“Drinking has indeed been sung, but why, I have heard it asked, have we no ‘Eating Songs’?—for eating is, surely, a fine pleasure. Many practise it already, and it is becoming more general every day. I speak not of the finicking joy of the gourmet, but the joy of an honest appetite in ecstasy, the elemental joy of absorbing quantities of fresh, simple food—mere roast lamb, new potatoes, and peas of living green. It is, indeed, an absorbing pleasure.” R. le Gallienne.
The quotation with which I have headed this chapter, though appropriate enough in a sense, disproves itself in the assertion. We have “Eating Songs” in plenty, both in our own language and in foreign tongues, but they have been neglected and spurned, and for that reason they well repay a little enterprising research. Here and there, throughout our literature, are gems of gastronomical versification, and it is, in fact, impossible to do more than indicate a tithe of the treasures that may be unearthed with a very little trouble and patience.
Among the anthologies of the future, the near future maybe, is undoubtedly the Anthology of the Kitchen. It is ready written, and only remains to be gathered. There is barely a poet of note who could not be laid under contribution. Shakespeare, Byron, Béranger, Browning, Burns, Coleridge, Crabbe, Dryden, Goethe, Heine, Landor, Prior, Moore, Rogers, and Villon are the first chance names to occur, but there are many more who might be cited with equal justice.
Thackeray wrote verses on Bouillabaisse; which it would be absurd to quote, so well are they known. Méry, Alexandre Dumas, Th. de Banville, Th. Gautier, and Aurélien Scholl collaborated, under the editorship of Charles Monselet (himself a gastronomic poet of no mean order), in a little book published in 1859 under the title “La Cuisinière Poétique.” Five years later there appeared in Philadelphia “A Poetical Cook Book,” by J. M. M., with charming rhymed recipes for such things as stewed duck and peas:—
When duck and bacon in a mass
You in a stew-pan lay,
A spoon around the vessel pass,
And gently stir away!
The poetical author dilates too upon buckwheat cakes and oatmeal pudding, and quotes Dodsley on butter and Barlow on hasty pudding. Sydney Smith’s recipe for a salad is only too well known, and it may be hoped that it is not often tried, because from a gastronomic point of view it is a dire decoction. Arthur Hugh Clough in “Le Diner” (Dipsychus) has this entirely charming verse:—
A clear soup with eggs: voilà tout; of the fish