The feast was gorgeous, an aldermanic display of turtles and venison with the suitable accompaniments of iced punch, potent ale, and generous Madeira. When the cloth had been drawn and many toasts had been honoured and songs sung, the claret and olives made way for broiled bones and a mighty bowl of punch, and when a few glasses of the hot beverage had restored their powers, the guests were ready to listen to the new romance, read aloud by Ballantyne ore rotundo. A novel, under these circumstances, especially if of the somewhat lengthy and descriptive nature current at that period, must have been at once stimulating, satisfying, and soporific.
There is authority and to spare as to the comparative plethora of food which was piled on the table to incite, provoke and assuage the decidedly healthy appetites of our forbears. In No. 148 of “The Tatler,” Addison writes:—
“At last I discovered, with some joy, a pig at the lower end of the table, and begged a gentleman that was near to cut me a piece of it. Upon which the gentleman of the house said with real civility: ‘I am sure you will like the pig, for it was whipt to death.’”
In those days a sucking-pig was supposed to acquire greater succulence through flagellation. What with burning down a house (although only a Chinese one) to make roast pork, and flogging a baby, the pigs must have had rather a hard time. An eighteenth-century pig underwent various vicissitudes from which a twentieth-century pig is exempt.
Goethe has a story in his “Campaign in France” that, after a long and tiring fight, some of Prince Louis Ferdinand’s soldiers looted a heavy locked-up kitchen-dresser, in which they heard something heavy rolling about. They concluded it was food, and as they were well-nigh famished they took it out to the camp and broke it open. To their horror and disgust, all it contained was a weighty cookery book. However, they made the best of a bad job, and as they had no supper, they sat round the camp fire and one man after the other read out a succulent receipt from the book, and thus they tried to pretend that they were enjoying a gorgeous supper. This is, indeed, the true spirit of appreciative gastronomy, and the table-manners of these hungry but easily appeased warriors must have been the quintessence of simplicity and good taste. For, after all, a dinner in its diurnal regularity is the most perennial of delights. Bulwer Lytton, in “Pelham,” says:—
“A buried friend may be replaced, a lost mistress renewed, a slandered character be recovered, even a broken constitution restored; but a dinner once lost is irremediable; that day is for ever departed; an appetite once thrown away can never, till the cruel prolixity of the gastric agent is over, be regained. Il y a tant de maîtresses (says the admirable Corneille), il n’y a qu’un diner.”
Speaking of the close of the Tudor period, William Harrison, a contemporary historian, writes:—
“I might here talke somewhat of the great silence that is used at the tables of the honourable and wiser sorte generallie over all the realme (albeit that too much deserveth no commendation, for it belongeth to guests to be neither muti nor loquaces) likewise the moderate eating and drinking that is dailie seene, and finallie of the regard that each hath to keepe himselfe from note of surfetting and drunkenesse (for which cause salt meat, except beefe, bacon, and porke, are not anie whit esteemed, and yet these three may be much powdered); but as in the rehearsal thereof I should commend the nobleman, merchant, and frugall artificer, so I could not cleare the meaner sort of husbandman of verie much bobbling (except it be here and there some odd yeoman) with whom he is thought to be merriest that talketh of most ribaldrie....”
Very similar were the precepts taught to our remoter forefathers. In the “Accomplish’d Lady Rich’s Closet of Rareties, or Ingenious Gentlewoman’s Delightful Companion” (1653) ladies are told when carving at their own table to “distribute the best pieces first, and it will appear very comely and decent to use a fork.” The lady is also requested to sit at table “with a straight body,” and “even though she were an aunt,” to refrain from resting her elbows upon the table. She must not “by ravenous gesture display a voracious appetite,” and if “she talked with her mouth full, or smacked her lips like a pig, or swallowed spoon meat so hot that tears came to her eyes, she would be taken for an underbred person, even if she were really an Earl’s daughter.” But folk were almost exaggeratedly delicate in those days. It is related by the worthy Dr. Walker in his “Sufferings of the Clergy” that a pious parish priest was ejected from his cure by the Commonwealth Puritans because he was formally accused of “eating custard scandalously.” But the etiquette of the table dates back to the very earliest ages. Of the five hundred and sixty-five Chinese books on Behaviour, catalogued by a learned mandarin, no fewer than three hundred and sixty-one refer directly to the ceremonial of the Chinese dinner-table. It is remarkable too that among the Sybarites it was customary to invite ladies to dinner a year beforehand, ostensibly to give them time to beautify themselves.
In the year 1557 one Seager published his “Schoole of Vertue, a booke of good Nourture for Children,” wherein the following instructions are set forth in rhyme.