BEEF.
If I have a mission upon this earth, (apart from the patent and notable one of being a frightful example to the rising generation of blighted existence and misused energies)—that mission is, I believe, beef. I am a Cœlebs, not in search of a wife, as in Mrs. Hannah More’s white-neck-clothed novel, but in search of beef. I have travelled far and wide to find it—good, tender, nourishing, juicy, succulent; and when I die, I hope that it will be inscribed on my tombstone: “Here lies one who sought for beef. Tread lightly on his grave: quia multum amavit.”
Next to the Habeas Corpus and the Freedom of the Press, there are few things that the English people have a greater respect for and a livelier faith in than beef. They bear, year after year, with the same interminable unvarying series of woodcuts of fat oxen in the columns of the illustrated newspapers; they are never tired of crowding to the Smithfield Club cattle-show; and I am inclined to think that it is their honest reverence for beef that has induced them to support so long the obstruction and endangerment of the thoroughfares of the metropolis, by oxen driven to slaughter. Beef is a great connecting link and bond of better feeling between the great classes of the commonwealth. Do not dukes hob and nob with top-booted farmers over the respective merits of short-horns and Alderneys? Does not the noble Marquis of Argentfork give an ox to be roasted whole on the village green when his son, the noble Viscount Silvercorrel, comes of age? Beef makes boys. Beef nerves our navvies. The bowmen who won Cressy and Agincourt were beef-fed, and had there been more and better beef in the Crimea a year ago, our soldiers would have borne up better under the horrors of a Chersonesean winter. We feast on beef at the great Christian festival. A baron of beef at the same time is enthroned in St. George’s Hall, in Windsor’s ancient castle, and is borne in by lacqueys in scarlet and gold. Charles the Second knighted a loin of beef; and I have a shrewd suspicion that the famous Sir Bevis of Southampton was but an ardent admirer, and doughty knight-errant in the cause of beef. And who does not know the tradition that even as the first words of the new-born Gargantua were “A boyre, à boyre,” signifying that he desired a draught of Burgundy wine—so the first intelligible sounds that the infant Guy of Warwick ever spake were, “Beef, beef!”
When the weary pilgrim reaches the beloved shores of England after a long absence, what first does he remark—after the incivility of the custom-house officers—but the great tankard of stout and the noble round of cold beef in the coffee-room of the hotel? He does not cry “Io Bacche! Evöe Bacche!” because beef is not Bacchus. He does not fall down and kiss his native soil, because the hotel carpet is somewhat dusty, and the action would be, besides, egregious; but he looks at the beef, and his eyes filling with tears, a corresponding humidity takes place in his mouth; he kisses the beef; he is so fond of it that he could eat it all up; and he does ordinarily devour so much of it to his breakfast, that the thoughtful waiter gazes at him, and murmurs to his napkin, “This man is either a cannibal or a pilgrim grey who has not seen Albion for many years.”
By beef I mean, emphatically, the legitimate, unsophisticated article. Give me my beef, hot or cold, roast, boiled, or broiled; but away with your beef-kickshaws, your beef-stews, your beef-haricoes, your corned beef, your hung beef, and your spiced beef! I don’t think there is anything so contemptible, fraudulent, adulterine in the whole world (of cookery) as a beef sausage. I have heard that it is a favourite dish with pickpockets at their raffle-suppers. I believe it. There was a boy at school with me in the byegone—a day-boy—who used to bring a clammy brownish powder, in a sandwich-box, with him for lunch. He called it powdered beef; and he ate this mahogany, sawdust-looking mixture between slices of stale bread and butter. He was an ill-conditioned boy who had begun the world in the face-grinding sense much too early. He lent halfpence at usury, and dealt in sock (which was our slang for surreptitious sweet-stuff); and I remember with what savage pleasure I fell upon and beat him in the course of a commercial transaction involving a four-bladed penknife he had sold me, and which wouldn’t cut—no, not even slate-pencil. But the penknife was nothing more than a pretext: I beat him for his beef. He had the ring-worm, and it was bruited about afterwards that he was of Jewish parentage. I believe, when he began life, he turned out but badly.
I am reminded, however, that the subject of beef, as a British institution, has already been treated at some length in this journal.[A] I have merely ventured a few remarks on the bovine topic generally, to preface the experiences I have to record of some recent travels in search of beef I have made in the capital of France. One might employ oneself better, perhaps, than in transcribing the results of a week’s hankering after the flesh-pots of Egypt; and surely the journey in search of bread is long and wearisome enough that we might take beef as it comes, and thankfully. But, as I have said, beef is my mission. I am a collector of bovine experiences, as some men collect editions of Virgil, and some Raffaelle’s virgins, and some broadsides, and some butterflies. And I know that there are moralities to be found in beef as well as in the starry heavens and the vestiges of creation.
[A] See Volume x. page 113.
Let me first sum up all the knowledge I have acquired on the subject, by stating my firm conviction that there is no beef in Paris,—I mean, no beef fit to be eaten by a philobosopher. Some say that the French cut their meat the wrong way; that they don’t hang it properly; that they don’t hang it enough; that they beat it; that they overcook it. But I have tasted infinite varieties of French beef; of the first, second, and third categories. I have had it burnt to a cinder, and I have had it very nearly raw. I have eaten it in private English families resident in Paris, and dressed by English cooks. It is a delusion: there is no beef in Lutetia.
The first beef I tried in my last campaign was the evening I dined at His Lorship’s. Don’t be alarmed, my democratic friend. I am not upon Lord Cowley’s visiting list, nor are any coronetted cards ever left at my door on the sixth storey. I did not receive a card from the British Embassy on the occasion of the last ball at the Hôtel de Ville; and I am ashamed to confess that, so anxious was I to partake of the hospitality of the Prefect of the Seine (the toilettes and the iced punch are perfect at his balls), that I was mean enough to foreswear temporarily my nationality and to avail myself of the card of Colonel Waterton Privilege of Harshellopolis, Mass.:—said colonel being at that time, and in all probability exceedingly sick, in his stateroom of the United States steamer Forked Lightning, in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. But, by His Lorship’s I mean an Anglo-French restaurant—named after a defunct English city eating-house—situate near the Place de la Concorde, and where I heard that real English roast beef was to be obtained at all hours in first-rate condition.
Now, there is one thing that I do not like abroad; yea, two that are utterly distasteful to me. The one thing is my countrymen’s hotels and restaurants. These houses of refection I have usually found exceedingly uncomfortable. So I was disposed to look somewhat coldly upon His Lordship’s invitation, as printed upon placards, and stencilled on the walls, till I was assured that his beef was really genuine, and that he was an Englishman without guile.
His Lordship’s mansion I found unpretending, even to obscurity. There was no porte-cochère, no courtyard, no gilt railings, nor green verandahs. His Lordship’s hotel was, in fact, only a little slice of a shop, with one dining-room over it; for which I was told he paid an enormous rent—some thousands of francs a-year. In his window were displayed certain English viands pleasant to the sight: a mighty beef-steak pie just cut; the kidney end of a loin of veal, with real English stuffing, palpable to sight; some sausages that might have been pork, and of Epping; some potatoes in their homely brown jackets, just out at elbows, as your well-done potatoes should be, with their flannel under-garments peeping through; and a spherical mass, something of the size and shape of a bombshell, dark in colour, speckled black and white, and that my beating heart told me was a plum-pudding. A prodigious Cheshire cheese, rugged as Helvellyn, craggy as Criffell, filled up the background like a range of yellow mountains. At the base there were dark forests of bottles branded with the names of Allsopp, and Bass, and Guinness, and there were cheering announcements framed and glazed, respecting Pale Ale on draught, L.L. whisky, and Genuine Old Tom.[B] I rubbed my hands in glee. “Ha! ha!” I said internally. “Nothing like our British aristocracy, after all. The true stock, sir! May His Lordship’s shadow never diminish.”
[B] Our gallant allies have yet much to learn about our English manners and customs. Only the other night, in the Foyer of the Grand Opera, I saw (and you may see it there still if you are incredulous) a tastefully enamelled placard, announcing that “genuine Old Tom” was to be had at the Buffet. Imagine Sir Harcourt Courtley asking the Countess of Swansdown, in the crush-room of Covent Garden Theatre, if she would take half a quartern of gin!
His Lordship’s down-stairs’ apartment was somewhat inconveniently crowded with English grooms and French palefreniers, and with an incorrigible old Frenchman, with a pipe as strong as Samson, a cap, cotton in his ears, and rings in the lobes thereof, who had learnt nothing of English but the oaths, and was cursing some very suspicious-looking meat (not my beef, I hope) most energetically. I have an opinion that stables and the perfume thereof are pretty nearly analogous the whole world over; so, at the invitation of a parboiled-looking man in a shooting-jacket and a passion (who might have been His Lordship himself for aught I knew), I went up-stairs. There was an outer chamber, with benches covered with red cotton velvet, and cracked marble tables, like an indifferent café; where some bearded men were making a horrible rattle with their dominoes, and smoking their abominable cigars (surely a course of French cigars is enough to cure the most inveterate smoker of his love for the weed). This somewhat discomposed me; but I was fain to push forward into the next saloon where the tables were laid out for dining; and taking my seat, to wait for beef.
There was myself and a black man, and his (white) wife, the Frenchman with the spectacles, and the Frenchman with the bald head (I speak of them generically, for you are sure to meet their fellows at every public dining-table abroad), the poor old Frenchman with the wig, the paralytic head and the shaking hands that trifle with the knives and forks, as though they were red-hot. There were half-a-dozen other sons of Gaul; who, with their beards, cache-nezs, and paletôts, all made to pattern, might have been one another’s brothers; two ancient maiden ladies, who looked like English governesses, who had passed, probably, some five-and-thirty years in Paris, and had begun to speak a little of the language; a rude young Englishman, who took care to make all the company aware of the coarseness of his birthplace; an English working engineer, long resident abroad, much travel-worn, and decidedly oily, who had a voice like a crank, and might have been the identical engineer that Mr. Albert Smith met on the Austrian Lloyd’s steamer; and a large-headed little boy, with a round English jacket, who sat alone, eating mournfully, and whom I could not help fancying to be some little friendless scholar in a great French school, whose jour de sortie it was, and who had come here to play at an English dinner. The days be short to thee, little boy with the large head! May they fly quickly till the welcome holidays, when thou wilt be forwarded, per rail and boat, to the London Bridge station of the South Eastern Railway, to be left till called for. I know from sad experience how very weary are the strange land and the strange bed, the strange lessons and the strange playmates, to thy small English heart!
A gaunt, ossified waiter, with blue black hair, jaws so closely shaven that they gave him an unpleasant resemblance to the grand inquisitor of the holy office in disguise seeking for heretics in a cook-shop, and who was, besides, in a perpetual cold perspiration of anger against the irate man in the shooting jacket below, and carried on fierce verbal warfare with him down the staircase. This waiter rose up against me, rather than addressed me, and charged me with a pike of bread, cutting my ordinarily immense slice from it. I mildly suggested roast beef, wincing, it must be owned, under the eye of the cadaverous waiter; who looked as if he were accustomed to duplicity, and did not believe a word that I was saying.
“Ah! rosbif!” he echoed, “bien saignant n’est ce pas?”
Now, so far from liking my meat “bien saignant” I cannot even abide the sight of it rare, and I told him so. But he repeated “bien saignant,” and vanished.
He came again, though; or rather his Jesuitical head protruded itself over the top of the box where I sat (there were boxes at His Lordship’s) and asked:
“Paint portare? p’lale? ole’ ale?”
I was nettled, and told him sharply that I would try the wine, if he could recommend it. Whereupon there was silence, and then I heard a voice crying down a pipe, “Paint portare!”
He brought me my dinner, and I didn’t like it. It was bien saignant, but it wasn’t beef, and it swam in a dead sea of gravy that was not to my taste; fat from strange animals seemed to have been grafted on to the lean. I did not get on better with the potatoes, which were full of promise, like a park hack, and unsatisfactory in the performance. I tried some plum-pudding afterwards; but, if the proof of the pudding be in the eating, that pudding remains unproved to this day; for, when I tried to fix my fork in it, it rebounded away across the room, and hit the black man on the leg. I would rather not say anything about the porter, if you please; and perhaps it is well to be brief on the subject of the glass of hot gin-and-water I tried afterwards, in a despairing attempt to be convivial; for it smelt of the midnight-lamp like an erudite book, and of the midnight oilcan, and had the flavour of the commercial terebinthium, rather than of the odoriferous Juniperus. I consoled myself with some Cheshire cheese, and asked the waiter if he had the Presse.
“Ze Time is gage,” he answered.
I did not want the Times. I wanted the Presse.
“Sare,” he repeated wrathfully, “Ze Time is gage. Le Journal Anglais (he accentuated this spitefully) is gage.”
He would have no further commerce with me after this; and, doubtlessly thinking that an Englishman who couldn’t eat his beef under-done or indeed at all, and preferred the Presse to the Times newspaper, was an outcast and a renegade, abandoned me to my evil devices, and contented himself with crying “Voila!” from the murky distance without coming when I called. He even declined to attend to receive payment, and handed me over for that purpose to a long French boy in a blouse, whose feet had evidently not long been emancipated from the pastoral sabots, whose hair was cropped close to his head (in the manner suggesting county gaol at home, and ignorance of small toothcombs abroad), and who had quite a flux of French words, and tried to persuade me to eat civet de lièvre that was to be served up at half-past seven of the clock.
But I would have borne half a hundred disappointments similar to this dinner for the sake of the black man. Legs and feet! he was a character! He sat opposite to me, calm, contented, magnificent, proud. He was as black as my boot, and as shiny. His woolly head, crisped by our bounteous mother Nature, had unmistakeably received a recent touch of the barber’s tongs. He was perfumed; he was oiled; he had moustaches (as I live!) twisted out into long rats’-tails by means of pommade Hongroise. He had a tip. He had a scarlet Turkish cap with a long blue tassel. He had military stripes down his pantaloons. He had patent leather boots. He had shirt-studs of large circumference, pins, gold waistcoat-buttons, and a gorgeous watch-chain. I believe he had a crimson under-waistcoat. He had the whitest of cambric handkerchiefs, a ring on his forefinger, and a stick with an overpowering gold knob. He was the wonderfullest nigger that the eye ever beheld.
He had a pretty little English wife—it is a fact, madam—with long auburn ringlets, who it was plain to see was desperately in love with, and desperately afraid of, him. It was marvellous to behold the rapt, fond gaze with which she contemplated him as he leaned back in his chair after dinner, and refreshed his glistening ivories with a toothpick. Equally marvellous was the condescension with which he permitted her to eat her dinner in his august presence, and suffered her to tie round his neck a great emblazoned shawl like a flag.
Who could he have been? The father of the African twins; the Black Malibran’s brother; Baron Pompey; Prince Mousalakatzic of the Orange River; Prince Bobo; some other sable dignitary of the empire of Hayti; or the renowned Soulouque himself, incognito? Yet, though affable to his spouse, he was a fierce man to the waiter. The old blood of Ashantee, the ancient lineage of Dahomey, could ill brook the shortcomings of that cadaverous servitor. There was an item in the reckoning that displeased him.
“Wass this sa?” he cried, in a terrible voice; “wass this, sa? Fesh your mas’r, sa!”
The waiter cringed and fled, and I laughed.
“Good luck have thou with thine honour: ride on ——” honest black man; but oh, human nature, human nature! I would not be your nigger for many dollars. More rib-roasting should I receive, I am afraid, than ever Uncle Tom suffered from fierce Legree.
I have not dined at His Lordship’s since—I would dine there any day to be sure of the company of the black man—but I have more to say about Beef.