The great Brillat-Savarin, speaking of female gourmets, said, “They are plump and pretty rather than handsome, with a tendency to embonpoint.” I confess that my experience leads me to disagree; the real female gourmet (alas, that she should be so rare!), broad-minded, unprejudiced, and knowledgeable, is handsome rather than pretty, thin rather than stout, and silent rather than talkative. This, however, by the way.
Two schoolgirls did me the honour of dining with me at Prince’s not long ago, before going to the play. I gave them carte blanche to order what they liked, and this was the extraordinary result:—
Langouste en aspic.
Meringues Chantilly.
Consommé à la neige de Florence.
Selle de Chevreuil.
Gelée Macédoine.
Faisan en plumage.
Bombe en surprise.
Nid de Pommes Dauphine.
I ventured to suggest that there was a certain amount of fine confused feeding about this programme, that it was so heavy that even two hungry schoolgirls and a middle-aged bachelor might find it difficult to tackle, also that the sequence of dishes was not quite conventional. Eventually they blushingly explained that they had ordered all these things because they did not know what any of them meant, and they wanted to find out—“besides, they’ve got such pretty names, and it will help us so much in our French lessons.” I reduced the formidable dimensions of the dinner, and there were no disastrous results.
I once had the temerity to invite a real lady journalist to dine with me at the Berkeley. I think that she writes as Aunt Sophonisba, or something of the sort, and her speciality is the soothing of fluttering hearts and the explaining of the niceties of suburban etiquette. Anyhow, she knows nothing about cookery, although I understand she conducts a weekly column entitled “Dainty Dishes for Delicate Digestions.” It was in July, and she said we might begin with oysters and then have a partridge. When I explained that owing to official carelessness these cates happened to be out of season, she waxed indignant and said that she thought “they were what the French call primeurs.” Nevertheless, she made a remarkably good hot-weather dinner, eating right through the menu, from the melon réfraichie to the petits fours. Women who golf, lady journalists, and widows, I observe, have usually remarkably good appetites.
I recollect also an American actress who sang coon songs—and yearned for culture. We lunched at the Cecil, and when she espied on the card eggs à la Meyerbeer, she instantly demanded them because “he was a composer way back about the year dot, and I just love his music to ‘Carmen.’” She hunted through the menu for celebrated names, preferably historical, and ordered successively Sole à la Colbert, Poulet Henri Quatre, and Nesselrode pudding, because they reminded her of the time when she was studying French history.
With the keenest desire not to be thought disrespectful or ungallant, I really believe that, however well a woman may manage her household, her cook, her husband, and her kitchen expenses, she cannot order a dinner at a restaurant. Whether it be the plethora of choice, or the excitement of the lights and music, or awe of the maître d’hôtel and the sommelier, I do not know, but I am sure that the good hostess who gives you a very eatable little dinner at her own house will make hash of the best restaurant carte du jour in her endeavours to order what she thinks is nice and appropriate.
In referring just now to the excellent Miss Jane Austen, I am reminded that eating and drinking play no small part in her delightful novels. Who does not remember Mrs. Bennet, who dared not invite Bingley to an important dinner, “for although she always kept a good table, she did not think anything less than two courses could be good enough for a man on whom she had such anxious designs, or satisfy the appetite and pride of one who had ten thousand a year.” The dinner eventually served consisted of soup, venison, partridges, and an unnamed pudding. And a very good meal too!
An American critic is of opinion that there is a surfeit of mutton in English literature. “It is boiled mutton usually, too.” Now boiled mutton is, to the critic, a poor sort of dish, unsuggestive, boldly and flagrantly nourishing, a most British thing, which “will never gain a foothold on the American stomach.” This last is a vile phrase, even for an American critic, and suggests a wrestling match. The critic goes on: “The Austenite must e’en eat it. Roast mutton is a different thing. You might know Emma Woodhouse would have roast mutton rather than boiled; it is to roast mutton and rice pudding that the little Kneightleys go scampering home through the wintry weather.”
From Miss Austen to Mrs. Gaskell is no such very far cry. “We had pudding before meat in my day,” says Mr. Holbrook, the old-fashioned bachelor-yeoman in “Cranford.” “When I was a young man we used to keep strictly to my father’s rule: ‘No broth, no ball; no ball, no beef.’ We always began dinner with both, then came the suet puddings boiled in the broth with the beef; and then the meat itself. If we did not sup our broth, we had no ball, which we liked a deal better, and the beef came last of all. Now folks begin with sweet things, and turn their dinners topsy-turvy.”