Perhaps we may help those on the lower rungs of the ladder to mount from one to the other. Perhaps we may hint at the poetry, the romance, the history, the literature of entertaining; perhaps with practical hints of how to feed our guests we may suggest where meat faileth to feed the soul, and where intellect, wit, and taste come in.
American dinners are pronounced by foreign critics as overdone. The great too much is urged against us. We are a wasteful people as to food; we should learn an elegant and a wise economy. In a French family, eggs and lumps of sugar are counted. Economy is a part of the art of entertaining; if judiciously studied it is far from niggardliness. Such economy leads to judicious selection.
One has but to read the Odes of Horace to learn how much of the mind can be appropriately devoted to the art of entertaining. Milton does not disdain, in Paradise Lost, to give us the menu of Eve's dinner to the Angel. We find in all great poets and historians stories of great feasts. And with us in the nineteenth century, dinner is not alone a thing of twelve courses, it is the bright consummate flower of the day, which brings us all together from our various fields of work. It is the open sesame of the soul, the hour of repose, of amusement, of innocent hilarity,—the hour which knits up the ravelled sleeve of care. The body is carefully apparelled, the mind swept and garnished, the brain prepared for fresh impress. It is said that no important political movement was ever inaugurated without a dinner, and we may fancifully state that no great poem, no novel, no philosophical treatise, but has been made or marred by a dinner.
There is much entertaining, however, which is not eating. We do not gorge ourselves, as in the days of Dr. Johnson, until the veins in the forehead swell to bursting, but perhaps we are just as far from those banquets which Horace describes,—a glass of Falernian, a kid roasted, a bunch of grapes, and a rose, with good talk afterward. We have not mingled enough of the honey of Hymettus with our cookery.
Lady Morgan described years ago a dinner at Baron Rothschild's in Paris where the fineness of the napery, the beauty of the porcelain and china, the light, digestible French dishes, seemed to her a great improvement on the heaviness of an English dinner. That one paper is said to have altered the whole fabric of English dinner-giving. English dinners of to-day are superlatively good and agreeable in the best houses, and although national English cookery is not equal to that on the other side of the Channel, perhaps we could not have a better model to follow. We can compass an "all round" mastery of the art of entertaining if we choose.
It is not alone the wealth of America which can assist us, although wealth is a good thing. It is our boundless resource, and the capability, spirit, and generosity of our people. Venice alone at one imperial moment of her success had such a chance as we have; she was free, she was industrious, she was commercial, she was rich, she was artistic. All the world paid her tribute. And we see on her walls to-day, fixed there by the pencils of Tintoretto and Titian, what was her idea of the art of entertaining. Poetry, painting, and music were the hand-maidens of plenty; they wait upon those Godlike men and those beautiful women. It is a saturnalia of colour, an apotheosis of plenty with no vulgar excess, with no slumberous repletion. "'Tis but the fool who loves excess," says our American Horace in his "Ode to an Old Punch Bowl."
When we read Charles Lamb's "Essay on Roast Pig," Brillat Savarin's grave and witty "Physiologie du Gout," Thackeray's "Fitz Boodle's Professions," Sydney Smith's poetical recipe for a salad; when we read Disraeli's description of dinners, or the immortal recipes for good cheer which Dickens has scattered through his books, we learn how much the better part of dinner is that which we do not eat, but only think about. What a liberal education to hear the late Samuel Ward talk about good dinners! Variety not vegetables, manners not meat, was his motto. He invested the whole subject with a sort of classic elegance and a humorous sense of responsibility. Anacreon and Charles Delmonico seemed to mingle in his brain, and one would gladly now be able to dine with him and Longfellow at their yearly Christmas dinner.
Cookery books, receipts, and menus are apt to be of little use to young housekeepers before they have mastered the great art of entertaining. Then they are like the system of logarithms to the mariner. Almost all young housekeepers are at sea without a chart. A great, turbulent ocean of butchers, bakers and Irish servants swim before their eyes. How grapple with that important question, "How shall I give a dinner?" Who can help them? Shall we try?
CONTENTS.
| PAGE | |
| Our American Resources and Foreign Allies | [13] |
| The Hostess | [22] |
| Breakfast | [35] |
| The Lunch | [49] |
| Afternoon Tea | [59] |
| The Intellectual Components of a Dinner | [68] |
| Conscientious Diners | [79] |
| Various Modes of Gastronomical Gratification | [94] |
| Soups | [105] |
| Fish | [113] |
| Salad | [124] |
| Desserts | [134] |
| German Eating and Drinking | [143] |
| The Influence of Good Cheer on Authorsand Geniuses | [152] |
| Bonbons | [162] |
| Famous Menus and Receipts | [176] |
| Cookeries and Wines of Southern Europe | [185] |
| Some Oddities in the Art of Entertaining | [197] |
| The Servant Question | [206] |
| Something About Cooks | [221] |
| Furnishing a Country House | [233] |
| Entertaining in a Country House | [241] |
| A Picnic | [253] |
| Pastimes of Ladies | [260] |
| Private Theatricals | [271] |
| Hunting and Shooting | [280] |
| Golf | [288] |
| Games | [299] |
| Archery | [313] |
| The Season—Balls and Receptions | [321] |
| Weddings | [331] |
| How Royalty Entertains | [340] |
| Entertaining at Easter | [353] |
| How to Entertain Children | [361] |
| Christmas and Children | [371] |
| Certain Practical Suggestions | [381] |
| The Comparative Merits of American andForeign Modes of Entertaining | [389] |