Georges Avenel has recently delivered himself of a screed on the “Mechanism of Modern Life,” wherein are many pertinent, if sometimes trite, observations on the more or less automatic processes by which we are lodged, fed, and clothed to-day.
He gives rather a quaint, but unquestionably true, reason for the alleged falling-off in the cookery of French—of course he means Parisian—restaurants. It is, he says, that modern patrons will no longer pay the prices, or, rather, will not spend the money that they once did. In the first half of the last century—the time of Dumas’ activities and achievements—he tells us that many Parisian lovers of good fare were accustomed to “eat a napoleon” daily for their dinner. Nowadays, the same persons dine sufficiently at their club for eight and a half francs. Perhaps the abatement of modern appetites has something to say to this, as many folk seldom take more than thirty-five or forty minutes over their evening meal. How would this compare with the Gargantuan feasts described by Brillat-Savarin and others, or the gastronomic exploits of those who ate two turkeys at a sitting?
Clearly, for comfort, and perhaps luxury, the Parisian hotels and restaurants of a former day compare agreeably with those of our own time; not so much, perhaps, with regard to time and labour-saving machinery, which is the equipment of the modern batterie de cuisine, but with the results achieved by more simple, if more laborious, means, and the appointments and surroundings amid which they were put upon the board. “The proof of the pudding is in the eating” is still applicable, whether its components be beaten or kneaded by clockwork or the cook’s boy.
With the hotels himself, Avenel is less concerned, though he reminds us again that Madame de Sevigné had often to lie upon straw in the inns she met with in travelling, and looked upon a bed in a hotel, which would allow one to undress, as a luxury. We also learn that the travellers of those days had to carry their own knives, the innkeeper thinking that he did enough in providing spoons and forks. Nor were hotels particularly cheap, a small suite of rooms in a hotel of the Rue Richelieu costing 480 francs a week. It was Napoleon III. who, by his creation of the Hôtel de Louvre,—not the present establishment of the same name, but a much larger structure,—first set the fashion of monster hostelries. But what was this compared with the Elysées Palace, which M. d’Avenel chooses as his type of modern luxury, with its forty-three cooks, divided into seven brigades, each commanded by an officer drawing 3,750 francs a year, and its thirty-five hundred pairs of sheets and fifty thousand towels, valued together at little short of 250,000 francs? Yet, as we well know, even these totals pale before some of the hotels of America, in which M. d’Avenel sees the ne plus ultra of organization and saving of labour by the ingenious use of machinery, and incidentally a great deal of the sentiment of good cheer, which was as much an ingredient of former hospitality as was the salt and pepper of a repast.
It is pleasant to read of Alexandre Dumas’ culinary skill, though the repetition of the fact has appeared in the works of well-nigh every writer who has written of the Paris of the fifties and sixties. The dinners at his apartments in the Boulevard Malesherbes were worthy of Soyer or even of Brillat-Savarin himself in his best days. In his last “Causeries Culinaires,” the author of “Monte Cristo” tells us that the Bourbon kings were specially fond of soup. “The family,” he writes, “from Louis XIV. to the last of their race who reigned in France, have been great eaters. The Grand Monarque commenced his dinner by two and sometimes three different kinds of soup; Louis-Philippe by four plates of various species of this comestible; in the fifth plate his Majesty usually mixed portions of the four varieties he had eaten, and appeared to enjoy this singular culinary combination.”
Dumas’ reputation as an epicure must have been formed early; he describes in his “Mémoires” how, on a certain occasion, when he had first become installed in Paris, he met a gentleman, Charles Nodier, in the stalls of the Porte St. Martin, who was reading a well-worn Elzevir entitled “La Pastissier Française.” He says, “I address him.... ‘Pardon my impertinence, but are you very fond of eggs?’ ‘Why so?’ ‘That book you are reading, does it not give recipes for cooking eggs in sixty different ways?’ ‘It does.’ ‘If I could but procure a copy.’ ‘But this is an Elzevir,’ says my neighbour.”
The Parisian is without a rival as an epicure and a gastronome, and he associates no stigma with the epithet. In Anglo-Saxon lands the reverse is the case, though why it is hard to see.
“Frog-legs” came to be a tidbit in the tables d’hôte of New York and London many years ago, but sympathy has been withheld from the luscious escargot. There be those fearless individuals who by reason of the entente cordiale have tasted of him and found him good, but learning that in the cookshops of Paris they have at last learned to fabricate them to equal the native grown article of Bourgogne, have tabooed them once for all, and threaten to withdraw their liking for that other succulent dainty, the frog.
At any rate, the schoolboy idea that the Parisian’s staple fare is snails and frogs is quite exploded, and small wonder it is that Anglo-Saxon palates never became wholly inured to them. But what about England’s peculiar dishes? Marrow-bones and stewed eels, for instance?