VARIOUS MODES OF GASTRONOMIC GRATIFICATION.
Phyllis, I have a cask full of Albanian wine upwards of nine years old; I have parsley in the garden for the weaving of chaplets. The house shines cheerfully with plate; all hands are busy.
Horace, Ode XI.
Some old French wit spoke of an "idea which could be canonized." Perhaps yet we may have a Saint Table-Cloth. There have been worse saints than Saint Table-Cloth and clean linen, since the days of Louis XIII!
We notice in the old pictures of feasting that the table-cloth was of itself a picture,—lace, in squares, blocks, and stripes, sometimes only lace over a colour, but generally mixed with linen.
It was the highest ambition of the Dutch housewife to have much double damask of snowy whiteness in her table-linen chest. That is still the grand reliable table-linen. No one can go astray who uses it.
Table-linen is now embroidered in coloured cottons, or half of its threads are drawn out and it is then sewed over into lace-work. It is then thrown over a colour, generally bright red. But pale lilac is more refined, and very becoming to the lace-work.
Not a particle of coarse food must go on that table-cloth. Everything must be brought to each guest from the broad, magnificent buffet; all must be served à la Russe from behind a grand, impenetrable screen, which should fence off every dining-room from the butler's pantry and the kitchen. All that goes on behind that screen is the butler's business, and not ours. The butler is a portly man, presumably, with a clean-shaven face, of English parentage. He has the key of the wine-cellar and of the silver-chest, two heavy responsibilities; for nowadays, not to go into the question of the wines, the silver-chest is getting weighty. Silver and silver-gilt dishes, banished for some years, are now reasserting their pre-eminent fitness for the dinner-table: The plates may be of solid silver; so are the high candlesticks and the salt-cellars, of various and beautiful designs after Benvenuto Cellini.
Old silver is reappearing, and happy the hostess who has a real Queen Anne teapot. The soup-tureen of silver is again used, and so are the old beer-mugs. Our Dutch ancestors were much alive to good silver; he may rejoice who, joking apart, had a Dutch uncle. I, for one, do not like to eat off a metallic plate, be it of silver or gold. It is disagreeable to hear the knife scrape on it, even with the delicate business of cutting a morsel of red canvas-back. Gastronomic gratification should be so highly refined that it trembles at a crumpled rose-leaf. Porcelain plates seem to be perfect, if they have not on them the beautiful head of Lamballe. Nobody at a dinner desires to cut her head off again, or to be reminded of the French Revolution. Nor should we hurry. A master says, "I have arrived at such a point that if the calls of business or pleasure did not interpose, there would be no fixed date for finding what time might elapse between the first glass of sherry and the final Maraschino."
However, the pleasures of a dinner may be too prolonged. Men like to sit longer eating and drinking than women; so when a dinner is of both sexes it should not continue more than one hour and a half. Horace, that prince of diners, objected to the long-drawn-out meal. "Then we drank, each as much as he felt the need," meant no orgy amongst the Greeks.
But if the talk lingers after the biscuit and cheese the hostess need not interrupt it.