BLACKWOOD’S MAGAZINE.
Cookery and Civilization. It is only after passing through an ordeal cruelly insidious, tolerably severe, and rather protracted, that we feel conscientiously entitled to assert our ability to dine every day of every week at the Reform Club, without jeopardy to those immutable principles which are incorruptible by Whigs and indestructible by Rats. A sneer, perhaps, is curling with “beautiful disdain” the lips of some Conservative Achilles. Let us nip his complacent sense of invulnerability in the bud. To eat and to err are equally attributes of humanity. Looking at ourselves in the mirror of honest criticism, we behold features as unchangeable as sublunary vicissitudes will allow.
“Time writes no wrinkles on our azure brow.”
Witness it! ye many years of wondrous alternation—of lurid tempest and sunny calm—of disastrous rout and triumphant procession—of shouting pæan and wailing dirge—witness the imperturbable tenor of our way! Attest it, thou goodly array of the tomes of Maga, laden and sparkling, now as ever, with wisdom and wit, science and fancy!—attest the unwavering fidelity of our career! All this is very true; but the secret annals of the good can never be free from temptations, and never are in reality unblotted by peccadilloes. The fury of the demagogue has been our laughing-stock—the versatility of trimming politicians, our scorn. We have crouched before none of the powers which have been, or be; neither have we been carried off our feet by the whirlwinds of popular passion. Yet it is difficult to resist a good dinner. The victories of Miltiades robbed Themistocles of sleep. The triumphs of Soyer are apt to affect us, “with a difference,” after the same fashion.
There was, we remember, a spirit of surly independence within us on visiting, for the first time, the “high capital” of Whiggery, where the Tail at present,
“New rubb’d with balm, expatiate and confer
Their state affairs.”
To admire anything was not our mood:
“The ascending pile
Stood fix’d her stately heighth; and straight the doors,
Opening their brazen folds, discover, wide
Within, her ample spaces, o’er the smooth
And level pavement.”
And as these lines suggested themselves, we recollected who the first Whig is said to have been, and whose architectural glories Milton was recording. We never yet heard a Radical disparage a peer of the realm without being convinced, that deep in the pocket, next his heart, lay an incautious hospitable invitation from the noble lord, to which a precipitate answer in the affirmative had already been dispatched. Analogously, in the magnificent edifice, whose tesselated floor we were treading gingerly, it seemed to us that we surveyed an unmistakable monument of an innate predilection for the splendours and comforts, the pomp and the abandon, of a “proud aristocracy.” This was before dinner, and we were hungry. To tell all that happened to us for some hours afterwards, would, in fact, force us to transfer to our pages more than half of the volume which is prompting these observations. Suffice it to say, that when we again stood on Pall-Mall, a bland philanthropy of sentiment, embracing all races, and classes, and sects of men, permeated our bosom. Whence came the mellowing influence, seeing that we had been, as our custom is, very innocent of wine? Nor could it be the seductive eloquence of the company. We had, indeed, been roundly vituperated in argument by the Liberator. Oh, yes! but we had been fed by the Regenerator.
To us, then, on these things much meditating—so Cicero and Brougham love to write—many of the speculations in which we had indulged, and of the principles which we had advocated, were obviously not quite in harmony with the views long inculcated by us on a docile public. Suddenly the truth flashed across and illuminated the perplexity of our ponderings. We were aware that, early in the evening, a much milder censure than usual upon some factious Liberal manœuvre had passed our lips. This took place just about the fourth spoonful of soup. The spells were already in operation under the shape of “potage à la Marcus Hill.” There is a fascination even in the name of this “delicious soup”—such is the epithet of Soyer—which our readers will better understand in the sequel. Again it was impossible to deny that we had hazarded several equivocal observations in reference to the Palmerstonian policy in Syria. But it was equally true that such inadvertencies slipped from us while laboriously engaged in determining a delicate competition between “John Dorée à l’Orléannaise” and “saumon à la Beyrout.” A transient compliment to the influence at elections of the famous Duchess of Devonshire was little liable to objection, we imagined, during a playful examination of a few “aiguillettes de volaille à la jolie fille.” More questionable, it must be admitted, were certain assertions regarding the Five Points, enunciated hastily over a “neck of mutton à la Charte.” No fault, however, had we to find with the cutting facetiousness with which we had garnished “cotelettes d’agneau à la réforme en surprise aux champignons.” The title of this dish was so ludicrously applicable to the consternation of the remnants of the Melbourne ministry—the cutlets of lamb—in finding themselves outrun in the race by mushroom free-traders, that our pleasantly thereanent was irresistible. It was difficult, at the same time, to justify the expression of an opinion, infinitely too favorable to Peel’s commercial policy, yielding to the allurements of a “turban des cailles à la financière.” And, on the whole, we smarted beneath a consciousness that all our conversation had been perceptibly flavoured by “filets de bécasses à la Talleyrand.”