“There was some nice soup; also roast meat, boiled meat, vegetables, pie, and cheese.” [Cheese at a small boys’ school!] “Every young gentleman had a massive silver fork and a napkin; and all the arrangements were stately and handsome. In particular there was a butler in a blue coat and bright buttons” [surely this was a footman?] “who gave quite a winey flavour to the table beer, he poured it out so superbly.”
Dinner at Mrs. Jellyby’s in Bleak House is one of the funniest and most delightful incidents in the book, especially the attendance. “The young woman with the flannel bandage waited, and dropped everything on the table wherever it happened to go, and never moved it again until she put it on the stairs. The person I had seen in pattens (who I suppose to have been the cook) frequently came and skirmished with her at the door, and there appeared to be ill-will between them.” The dinner given by Mr. Guppy at the “Slap Bang” dining house is another feature of this book—veal and ham, and French beans, summer cabbage, pots of half-and-half, marrow puddings, “three Cheshires” and “three small rums.” Of the items in this list, the marrow pudding seems to be as extinct—in London, at all events—as the dodo. It appears to be a mixture of bread, pounded almonds, cream, eggs, lemon peel, sugar, nutmeg, and marrow; and sounds nice.
David Copperfield’s dinner in his Buckingham Street chambers was an event with a disastrous termination. “It was a remarkable want of forethought on the part of the ironmonger who had made Mrs. Crupp’s kitchen fireplace, that it was capable of cooking nothing but chops and mashed potatoes. As to a fish-kettle, Mrs. Crupp said ‘Well! would I only come and look at the range? She couldn’t say fairer than that. Would I come and look at it?’ As I should not have been much the wiser if I had looked at it I said never mind fish. But Mrs. Crupp said, ‘Don’t say that; oysters was in, and why not them?’ So that was settled. Mrs. Crupp then said ‘What she would recommend would be this. A pair of hot roast fowls—from the pastry cook’s; a dish of stewed beef, with vegetables—from the pastry cook’s; two little corner things, as a raised pie and a dish of kidneys—from the pastry cook’s; a tart, and (if I liked) a shape of jelly—from the pastry cook’s. This,’ Mrs. Crupp said, ‘would leave her at full liberty to concentrate her mind on the potatoes, and to serve up the cheese and celery as she could wish to see it done.’”
Then blessings on thee, Micawber, most charming of characters in fiction, mightiest of punch-brewers! The only fault I have to find with the novel of David Copperfield is that we don’t get enough of Micawber. The same fault, however, could hardly be said to lie in the play; for if ever there was a “fat” part, it is Wilkins Micawber.
Martin Chuzzlewit bubbles over with eating and drinking; and “Todgers” has become as proverbial as Hamlet. In Nicholas Nickleby, too, we find plenty of mention of solids and liquids; and as a poor stroller myself at one time, it has always struck me that “business” could not have been so very bad, after all, in the Crummles Combination; for the manager, at all events, seems to have fared particularly well. Last on the list comes The Old Curiosity Shop, with the celebrated stew at the “Jolly Sandboys,” the ingredients in which have already been quoted by the present writer. With regard to this stew all that I have to remark is that I should have substituted an ox-kidney for the tripe, and left out the “sparrowgrass,” the flavour of which would be quite lost in the crowd of ingredients. But there! who can cavil at such a feast? “Fetch me a pint of warm ale, and don’t let nobody bring into the room even so much as a biscuit till the time arrives.”
Codlin may not have been “the friend”; but he was certainly the judge of the “Punch” party.
In this realistic age, meals on the stage have to be provided from high-class hotels or restaurants; and this is, probably, the chief reason why there is so little eating and drinking introduced into the modern drama. Gone are the nights of the banquet of pasteboard poultry, “property” pine-apples, and gilded flagons containing nothing more sustaining than the atmosphere of coal-gas. Not much faith is placed in the comic scenes of a pantomime nowadays; or it is probable that the clown would purloin real York hams, and stuff Wall’s sausages into the pockets of his ample pants. Champagne is champagne under the present regime of raised prices, raised salaries, raised everything; and it is not so long since I overheard an actor-manager chide a waiter from a fashionable restaurant, for forgetting the Soubise sauce, when he brought the cutlets.
In my acting days we usually had canvas fowls, stuffed with sawdust, when we revelled on the stage; or, if business had been particularly good, the poultry was made from breakfast rolls, with pieces skewered on, to represent the limbs. And the potables—Gadzooks! What horrible concoctions have found their way down this unsuspecting throttle! Sherry was invariably represented by cold tea, which is palatable enough if home-made, under careful superintendence, but, drawn in the property-master’s den, usually tasted of glue. Ginger beer, at three-farthings for two bottles, poured into tumblers containing portions of a seidlitz-powder, always did duty for champagne; and as for port or claret—well, I quite thought I had swallowed the deadliest of poisons one night, until assured it was only the cold leavings of the stage-door-keeper’s coffee!
The story of Tiny Tim who ate the goose is a pretty familiar one in stage circles. When playing Bob Cratchit, in The Christmas Carol at the Adelphi, under Mr. Benjamin Webster’s management, Mr. J. L. Toole had to carve a real goose and a “practicable” plum-pudding during the run of that piece, forty nights. And the little girl who played Tiny Tim used to finish her portions of goose and pudding with such amazing celerity that Mr. Toole became quite alarmed on her account.