“You speak like an oracle—like the Cook’s Oracle, Mr. Pelham: may I send you some soup, it is a la Carmelite? But what are you about to do with that case?”
“It contains” (said I) “my spoon, my knife, and my fork. Nature afflicted me with a propensity, which through these machines I have endeavoured to remedy by art. I eat with too great a rapidity. It is a most unhappy failing, for one often hurries over in one minute, what ought to have afforded the fullest delight for the period of five. It is, indeed, a vice which deadens enjoyment, as well as abbreviates it; it is a shameful waste of the gifts, and a melancholy perversion of the bounty of Providence: my conscience tormented me; but the habit, fatally indulged in early childhood, was not easy to overcome. At last I resolved to construct a spoon of peculiarly shallow dimensions, a fork so small, that it could only raise a certain portion to my mouth, and a knife rendered blunt and jagged, so that it required a proper and just time to carve the goods ‘the gods provide me.’ My lord, ‘the lovely Thais sits beside me’ in the form of a bottle of Madeira. Suffer me to take wine with you?”
“With pleasure, my good friend; let us drink to the memory of the Carmelites, to whom we are indebted for this inimitable soup.”
“Yes!” I cried. “Let us for once shake off the prejudices of sectarian faith, and do justice to one order of those incomparable men, who, retiring from the cares of an idle and sinful world, gave themselves with undivided zeal and attention to the theory and practice of the profound science of gastronomy. It is reserved for us, my lord, to pay a grateful tribute of memory to those exalted recluses, who, through a long period of barbarism and darkness, preserved, in the solitude of their cloisters, whatever of Roman luxury and classic dainties have come down to this later age. We will drink to the Carmelites at a sect, but we will drink also to the monks as a body. Had we lived in those days, we had been monks ourselves.”
“It is singular,” answered Lord Guloseton—“(by the by, what think you of this turbot?)—to trace the history of the kitchen; it affords the greatest scope to the philosopher and the moralist. The ancients seemed to have been more mental, more imaginative, than we are in their dishes; they fed their bodies as well as their minds upon delusion: for instance, they esteemed beyond all price the tongues of nightingales, because they tasted the very music of the birds in the organs of their utterance. That is what I call the poetry of gastronomy!”
“Yes,” said I, with a sigh, “they certainly had, in some respects, the advantage over us. Who can pore over the suppers of Apicius without the fondest regret? The venerable Ude [Note: Q.—The venerable Bede—Printer’s Devil.] implies, that the study has not progressed. ‘Cookery (he says, in the first part of his work) possesses but few innovators.’”
“It is with the greatest diffidence,” said Guloseton, (his mouth full of truth and turbot,) “that we may dare to differ from so great an authority. Indeed, so high is my veneration for that wise man, that if all the evidence of my sense and reason were on one side, and the dictum of the great Ude upon the other, I should be inclined—I think, I should be determined—to relinquish the former, and adopt the latter.” [Note: See the speech of Mr. Brougham in honour of Mr. Fox.]
“Bravo, my lord,” cried I, warmly. “‘Qu’un Cuisinier est un mortel divin!’ Why should we not be proud of our knowledge in cookery? It is the soul of festivity at all times, and to all ages. How many marriages have been the consequence of meeting at dinner? How much good fortune has been the result of a good supper? At what moment of our existence are we happier than at table? There hatred and animosity are lulled to sleep, and pleasure alone reigns. Here the cook, by his skill and attention, anticipates our wishes in the happiest selection of the best dishes and decorations. Here our wants are satisfied, our minds and bodies invigorated, and ourselves qualified for the high delights of love, music, poetry, dancing, and other pleasures; and is he, whose talents have produced these happy effects, to rank no higher in the scale of man than a common servant? [Note: Ude, verbatim.]
“‘Yes,’ cries the venerable professor himself, in a virtuous and prophetic paroxysm of indignant merit—‘yes, my disciples, if you adopt, and attend to the rules I have laid down, the self-love of mankind will consent at last, that cookery shall rank in the class of the sciences, and its professors deserve the name of artists!’” [Note: Ibid.]
“My dear, dear Sir,” exclaimed Guloseton, with a kindred glow, “I discover in you a spirit similar to my own. Let us drink long life to the venerable Ude!”