said to be the oldest tavern in London, and which has been more than once swept and garnished, and reformed altogether, since its establishment during the reign of King Richard II. But they could have known but little about the superior advantages offered by the turtle as a life-sustainer, in those days; whereas at the present day some hundreds of the succulent reptiles die the death on the premises, within a month, in order that city companies, and stockbrokers, and merchants of sorts, and mining millionaires, and bicycle makers, and other estimable people, may dine and lunch.
Then there are the numerous clubs, not forgetting one almost at the very door of “The House,” where the 2000 odd (some of them very odd) members are regaled on the fat of the land in general, and of the turtle in particular, day by day; and that mammoth underground palace the “Palmerston,” where any kind of banquet can be served up at a few minutes’ notice, and where “special Greek dishes” are provided for the gamblers in wheat and other cereals, at the adjacent “Baltic.” There be also other eating-houses, far too numerous to mention, but most of them worth a visit.
A “filling” sort of luncheon is a portion of a
Cheshire Cheese Pudding.
A little way up a gloomy court on the north side of Fleet Street—a neighbourhood which reeks of printers’ ink, bookmakers’ “runners,” tipsters, habitual borrowers of small pieces of silver, and that “warm” smell of burning paste and molten lead which indicates the “foundry” in a printing works—is situated this ancient hostelry. It is claimed for the “Cheese” that it was the tavern most frequented by Dr. Samuel Johnson. Mr. C. Redding, in his Fifty Years’ Recollections, Literary and Personal, published in 1858, says: “I often dined at the
“Cheshire Cheese.”
Johnson and his friends, I was informed, used to do the same, and I was told I should see individuals who had met them there. This I found to be correct. The company was more select than in later times, but there are Fleet Street tradesmen who well remembered both Johnson and Goldsmith in this place of entertainment.”
Few Americans who visit our metropolis go away without making a pilgrimage to this ancient hostelry, where, upstairs, “Doctor Johnson’s Chair” is on view; and many visitors carry away mementoes of the house, in the shape of pewter measures, the oaken platters upon which these are placed, and even samples of the long “churchwarden” pipes, smoked by habitués after their evening chops or steaks.
Ye Pudding,
which is served on Wednesdays and Saturdays, at 1.30 and 6.0, is a formidable-looking object, and its savour reaches even into the uttermost parts of Great Grub Street. As large, more or less, as the dome of St. Paul’s, that pudding is stuffed with steak, kidney, oysters, mushrooms, and larks. The irreverent call these last named sparrows, but we know better. This pudding takes (on dit) 17½ hours in the boiling, and the “bottom crust” would have delighted the hearts of Johnson, Boswell, and Co., in whose days the savoury dish was not. The writer once witnessed a catastrophe at the “Cheshire Cheese,” compared to which the burning of Moscow or the bombardment of Alexandria were mere trifles. 1.30 on Saturday afternoon had arrived, and the oaken benches in the refectory were filled to repletion with expectant pudding-eaters. Burgesses of the City of London were there—good, “warm,” round-bellied men, with plough-boys’ appetites—and journalists, and advertising agents, and “resting” actors, and magistrates’ clerks, and barristers from the Temple, and well-to-do tradesmen. Sherry and gin and bitters and other adventitious aids (?) to appetite had been done justice to, and the arrival of the “procession”—it takes three men and a boy to carry the pièce de résistance from the kitchen to the dining-room—was anxiously awaited. And then, of a sudden we heard a loud crash! followed by a feminine shriek, and an unwhispered Saxon oath. “Tom” the waiter had slipped, released his hold, and the pudding had fallen downstairs! It was a sight ever to be remembered—steak, larks, oysters, “delicious gravy,” running in a torrent into Wine Office Court. The expectant diners (many of them lunchers) stood up and gazed upon the wreck of their hopes, and then filed, silently and sadly, outside. Such a catastrophe had not been known in Brainland since the Great Fire.