The activities of the day at Outside Inn began with luncheon and the preparation for it. Nancy longed to serve breakfast there, but as yet it had not seemed practicable to do so. Most of the patrons of the restaurant conducted the business of the day down-town, but had their actual living quarters in New York’s remoter fastnesses,—Brooklyn, the Bronx or Harlem. Nancy was satisfied that the bulk of her patronage should be the commuting and cliff dwelling contingent of Manhattanites,—indeed it was the sort of patronage that from the beginning she had intended to cater to.
Nancy did most of the marketing herself at first, but Gaspard—the big cook—gradually coaxed this privilege away from her.
“You see,” he said, “we sit—us together, and talk of eating”—he prided himself on his use of English, and never used his native tongue to help him out, except in moments of great excitement. “It is immediately after breakfast. 70 Yes! I am full of milk-coffee sopped with bread, and you of bacon with eggs and marmalade. We say, what shall we give to our custom for its dinner and its luncheon? We think sadly—we who have but now brushed away the crumbs of breakfast—of those who must sit down so soon to the table groaning with viands. Therefore we say, ‘Market delicately. Have the soup clear, the entrée light and the salad green with plenty of vinegar.’ Even your calories—they do not help us much. They are in quantities so unexpected in the food that weighs nothing in the scales. We say you shall go to market and buy these things, and you go. I stir and walk about, and grow restless for my déjeuner, and when you return from market, hungry too, we are not the same people who had thought our soup should be clear, and our entrée more beautiful than nutritious. If I go to market myself late I am inspired there to buy what is right, because by that hour I have a proper relish and understanding of what all the world should eat.”
“I know he is right,” Nancy said to Billy afterward in reporting the conversation, “I hate to admit it, but even my notion of what 71 other people should eat is colored by my own relation to food. I never realized before how little use an intellect is in this matter of food values. I can actually get up a meal that according to the tables is scientifically correct that wouldn’t feed anybody if they were hungry.”
“One banana is equal to a pound and three-quarters of steak,” Billy misquoted helpfully.
“The trouble is that it isn’t,” Nancy said, “except technically.”
“You can’t eat it and grow thin.”
“You can’t eat it and grow fat unless it happens to be the peculiar food to which you are idiosyncratic.”
“If that’s really a word,” Billy said, “I’ll overlook your trying it out on me. If it isn’t you’ll have to take the consequences.” He went through the pantomime of one preparing to do physical violence.
“Oh! it’s a word. Ask Caroline.” Nancy’s eyes still held their look of being focussed on something in the remote distance. “The trouble with all this dietetic problem is that the individual is dependent on something more than an adjustment of values. His environment and 72 his heredity play an active part in his diet problem. Some people can eat highly concentrated food, others have to have bulk, and so on. You can’t substitute cheese and bananas for steak and do the race a service no matter what the cost of steak may soar to. You can’t even substitute rice for potatoes.”