The filets de sole are a moderate dish
A la Orly, but you’re for red mullet you say.
By the gods of good fare, who can question to-day?
How pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
How pleasant it is to have money!
Nearly two hundred years ago (in 1708, to be precise) Dr. William King wrote “The Art of Cookery,” in imitation of Horace’s “Art of Poetry”; in the original edition it was advertised as being by the author of “A Tale of a Tub,” but although King was a friend of Swift, there seems to have been no authority to make use of his name. In the second edition, in the following year, some letters to Dr. Lister are added, and the title page ascribes the poem to “the Author of the Journey to London,” who dedicates it—or, rather, “humbly inscribes” it—to “The Honourable Beefsteak Club.” This edition has an exquisitely engraved frontispiece by M. Van der Gucht.
In the fifth volume of Grimod de la Reynière’s entrancing “Almanach des Gourmands” (1807) there is a poetical epistle d’un vrai Gourmand à son ami, l’Abbé d’Herville, homme extrêmement sobre, et qui ne cessoit de lui prêcher l’abstinence. These are a few of his lines:—
Harpagon dit: Il faut manger pour vivre;
Et je dis, moi, que je vis pour manger.
Que l’on m’appelle un cochon d’epicure: