Host and Guest

by A. V. Kirwan

During the season of which I speak, the prices of all table luxuries are enhanced, spring chickens as they are called costing generally about 12s. or 13s. the couple. Fashion, however, will exert its sway, and, totally irrespective of cost, diners d’apparat, or grand entertainments, are always given during this season. Covers are laid for twelve, fourteen, sixteen, eighteen, or twenty, as the case may be, though occasionally the number of guests is considerably larger. At regular dress dinners of this kind there is great magnificence, great luxury, all the primeurs, as the French call them, all the early fruits and vegetables, no matter what the cost, are provided and produced. Green peas are imported from Portugal, and asparagus from the same place, and from Hyeres, Nice, &c. Most of the nobility and gentry are enabled to supply themselves from their country seats with hot-house grapes and pines; but, to such as are not, Covent Garden, and the best fruiterers of London are always open, and in no country in the world do you find, if prepared to incur the expenditure, finer fruits (especially hot-house fruits) than in England, though finer vegetables are to be found in the Brussels and occasionally in the Parisian markets.

At the grand dinners of which I speak the custom has been, and still in a great degree is, to divide the dinner into several courses, but this is a practice super-inducing trouble, profusion, and expense. These may be incurred where there are large establishments and colossal fortunes (as there are in England in a greater degree than in any country in the world), and where the object is to astonish and render rivalry hopeless, rather than to please or satisfy your guest; but as in the great majority of cases the fortunes and the desires of men are moderate, it seems to me it would be in better sense, and, indeed, in better taste too, to allow of but two courses as in France. In some of the best houses in the Faubourg St. Germain, fish and hors d’œuvre, such as patties, &c., form part of the first course, and not a distinct course as here.

In all grand dinners for twelve persons in England, two soups, two fishes, and four entrées for the first course are considered indispensable; and two roasts, two removes, and half a dozen entremets for the second course. For a dinner of twenty, the entrées and the entremets would necessarily have to be doubled, being each increased to eight. Of course the bill of fare for these dinners varies with the season. In April a turtle and a spring soup may be given with turbot and crimped salmon, roast fore-quarter of lamb, fillet of beef, &c.; whereas in January or February there may be an ox-tail, a mock turtle, a gravy or a giblet or a grey pea soup, with a variety of game, such as partridges, black cock, wild duck, snipe, and woodcock, not procurable in April or May. Persons giving dinners should, of course, consider the season.

Men of rank and fortune who keep a regular house steward or maître d’hôtel have this trouble taken off their hands, for a confidential servant, or a French chef de cuisine arranges with the master of the establishment or the lady of the house what is to be the menu or bill of fare; but persons of two or three thousand a year, or of one thousand a year (and such persons now give occasional dinners, vying with those of ten and twenty times their fortune) cannot afford to keep French men cooks, or to maintain extensive establishments. It is therefore necessary, unless these gentlemen be supplied by Gunter, Bridgeman, or some other tradesmen, at so much per head, that he should know how to order a dinner.

In the case of men of moderate fortune, it is very likely a first-rate man cook, French or English, will be introduced for the occasion, and come the day before the dinner to make preliminary arrangements, and to give directions to, and to aid the ordinary woman cook of the household. Unless some such arrangement as this be adopted, a dinner cannot be very satisfactory, and probably it would be better for persons who have to give set dinners on certain occasions twice or thrice a year, and who cannot fully rely on their own English female cook, and the professed man cook brought in to assist and superintend, to contract with some renowned undertaker or entrepreneur of dinners, such as Gunter, Staples, Bathe and Breach, &c., to supply the party of twelve or twenty, as the case may be, at so much a head, exclusive of wine.

In arrangements such as this much trouble is saved to the man of small fortune, and there is no waste, for the provider of the dinner removes the débris on the very night of the feast, or early the following morning. Why, however, it will be asked, should persons of a couple or three thousand a year give so pretentious and costly a dinner? Because every one in England tries to ape the class two or three degrees above him in point of rank and fortune, in style of living, and manner of receiving his friends. Thus it is that a plain gentleman of moderate fortune, or a professional man making a couple of thousands a year, having dined with a peer of £50,000 a year in Grosvenor Square or Belgravia, seeks when he himself next gives a dinner, to imitate the style of the Marquis, Earl, or Lord Lieutenant of a county with whom he has come into social contact. The attempt is a great mistake, and generally a failure; for unless there be a unity and completeness, an ensemble in such a feast, it is a misadventure. In a party of twenty at one of these great houses there are from a dozen to fifteen servants, exclusive of the butler and under-butler, waiting at table, and where is the man of three thousand or six thousand a year who could afford such a retinue of liveried lackeys! The keep, liveries, beer-money, and wages of a dozen livery servants of this kind, would amount to from £1600 to £2000 a year alone. Is it not therefore folly for gentlemen of small means, or for struggling professional men, to seek to vie with, by aping, these magnates. Let the great brewers, the great bankers, the great merchants, and the great railway contractors and millionaires, vie with them if it please them, but let men of mind and brain not attempt it. Even in the case of millionaires, the essay at rivalry is rarely successful. There is ostentation without ease, elegance, good breeding, or good taste, and the parvenu too often appears in all his disagreeable hideousness and self-sufficiency. It were far better if men of moderate fortune would attempt less. The success of a dinner does not depend in the least on two soups, two fishes, two removes, and eight entrées, but on having sufficient on table the best of its kind, and thoroughly well dressed. Better far have one first-rate soup and one good fish, such as turbot or salmon, than a multiplicity of dishes, unless you have good cooks and a retinue of servants, and all the accessories of a first-rate establishment. It is within the power of every gentleman of fair means to give a good soup, a good fish, a couple of removes, and four entrées at the first course, and a couple of small roasts, a couple of removes, and a few entremets at the second course, and what can any reasonable man want in addition? If the dinner be composed exclusively of English, let the remove be a haunch or saddle of mutton, a roast turkey and ham, a braized leg of mutton, a fillet or a sirloin of beef, and surely there is enough to create “a soul under the ribs of death,” with the entrées of lamb, mutton, and veal cutlets, with fillets of pheasants, vol au vents blanquette, of sweetbreads and such like. In April, May, June, and July, fricassées of chickens, leverets, pigeons, fillets of rabbits, with quails, ducklings, turkey poults, and guinea fowls may be served for entrées and second courses; while in August there is venison, grouse, and wheatears. In September, October, November, and December, there are partridges, grouse, blackcock, golden plover, snipe, woodcock, wild duck, hare, and pheasants; while in the two last months of November and December, ox-tail, mulligatawney, mock turtle, and giblet soups may do frequent duty, with turbot, crimped cod, haddock, and brill for fish. For entrées in the winter months there may be pork cutlets, quenelles, mutton cutlets, rabbit curries, &c.

I am now speaking, of course, of dinners of some pretension; but there are every day given in England those quiet little family dinners of six or eight persons, which are the perfection of social life.

It is said that the number present at these dinners should not be less than the graces, nor more than the muses. There is a good deal of truth in this. Conversation cannot be general or quite unrestrained, where the company exceeds eight or ten. In a party of sixteen or twenty you are forced to converse with your neighbours on either side, or with the gentleman opposite to you. The master of a feast should take care in selecting his guests, whether in a large or in a small party, but more particularly in a small party—that they should be people of analogous tastes. In most cases it would not very well answer to place a Puritan side by side with a High Churchman—or a peace-at-any-price man next an engineer officer, earnest in the pursuit of his profession. An Allopathist should not be united en petit comité with a Homœopathist; nor a whig of the old school with a violent radical. The great object is to pair amiable, pleasant and agreeable men, who have travelled much and lived in the world, and pleasant and agreeable women. A good talker at a dinner-table is a great acquisition, but good listeners are not less essential.

But your good talker should be an urbane and polite man, not bumptious and underbred. Barristers and travelled physicians are generally excellent company, though the former not seldom monopolise too much of the conversation, and give it occasionally a shoppy air. If the object of dining be to secure the greatest quantity of health and enjoyment, such results are more likely to be attained at small than at those set and formal dinners, where people are kept—to use the language of the late Mr. Walker, in “stately durance.” The essence of a good dinner, as the author of the “Original” sensibly remarks, is “that it should be without ceremony, and that you should have what you want when you want it.” This you cannot have at a ceremonial and formal London dinner, where you are encumbered with help, and are not allowed to do anything for yourself. At small every-day dinners, you may have every thing upon the table that is wanted at the time; thus for salmon you would have lobster, or parsley and butter, or cockle sauce, as you might prefer, with cayenne, chili vinegar, sliced cucumber, &c. The comfort of this is great, as the guests pass the sauces at once and instantaneously to each other. At great dinners this is never done. Everything is handed round by a file of liveried servants, who are continually changing the courses and taking up and laying down dishes, to the discomfort of the guests. Yet it is this dull, comfortless, stately and ostentatious formality that every one is striving at.

“State,” as Mr. Walker observes, “without the machinery of state, is of all states the worst;” and it is detestable to see men with a couple of thousands a year, and a couple of men servants, and an English female cook, imitating the style of living of men of thirty thousand a year, with a dozen male servants. I would not have it inferred, that a large income and a first-rate man cook are indispensable to the giving of good dinners. There are now several Schools of Cookery in London, from some of which one can obtain regularly educated female cooks, and it is quite possible, with small establishments and small fortunes, to give comfortable and even elegant dinners, in which the English style shall be diversified by the French. But in these small establishments too much should not be attempted. Everything savouring of too much state and over-display should be discarded. The dishes should be choice, but limited in number, and the wines more remarkable for their excellence than their variety. It is the exquisite quality of a dinner or a wine that pleases us, not the number of dishes, nor the number of vintages. The late Earl of Dudley was wont to say, “that a good soup, a small turbot, a neck of venison, and ducklings with green peas, or chicken with asparagus, or an apricot tart, was a dinner for an emperor!” and to my thinking it was far too good for most emperors past and present.