Oh! the Roast Beef of Old England,
And oh! the old English Roast Beef!
How many casual diners at the Carlton could hum or whistle that fine old air? Probably not one—not even M. Jacques. And yet it is about the only really appropriate and legitimate tune to which Britons ought to feed. What do we get instead? Musical-comedy selections, languorous waltzes, cornet solos, coon songs, and an occasional czardas. Is music really an aid to digestion, or is it designed, like the frills on the cutlets, to induce us to ignore the imported mutton in favour of the trimmings?
It is tolerably certain that music with dinner (at a restaurant, for the ordinary diner) was unknown in England before 1875. In the previous year the late George Augustus Sala, who knew most things worth knowing—gastronomically—wrote an article in a monthly magazine on dinner music, and refers to it as existing only in royal palaces. Very soon afterwards, however, it was offered to anybody who could afford to pay a few shillings for a set dinner amid clean and appetizing surroundings. Subject to correction, it is fairly certain that the first place in London where they provided music at dinner was the Holborn Restaurant, which had been a swimming-bath, a dancing-casino, and other things. The example was speedily followed, and very soon bands sprang up like mushrooms right and left, at every restaurant which made any pretence of attracting the multitude.
The Criterion started glee-singers, although this was perhaps more directly an outcome of Herr Jongmanns’ boys’ choir at Evans’ in Covent Garden.
Nearly every restaurant in London nowadays has a band, and go where you will, such spectacles are offered you as a man with music in his soul trying to take his hot soup in jig time, because the band is playing prestissimo forsooth, and getting very red in the face whilst so doing. Then will follow the whitebait, and the band, just out of pure cussedness, plays a languishing slow movement, whereupon the musical diner is obliged to eat his whitebait andante, and the dear little fish get quite cold in the process.
Over in Paris, Berlin, and on the Riviera it is even worse. The restaurateurs there encourage a wild, fierce race of hirsute ruffians called Tsiganes, who are supposed to be Hungarian gipsies: “A nation of geniuses, you know; they can’t read a note of music, and play only by ear!” That’s just the trouble of it—because their ears are often all wrong. There is absolutely nothing less conducive to a good appetite than to watch these short-jacketed, befrogged, Simian fiddlers playing away for dear life the Rakoczy March or a maltreated Strauss waltz, and ogling à la Rigo any foolish female who seems attracted by them. It is on record that an Englishman once approached the leader of such a band in a Paris restaurant and asked him the name of the dance he had just been playing. “Sure, an’ I don’t know, yer honour,” was the reply, “but I’m thinking it’s a jig.” All the Hungarians do not come from Hungary.
Curiously enough, there is an old-time connexion between music and dinner, although not precisely as we understand either. In the great houses of the seventeenth century dinner was announced by a concert of trumpets and drums, or with blasts from a single horn, blown by the head huntsman. The music of huntsmen running in upon their quarry was the music which declared the venison and wild boar ready for the trenchers. Blown to announce the coming of dinner and supper, the horn was also wound to celebrate the virtue of particular dishes. The nobler creatures of the chase were seldom brought to table without notes from the trumpet. Musical honours were accorded to the peacock, the swan, the sturgeon, and the turbot. The French used to say, “Cornez le diner,” i.e. “Cornet the dinner”—hence we derive our corned beef.