One may always trust the cuisine at the Savoy. There is a thoroughness of conception about every specially ordered dinner which bespeaks the eye, the hand, the brain of the master. Take the following menu, for example, which, charmingly printed on a graceful little silk Japanese fan, formed an exquisite meal of some originality.
MENU
Melon Cantaloup. Petite Marmite.
Crême Portugaise. Truite à la Saatz.
Whitebait Diablé.
Caille Bridget. Medaillon de Béhague à l’Estragon.
Petits Pois à la Française. Pommes Savoyarde.
Soufflé de Jambon à la Hongroise. Neige au Kirsch.
Caneton au Sang.
Haricots verts et tomates en salade.
Fonds d’artichauts à l’Italienne.
Framboises glacées à la Vanille. Friandises.
Pailles de Parmesan. Corbeille de Fruits.
Note the graceful juxtaposition of the Hungarian ham and the Kirsch, followed by duck and French beans. It is touches such as these which in their poetic elegance and subtlety force one to recognize what the high art of cookery really means.
To whom hath it not fallen to take the female faddist in to dinner?—I speak, of course, from the masculine point of view. The plethoric dame, for instance, who says, “Thank you, I only eat toast, and I prefer it very crisp”; or the earnest spinster who talks for miles about proteids and other abominable scientific non-gastronomics; or the materfamilias who laments the absence of Benger from the dinner-party menu? Like the poor, such as these are always with us.
There are fashions in these things, as in everything else. Now and again one comes across a real Fletcherite, who chews his or her food eighty-seven times and allows it to disappear by a slow process of gradual deglutition. Mr. Horace Fletcher himself is, I am given to understand, a man of irreproachable morality, and the possessor, moreover, of a beautiful Palazzo on the Grand Canal at Venice; but, whether for good or ill, he has introduced a deal of dullness into the modern dinner party. It is obviously impossible to keep up a ready flow of brilliant conversation when every mouthful has to be masticated unto seventy times seven times. Such a salutary procedure puts a damper on prandial discourse, and makes a dinner only one degree less lively than a funeral. It would seem preferable to suffer tortures of indigestion rather than act as a dinner-party wet-blanket.
A former generation suffered from the Andrew Clark regime, and I can even remember a dinner menu divided into halves, one of which was headed “Clarkists,” and was confined to the dishes prescribed by that eminent medico, and the other half labelled “Just ordinary folk”—and it was much the better programme of the two. A little later one met the weird folk who produced from hidden recesses mysterious little silver boxes, from which they extracted little white pilules “to be taken between each course”—but I have noticed that these people usually ate a remarkably hearty dinner, despite, or perhaps because, of these same pilules.
One comes across, too, the Stokerites, with their peculiar antipathies, the “Natural Feeders,” the “Little Grangers,” and the maigre tous les jours sort of folk. As for the vegetarians, there is little to be said for or against them. They are, of course, fully justified in their opinions, but they do give a lot of bother at an ordinary dinner party. I may be unfortunate in my vegetarian friends, but it always appears to me that after a time they seem to assimilate certain characteristics of the food they eat, and eventually become very like their favourite vegetables; so much so that they might almost be accused of cannibalism. Certain it is that I can spot a carrot-eating man by his hair, an onion-lover by his breath, and a Brussels-sprout devotee by his whiskers.
Take it, however, by and large, the food faddist, be it a he or a she, is rarely a pleasant table-companion, and in these times of strenuous dining he, she, or it, is usually a poor conversationalist and a poorer critic; which is a pity.
It is quite a mistake to imagine that a good dinner can afford to despise the adjuncts of a well-decorated table. Nothing could be more fallacious. One’s sense of taste should not alone be titillated. One’s palate-gusto is distinctly enhanced by something pleasant to look upon, by something artistic to accompany the mere mechanism of mastication, by a general sense of beauty and non-flamboyant restfulness.
We have gone far in this direction during the past two or three decades. There are many happily still surviving among us who remember vividly, and not without a certain amount of awe, the vast erections which appeared on the dinner-tables of our forbears. The silver branch candelabra, the epergnes, the great piles of fruit, the towering “set-pieces,” the bushy and umbrageous plants and flowers, the plates of mixed biscuits, and the various impossible dishes of confectionery which nobody was expected to eat.