CHAPTER VII.
Late Hours kept in New York.—The Oyster-shops of New York compared to those of Philadelphia.—Important Schism on that Subject.—The Café de l’Indépendance.—A French Character.—Description of a Fashionable Oyster-shop.—A Sensible American just returned from Paris.—His Account of American Aristocracy abroad.—Mr. L*** and Mr. Thistle.—A shrewd Yankee Tailor in Paris.—His Advice to his Countrymen.—An American Senator scorning to become the fee’d Advocate of the Mob, after the manner of O’Connell.
Mons. Jourdain.—“Et comme l’on parle, qu’est-ce que c’est donc que cela?”
Le maître de philosophie.—“De la prose.”
Mons. Jourdain.—“Quoi! quand je dis, ‘Nicole, apportez-moi mes pantoufles, et me donnez mon bonnet de nuit,’ c’est de la prose?”
Le maître de philosophie.—“Oui, monsieur.”
Mons. Jourdain.—“Par ma foi! il y a plus de quarante ans que je dis de la prose sans que j’en susse rien; et je vous suis le plus obligé du monde de m’avoir appris cela.”
Moliere’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Act ii. Scene 5.
Those of my readers who are not aware of the fact that New York is an excellent place for shell-fish, know in all probability little or nothing of the many elegant subterraneous establishments called “oyster-cellars” which adorn the principal avenues and public places of the great American Persepolis. The good people of New York swear that their oysters are the best in the world; and though I, for my own part, greatly prefer the delicate little “natives” of Colchester, or the still more savoury “green oysters of Ostend,” I never before now dared to express my opinion on so delicate a subject, for fear of becoming unpopular, and being eventually excluded from society. One thing, however, I can testify; which is, that the Americans display, in the different modes of cooking and dressing them, a degree of refinement altogether incommensurate with the little progress they have thus far made in other equally useful and important branches of the culinary art.
The New-Yorkers alone have, I believe, twenty different ways of cooking oysters; the Philadelphians, who will not suffer themselves to be in anything outdone by their neighbours, twenty-one; and the Baltimorians boast of a still greater variety of dishes prepared of that most excellent shell-fish. This, in a country in which there is but one way of dressing meat, and precisely the same number of sorts of gravy, is certainly a most extraordinary phenomenon, and betokens an aristocratic predilection in favour of that slippery friandise, sufficient to establish its vast superiority over roast beef, the standing dish of the great mass of the American people. Oysters, in fact, have acquired a patrician reputation; though, like most of the distinctions lately introduced into the United States, they are only to be found along the sea-coast, and for the most part bedded in sand. Some of them occasionally find their way to the “Western Country;” but they seldom remain there long in good odour. I could tell a number of crack stories on this subject; but, my diary having already grown longer than I at first anticipated, I am obliged to omit them, and content myself with mentioning the important schism, which, ever since the quakers established themselves in Philadelphia, separated the respectable inhabitants of that city from the enterprising descendants of the great Knickerbocker.