The far-famed poulet du Mans and equally attractive poularde de Bresse are on the market at about twelve and sixpence each, but there is, I regret to say, a deal of fiction attending the appearance of these plump and pleasing birds on the usual London restaurant bill of fare. Either of them forms an imposing line on the menu, but see that you get the real French bird, and not the ordinary Surrey barn-door fowl, which, however good in its way—and I should be the last to underrate the product of my own county—is of distinctly inferior flavour compared with its better-bred Gallic cousin.
The timely primeurs in the way of salads are numerous: the mâche is in excellent condition, and so is the barbe de capucin, duly blanched in cellars; the Chicorée de Bruxelles is a welcome change; and although the romaine at one and sixpence each are expensive, they are large-hearted and good of their kind.
The craze, however, for early vegetables may easily be overdone. A rather well-known gourmet, who has a place in the country, grows all his “early-out-of-the-season” stuff under glass. He was entertaining some friends in the month of May, and gave them very excellent new potatoes, boasting the while of their rarity. “My good man,” said a guest, “there is really nothing at all extraordinary in getting new potatoes in May, one can eat them anywhere.” But he had reckoned without his host. “Of course you can,” was the reply, “if you want ordinary new potatoes. These of mine are early potatoes of next season but one!”
“If I drink any more,” said Lady Coventry at Lord Hertford’s table, “if I drink any more, I shall be muckibus.”
“Lord!” said Lady Mary Coke, “what is that?”
“Oh,” was the reply, “it is Irish for sentimental.”
This was dinner-table conversation one hundred and fifty years ago, teste Horace Walpole. They were franker in those days.
“This wine,” said a notable host to one Mr. Pocock of Bristol, “costs me six shillings a bottle.”
“Does it,” asked the guest, with a quaint look of gay reproof; “then pass it round, and let me have another six penn’orth!”
In the eighteenth century, Sir Walter Besant tells us, people habitually ate and drank too much; citizens and aldermen grew portentously fat; well-bred people would gnaw bones with their fingers at public banquets; an imperial quart of ale was a day’s ordinary allowance, and a man would drink his six bottles of port at a sitting. Another illustration of a lusty appetite may be quoted from the Memoirs of Sir Walter Scott. He and his friend, Mr. Shortreed, on one of those Liddesdale raids when he was so brisk-hearted and jovial, rode over one morning from Clenchhead to breakfast with Thomas Elliott of Tuzzliehope. Before starting at six o’clock, just to lay their stomachs, they had a couple of ducks and some London porter, and were, nevertheless, well disposed on their arrival at Tuzzliehope for a substantial breakfast, with copious libations of whisky punch, which did not in any degree incapacitate them, for they were able to pursue their journey, picking up fragments of border minstrelsy as they went along. And it was not only on country excursions that meat and drink were consumed ad libitum; the ordinary diet of the men of the period was what we would call redundant, and their feasts were Gargantuan. A dinner given by James Ballantyne on the birth-eve of a novel is thus described:—