Dismember a large white fowl very carefully. Stew it in white stock, with a chopped onion, a good pinch of paprika, and two glasses of white wine, for about forty-five minutes. Take out the fowl, and pass the stock through the tammy. Flavour with a good cray-fish butter, and garnish with tails of cray-fish, large truffles, olives, and croûtons of French puff-paste (feuilletage). Serve very hot.
[CHAPTER II]
THE CHESHIRE CHEESE
I had been kept late in Fleet Street on Saturday, and at a little before seven I woke to the fact that it was near the dinner hour, that I was in the clothes I had worn all day, that I was brain-weary and tired, and not energetic. I should be late for dinner if I went home, half across the width of London; I could not well dine at a club without evening clothes, and a smart restaurant was equally out of the question, for I felt, being in the state of humiliation which weariness and London grime bring one to, that I could not have held my own as to the choice of a table or the ordering of a dinner against even the least determined maître d'hôtel.
The easiest way was to dine at one of the Fleet Street hostelries, and I ran such of them as I know over in my mind. How they have changed since Herrick rang them into rhyme! Then they were the Sun, the Dog, the Triple Tun. Now they are the Rainbow, the Cock, Anderton's, the Cheshire Cheese, and a host more. It was a pudding day at the Cheshire Cheese, not the crowded day, which is Wednesday, but a day on which I was sure to get a seat in the lower room and be able to eat my meal in comfort and content; and that finally decided me in favour of the hostelry in Wine Office Court.
It is not a cheerful thoroughfare that leads up to the Cheshire Cheese. It is a narrow and dark passage, and the squat little door of the tavern itself is not inviting, for it is reminiscent of a country public-house. It is not until one is through the sawdusted passage and into the lower room that one is in warmth and comfort.
I was a little late. The man who loves the Cheshire Cheese pudding is in his place at table a few minutes before the pudding is brought in at 6.30 P.M., a surging billow of creamy white bulging out of a great brown bowl, and then when the host begins to carve—and there is a certain amount of solemnity about the opening of this great pudding—the early guest gets the best helping. By a quarter-past seven, when I made my entry, the pudding had sunk down into the depths of the bowl.