The chef de cuisine at Claridge's is M. Maurice Bonhomme, who had passed through the kitchens of two great Parisian restaurants, the Café de Paris, and Ledoyen's, in the Champs Elysées, before he came to London. He is a chef of high repute, and these are the specialities of his kitchen:—filet de sole Tosca, suprême de sole Pré Catalan, Coulibiac de saumon, suprême de volaille d'Orléans, cailles Hacchi Pacha, Coq en Pâte Claridge's, pêches Caprice, fraises Delphine.
Of the dishes of my dinner, the excellent Bortch à la Russe was served as it is in Russia, with little pâtés to break into it. The list of these pâtés in the menu of a Russian dinner is often a long one. The filet de sole, which M. Bonhomme paid me the compliment of christening to my name, is a quite admirable sole poché au Madère, with all the fumet of the fish retained and served with sliced champignons and pointes d'asperges. I sent my very best compliments to M. Bonhomme on his masterpiece. The coq en pâte is an ornamental dish, for the fowl stuffed with all manner of rich things is encased in a paste shaped like a cock, crest and all. The outer covering is broken before the bird is carved. It is a dish of almost terrifying richness.
Quite a number of the great people of the land give their banquets at Claridge's, and out of the sheaf of the menus of these feasts I select one of the Surrey Magistrates' Club Dinner, which shows that our Solons across the Thames dine and wine with much discretion and taste:
Royal Natives.
Hors d'œuvre.
Consommé Monte-Carlo.
Bisque de Crabes.
Turbotin braisé au Champagne.
Whitebait diable noir.
Selle de Béhague à l'Estragon.
Haricots verts de Nice.
Pommes nouvelles au Beurre.
Timbale à la Galoise.
Caneton d'Aylesbury à l'Anglaise.
Salades d'Oranges.
Asperges vertes Sauce Hollandaise.
Pêches Melba.
Friandises.
Bonne Bouche.
Vins.
Oloroso Fine Old.
Piesporter, 1904.
George Goulet (mag.), 1900.
Moët et Chandon.
Dry Imper., 1904.
Dow's 1896.
Courvoisier Brandy.
Fine Champagne, 1865.
I wonder how a club dinner of magistrates of fifty years ago would contrast with such a dinner as the above.
[XII]
THE EUSTACE MILES RESTAURANT
Old "Rats," which is the disrespectful title by which most of his friends call Major-General Sir Ulysses Ratbourne, late of the Bundlekund Fusiliers, was holding forth to his crony, Colonel Bunthunder, late of the same distinguished regiment, in the hall of the Cutlass and Cross-bow Club as I passed through it, and the General paused for a second in his denunciation of Radicals and Socialists to say that he wanted to have a word with me, and then finished his peroration. Colonel Bunthunder muttered: "Very true, very true," and went on into the smoking-room shaking his head sorrowfully, and the General turned to me.