head like mother-of-pearl, voluptuously lying on this bed of shining green, composed of fresh butter and virgin oil congealed by ice, to which tarragon, chive, parsley, and watercresses have given this bright emerald colour! And what perfume! How the freshness of this seasoning contrasts with the pungency of the spices which relieve it! How delicious! And this wine of Sauterne! As the great man of the kitchen says, how admirably this ambrosia is suited to the character of this divine trout which gives me a growing appetite!”

After the trout came another dish, accompanied with this bulletin:

“Fillets of grouse with white Piedmont truffles, minced raw.

“Enclose each mouthful of grouse between two slices of truffle, and moisten the whole well with sauce à la Perigueux, with which black truffles are mingled.

“Masticate forte, as the white truffles are raw.

“Drink two glasses of this wine of Château-Margaux 1834—it also has made a voyage from the Indies.

“This wine reveals itself in all its majesty only in the aftertaste.”

These fillets of grouse, far from appeasing the growing appetite of the canon, excited it to violent hunger, and, in spite of the profound respect which the orders of the great man had inspired in him, he sent Pablo, before another ringing of the bell, in search of a new culinary wonder.

Finally the bell sounded.

The major-domo returned with this note, which accompanied another dish:

“Salt marsh rails roasted on toast à la Sardanapalus.

“Eat only the legs and rump of the rails; do not cut the leg, take it by the foot, sprinkle it lightly with salt, then cut it off just above the foot, and chew the flesh and the bone.

“Masticate largo and fortissimo; eat at the same time a mouthful of the hot toast, coated over with an unctuous condiment made of the combination of snipe liver and brains and fat livers of Strasburg, roebuck marrow, pounded anchovy, and pungent spices.

“Drink two glasses of Clos Vougeot of 1817.

“Pour out this wine with emotion, drink it with religion.”

After this roast, worthy of Lucullus or Trimalcyon, and enjoyed by the canon with all the intensity of unsatisfied hunger, the major-domo reappeared with two side-dishes that the menu announced thus:

“Mushrooms with delicate herbs and the essence of ham; let this divine mushroom soften and dissolve in the mouth.

“Masticate pianissimo.

“Drink a glass of the wine Côte-Rôtie 1829, and a glass of Johannisberg of 1729, drawn from municipal vats of the burgomasters of Heidelberg.

“No recommendation to make for the advantage of the wine, Côte- Rôtie; it is a proud, imperious wine, it asserts itself. As for the old Johannisberg, one hundred and forty years old, approach it with the veneration which a centenarian inspires; drink it with compunction.

“Two sweet side-dishes.

“Morsels à la duchesse with pineapple jelly.

“Masticate amoroso.

“Drink two or three glasses of champagne dipped in ice, dry Sillery the year of the comet.

“Dessert.

“Cheese from Brie made on the farm of Estonville, near Meaux. This house had for forty years the honour of serving the palate of Prince Talleyrand, who pronounced the cheese of Brie the king of cheeses—the only royalty to which this great diplomatist remained faithful unto death.

“Drink a glass or two of Port wine drawn from a hogshead recovered from the great earthquake of Lisbon.

“Bless Providence for this miraculous salvage, and empty your glass piously.

“N. B. Never fruits in the morning; they chill, burden, and involve the stomach at the expense of the repose of the evening; simply rinse the mouth with a glass of cream from the Barbadoes of Madame Amphoux, 1780, and take a light siesta, dreaming of dinner.”

It is needless to say that all the prescriptions of the cook were followed literally by the canon, whose appetite, now a prodigious thing, seemed to increase in proportion as it was fed; finally, having exhausted his glass to the last drop, Dom Diégo, his ears scarlet, his eyes softly closed, and his cheeks flushed, commenced to feel the tepid moisture and light torpor of a happy and easy digestion; then, sinking into his armchair with a delicious languor, he said to his major-domo:

“If I were not conscious of a tiger’s hunger, which threatens explosion too soon, I would believe myself in Paradise. So, Pablo, go at once for this great man of the kitchen, this veritable magician; tell him to come and enjoy his work; tell him to come and judge of the ineffable beatitude in which he has plunged me, and above all, Pablo, tell him that if I do not go myself to testify my admiration, my gratitude, it is because—”

The canon was interrupted by the sight of the culinary artist, who suddenly entered the room, and stood face to face with Diégo, staring at him with a strange expression of countenance.

There is one man, more than any other among Frenchmen written about by Frenchmen, who counteracts all of Sue’s indigestible flim-flam: Tartarin of Tarascon. He is as innocent as cool water after too many sauces. He is light and gay and silly after the affectations and excesses of more worldly gluttons. He is a lovable little braggart, with such an appetite for life that he makes us hungry too, whether he is lying about his trips to fabulous countries or is upsetting the routine in a stuffy Swiss pension by refusing to touch either the boiled rice or the boiled prunes for dessert.

From Tartarin on the Alps by Alphonse Daudet, 1840–1897

A sight indeed is the salle-à-manger of the Rigi-Kulm.

Six hundred guests seated around an immense horse-shoe table on which dishes of rice and prunes alternate in long files with green plants, reflecting in their clear or brown sauce the lights of the lustres or the gilding of the panelled ceiling.

As at all Swiss tables d’hôte, this rice and these prunes divide the diners into two rival factions, and the looks of hatred or covetousness bestowed upon the dessert dishes is quite sufficient to enable the spectator to divine to which party the guests belong. The Rice Party betray themselves by their pallor, the Prunes by their congested appearance.

On this particular evening the latter were in the majority, and included all the most important personages, quite European celebrities, such as the great historian Astier-Réhu of the French Academy; the Baron de Stolz, an old Austro-Hungarian diplomatist; Lord Chippendale, a member of the Jockey Club with his niece (?) (hum!); the illustrious Professor Schwanthaler, of Bonn University; a Peruvian general and his eight daughters.

To all these the Rice faction could only oppose as vedettes a Belgian senator and his family; Madame Schwanthaler, the wife of the Professor aforesaid; and an Italian tenor on his way from Russia, exhibiting upon the tablecloth a pair of sleeve-links as large as saucers.

These double and opposing currents no doubt gave an air of lassitude and stiffness to the table d’hôte. How otherwise can we account for the silence of these six hundred persons, stiff, surly, defiant, with that supreme contempt which they affected to possess one for the other? A superficial observer would have attributed it to the stupid Anglo-Saxon reserve which now gives the tone to the travelling world.

But no! Human beings do not thus hate each other at first sight; turning up their noses at each other; sneering, and glancing superciliously at one another in the absence of introductions. There must have been something else!

Rice and Prunes, I tell you. There you have the explanation of the mournful silence that weighed down upon the dinner at the Rigi-Kulm, which, considering the number and the varied nationalities of the guests, ought to have been very animated and noisy; something like what one would imagine a meal at the foot of the Tower of Babel might have been.

The mountaineer entered the room—a little perplexed in this assembly of Trappists beneath the glare of the lustres—coughed loudly without anyone taking any notice of him, and seated himself in his place next the last comer, at the end of the table. Unaccoutred now, he was simply an ordinary tourist, but of a very amiable appearance; bald, rotund, his beard thick and pointed, a fine nose, thick and somewhat fierce eyebrows, with a pleasant manner and appearance.

Rice or Prune! No one knew yet.

Scarcely had he seated himself when quitting his place with a bound, he exclaimed, “Outre! a draught!” and rushed to an empty chair turned down at the centre of the table.

He was stopped by one of the Swiss female attendants, a native of the canton of Uri, wearing little silver chains and white stomacher.

“Monsieur, that is engaged.”

Then, from the table, a young lady, of whom he could see nothing but a mass of fair hair relieved by a neck white as virgin snow, said, without turning round, and with a foreign accent:

“This seat is at liberty; my brother is not well, and will not come down to dinner.”

“Ill?” asked the mountaineer, with an interested, almost affectionate, manner, as he seated himself. “Ill? Not dangerously, au moins?”

He pronounced the last words au mouain, and they reasserted themselves with some other vocal parasites, “hé, qué, té, zou, vé, vaï, allons,” &c., that still further accentuated his southern tongue, which was no doubt displeasing to the youthful blonde; for she only replied to him with a stony stare—from eyes of deep, dark blue.

The neighbour on his right was not encouraging either. He was the Italian tenor, with a low forehead, very moist eyes, and Hectoring moustaches which he twirled in an irritable manner, for had he not been separated from his pretty neighbour? But the good mountaineer had a habit of talking while he was eating—he thought it good for his digestion.

“Vé! What pretty buttons,” he remarked aloud to himself, as he glanced at the Italian’s sleeve-studs. “Those notes of music, inlaid with the jasper, have a charming effect”—“un effet charmain!”

His strident tones rang through the silent salle, without producing the least echo.

“Surely monsieur is a singer, qué?”

“Non capisco,” growled the Italian through his moustache.

For a moment the man devoted himself to his dinner without speaking—but the food choked him. At length, as his opposite neighbour, the Austro-Hungarian diplomatist, attempted to reach the mustard-pot with his small, aged, shaking hands, enveloped in mittens, our hero passed it politely to him, saying, “A votre service, monsieur le baron,” for he had heard him thus addressed.

Unfortunately poor M. de Stolz, notwithstanding the cunning and ingenious air which he had contracted in the pursuit of Chinese diplomacy, had long ago lost his speech and his ideas, and was travelling around the mountains with the view of finding them again. He opened his eyes wide and gazed at the unknown face, and then shut them again without saying anything. It would have taken ten old diplomats of his intellectual power to find the formula of acknowledgment.

At this new failure the mountaineer made a grimace, and the rough manner in which he seized the bottle gave one the idea that he was going to break, with it, the cracked head of the old diplomatist. But no such thing. It was merely to offer his neighbour a glass of wine, but she did not hear him, being lost in a murmured conversation—a chirping, sweet and lively, in an unknown tongue—with two young people close by. She leaned forward, she became animated. He could see her little curls shimmer in the light against a tiny ear, transparent and rosy-tinted. Polish? Russian? Norwegian? Well, certainly Northern; and a pretty little song of his native district escaped the lips of the Southerner, who quietly began to hum:

O coumtesso gènto,

Estelo dou Nord

Qué la neu argento,

Qu’ Amour friso en or.

Everybody at table turned round: they all thought he had gone mad. He blushed and kept himself quiet in his place, not moving except to push violently away the dish of sacred fruit which they passed to him.

“Prunes! Never in my life!”

This was too much.

There was a great movement of chairs. The Academician, Lord Chippendale, the Professor of Bonn, and some other notables of the party, rose and quitted the room by way of protest.

The Rice Party almost immediately followed them when they perceived the stranger push away from him the other dessert dish as violently as the former.

Neither Rice nor Prune! What then?

All the guests retired, and the silence was truly glacial as the people, with bowed heads and with the corners of their mouths disdainfully drawn down, passed in front of the unhappy individual who remained alone in the immense dining-room, inclined de faire une trempette after the manner of his country, but kept down by the universal disdain!

J. K. Huysmans, who wrote Against the Grain, has often been called “a prince of gastronomes,” and “the father of present-day table sybaritism,” with a complete inaccuracy which would have displeased and astonished him. He was never a gastronomer, in the quasi-professional sense attributed to that term, although his was a fastidious and intelligent appetite which could teach much to the self-styled “gourmets” of the world.

His friend and doctor, de Lézinier, wrote of him, “The frugality of his stomach and the austerity of his appetite had refined the aristocracy of his palate . . . he chose his food and wines primarily for their taste, and then for their health-sustaining properties.”

He was a man ever conscious of the “distressing absurdity of human affairs,” and yet his constant shuddering disgust was always tolerant, patient, and even a little amused, so that, as one English critic has written of him in the Wine and Food Quarterly, “Like Robert Louis Stevenson he believed that to detect the flavor of an olive is no less a piece of human perfection than to find beauty in the colors of the sunset.”

The three short excerpts I have chosen from Against the Grain give, perhaps as well as any could, an idea of the jaded young Des Esseintes’s extravagantly futile life in Paris, just before he fled to the country; the way he lived there, in his equally futile attempt at simplicity; and finally, how he spent his last evening in Paris, on his way to London and freedom from satiety:

From Against the Grain by J. K. Huysmans, 1848–1907

He acquired the reputation of an eccentric, which he enhanced by wearing costumes of white velvet, and gold-embroidered waistcoats, by inserting, in place of a cravat, a Parma bouquet in the opening of his shirt, by giving famous dinners to men of letters, one of which, a revival of the eighteenth century, celebrating the most futile of his misadventures, was a funeral repast.

In the dining room, hung in black and opening on the transformed garden with its ash-powdered walks, its little pool now bordered with basalt and filled with ink, its clumps of cypresses and pines, the dinner had been served on a table draped in black, adorned with baskets of violets and scabiouses, lit by candelabra from which green flames blazed, and by chandeliers from which wax tapers flared.

To the sound of funeral marches played by a concealed orchestra, nude Negresses, wearing slippers and stockings of silver cloth with patterns of tears, served the guests.

Out of black-edged plates they had drunk turtle soup and eaten Russian rye bread, ripe Turkish olives, caviar, smoked Frankfort black pudding, game with sauces that were the color of licorice and blacking, truffle gravy, chocolate cream puddings, nectarines, grape preserves, mulberries, and black-heart cherries; they had sipped, out of dark glasses, wines from Limagnes, Roussillon, Tenedos, Val de Penas, and Porto, and after the coffee and walnut brandy had partaken of kvas and porter and stout.

The farewell dinner to a temporarily dead virility—this was what he had written on invitation cards designed like bereavement notices.

. . . It occurred to him that he needed a cordial to revive his flagging spirits.

He went to the dining room where, built in one of the panels, was a closet containing a number of tiny casks, ranged side by side, and resting on small stands of sandalwood.

This collection of barrels he called his mouth organ.

A stem could connect all the spigots and control them by a single movement, so that once attached, he had only to press a button concealed in the woodwork to turn on all the taps at the same time and fill the mugs placed underneath.

The organ was now open. The stops labelled flute, horn, celestial voice, were pulled out, ready to be placed. Des Esseintes sipped here and there, enjoying the inner symphonies, succeeded in procuring sensations in his throat analogous to those which music gives to the ear.

Moreover, each liquor corresponded, according to his thinking, to the sound of some instrument. Dry curaçao, for example, to the clarinet, whose tone is sourish and velvety; kümmel to the oboe, whose sonorous notes snuffle; mint and anisette to the flute, at once sugary and peppery, puling and sweet; while, to complete the orchestra, kirschwasser has the furious ring of the trumpet; gin and whiskey burn the palate with their strident crashing of trombones and cornets; brandy storms with the deafening hubbub of tubas; while the thunder-claps of the cymbals and the furiously beaten drum roll in the mouth by means of the rakis de Chio.

He also thought that the comparison could be continued, that quartets of string instruments could play under the palate, with the violin simulated by old brandy, fumous and fine, piercing and frail; the tenor violin by rum, louder and more sonorous; the cello by the lacerating and lingering ratafia, melancholy and caressing; with the double-bass, full-bodied, solid and dark as the old bitters. If one wished to form a quintet, one could even add a fifth instrument with the vibrant taste, the silvery detached and shrill note of dry cumin imitating the harp.

The comparison was further prolonged. Tone relationships existed in the music of liquors; to cite but one note, benedictine represents, so to speak, the minor key of that major key of alcohols which are designated, in commercial scores, under the name of green Chartreuse.

These principles once admitted, he succeeded, after numerous experiments, in enjoying silent melodies on his tongue, mute funeral marches, in hearing, in his mouth, solos of mint, duos of ratafia and rum.

He was even able to transfer to his palate real pieces of music, following the composer step by step, rendering his thought, his effects, his nuances, by combinations or contrasts of liquors, by approximative and skilled mixtures.

At other times, he himself composed melodies, executed pastorals with mild black-currant which evoked, in his throat, the trillings of nightingales; with the tender chouva cocoa which sang saccharine songs like “The romance of Estelle” and the “Ah! Shall I tell you, mama,” of past days.

But on this evening Des Esseintes was not inclined to listen to this music. He confined himself to sounding one note on the keyboard of his organ, by swallowing a little glass of genuine Irish whiskey.

The fiacre stopped in front of the tavern. Once more, Des Esseintes alighted and entered a long dark plain room, divided into partitions as high as a man’s waist—a series of compartments resembling stalls. In this room, wider towards the door, many beer pumps stood on a counter, near hams having the color of old violins, red lobsters, marinated mackerel, with onions and carrots, slices of lemon, bunches of laurel and thyme, juniper berries and long peppers swimming in thick sauce.

One of these boxes was unoccupied. He took it and called a young black-suited man who bent forward, muttering something in a jargon he could not understand. While the cloth was being laid, Des Esseintes viewed his neighbors. They were islanders . . . with cold faïence eyes, crimson complexions, thoughtful or haughty airs. They were reading foreign newspapers. The only ones eating were unescorted women in pairs, robust English women with boyish faces, large teeth, ruddy apple cheeks, long hands and legs. They attacked, with genuine ardor, a rumpsteak pie, a warm meat dish cooked in mushroom sauce and covered with a crust, like a pie.

After having lacked appetite for such a long time, he remained amazed in the presence of these hearty eaters whose voracity whetted his hunger. He ordered oxtail soup and enjoyed it heartily. Then he glanced at the menu for the fish, ordered a haddock and, seized with a sudden pang of hunger at the sight of so many people relishing their food, he ate some roast beef and drank two pints of ale, stimulated by the flavor of a cowshed which this fine, pale beer exhaled.

His hunger persisted. He lingered over a piece of blue Stilton cheese, made quick work of a rhubarb tart, and to vary his drinking quenched his thirst with porter, that dark beer which smells of Spanish licorice but which does not have its sugary taste.

He breathed deeply. Not for years had he eaten and drunk so much. This change of habit, this choice of unexpected and solid food had awakened his stomach from its long sleep. He leaned back in his chair, lit a cigarette and prepared to sip his coffee, into which gin had been poured.

The rain continued to fall. He heard it patter on the panes which formed a ceiling at the end of the room; it fell in cascades down the spouts. No one was stirring in the room. Everybody, utterly weary, was indulging himself in front of his wine glass.

Tongues were now wagging freely. As almost all the English men and women raised their eyes as they spoke, Des Esseintes concluded that they were talking of the bad weather; not one of them laughed. He threw a delighted glance on their suits, whose color and cut did not perceivably differ from that of others, and he experienced a sense of contentment in not being out of tune in this environment, of being, in some way, though superficially, a naturalized London citizen.

There were two revolutions in French and therefore international gastronomy: the Revolution itself, and the almost equally drastic accident of César Ritz’s first hotel, with Escoffier in the kitchen.

From “From Esau to Escoffier” by André Simon, Wine and Food Quarterly, Spring 1940

In France, during the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI, gastronomy flourished under royal patronage; courtiers and courtesans, financiers and church dignitaries paid lavishly for the services of gifted chefs who had to provide quantities of victuals, prepare them in the most novel ways and present them in the most spectacular manner possible, in order to provoke the admiration of guests, many of whom were not merely exacting, but blasés. Unfortunately, whilst the Grande Cuisine had never been “grander,” the people had never been poorer nor so poorly fed, and starvation brought in the Revolution.

The great chefs of the day, whose noble or wealthy masters had shared the fate of the King, or else had fled the country, had no hope of finding anybody anxious to secure their services or able to reward them. The best thing they could do was to give the benefit of their skill to “la nation” and “les citoyens”; it is what many of them did. They opened restaurants where all and sundry could and did seek better fare than they had at home. Véry, Méot, Beauvilliers, and others soon became famous as restaurateurs. Simple and inexpensive as was the fare which they offered to the public, at least at the beginning of their new career, it had the artist’s touch and must have been excellent. Chefs became very popular and their former association with hated aristocratic “ci-devants” was forgiven and forgotten, even when their charges rose with their fortunes and when their cuisine became too dear for any but the nouveaux riches of the nouveau régime. Food, more food and better food was the cry of the hour; the cook’s head was more sacred than that of his king, and the chef’s calling became one of the most important as well as one of the best paid: many of the more intelligent youths of the day, attracted by the success of those who made it their business to feed the people, rushed forth as willing apprentices of the great chefs. They were taught and trained in the right tradition, and, in time, they taught and trained others. By becoming more democratic, in France, gastronomy lost nothing: on the contrary, it gained a great deal. When it ceased to be the privilege of a comparatively few extravagant idlers, it brought to the mass of the people the glad tidings that food is not to man what fodder is to his horse, merely a necessity, but that it could be and that it should be a joy as well. This happy realization came about gradually: its dawn, as brilliant and sudden as that of the tropical sun, came in during the first decade of the nineteenth century, with Câreme, and it reached its zenith a hundred years later, with Escoffier. Both . . . were remarkable men, skilled artisans, who possessed the great and rare gift of expression; men of taste both, and of great courage; men of faith and vision both, but, of course, men of their own generation. Câreme, in spite of being—or maybe because he had been—brought up on a starvation diet, was the apostle of majesty; his dishes are rich, his cakes are works of art. But Escoffier, in spite of—or perhaps because of—his long association with Ritz and having cooked for all the European crowned heads, at a time when they were numerous and brilliant, was always the apostle of simplicity.

In the siege of Paris, during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, César Ritz was already a waiter at Voisin’s, and Escoffier was a rising young chef at a minor restaurant called Le Petit Moulin Rouge. As the enemy tightened the walls of hunger and anxiety around Paris, Voisin’s became almost another government headquarters, as one of the few restaurants whose owners had thought to store up extra provisions . . . “sides of beef, carcasses of mutton, rows of hams, of sausages, tanks of trout, cages of rabbits and poultry,” Marie Louise Ritz writes in the biography of her husband.

From César Ritz, 1938, by Marie Louise Ritz

. . . Nevertheless, by the end of November the catering problem was acute. For a time—probably for much longer than any other Paris restaurant—Voisin’s stood out against the newest culinary innovations. But in December beef was unprocurable, horse meat was growing scarce, and well-dressed bourgeois citizens were glad to join the queues of people outside groceries where a few tinned foods might still be found. The business of preserving foods was given quite an impetus by the Franco-German war, when more than one French town suffered a prolonged siege and the mortality from malnutrition exceeded the mortality from wounds in battle. Escoffier told me that his experience in Metz, where he was chef de cuisine at General Headquarters, gave him the first idea of the possibility and of the dire necessity the world had for tinned foods. And he was the first great chef to study seriously the preservation of meats, vegetables, and sauces and to manufacture them in quantities. Only the other day an Englishman who had lived many years in India told me, “Thanks to Escoffier’s tinned and bottled foods, I was able for many years to enjoy good French cooking in the wilds.” Tinned foods now became a rare and much appreciated luxury.

Rats were being sold openly in the market for from one franc to one franc fifty, depending upon their size. Ragout of rabbit and saddle of lamb still figured on restaurant menus, but stray cats and dogs had become mysteriously rare! Roast donkey was a gourmet’s luxury. The small lake in the Luxembourg Gardens had been dragged for tiny fish. The banks of the Seine were crowded with earnest fishermen, in respectable bourgeois black, in army red, in workmen’s blouses. And one by one the animals in the Jardin des Plantes were killed. . . .

Both Escoffier and Ritz used to torment me with descriptions of the food they had eaten at this time. In Metz the cavalry horses had eventually all been slaughtered and before the end of the siege there even the teams for heavy artillery had been sacrificed. “Horse meat,” thus Escoffier would hold forth, his eyes twinkling, “is delicious, when you are in the right condition to appreciate it!” “A little sweet, perhaps,” César would add. “I found, too, that it is hard to digest. But cat-meat! Now, there is a gourmet’s dish! The best ragout of rabbit I ever ate was made of alley-cat.” “And as to rat-meat, it approaches in delicacy the taste of roast pig!” “But you should taste a stew of elephant trunk! A little oily—but with marvellous flavour—” Etc., etc., until they saw I could stand no more!

Bellenger⁵ stood out as long as possible, then he had to capitulate. One day he had a consultation with the chef, and the following menu was the result—the first of a long series of such menus:

Purée de lentilles

Sardines à l’huile

Vol-au-vent

Selle d’Epagneul

Haricots blancs et rouges

Oranges

The chef complained most bitterly of the lack of butter, coco-butter being but a poor substitute in cooking for the real thing. The clients did not worry about such details, but they did, for the most part, object to the saddle of spaniel. But according to César, the worst feature of the menu was the quite rightly anonymous vol-au-vent.

Before the siege was over, the chef had an opportunity to prepare more exotic dishes. Castor and Pollux, the two elephants of the Zoo, were killed and their carcasses fetched good prices. The trunks were considered tidbits, and the price for them was accordingly high. Bellenger put in a supply of elephant; and Voisin’s soon became famous for its “elephant trunk, sauce chasseur,” and elephant blood-pudding was pronounced by people of cultivated taste to be most excellent.

It is not inappropriate to note here that human curiosity, as well as human hunger, has made men taste and furthermore enjoy many more exotic foods than elephant and spaniel.

Fried new-born mice in China, the hump of the white rhino roasted in its skin in South Africa, crocodile eggs (which Theodore Roosevelt preferred scrambled); narwhal skin (“When fresh, the flavor is delicious and reminds one of nuts or mushrooms. It is about half an inch thick and looks like linoleum. When one bites it, it has the same consistency as celery. . . .”); bats and flying foxes in Australia; hedgehogs roasted in clay by English gypsies at Michaelmas, when the little beasts have had their fill of windfalls and crabapples and their flesh is white and tender; termites in Africa “like pineapple, but there is a knack in popping them into the mouth and synchronizing the bite” before the tongue is nipped in return; bees plucked of their wings and fried in butter in Asia: few if any men have ever died from or even been sickened by such outlandish dishes.

I hope never to have to eat the saddle of a little dog, and yet I do not see why I should be any more averse to that than to chops cut from the tender lightsome body of a young spring-bok. Gastronomy is influenced by both geography and behaviorism.

The miraculous combination of César Ritz’s exquisite taste as a restaurateur and Escoffier’s masterly skill as a chef created the first Ritz Hotel, and then many other such luxurious, fashionable, and above all proper gathering-places. For the first time ladies as well as demi-mondaines, on both sides of the Atlantic, enjoyed all the pleasures of fine food and wine in public, and gentlemen came out from the rich alcoholic shadows of their clubs to join them. Everywhere in high society there was a new interest in the amenities of the table, and quality, not quantity, became the order, just as it had so long ago when the Normans first taught the vanquished Saxons not to snarl over their banquet-bones.

“More simplicity, as well as greater refinement, became the law,” André Simon writes, but when we read a typical Ritz menu, following in the great chef’s tradition although served as late as 1930, it is difficult to think with anything but amusement of what he believed was gastronomical restraint! Here, as his wife reports it, is what was produced from the kitchens and cellars of the Ritz in Paris, to celebrate a successful financial deal made by one of the postwar brokers:

From César Ritz, 1938, by Marie Louise Ritz

There were ten guests, all men, all world-known financiers, German, French, and Belgian. The host consulted with Rey, with Olivier, with Gimon. “Money doesn’t count,” he said to Rey. “I only want you to see that the food and wine are perfect, regardless of cost. Here’s a little to go on with.” And the great financier produced ten crisp one-thousand-franc notes! The ten thousand francs were, as it turned out, not enough to cover the costs, and before the day arrived Rey asked for and received a couple of thousand more.

Here is the menu that was finally decided upon:

Consommé de Faisan en Tasse

Mousseline de Sole Empire

Cassolette de Queues d’Ecrevisses

Escalope de Foie gras au Beurre noisette

Velouté de Petits Poisfrais

Carré de Veau braisé à la crême

Pommes de Terre Anna

Pointes d’Asperges

Sorbets au Montrachet

Bécasses au Fumet

Salade de Laitue

Truffes en Papillotes

Mandarines de Nice givrées

Friandises

Le splus beaux Fruits de France

Now, that is a good menu, it is even an excellent menu, and Rey, Olivier, and Gimon are to be complimented upon its composition. Fresh peas and asparagus in December, and truffles and woodcock at any time, are apt to be expensive. But why should this dinner, no matter how exquisitely prepared, cost more than one thousand francs per person? Ah, but I have not yet mentioned the wines. The host, a famous connoisseur, knew the type of wine which he wished to be served with each course—as did Rey. And he insisted that Rey should furnish from the Ritz cellars or elsewhere just the right wines, vintage wines all of them, and of the best years.

Here is the list of wines which were served, in their correct order:

Sherry Carta Oro Viejo

Meursault Goutte d’Or 1915

Magnum de Château Léonville Barton 1878

Jeroboam de Château Lafitte 1870

Pommery 1911

Grand Chambertin 1906

Romanée 1881

Giesler 1906

Château Yquem 1869

Cognac Hennessy (Réservée Privée)

To procure these wines was not in every case easy. The Jeroboam of Château Lafitte 1870 and the Château Yquem 1869 had to be brought specially from Bordeaux by messenger! The messenger sat up all night with his precious package, never let it leave his hand for a moment, was careful to see that it received the minimum of shock in movement. Both messenger and wine were heavily insured, and their arrival was awaited with much tenseness on the part of all concerned. As to the Romanée 1881, that was “found” by Rey in the private cellars of a princely friend. The Château Yquem, served with the dessert, tasted, Rey assures me, “like flowers.”

The liqueur, Cognac Hennessy, from our private stock, and of which there is still a small supply in our cellars, was entirely worthy of the wines that had preceded it. Guyot, our present chief cellarer, who is young, but who knows his métier if anyone does (this would amaze Julian Street, who maintained in one of his books that “a sommelier must be grey-haired”), assures me that it is “priceless.” Three-star Hennessy, bearing no date whatever, not cobwebbed in the least—our cellarmen scorn factitious spiderwebs—yet it is wondrous old and wondrous good, and could follow, with no loss of dignity, a list of wines which is almost incomparable.

If the assembling of these wines had caused trouble, their serving did likewise. Aside from the business of bringing them all to the exact, the absolutely exact temperatures required, there was the business of the glasses. Not the finding of the correct shapes and sizes or the perfect thinness and fragility, for our glasses were designed with care and beautifully made by Baccarat; but with such wines with which to fill them, Rey took especial pains that they should be polished to an unheard-of degree. And he personally supervised their washing, adding lemon to the water in which they were rinsed.

At last the tables were set, the waiters held themselves ready, and Rey took one last look to see that all was well. He had emphasised the importance of keeping the glasses in their polished state, and a waiter, in an agony of zeal, had—oh, tragedy!—covered them lightly with clean table- napkins. Rey lifted a glass towards his nose. Horrors! There was a smell—a faint smell, but still, enough!—of fresh laundry! Back to the kitchens went those glasses, to be washed, rinsed, and polished anew. This at the last minute.

Well, the dinner was a success. The guests sat down to it at half past eight, and coffee was not served until eleven o’clock! When Rey saw that the guests intended to sit long over their coffee, liqueurs and cigars—and I wonder what momentous conversation?—he skilfully had arm-chairs substituted for the chairs. The guests continued to sit in comfort. And the party did not break up until two o’clock in the morning.

But as a test of the perfection of that menu, the superb quality of the food and wine, Rey always adds when he recites the epic story of this dinner: “And none of the guests felt in the least indisposed on the following morning.” The host, in fact, telephoned next day to each of his guests, and put to them the same questions: Had they slept well? Were they feeling well? And the report in each case was favourable.

Are such efforts worthwhile to achieve so transient a work of art as a dinner? The host and the guests in this case, all connoisseurs, all gourmets, apparently thought so. Rey, Olivier, and Gimon still think so. Our chief cellarer, Guyot, who presides over his domains with the zeal of a priest guarding sacred altars, thinks so, and thinks so passionately.

The one thing I have chosen to print from German literature, the housewarming dinner in Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann, I have also chosen to place as a kind of spiritual link between the gastronomy of the Continent and England. It has all the exotic, subtle overtones, down to the last little glass of “sweet, golden-yellow Malmsey,” of a moral heritage from old Europe, with its infinity of behavior-patterns carried from the Orient, and the South, and the hard North. And at the same time it has the solidity, and the accustomed gracefulness, often monotonously smug at the moment it is most admirable, of the well-fed bourgeoisie which probably came to its full flower in England under Queen Victoria.

It is at once sophisticated and full of hard common sense, just as its table-talk ranges from poetical outbursts to business details, and its fare from carp in red wine to cabbage soup.

We are in the drawing room of the renovated and newly furnished town-house of the Buddenbrooks’, in a German shipping center, in October 1835. Most of the family, and the oldest friends, are there for the housewarming:

From Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann, 1875–1955

The company had for the most part seated themselves on the chairs and the sofa. They talked with the children or discussed the unseasonable cold and the new house. Herr Hoffstede admired a beautiful Sèvres inkstand, in the shape of a black and white hunting dog, that stood on the secretary. Doctor Grabow, a man of about the Consul’s age, with a long mild face between thin whiskers, was looking at the table, set out with cakes and currant bread and salt-cellars in different shapes. This was the “bread and salt” that had been sent by friends for the housewarming; but the “bread” consisted of rich, heavy pastries, and the salt came in dishes of massive gold, that the senders might not seem to be mean in their gifts.

“There will be work for me here,” said the Doctor, pointing to the sweetmeats and threatening the children with his glance. . . .

The guests did not sit down, but stood about awaiting the principal event of the evening and passing the time in casual talk. At length, Johann Buddenbrook the older offered his arm to Madame Köppen and said in an elevated voice, “Well, mesdames et messieurs, if you are hungry . . .”

Mamsell Jungmann and the servant had opened the folding-doors into the dining-room; and the company made its way with studied ease to table. One could be sure of a good square meal at the Buddenbrooks’. . . . [Madame Buddenbrook] sat down between Pastor Wunderlich and the elder Kröger, who presided on the window side.

“Bon appétit!” she said, with her short, quick, hearty nod, flashing a glance down the whole length of the table till it reached the children at the bottom.

“Our best respects to you, Buddenbrook—I repeat, our best respects!” Herr Köppen’s powerful voice drowned the general conversation as the maid-servant, in her heavy striped petticoat, her fat arms bare and a little white cap on the back of her head, passed the cabbage soup and toast, assisted by Mamsell Jungmann and the Frau Consul’s maid from upstairs. The guests began to use their soup-spoons.

“Such plenty, such elegance! I must say, you know how to do things!—I must say—” Herr Köppen had never visited the house in its former owner’s time. He did not come of a patrician family, and had only lately become a man of means. He could never quite get rid of certain vulgar tricks of speech—like the repetition of “I must say”; and he said “respecks” for “respects.” . . .

As far as possible, ladies and gentlemen had been paired off, and members of the family placed between friends of the house. But the arrangement could not be carried out in every case; the two Overdiecks were sitting, as usual, nearly on each other’s laps, nodding affectionately at one another. The elder Kröger was bolt upright, enthroned between Madame Antoinette and Frau Senator Langhals, dividing his pet jokes and his flourishes between the two ladies.

“When was the house built?” asked Herr Hoffstede diagonally across the table of old Buddenbrook, who was talking in a gay chaffing tone with Madame Köppen.

“Anno . . . let me see . . . about 1680, if I am not mistaken. My son is better at dates than I am.”

“Eighty-two,” said the Consul, leaning forward. He was sitting at the foot of the table, without a partner, next to Senator Langhals. “It was finished in the winter of 1682. Ratenkamp and Company were just getting to the top of their form. . . . Sad, how the firm broke down in the last twenty years!”

A general pause in the conversation ensued, lasting for half a minute, while the company looked down at their plates and pondered on the fortunes of the brilliant family who had built and lived in the house and then, broken and impoverished, had left it. . . .

The Consul rather absently lifted his glass to his father. Lebrecht Kröger broke in: “Let’s stick by the jolly present!” He took up a bottle of white wine that had a little silver stag on the stopper; and with one of his fastidious, elegant motions he held it on its side and examined the label. “C. F. Köppen,” he read, and nodded to the wine-merchant. “Ah, yes, where should we be without you?”

Madame Antoinette kept a sharp eye on the servants while they changed the gilt-edged Meissen plates; Mamsell Jungmann called orders through the speaking-tube into the kitchen, and the fish was brought in. Pastor Wunderlich remarked, as he helped himself:

“This ‘jolly present’ isn’t such a matter of course as it seems, either. The young folk here can hardly realize, I suppose, that things could ever have been different from what they are now. But I think I may fairly claim to have had a personal share, more than once, in the fortunes of the Buddenbrook family. Whenever I see one of these, for instance—” he picked up one of the heavy silver spoons and turned to Madame Antoinette— “I can’t help wondering whether they belong to the set that our friend the philosopher Lenoir, Sergeant under His Majesty the Emperor Napoleon, had in his hands in the year 1806—and I think of our meeting in Alf Street, Madame.”

Madame Buddenbrook looked down at her plate with a smile half of memory, half of embarrassment. Tom and Tony, at the bottom of the table, cried out almost with one voice, “Oh, yes, tell about it, Grandmama!” They did not want the fish, and they had been listening attentively to the conversation of their elders. But the Pastor knew that she would not care to speak herself of an incident that had been rather painful to her. He came to her rescue and launched out once more upon the old story. It was new, perhaps, to one or two of the present company. As for the children, they could have listened to it a hundred times.

“Well, imagine a November afternoon, cold and rainy, a wretched day; and me coming back down Alf Street from some parochial duty. I was thinking of the hard times we were having. Prince Blücher had gone, and the French were in the town. There was little outward sign of the excitement that reigned everywhere: the streets were quiet, and people stopped close in their houses. Prahl the master-butcher had been shot through the head, just for standing at the door of his shop with his hands in his pockets and making a menacing remark about its being hard to stand. Well, thought I to myself, I’ll just have a look in at the Buddenbrooks’. Herr Buddenbrook is down with erysipelas, and Madame has a great deal to do, on account of the billeting.

“At that very moment, whom should I see coming towards me but our honored Madame Buddenbrook herself? What a state she was in! hurrying through the rain hatless, stumbling rather than walking, with a shawl flung over her shoulders, and her hair falling down—yes, Madame, it is quite true, it was falling down!

“ ‘This is a pleasant surprise,’ I said. She never saw me, and I made bold to lay my hand on her sleeve, for my mind misgave me about the state of things. ‘Where are you off to in such a hurry, my dear?’ She realized who I was, looked at me, and burst out: ‘Farewell, farewell! All is over—I’m going into the river!’

“ ‘God forbid,’ cried I—I could feel that I went white. ‘That is no place for you, my dear.’ And I held her as tightly as decorum permitted. ‘What has happened?’ ‘What has happened!’ she cried, all trembling. ‘They’ve got at the silver, Wunderlich! That’s what has happened! And Jean lies there with erysipelas and can’t do anything—he couldn’t even if he were up. They are stealing my spoons, Wunderlich, and I am going into the river!’

“Well, I kept holding her, and I said what one would in such cases: ‘Courage, dear lady. It will be all right. Control yourself, I beg of you. We will go and speak with them. Let us go.’ And I got her to go back up the street to her house. The soldiers were up in the dining-room, where Madame had left them, some twenty of them, at the great silver-chest.

“ ‘Gentlemen,’ I say politely, ‘with which one of you may I have the pleasure of a little conversation?’ They begin to laugh, and they say: ‘With all of us, Papa.’ But one of them steps out and presents himself, a fellow as tall as a tree, with a black waxed moustache and big red hands sticking out of his braided cuffs. ‘Lenoir,’ he said, and saluted with his left hand, for he had five or six spoons in his right. ‘Sergeant Lenoir. What can I do for you?’

“ ‘Herr Officer,’ I say, appealing to his sense of honour, ‘after your magnificent charge, how can you stoop to this sort of thing? The town has not closed its gates to the Emperor.’

“ ‘What do you expect?’ he answered. ‘War is war. The people need these things. . . .’

“ ‘But you ought to be careful,’ I interrupted him, for an idea had come into my head. ‘This lady,’ I said—one will say anything at a time like that—‘the lady of the house, she isn’t a German. She is almost a compatriot of yours—she is a Frenchwoman. . . .’ ‘Oh, a Frenchwoman,’ he repeated. And then what do you suppose he said, this big swashbuckler? ‘Oh, an emigrée? Then she is an enemy of philosophy!’

“I was quite taken aback, but I managed not to laugh. ‘You are a man of intellect, I see,’ said I. ‘I repeat that I consider your conduct unworthy.’ He was silent for a moment. Then he got red, tossed his half-dozen spoons back into the chest, and exclaimed, ‘Who told you I was going to do anything with these things but look at them? It’s fine silver. If one or two of my men take a piece as a souvenir . . .’

“Well, in the end, they took plenty of souvenirs, of course. No use appealing to justice, either human or divine. I suppose they knew no other god than that terrible little Corsican. . . .”

“Did you ever see him, Herr Pastor?”

The plates were being changed again. An enormous brick-red boiled ham appeared, strewn with crumbs and served with a sour brown onion sauce, and so many vegetables that the company could have satisfied their appetites from that one vegetable-dish. Lebrecht Kröger undertook the carving, and skilfully cut the succulent slices, with his elbows slightly elevated and his two long forefingers laid out along the back of the knife and fork. With the ham went the Frau Consul’s celebrated “Russian jam,” a pungent fruit conserve flavoured with spirits.

No, Pastor Wunderlich regretted to say that he had never set eyes on Bonaparte. Old Buddenbrook and Jean Jacques Hoffstede had both seen him face to face, one in Paris just before the Russian campaign, reviewing the troops at the Tuileries; the other in Danzig.

“I must say, he wasn’t a very cheerful person to look at,” said the poet, raising his eyebrows, as he disposed of a forkful of ham, potato, and sprouts. “But they say he was in a lively mood, at Danzig. There was a story they used to tell, about how he would gamble all day with the Germans, and make them pay up too, and then spend the evening playing with his generals. Once he swept a handful of gold off the table, and said: ‘Les Allemands aiment beaucoup ces petits Napoléons, n’est-ce pas, Rapp?’ ‘Oui, Sire, plus que le Grand!’ Rapp answered.”

There was general laughter—Hoffstede had told the story very prettily, even mimicking the Emperor’s manner. . . .

. . . Herr Köppen had grown more and more crimson from eating, and puffed audibly as he spoke. Pastor Wunderlich had not changed colour; he looked as pale, refined, and alert as ever, while drinking down glass after glass of wine.

The candles burned down slowly in their sockets. Now and then they flickered in a draught and dispersed a faint smell of wax over the table.

There they all sat, on heavy, high-backed chairs, consuming good heavy food from good heavy silver plate, drinking full-bodied wines and expressing their views freely on all subjects. When they began to talk shop, they slipped unconsciously more and more into dialect, and used the clumsy but comfortable idioms that seemed to embody to them the business efficiency and the easy well-being of their community. Sometimes they even used an over-drawn pronunciation by way of making fun of themselves and each other, and relished their clipped phrases and exaggerated vowels with the same heartiness as they did their food.

The ladies had not long followed the discussion. Madame Kröger gave them the cue by setting forth a tempting method of boiling carp in red wine. “You cut it into nice pieces, my dear, and put it in the saucepan, add some cloves, and onions, and a few rusks, a little sugar, and a spoonful of butter, and set it on the fire. . . . But don’t wash it, on any account. All the blood must remain in it.”

The elder Kröger was telling the most delightful stories; and his son Justus, who sat with Dr. Grabow down at the bottom of the table, near the children, was chaffing Mamsell Jungmann. She screwed up her brown eyes and stood her knife and fork upright on the table and moved them back and forth. Even the Overdiecks were very lively. Old Frau Overdieck had a new pet name for her husband: “You good old bell-wether,” she said, and laughed so hard that her cap bobbed up and down. . . .

“Krishan, don’t eat too much,” [old man Buddenbrook] suddenly called out, in dialect. “Never mind about Tilda—it doesn’t hurt her. She can put it away like a dozen harvest hands, that child!”

And truly it was amazing, the prowess of this scraggy child with the long, old-maidish face. Asked if she wanted more soup, she answered in a meek drawling voice: “Ye-es, ple-ase.” She had two large helpings both of fish and ham, with piles of vegetables; and she bent short-sightedly over her plate, completely absorbed in the food, which she chewed ruminantly, in large mouthfuls. “Oh, Un-cle,” she replied, with amiable simplicity, to the old man’s gibe, which did not in the least disconcert her. She ate: whether it tasted good or not, whether they teased her or not, she smiled and kept on, heaping her plate with good things, with the instinctive, insensitive voracity of a poor relation—patient, persevering, hungry, and lean.

And now came, in two great cut-glass dishes, the “Plettenpudding.” It was made of layers of macaroons, raspberries, ladyfingers, and custard. At the same time, at the other end of the table, appeared the blazing plum- pudding which was the children’s favourite sweet.

“Thomas, my son, come here a minute,” said Johann Buddenbrook, taking his great bunch of keys from his trousers pocket. “In the second cellar to the right, the second bin, behind the red Bordeaux, two bottles— you understand?” Thomas, to whom such orders were familiar, ran off and soon came back with the two bottles, covered with dust and cobwebs; and the little dessert-glasses were filled with sweet, golden-yellow Malmsey from these unsightly receptacles. Now the moment came when Pastor Wunderlich rose, glass in hand, to propose a toast; and the company fell silent to listen. He spoke in the pleasant, conversational tone which he liked to use in the pulpit; his head a little on one side, a subtle, humorous smile on his pale face, gesturing easily with his free hand. “Come, my honest friends, let us honour ourselves by drinking a glass of this excellent liquor to the health of our host and hostess in their beautiful new home. Come, then—to the health of the Buddenbrook family, present and absent! May they live long and prosper!” . . .

Broker Gratjens got up next, and his speech was rather long-winded; he ended by proposing in his high-pitched voice a health to the firm of Johann Buddenbrook, that it might continue to grow and prosper and do honour to the town.

Johann Buddenbrook thanked them all for their kindness, first as head of the family and then as senior partner of the firm—and sent Thomas for another bottle of Malmsey. It had been a mistake to suppose that two would be enough.

Lebrecht Kröger spoke too. He took the liberty of remaining seated, because it looked less formal, and gestured with his head and hands most charmingly as he proposed a toast to the two ladies of the family, Madame Antoinette and the Frau Consul. As he finished, the Plettenpudding was nearly consumed, and the Malmsey nearing its end; and then, to a universal, long-drawn “Ah-h!” Jean Jacques Hoffstede rose up slowly, clearing his throat. The children clapped their hands with delight.

“Excusez! I really couldn’t help it,” he began. He put his finger to his long sharp nose and drew a paper from his coat pocket. . . . A profound silence reigned throughout the room.

His paper was gaily parti-coloured. On the outside of it was written, in an oval border surrounded by red flowers and a profusion of gilt flourishes:

On the occasion of my friendly participation in a delightful house-warming party given by the Buddenbrook family. October 1835.

He read this aloud first; then turning the paper over, he began, in a voice that was already somewhat tremulous:

Honoured friends, my modest lay

Hastes to greet you in these walls:

May kind Heaven grant to-day

Blessing on their spacious halls. . . .

The general merriment had now reached its height. Herr Köppen felt a great need to unfasten a few buttons of his waistcoat; but it obviously wouldn’t do, for not even the elderly gentlemen were permitting themselves the liberty. Lebrecht Kröger sat up as straight as he did at the beginning; Pastor Wunderlich’s face was as pale as ever, his manner as correct. The elder Buddenbrook had indeed sat back a little in his chair, but he maintained perfect decorum. There was only Justus Kröger—he was plainly a little overtaken.

But where was Dr. Grabow? The butter, cheese, and fruit had just been handed round; and the Frau Consul rose from her chair and unobtrusively followed the waitress from the room; for the Doctor, Mamsell Jungmann, and Christian were no longer in their places, and a smothered wail was proceeding from the hall. There in the dim light, little Christian was half lying, half crouching on the round settee that encircled the central pillar. He was uttering heart-breaking groans. Ida and the Doctor stood beside him.

“Oh dear, oh dear,” said she, “the poor child is very bad!”

“I’m ill, Mamma, damned ill,” whimpered Christian, his little deep-set eyes darting back and forth, and his big nose looking bigger than ever. The “damned” came out in a tone of utter despair; but the Frau Consul said: “If we use such words, God will punish us by making us suffer still more!”

Doctor Grabow felt the lad’s pulse. His kindly face grew longer and gentler.

“It’s nothing much, Frau Consul,” he reassured her. “A touch of indigestion.” He prescribed in his best bed-side manner: “Better put him to bed and give him a Dover powder—perhaps a cup of camomile tea, to bring out the perspiration. . . . And a rigorous diet, you know, Frau Consul. A little pigeon, a little French bread . . .”

“I don’t want any pigeon,” bellowed Christian angrily. “I don’t want to eat anything, ever any more. I’m ill, I tell you, damned ill!” The fervour with which he uttered the bad word seemed to bring him relief.

Doctor Grabow smiled to himself—a thoughtful, almost a melancholy smile. He would soon eat again, this young man. He would do as the rest of the world did—his father, and all their relatives and friends: he would lead a sedentary life and eat four good, rich, satisfying meals a day. Well, God bless us all! He, Friedrich Grabow, was not the man to upset the habits of these prosperous, comfortable tradesmen and their families. He would come when he was sent for, prescribe a few days’ diet—a little pigeon, a slice of French bread—yes, yes, and assure the family that it was nothing serious this time. Young as he was, he had held the head of many an honest burgher who had eaten his last joint of smoked meat, his last stuffed turkey, and, whether overtaken unaware in his counting-house or after a brief illness in his solid old four-poster, had commended his soul to God. Then it was called paralysis, a “stroke,” a sudden death. And he, Friedrich Grabow, could have predicted it, on all of these occasions when it was “nothing serious this time”—or perhaps at the times when he had not even been summoned, when there had only been a slight giddiness after luncheon. Well, God bless us all! He, Friedrich Grabow, was not the man to despise a roast turkey himself. That ham with onion sauce had been delicious, hang it! And the Plettenpudding, when they were already stuffed full—macaroons, raspberries, custard . . . “A rigorous diet, Frau Consul, as I say. A little pigeon, a little French bread. . . .”

They were rising from table.

“Well, ladies and gentlemen, gesegnete Mahlzeit! Cigars and coffee in the next room, and a liqueur if Madame feels generous. . . . Billiards for whoever chooses. Jean, you will show them the way back to the billiard- room? Madame Köppen, may I have the honour?”

Full of well-being, laughing and chattering, the company trooped back through the folding doors into the landscape-room. The Consul remained behind, and collected about him the gentlemen who wanted to play billiards.

“You won’t try a game, Father?”

No, Lebrecht Kröger would stop with the ladies, but Justus might go if he liked. . . . Senator Langhals, Köppen, Gratjens, and Doctor Grabow went with the Consul, and Jean Jacques Hoffstede said he would join them later. “Johann Buddenbrook is going to play the flute,” he said. “I must stop for that. Au revoir, messieurs.”

As the gentlemen passed through the hall, they could hear from the landscape-room the first notes of the flute, accompanied by the Frau Consul on the harmonium: an airy, charming little melody that floated sweetly through the lofty rooms. The Consul listened as long as he could. He would have liked to stop behind in an easy-chair in the landscape-room and indulge the reveries that the music conjured up; but his duties as host . . .

“Bring some coffee and cigars into the billiard-room,” he said to the maid whom he met in the entry.

The dates of a group of stories and essays all written within the past ninety years certainly cannot matter very much, at least gastronomically, in a collection which starts somewhere behind the twenty centuries of the Christian era. What is more important, I think, is that they were all written by Britons, about themselves or their fellows, and that they all ate, after their own fashions.

Only a few days ago I heard a man who has read more than any human being should, say with unfeigned wistfulness, “How I envy anybody who is meeting Mr. Pooter for the first time!” And that is probably the way everyone feels who has ever read the imaginary diary written by two brothers in 1892, about Mr. Pooter the Nobody, who miraculously is everybody as he sets down the daily story of his life with Carrie and their troublesome son Lupin, of his little puns, his triumphs and misadventures, verbal and otherwise. He is an 1890 fuddydud for sure, but he is every gentle well-meaning respectable man who has ever lived in a suburban villa called “The Laurels” or “The Cedars” or “The Poplars,” then or in 1996, near London or near Kansas City. His name is Pooter, and the book about him is called The Diary of a Nobody, beyond argument, but I know him well indeed, and so does anyone who has read even one page of the journal and then looked about him:

From The Diary of a Nobody, 1892, by George and Weedon Grossmith

November 12, Sunday.

Coming home from church Carrie and I met Lupin, Daisy Mutlar, and her brother. Daisy was introduced to us, and we walked home together, Carrie walking on with Miss Mutlar. We asked them in for a few minutes, and I had a good look at my future daughter-in-law. My heart quite sank. She is a big young woman, and I should think at least eight years older than Lupin. I did not even think her good-looking. Carrie asked her if she could come in on Wednesday next with her brother to meet a few friends. She replied that she would only be too pleased.

November 13.

Carrie sent out invitations to Gowing, the Cummings, to Mr. and Mrs. James (of Sutton), and Mr. Stillbrook. I wrote a note to Mr. Franching, of Peckham. Carrie said we may as well make it a nice affair, and why not ask our principal, Mr. Perkupp? I said I feared we were not quite grand enough for him. Carrie said there was “no offence in asking him.” I said: “Certainly not,” and I wrote him a letter. Carrie confessed she was a little disappointed with Daisy Mutlar’s appearance, but thought she seemed a nice girl.

November 14.

Everybody so far has accepted for our quite grand little party for tomorrow. Mr. Perkupp, in a nice letter which I shall keep, wrote that he was dining in Kensington, but if he could get away, he would come up to Holloway for an hour. Carrie was busy all day, making little cakes and open jam puffs and jellies. She said she felt quite nervous about her responsibilities tomorrow evening. We decided to have some light things on the table, such as sandwiches, cold chicken and ham, and some sweets, and on the sideboard a nice piece of cold beef and a Paysandu tongue for the more hungry ones to peg into if they liked.

Gowing called to know if he was to put on “swallow-tails” tomorrow. Carrie said he had better dress, especially as Mr. Franching was coming, and there was a possibility of Mr. Perkupp also putting in an appearance.

Gowing said: “Oh, I only wanted to know; for I have not worn my dress-coat for some time, and I must send it to have the creases pressed out.”

After Gowing left, Lupin came in, and, in his anxiety to please Daisy Mutlar, carped at and criticised the arrangements, and, in fact, disapproved of everything, including our having asked our old friend Cummings, who, he said, would look in evening dress like a green-grocer engaged to wait, and who must not be surprised if Daisy took him for one.

I fairly lost my temper, and said: “Lupin, allow me to tell you Miss Daisy Mutlar is not the Queen of England. I gave you credit for more wisdom than to allow yourself to be inveigled into an engagement with a woman considerably older than yourself. I advise you to think of earning your living before entangling yourself with a wife whom you will have to support, and, in all probability, her brother also, who appeared to be nothing but a loafer.”

Instead of receiving this advice in a sensible manner, Lupin jumped up and said: “If you insult the lady I am engaged to, you insult me. I will leave the house and never darken your doors again.”

He went out of the house, slamming the hall-door. But it was all right. He came back to supper, and we played bezique till nearly twelve o’clock.

November 15.

A red-letter day. Our first important party since we have been in this house. I got home early from the City. Lupin insisted on having a hired waiter, and stood a half-dozen of champagne. I think this an unnecessary expense, but Lupin said he had had a piece of luck, having made three pounds out of a private deal in the City. I hope he won’t gamble in his new situation. The supper-room looked so nice, and Carrie truly said: “We need not be ashamed of its being seen by Mr. Perkupp, should he honour us by coming.”

I dressed early in case people should arrive punctually at eight o’clock, and was much vexed to find my new dress-trousers much too short. Lupin, who is getting beyond his position, found fault with my wearing ordinary boots instead of dress-boots.

I replied satirically: “My dear son, I have lived to be above that sort of thing.”

Lupin burst out laughing, and said: “A man generally was above his boots.”

This may be funny, or it may not; but I was gratified to find he had not discovered the coral had come off one of my studs. Carrie looked a picture, wearing the dress she wore at the Mansion House. The arrangement of the drawing-room was excellent. Carrie had hung muslin curtains over the folding-doors, and also over one of the entrances, for we had removed the door from its hinges.

Mr. Peters, the waiter, arrived in good time, and I gave him strict orders not to open another bottle of champagne until the previous one was empty. Carrie arranged for some sherry and port wine to be placed on the drawing-room sideboard, with some glasses. By-the-by, our new enlarged and tinted photographs look very nice on the walls, especially as Carrie has arranged some Liberty silk bows on the four corners of them.

The first arrival was Gowing, who, with his usual taste, greeted me with: “Hulloh, Pooter—why, your trousers are too short!”

I simply said: “Very likely, and you will find my temper ‘short’ also.”

He said: “That won’t make your trousers longer, juggins. You should get your missus to put a flounce on them.”

I wonder I waste my time entering his insulting observations in my diary.

The next arrivals were Mr. and Mrs. Cummings. The former said: “As you didn’t say anything about dress, I have come ‘halfdress.’ ” He had on a black frock-coat and white tie. The James’, Mr. Merton, and Mr. Still- brook arrived, but Lupin was restless and unbearable till his Daisy Mutlar and Frank arrived.

Carrie and I were rather startled at Daisy’s appearance. She had a bright-crimson dress on, cut very low in the neck. I do not think such a style modest. She ought to have taken a lesson from Carrie, and covered her shoulders with a little lace. Mr. Nackles, Mr. Sprice-Hogg and his four daughters came; so did Franching, and one or two of Lupin’s new friends, members of the “Holloway Comedians.” Some of these seemed rather theatrical in their manner, especially one, who was posing all the evening, and leant on our little round table and cracked it. Lupin called him “our Henry,” and said he was “our lead at the H.C.’s,” and was quite as good in that department as Harry Mutlar was as the low-comedy merchant. All this is Greek to me.

We had some music, and Lupin, who never left Daisy’s side for a moment, raved over her singing of a song called “Some Day.” It seemed a pretty song, but she made such grimaces, and sang, to my mind, so out of tune, I would not have asked her to sing again; but Lupin made her sing four songs right off, one after the other.

At ten o’clock we went down to supper, and from the way Gowing and Cummings ate you would have thought they had not had a meal for a month. I told Carrie to keep something back in case Mr. Perkupp should come by mere chance. Gowing annoyed me very much by filling a large tumbler of champagne, and drinking it straight off. He repeated this action, and made me fear our half-dozen of champagne would not last out. I tried to keep a bottle back, but Lupin got hold of it, and took it to the side-table with Daisy and Frank Mutlar.

We went upstairs, and the young fellows began skylarking. Carrie put a stop to that at once. Stillbrook amused us with a song, “What have you done with your Cousin John?” I did not notice that Lupin and Frank had disappeared. I asked Mr. Watson, one of the Holloways, where they were, and he said: “It’s a case of ‘Oh, what a surprise!’ ”

We were directed to form a circle—which we did. Watson then said: “I have much pleasure in introducing the celebrated Blondin Donkey.” Frank and Lupin then bounded into the room. Lupin had whitened his face like a clown, and Frank had tied round his waist a large hearthrug. He was supposed to be the donkey, and he looked it. They indulged in a very noisy pantomime, and we were all shrieking with laughter.

I turned round suddenly, and then I saw Mr. Perkupp standing halfway in the door, he having arrived without our knowing it. I beckoned to Carrie, and we went up to him at once. He would not come right into the room. I apologised for the foolery, but Mr. Perkupp said: “Oh, it seems amusing.” I could see he was not a bit amused.

Carrie and I took him downstairs, but the table was a wreck. There was not a glass of champagne left—not even a sandwich. Mr. Perkupp said he required nothing, but would like a glass of seltzer or soda water. The last syphon was empty. Carrie said: “We have plenty of port wine left.” Mr. Perkupp said with a smile: “No, thank you. I really require nothing, but I am most pleased to see you and your husband in your own home. Goodnight, Mrs. Pooter—you will excuse my very short stay, I know.” I went with him to his carriage, and he said: “Don’t trouble to come to the office till twelve tomorrow.”

I felt despondent as I went back to the house, and I told Carrie I thought the party was a failure. Carrie said it was a great success, and I was only tired, and insisted on my having some port myself. I drank two glasses and felt much better, and we went into the drawing-room, where they had commenced dancing. Carrie and I had a little dance, which I said reminded me of old days. She said I was a spooney old thing.

Few people have bothered to record the daily lives of the Pooters, in England or anywhere, but it is easy to find countless descriptions of life among the easier, plumper, more fortunate classes still referred to as “middle” but usually amplified as “upper middle”—a designation almost totally concerned with financial brackets. Most of the accounts are either poorly made or are intellectualized by professional writers.

That is why George Saintsbury’s story of some of the dinner parties he gave during the last thirty years of the nineteenth century is so agreeable: it is written by a man who knew too much about both himself and the English language to be anything but good.

His Notes on a Cellar-Book appeared in 1920, after a long rich life when he was one of the foremost critics and scholars in a long rich period in British letters. His menus, thus “recollected in tranquillity,” may seem strangely overelaborate now, but in a day of heavy abundance they stood out as gems of austerity.

A good proof of that is a quick glance at Breakfasts, Luncheons, and Ball Suppers, a book published anonymously in London in 1887. It attempted, with some success, to debunk the well-heeled Englishman’s ambitions to out-spend his club members in the three most popular forms of entertaining . . . and gives now a horrendous picture of what stark simplicity meant in that vanished epoch.

The writer, who cautiously signed himself “Major L——,” perhaps to prove to his readers that although he urged embarrassingly low-class economy in his suggestions he was after all “one of them” in his rank and requisite breeding, wrote daringly on the subject of ball suppers: “I shall give only four bills of fare. Anyone who gives more than four balls in one year will probably be in a lunatic asylum before the next, so will not require more.”

He goes on, after a lecture on saving time as well as nervous energy in such plans: “Ball suppers, like other repasts, require some care, some management, some taste to be displayed, to be really nice. In the winter a clever cutlet is a luxury, but unless the establishment is large I should almost advise that everything should be cold, soups of course excepted . . . a hot meal so soon after dinner is hardly required. . . .”

Then, as an example of his revolutionary and yet completely “acceptable” theories, he suggests the following basic menu for a little ball to be given in June:

Consommé

Purée of Chicken à la Crême

Chaufroix of Sole

Chaufroix of Salmon

Prawns in Aspic

Stuffed Quails

Chicken and Tongue

Mayonnaise of Lobster

Galantines in Aspic

Chaufroix of Chicken

Pâté of Chicken and Tongue

Cold Ham

Macédoine of Fruits

Compôte of Strawberries

Ices: Strawberry Cream, Raspberry Water

Cakes, Grapes, Strawberries

Oh, Mr. Pooter, how stingy was your party for Miss Daisy Mutlar! Oh, Professor Saintsbury, how niggardly was some such little “contrast of simplicity” as your third menu in Notes on a Cellar-Book!

And how agreeable it is to read about fine food, and beautiful bottles, in prose that is knowingly simple and honest, like the writer himself and the feasts he served to his friends!

Here are too few pages, and three bills of fare, from Saintsbury’s book:

From Notes on a Cellar-Book by George Saintsbury, 1845–1933

It is good to have read Walz’s Rhetores Graeci and the Grand Cyrus, and nearly all the English poets that anybody has ever heard of; also to find The Earthly Paradise, at a twentieth reading in 1920, as delightful as it was at a first in 1868. It is good to have heard Sims Reeves flood St. James’s Hall with “Adelaida,” till you felt as if you were being drowned, not in a bath but in an ocean of musical malmsey; and to have descanted on the beauties of your first Burne-Jones, without knowing that a half-puzzled, half-amused don stood behind you. Many other things past, and some present, have been and are—for anything, once more, that has been is—good.

But I do not feel the slightest shame in ranking as good likewise and very good, those voyages to the Oracle of the Bottle and those obediences to its utterance, taken literally as well as allegorically, which are partially chronicled here. If I subjoin a few examples of menus, and some wine-lists, it is chiefly for the purpose of illustrating the doctrines laid down and the practices recommended in this book. They are all records of meals and wines discussed in my own houses, and mostly devised by ourselves. Some great authorities have pronounced such things not bad reading, Barmecidal as they are. I know that I found them comfortable in the days of rationing, when there were other calls, even on the absurd modicum of meat that was allotted to one in common with babies, dead men, and vegetarians, and when one had to be content with sprats and spaghetti. I wish I could imitate the Barmecide himself in following up these ghostly banquets with real ones. But I hope that all good men and all fair ladies who read me will accept the assurance that I would, if I could, minister unto them, even as I was privileged to do to others of their kind from fifty to five years ago, when “we drank it as the Fates ordained it,” and took, as cheerfully as we drank it, what else the Fates ordained.

Let us begin with two specimens of a kind of dinner which I now think over-elaborated. Two entrées are quite enough. But the fact was that at the time when they and others like them were given (the opening years of the Cellar-Book, 1884–6), both my wife and I were rather fascinated by a French chef named Grégoire, who in those days both sent out and superintended dishes, less impossibly than poor Rosa Timmins’s volunteer assistant, and very admirably. Alas! he died. His soufflés were sublime.

By one of these may hang a little tale. At a dinner of the usual “sonnet” or “fourteener” number, the lady on my left refused it; the man next her, who was busy talking to his other neighbour, did ditto; so did his accomplice; and what a seventeenth-century Puritan pamphleteer, picturesquely anticipating later slang, calls “a rot among the Bishops” set in. My wife might have stopped it, but didn’t: and the dish came back to me virgin. I helped myself, observed gravely, “I’m sorry to keep you all waiting,” and ate. Thereupon my lady said, “It looks very good: may I change my mind?” And the man next her changed his mind; and his damsel followed; and they all followed—the whole dozen of them (omitting my wife, who is sometimes propositi tenax). I said nothing aloud: but murmured to myself and the soufflé, “Sheep!”

I.

Montilla	Consommé aux Pointcs d’Asperges
Johannisberg Claus Auslese, 1874	John Dory Sauce Livournaise
Ch. Grillet, 1865	Filets de Saumon à la gelée
Champagne Jeroboam. Dagonet, 1874 Romanée Conti, 1858 Ch. Margaux, 1868	Côtelettes à la Joncourt Plovers’ Eggs Aspic de Volaille à la Reine Haunch of Mutton Mayonnaise de Homard
Port, 1853	Soufflé glacé au Marasquin
Pedro Ximénès	Canapés de Crevettes

III.

As a contrast of simplicity take the following, long afterwards (some twenty years) constructed as an endeavour to carry out, for a single guest, the admirable combination of ordre et largeur in Foker’s prescription, “a bottle of sherry, a bottle of sham, a bottle of port, and a shass-caffy.”

Sherry “Titania”	Clear Soup
	Fried Trout
Champagne Moët, 1893 Port Cockburn’s, 1881	Filets de Bœuf à la St. Aubyn Roast Duckling Apricots à la Rosebery Sardines Dieu-sait-Comment
Green Chartreuse	Coffee

It would be foolish to make any kind of collection of recent English writing, even gastronomical, without having something by Somerset Maugham in it. Whether he writes about food or love or the weather, there is an epicurean detachment in what he says, epicurean in the true sense of intelligent and deliberate restraint, which is so often and easily forgotten by the gourmands of life.

The reason I have chosen such a simple thing as the story of the Vicar’s egg, out of a wealth of possibilities, is that it is one of my favorite meals in all literature, unforgettable in its downright selfish hatefulness.

From Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham, 1874–1965

Philip parted from Emma with tears, but the journey to Blackstable amused him, and when they arrived he was resigned and cheerful. Blackstable was sixty miles from London. Giving their luggage to a porter, Mr. Carey set out to walk with Philip to the vicarage; it took them little more than five minutes, and when they reached it, Philip suddenly remembered the gate. It was red and five-barred: it swung both ways on easy hinges; and it was possible, though forbidden, to swing backwards and forwards on it. They walked through the garden to the front-door. This was only used by visitors and on Sundays, and on special occasions, as when the Vicar went up to London or came back. The traffic of the house took place through a side-door, and there was a back door as well for the gardener and for beggars and tramps. It was a fairly large house of yellow brick, with a red roof, built about five and twenty years before in an ecclesiastical style. The front-door was like a church porch, and the drawing-room windows were gothic.

Mrs. Carey, knowing by what train they were coming, waited in the drawing-room and listened for the click of the gate. When she heard it she went to the door.

“There’s Aunt Louisa,” said Mr. Carey, when he saw her. “Run and give her a kiss.”

Philip started to run, awkwardly, trailing his club-foot, and then stopped. Mrs. Carey was a little, shrivelled woman of the same age as her husband, with a face extraordinarily filled with deep wrinkles, and pale blue eyes. Her gray hair was arranged in ringlets according to the fashion of her youth. She wore a black dress, and her only ornament was a gold chain, from which hung a cross. She had a shy manner and a gentle voice.

“Did you walk, William?” she said, almost reproachfully, as she kissed her husband.

“I didn’t think of it,” he answered, with a glance at his nephew.

“It didn’t hurt you to walk, Philip, did it?” she asked the child.

“No, I always walk.”

He was a little surprised at their conversation. Aunt Louisa told him to come in, and they entered the hall. It was paved with red and yellow tiles, on which alternately were a Greek Cross and the Lamb of God. An imposing staircase led out of the hall. It was of polished pine, with a peculiar smell, and had been put in because fortunately, when the church was reseated, enough wood remained over. The balusters were decorated with emblems of the Four Evangelists.

“I’ve had the stove lighted as I thought you’d be cold after your journey,” said Mrs. Carey.

It was a large black stove that stood in the hall and was only lighted if the weather was very bad and the Vicar had a cold. It was not lighted if Mrs. Carey had a cold. Coal was expensive. Besides, Mary Ann, the maid, didn’t like fires all over the place. If they wanted all them fires they must keep a second girl. In the winter Mr. and Mrs. Carey lived in the dining- room so that one fire should do, and in the summer they could not get out of the habit, so the drawing-room was used only by Mr. Carey on Sunday afternoons for his nap. But every Saturday he had a fire in the study so that he could write his sermon.

Aunt Louisa took Philip upstairs and showed him into a tiny bed-room that looked out on the drive. Immediately in front of the window was a large tree, which Philip remembered now because the branches were so low that it was possible to climb quite high up it.

“A small room for a small boy,” said Mrs. Carey. “You won’t be frightened at sleeping alone?”

“Oh, no.”

On his first visit to the vicarage he had come with his nurse, and Mrs. Carey had had little to do with him. She looked at him now with some uncertainty.

“Can you wash your own hands, or shall I wash them for you?”

“I can wash myself,” he answered firmly.

“Well, I shall look at them when you come down to tea,” said Mrs. Carey.

She knew nothing about children. After it was settled that Philip should come down to Blackstable, Mrs. Carey had thought much how she should treat him; she was anxious to do her duty; but now he was there she found herself just as shy of him as he was of her. She hoped he would not be noisy and rough, because her husband did not like rough and noisy boys. Mrs. Carey made an excuse to leave Philip alone, but in a moment came back and knocked at the door; she asked him, without coming in, if he could pour out the water himself. Then she went downstairs and rang the bell for tea.

The dining-room, large and well-proportioned, had windows on two sides of it, with heavy curtains of red rep; there was a big table in the middle; and at one end an imposing mahogany sideboard with a looking-glass in it. In one corner stood a harmonium. On each side of the fireplace were chairs covered in stamped leather, each with an antimacassar; one had arms and was called the husband, and the other had none and was called the wife. Mrs. Carey never sat in the arm-chair: she said she preferred a chair that was not too comfortable; there was always a lot to do, and if her chair had had arms she might not be so ready to leave it.

Mr. Carey was making up the fire when Philip came in, and he pointed out to his nephew that there were two pokers. One was large and bright and polished and unused, and was called the Vicar; and the other, which was much smaller and had evidently passed through many fires, was called the Curate.

“What are we waiting for?” said Mr. Carey.

“I told Mary Ann to make you an egg. I thought you’d be hungry after your journey.”

Mrs. Carey thought the journey from London to Blackstable very tiring. She seldom travelled herself, for the living was only three hundred a year, and, when her husband wanted a holiday, since there was not money for two, he went by himself. He was very fond of Church Congresses and usually managed to go up to London once a year; and once he had been to Paris for the exhibition, and two or three times to Switzerland. Mary Ann brought in the egg, and they sat down. The chair was much too low for Philip, and for a moment neither Mr. Carey nor his wife knew what to do.

“I’ll put some books under him,” said Mary Ann.

She took from the top of the harmonium the large Bible and the prayer-book from which the Vicar was accustomed to read prayers, and put them on Philip’s chair.

“Oh, William, he can’t sit on the Bible,” said Mrs. Carey, in a shocked tone. “Couldn’t you get him some books out of the study?”

Mr. Carey considered the question for an instant.

“I don’t think it matters this once if you put the prayer-book on the top, Mary Ann,” he said. “The book of Common Prayer is the composition of men like ourselves. It has no claim to divine authorship.”

“I hadn’t thought of that, William,” said Aunt Louisa.

Philip perched himself on the books, and the Vicar, having said grace, cut the top off his egg.

“There,” he said, handing it to Philip, “you can eat my top if you like.”

Philip would have liked an egg to himself, but he was not offered one, so took what he could.

“How have the chickens been laying since I went away?” asked the Vicar.

“Oh, they’ve been dreadful, only one or two a day.”

“How did you like that top, Philip?” asked his uncle.

“Very much, thank you.”

“You shall have another one on Sunday afternoon.”

Mr. Carey always had a boiled egg at tea on Sunday, so that he might be fortified for the evening service.

The report of a Christmas dinner served in the midst of war in London for a group of penniless old French refugees is one of the most touching things I have ever read, in spite of its far from literary polish. I am printing it just as it appeared in the Wine and Food Quarterly, firmly resisting all temptations to turn it into a story, or at least a withers-wringing anecdote. It could not be better done than it is here.

“Memorable Meals, No. 1”
From Wine and Food Quarterly, Spring, 1942

The place: Soho

The date: 25 December 1941

The hostess: Mademoiselle Chicou d’Argences

The guests: Forty-three destitute old French men and women

The fare: Crême de tomates

    Dindonneau farci à la mode de chez nous

    Haricots verts

    Pèche de mes rêves

    Café

The wines: Un doigt de porto

    La piquette de la cigale

    Les cerises de la fourmi

Mademoiselle Chicou d’Argences was born in 1858 and she has been an honoured guest at many rich men’s tables in her native France as well as in the United States, where she had once upon a time many friends, most of them dead by now and the others unaware of the fact that she has no income whatever today. Her old ship is at the bottom of the sea but she is not downhearted! Like the rest of the company on that happy Christmas Day, she still lives and bobs up and down on the choppy sea of misfortune, safe enough on that old raft, the French Benevolent Society in London. And she still has “le sourire”; she also has “le mot pour rire.” She was the most lively and delightful hostess imaginable when she presided over a déjeuner de Noël, provided by a generous French Restaurateur, who does not wish his name nor that of his restaurant to be mentioned.

The restaurant was closed to the public on that occasion and the little band of aged and poor French people, stranded in London, were given a meal such as they had lost all hope ever to enjoy again. The welcoming verre de porto which awaited them on arrival set everybody at ease and set tongues wagging. Then the steaming hot soup, the chestnut-stuffed turkey, and the haricots verts tossed in butter were so good that a hush fell upon the babel of tongues whilst jaws were busy. La piquette was unstinted, and what a joy it was for all these old French people to see once again wine in a glass before them; most of them looked at it with moist eyes before drinking it. To be penniless in a strange land and to be given wine when wine is so difficult to buy, even when you are as rich as rich can be! “Quel miracle!” Toasts began to be drunk before coffee was served, and with the coffee there was another miracle. “Des cerises à l’eau-de-vie, ma chère! Tout comme chez ma grand’ mère,” confided a guest of close upon ninety years to her neighbour.

When the company dispersed, not without gentle hints that it was time to be making for home before black-out time, some of the old legs may have been a little less steady than before lunch, but all the hearts were younger. And they all promised the kind host to come again next Christmas, when he took leave of them with “A Ilannée prochaine!” as a parting gift. Was there ever a more memorable meal?

Possibly the nicest thing about G. B. Stern’s jolly little book Bouquet is the final barbaric fillip to it when she admits, after a serious-minded albeit gay wine tour through France, that a dry Martini will taste very good indeed!

She and her husband are saying a last word to their two companions, who are motoring on to the Riviera with the luggage. She calls to them to have her tipple ready when she arrives at Antibes the day after tomorrow: “And suddenly a little thrill shot through my being, a thrill flavoured with Angostura and iced gin, as my imagination prophetically tasted this first most wonderful, most delicious cocktail, after the five weeks’ haughty abstinence which connoisseurship had exacted of us.”

I shall always admire Miss Stern for admitting to such a heathenish desire at the end of a book filled with so many sincerely appreciated bottles of fine wines!

Almost every page of Bouquet pleases in some such way as the last, even if one has not tasted quite so many noble vintages, nor known the delight of finding an “inn of legend” and proving the Guide Michelin a goose for once:

From Bouquet by G. B. Stern, 1890–1973

We had no idea, when we left Tain-l’Hermitage, that the rather dull, straight, white roads and poplars of my conventional imagination were to be exchanged for the enchantment of an unknown mountain region. When we left Le Puy the next morning, we saw by Michelin that it was a run of forty-five kilometres to Saugues; there, at the Hôtel de France, marked only with an egg-cup and spoon, we might be able to get a tolerable lunch. We had no idea that we were to be served with a lunch which is the dream of all who sojourn haphazard through France. There were no stars in Michelin to lure us to the Hôtel de France; and nothing on the outside of the hotel itself—plain walls and a plain sign, an open courtyard onto the village street, and an outside staircase to the steep front-door.

We asked if we could eat. We were taken through the kitchen by another dark winding scaircase into a small dining-room. At once, however, on entering it, we felt grateful, though it took a minute or two before we discovered why. . . . Ah yes, they had had the sense to keep their jalousies closed. The room was cool and dim in the green light filtering through; the blinding glare outside was blocked out, and there were no flies. Good! We asked the waiter, an efficient-looking man in white linen, what we could eat. “Trout and partridge,” he replied, with humility. Well, yes, faute de mieux, trout and partridge. . . . We should have liked the worst-end-of-the-neck with some winter greens, but nevertheless—be it so! And the wine-list? Chablis, 1918, was our choice, and vin ordinaire to begin with.

The waiter quickly brought us some home-cured ham as an hors-d’oeuvre. It was not very good. Only when the trout arrived, perfectly cooked, brown and delicious, with just the right accompaniment of butter and gravy, did we begin to suspect that our lunch might be above the egg-cup-and-spoon level.

After the trout, and without any waiting, champignons appeared, a big dish, crisp and brown and succulent, far too good for any remnants to be left upon our plates. Humphrey began to remind us gloomily that his surname was “Petit-Panche,” and that he had very little room left for partridge! And then the waiter, who appeared to know by magic just when we were ready for each course, brought in, not the partridge, but what was probably the most tender rabbit in the world, cooked with tomato sauce; because he said that Madame feared we would not have enough with partridge alone! I have eaten the breast of chicken which has tasted like rabbit, but I have never yet eaten rabbit which tasted so like the breast of chicken.

When the partridges appeared, we reminded the waiter that he had murmured something about potatoes, and could we have them at the same time? He agreed, but was genuinely distressed at our wish. “You will see,” he said, arriving with the potatoes, “that the flavours do not mingle well.”

That man was an artist. He was quite right. The potato savoury, with its delicate crust of cheese, was spoilt by being eaten with the partridge. We left it till afterwards.

The next course was écrevisses, delicate little river crayfish, cooked in brandy. I had given in by now, and Humphrey was sobbing bitterly; but Johnny plodded on; and Rosemary, in whom the gourmet had for once triumphed over indigestion, came in a good second.

The waiter cleared away the écrevisses rapidly and silently, and produced—flan, he called it: a delicious pudding of white of egg and cream beaten up, and sponge fingers to eat with it. Doubtless Madame was afraid that we might still be hungry! After that, we merely had to cope with cream-cheese, fruit, coffee, and four fines.

The bill for the four of us, complete with wine, mineral water, coffee, brandies, and service, amounted to one hundred and eighteen francs, fifty centimes. At the then rate of exchange, that is between fourteen and fifteen shillings, roughly, in English money. With the exception of the home-cured ham, not a single one of the nine courses or so but was as delicately and intelligently cooked—created, one might say—as a meal at any of the most famous five-star restaurants of Paris or London.

When we went down, we spoke a few dazed words of thanks and praise to Mme Anglade, the proprietress, a thin, quiet wisp of a woman. “Ah, madame,” she replied, “I was perhaps a good enough cook once, mais on devient vieille, et on perd le courage!”

“But one gets old, and one loses courage. . . .” We wondered, not unnaturally, with what sort of a dinner Madame would have served us before she lost courage! . . .

Mrs. Ramsay, in Virginia Woolf’s story To the Lighthouse, may not have been the author’s mother, any more than Mr. Pooter was George and Weedon Grossmith themselves; but she is all exhausted beautiful fertile women who must feed their children and the people they choose to love. The story of the dinner party she gave one summer night is hard to cut into, as anything good must be. Nothing much was said or done, there in the shadowy dining room, but human beings suddenly seemed what they were, which is magic when it happens on paper.

Everything was wrong for Mrs. Ramsay: her husband the scholar had laughed at the plan to go next day to the lighthouse with their eight children; Mr. Bankes was a difficult prissy man who fussed about what he ate; two of her young guests were much in love and very late; she was tired . . .

From To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, 1882–1941

. . . Again she felt alone in the presence of her old antagonist, life.

Jasper and Rose said that Mildred wanted to know whether she should wait dinner.

“Not for the Queen of England,” said Mrs. Ramsay emphatically.

“Not for the Empress of Mexico,” she added, laughing at Jasper; for he shared his mother’s vice: he, too, exaggerated.

And if Rose liked, she said, while Jasper took the message, she might choose which jewels she was to wear. When there are fifteen people sitting down to dinner, one cannot keep things waiting for ever. She was now beginning to feel annoyed with them for being so late; it was inconsiderate of them, and it annoyed her on top of her anxiety about them, that they should choose this very night to be out late, when, in fact, she wished the dinner to be particularly nice, since William Bankes had at last consented to dine with them; and they were having Mildred’s masterpiece—Bœuf en Daube. Everything depended upon things being served up to the precise moment they were ready. The beef, the bay-leaf, and the wine—all must be done to a turn. To keep it waiting was out of the question. Yet of course tonight, of all nights, out they went, and they came in late, and things had to be sent out, things had to be kept hot; the Bœuf en Daube would be entirely spoilt.

Jasper offered her an opal necklace; Rose a gold necklace. Which looked best against her black dress? Which did indeed, said Mrs. Ramsay absent-mindedly looking at her neck and shoulders (but avoiding her face) in the glass.

. . . There was a smell of burning. Could they have let the Bœuf en Daube overboil? she wondered, pray heaven not! when the great clangour of the gong announced solemnly, authoritatively, that all those scattered about, in attics, in bedrooms, on little perches of their own, reading, writing, putting the last smooth to their hair, or fastening dresses, must leave all that, and the little odds and ends on their washing-tables and dressing-tables, and the novels on the bed-tables, and the diaries which were so private, and assemble in the dining-room for dinner.

But what have I done with my life? thought Mrs. Ramsay, taking her place at the head of the table, and looking at all the plates making white circles on it. “William, sit by me,” she said. “Lily,” she said, wearily, “over there.” They had that—Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle—she, only this—an infinitely long table and plates and knives. At the far end was her husband, sitting down, all in a heap, frowning. What at? She did not know. She did not mind. She could not understand how she had ever felt any emotion or affection for him. She had a sense of being past everything, through everything, out of everything, as she helped the soup, as if there was an eddy—there—and one could be in it, or one could be out of it, and she was out of it. It’s all come to an end, she thought, while they came in one after another, Charles Tansley—“Sit there, please,” she said—Augustus Carmichael—and sat down. And meanwhile she waited, passively, for some one to answer her, for something to happen. But this is not a thing, she thought, ladling out soup, that one says.

Raising her eyebrows at the discrepancy—that was what she was thinking, this was what she was doing—ladling out soup—she felt, more and more strongly, outside that eddy; or as if a shade had fallen, and, robbed of colour, she saw things truly. The room (she looked round it) was very shabby. There was no beauty anywhere. She forbore to look at Mr. Tansley. Nothing seemed to have merged. They all sat separate. And the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her. . . . [She] wished, looking at her husband at the other end of the table, that he would say something. One word, she said to herself. For if he said a thing, it would make all the difference. He went to the heart of things. He cared about fishermen and their wages. He could not sleep for thinking of them. It was altogether different when he spoke; one did not feel then, pray heaven you don’t see how little I care, because one did care. Then, realising that it was because she admired him so much that she was waiting for him to speak, she felt as if somebody had been praising her husband to her and their marriage, and she glowed all over without realising that it was she herself who had praised him. She looked at him thinking to find this in his face; he would be looking magnificent. . . . But not in the least! He was screwing his face up, he was scowling and frowning, and flushing with anger. What on earth was it about? she wondered. What could be the matter? Only that poor old Augustus had asked for another plate of soup—that was all. It was unthinkable, it was detestable (so he signalled to her across the table) that Augustus should be beginning his soup over again. He loathed people eating when he had finished. She saw his anger fly like a pack of hounds into his eyes, his brow, and she knew that in a moment something violent would explode, and then—thank goodness! she saw him clutch himself and clap a brake on the wheel, and the whole of his body seemed to emit sparks but not words. He sat there scowling. He had said nothing, he would have her observe. Let her give him the credit for that! But why after all should poor Augustus not ask for another plate of soup? He had merely touched Ellen’s arm and said:

“Ellen, please, another plate of soup,” and then Mr. Ramsay scowled like that.

And why not? Mrs. Ramsay demanded. Surely they could let Augustus have his soup if he wanted it. He hated people wallowing in food, Mr. Ramsay frowned at her. He hated everything dragging on for hours like this. But he had controlled himself, Mr. Ramsay would have her observe, disgusting though the sight was. But why show it so plainly, Mrs. Ramsay demanded (they looked at each other down the long table sending these questions and answers across, each knowing exactly what the other felt). Everybody could see, Mrs. Ramsay thought. There was Rose gazing at her father, there was Roger gazing at his father; both would be off in spasms of laughter in another second, she knew, and so she said promptly (indeed it was time):

“Light the candles,” and they jumped up instantly and went and fumbled at the sideboard. . . .

Now eight candles were stood down the table, and after the first stoop the flames stood upright and drew with them into visibility the long table entire, and in the middle a yellow and purple dish of fruit. What had she done with it, Mrs. Ramsay wondered, for Rose’s arrangement of the grapes and pears, of the horny pink-lined shell, of the bananas, made her think of a trophy fetched from the bottom of the sea, of Neptune’s banquet, of the bunch that hangs with vine leaves over the shoulder of Bacchus (in some picture), among the leopard skins and the torches lolloping red and gold. . . . Thus brought up suddenly into the light it seemed possessed of great size and depth, was like a world in which one could take one’s staff and climb hills, she thought, and go down into valleys, and to her pleasure (for it brought them into sympathy momentarily) she saw that Augustus too feasted his eyes on the same plate of fruit, plunged in, broke off a bloom there, a tassel here, and returned, after feasting, to his hive. That was his way of looking, different from hers. But looking together united them.

Now all the candles were lit up, and the faces on both sides of the table were brought nearer by the candle light, and composed, as they had not been in the twilight, into a party round a table, for the night was now shut off by panes of glass, which, far from giving any accurate view of the outside world, rippled it so strangely that here, inside the room, seemed to be order and dry land; there, outside, a reflection in which things wavered and vanished, waterily.

Some change at once went through them all, as if this had really happened, and they were all conscious of making a party together in a hollow, on an island; had their common cause against that fluidity out there. Mrs. Ramsay, who had been uneasy, waiting for Paul and Minta to come in, and unable, she felt, to settle to things, now felt her uneasiness changed to expectation. . . . They must come now, [she] thought, looking at the door, and at that instant Minta Doyle, Paul Rayley, and a maid carrying a great dish in her hands came in together. . . . “Put it down there,” she said, helping the Swiss girl to place gently before her the huge brown pot in which was the Bœuf en Daube. . . . An exquisite scent of olives and oil and juice rose from the great brown dish as Marthe, with a little flourish, took the cover off. The cook had spent three days over that dish. And she must take great care, Mrs. Ramsay thought, diving into the soft mass, to choose a specially tender piece for William Bankes. And she peered into the dish, with its shiny walls and its confusion of savoury brown and yellow meats and its bay leaves and its wine, and thought. . . .

“It is a triumph,” said Mr. Bankes, laying his knife down for a moment. He had eaten attentively. It was rich; it was tender. It was perfectly cooked. How did she manage these things in the depths of the country? he asked her. She was a wonderful woman. All his love, all his reverence, had returned; and she knew it.

“It is a French receipe of my grandmother’s,” said Mrs. Ramsay, speaking with a ring of great pleasure in her voice. Of course it was French. What passes for cookery in England is an abomination (they agreed). It is putting cabbages in water. It is roasting meat till it is like leather. It is cutting off the delicious skins of vegetables. “In which,” said Mr. Bankes, “all the virtue of the vegetable is contained.” And the waste, said Mrs. Ramsay. A whole French family could live on what an English cook throws away. Spurred on by her sense that William’s affection had come back to her, and that everything was all right again, and that her suspense was over, and that now she was free both to triumph and to mock, she laughed, she gesticulated, till Lily thought, How childlike, how absurd she was, sitting up there with all her beauty opened again in her, talking about the skins of vegetables. There was something frightening about her. She was irresistible. . . .

“Then,” said Mr. Bankes, “there is that liquid the English call coffee.”

“Oh, coffee!” said Mrs. Ramsay. But it was much rather a question (she was thoroughly roused, Lily could see, and talked very emphatically) of real butter and clean milk. Speaking with warmth and eloquence, she described the iniquity of the English dairy system, and in what state milk was delivered at the door, and was about to prove her charges, for she had gone into the matter, when all round the table, beginning with Andrew in the middle, like a fire leaping from tuft to tuft of furze, her children laughed; her husband laughed; she was laughed at, fire-encircled, and forced to veil her crest, dismount her batteries, and only retaliate by displaying the raillery and ridicule of the table to Mr. Bankes as an example of what one suffered if one attacked the prejudices of the British Public.

No, she said, she did not want a pear. Indeed she had been keeping guard over the dish of fruit (without realising it) jealously, hoping that nobody would touch it. Her eyes had been going in and out among the curves and shadows of the fruit, among the rich purples of the lowland grapes, then over the horny ridge of the shell, putting a yellow against a purple, a curved shape against a round shape, without knowing why she did it, or why, every time she did it, she felt more and more serene; until, oh, what a pity that they should do it—a hand reached out, took a pear, and spoilt the whole thing. In sympathy she looked at Rose. She looked at Rose sitting between Jasper and Prue. How odd that one’s child should do that!

How odd to see them sitting there, in a row, her children, Jasper, Rose, Prue, Andrew, almost silent, but with some joke of their own going on, she guessed, from the twitching at their lips. It was something quite apart from everything else, something they were hoarding up to laugh over in their own room. It was not about their father, she hoped. No, she thought not. What was it, she wondered, sadly rather, for it seemed to her that they would laugh when she was not there. There was all that hoarded behind those rather set, still, mask-like faces, for they did not join in easily; they were like watchers, surveyors, a little raised or set apart from the grown-up people. . . .

. . . But dinner was over. It was time to go. They were only playing with things on their plates. She would wait until they had done laughing at some story her husband was telling. . . . Then she would get up. . . .

She tucked her napkin under the edge of her plate. Well, were they done now? No. That story had led to another story. Her husband was in great spirits tonight, and wishing, she supposed, to make it all right with old Augustus after that scene about the soup, had drawn him in—they were telling stories about some one they had both known at college. She looked at the window in which the candle flames burnt brighter now that the panes were black, and looking at the outside the voices came to her very strangely, as if they were voices at a service in a cathedral, for she did not listen to the words. The sudden bursts of laughter and then one voice (Minta’s) speaking alone, reminded her of men and boys crying out the Latin words of a service in some Roman Catholic cathedral. She waited. Her husband spoke. He was repeating something, and she knew it was poetry from the rhythm and the ring of exultation, and melancholy in his voice:

Come out and climb the garden path,

Luriana, Lurilee.

The China rose is all abloom and buzzing with the yellow bee.

The words (she was looking at the window) sounded as if they were floating like flowers on water out there, cut off from them all, as if no one had said them, but they had come into existence of themselves.

“And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.” She did not know what they meant, but, like music, the words seemed to be spoken by her own voice, outside her self, saying quite easily and naturally what had been in her mind the whole evening while she said different things. She knew, without looking round, that every one at the table was listening to the voice saying:

I wonder if it seems to you,

Luriana, Lurilee

with the same sort of relief and pleasure that she had, as if this were, at last, the natural thing to say, this were their own voice speaking.

But the voice stopped. She looked round. She made herself get up. Augustus Carmichael had risen and, holding his table napkin so that it looked like a long white robe, he stood chanting:

To see the Kings go riding by

Over lawn and daisy lea

With their palm leaves and cedar sheaves,

Luriana, Lurilee

and as she passed him, he turned slightly towards her repeating the last words:

Luriana, Lurilee

and bowed to her as if he did her homage. Without knowing why, she felt that he liked her better than he had ever done before; and with a feeling of relief and gratitude she returned his bow and passed through the door which he held open for her.