CHAPTER·X·AMENITIES·OF·THE·TABLE
“I had some hopes of the cook at first, but when I talked to her tightly and closely, I could make nothing of her: she was all wiggle-waggle, and I could never persuade her to be categorical.”
Dr. Johnson (“D’Arblay’s Memoirs”).
Some of us have been to school. It was usually a long time ago. Still, here and there a man with a memory may recollect that when Achilles, in the “Iliad,” has granted the request of the unhappy Priam in reference to the dead body of his son, his next remark to the old man is an eminently practical and sensible one: “Let us now go to dinner!” It has struck me that this classical allusion may have been one of the reasons for the erection of the Achilles statue at Hyde Park Corner; just to remind late dawdlers in the Park that dinner-time and dressing-tide wait for no man or woman.
I have already had the presumption to suggest that we eat too often and too much and too late and too elaborately; this has emboldened me to further frankness. A French friend who “knew himself” in dining matters said to me once: “En Angleterre on se nourrit bien, mais on ne dine pas.” He was both right and wrong. Right as regards the very pseudo-French cookery of the affluent middle-class, wrong as regards the best restaurants and hotels.
Buckle, in his “History of Civilisation,” following Cabanis, considers food as one of the four physical agents most powerfully influencing the human race. Men’s manners and morality, their customs and condition, depend mainly on what they eat. The boldness of the Norseman and the timidity of the Bengalee are justly due to their respective preference for meat or vegetables, for carbonaceous or nitrogenous diet. Slavery in India is the direct result of rice, in Egypt of dates, of maize in Mexico and Peru.
We must, therefore, adapt ourselves to circumstances in so far as the circumstances adapt themselves to us. It is no longer fashionable to get drunk, and in a generation or two it will be the worst kind of form to eat more than three courses at dinner.
“Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are,” said Brillat-Savarin, Judge of the French Court of Cassation in 1826, and not a professed cook, as so many folk seem to imagine. He goes on to say: “The gourmets by predestination can be easily told. They have broad faces, bright eyes, small foreheads, short noses, full lips, and rounded chins. The females are plump and pretty rather than handsome, with a tendency to embonpoint.”
This is not complimentary, and does not seem to be borne out by experience. Women gourmets are fewer than men, but they make up in knowledge what they lack in number. Both Goethe and Byron have left it on record that they objected to seeing women eat, but nowadays, with better table manners, it is not a disagreeable sight, except perhaps at a Swiss table d’hôte.
An English dinner-party, in the present year of grace, is not at all ugly. It may be—and sometimes is—almost a thing of beauty. The modern dinner-table approaches as nearly to the old Greek type as is compatible with the widely divergent character of the two civilisations. It certainly follows the classic pattern in two valuable particulars—beauty and repose. True, we do not wreathe our heads in roses, nor carry doves nestling in the folds of our robes, nor pour libations of wine over one another (such a messy habit!), but we have done away, for good and all, let us hope, with the dreadful mid-Victorian table decorations. Instead of hideous dish-covers, branching candelabra, hideous épergnes, and appalling “set pieces,” we have Hawthorn bowls of roses, delicate Venetian glass, beaten copper finger-bowls, perfectly plain silver, and the simplest of white china. Everything perfect of its kind, and its kind the non-ostentatious.
We have also become franker in the honest avowal of our appetites. Even in our grandmothers’ time it was considered somewhat immodest to take a second helping without being pressed. Pressure was expected as a politeness from the host. An old manual of table etiquette says: “Offer every dish at least thrice to each guest. Timid appetites must be tempted, for they exist still, especially among literary folk!”