I think that a "kosher" dinner, if this is a fair specimen, is a succession of admirably cooked dishes. But an ordinary man should be allowed a week in which to eat it.
[XXIV]
THE MITRE
AT HAMPTON COURT
We all know that in the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love, but it is not such common knowledge that in the early summer the thoughts of a man of mature age turn with equal agility to duckling and green peas. And with duckling and green peas I always associate the Mitre at Hampton Court. So it came to pass that I asked a crony of like tastes to myself to meet me on a spring Sunday at Hampton Court in the late afternoon, and suggested that we should walk in the gardens of the Palace and see the rhododendrons, which were then in great beauty, and that we should afterwards dine at the Mitre, sup green pea soup and eat duckling and green peas.
The Mitre is the most typically late Georgian, or early Victorian, inn that I know of in the neighbourhood of London, and its great attraction is that it has kept the old cookery, the old furniture, the old pictures, the old china, the old plate, and last, but not least, the old manners. It has been quite unconscious of the changes in the outside world, it knows nothing of electric light and such newfangled ideas, there are no French rolls to be found in its bread baskets, and its ducklings are spitted and roasted before an open fire, being well basted the while.
This, very briefly, is the history of the Mitre. It is the direct successor of the Toy Inn, an old house which stood on Crown property, and the lease of which expired about the year of the battle of Waterloo. The Toy was pulled down, and Mr Goodman, and Mr Sadler with him, were obliged to look for a new home in which to carry on the old traditions. This they found in three houses standing together near the wooden bridge (alas and alack that the picturesque old bridge has given place to the dull-red iron horror which was built in 1865!), and one of the charms of the Mitre is the quaint irregularity of its architecture, the brown bricks and red tiles of its face turned towards the Palace, its white face and slate roof on the river side, the great wistaria and the ivy knitting together all the various features.