DR. JOHNSON AND SAMUEL PEPYS.
Doubtless the attitude towards the pleasures of the table which displeased Thackeray was largely a sham, a mere pretense, though to some extent it was a Puritan reaction from the gross gluttony in which Englishmen indulged in ye olden times, as did the Germans, the Romans, the Russians, the Dutch, and many others.
Dr. Samuel Johnson was an amusing and amazing example of inconsistency in his gastronomic preaching and practice. To Mrs. Piozzi he remarked that "wherever the dinner is ill got up there is poverty or there is avarice, or there is stupidity; in short, the family is somehow grossly wrong." To Boswell he said: "Some people have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat. For my part, I mind my belly very studiously, and very carefully; for I look upon it that he that does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else."
Yet on other occasions Boswell heard him talk with great contempt of people who were anxious to gratify their palates. He sneered at gluttons, yet he was one himself. "When at table he was totally absorbed in the business of the moment: his looks seemed riveted to his plate; nor would he, unless when in very high company, say one word, or even pay the least attention to what was said by others, till he had satisfied his appetite; which was so fierce, and indulged with such intenseness, that, while in the act of eating, the veins of his forehead swelled, and generally a strong perspiration was visible." He told Boswell he had never been hungry but once; upon which that biographer comments: "They who beheld with wonder how much he ate upon all occasions, when his dinner was to his taste, could not easily conceive what he must have meant by hunger." Yet he was a man of discernment: he used to descant critically on the dishes which had been at table where he had dined or supped, and to recollect very minutely what he had liked. According to Mrs. Piozzi, his favorite dainties were "a leg of pork boiled till it dropped from the bone, a veal pie with plums and sugar, or the outside cut of a salt buttock of beef." He surely needed a Parisian education!
The same witness throws a limelight on the doctor's peculiarities by remarking with regard to drink that "his liking was for the strongest, as it was not the flavor but the effect he sought for and professed to desire."
In other words, strength and quantity were of greater importance to him than quality (Flavor); and in this he was a true descendant of his predecessors, one of whom has left an amazing record of his appetite. The home menus of Samuel Pepys included on one occasion "a dish of marrow bones, a leg of mutton, a loin of veal, a dish of fowl, three pullets, and a dozen larks all in a dish; a great tart, a neat's-tongue, a dish of anchovies, a dish of prawns, and cheese." More astonishing still is the following repast, prepared, as he boasts, by his "own only mayde": "We had a fricassee of rabbits and chickens, a leg of mutton boiled, three carps in a dish, a great dish of a side of lamb, a dish of roasted pigeons, a dish of four lobsters, three tarts, a lamprey-pie, a most rare pie, a dish of anchovies, good wine of several sorts, and all things mighty noble." This dinner, he exclaims, joyously, "was great." It certainly was.
If England is to the present day classed among the ungastronomic nations, by her own epicures as well as by foreigners, it is due largely to this indulgence in "great" dinners, this regard for quantity—especially of meats—at the expense, usually, of quality and artistic cooking. Generally speaking, the English have been slower than the Italians, the French, and the Germans in discovering the gastronomic importance of the more delicate Flavors developed by the cooking, which is done con amore. Koche mit Liebe is the title of a German cook book, and there certainly are more housewives in the three countries named who cook for their families "with loving devotion" to their task than there are in England or America.