“How odd that the woman should understand me when I did not comprehend a word she said!” meditated our discomfited interpreter, aloud.
The enigma was solved at lunch, where the story was told and the ridiculous element made the most of. A pretty little Russian lady was my vis-à-vis. The Russians we met abroad were, almost without exception, accomplished linguists. They are compelled they say, jestingly, to learn the tongues of other peoples, since few have the courage and patience to master theirs. My neighbor’s English caused us to fall in love with our own language. Her speech with her children was in French, and she conversed with German gentlemen at the table with equal facility.
“Your daughter is quite correct in her description of the Lucerne dialect,” she said, rounding each syllable with slow grace that was not punctiliousness. “It is a vile mongrel of which the inhabitants may well be ashamed. I have much difficulty in comprehending their simplest phrases, and I lived in Germany five years. The Germans would disown the patois. It is a provincial composite. The better classes understand, but will not speak it.”
I take occasion to say here, having enumerated the summer-delicacies offered for sale in the Lucerne market, that those of our countrypeople who visit Europe with the hope of feasting upon such products of orchard and garden as they leave behind them, are doomed to sore disappointment. Years ago, I heard Dr. E. D. G. Prime of the “New York Observer,” in his delightful lecture, “All Around the World,” assert that “the finest fruit-market upon the globe is New York City.” We smiled incredulously, thinking of East Indian pine-apples and mangoes, Seville oranges and Smyrna grapes. We came home from our briefer pilgrimage, wiser, and thankfully content. We murmured, not marveled at the pitiful display of open-air fruit in England, remembering the Frenchman’s declaration that baked apples were the only ripe fruit he had tasted in that cloudy isle. Plums and apricots there are of fair quality, the trees being trained upon sunny walls, but the prices of these are moderate only by contrast with those demanded for other things. Peaches are sixpence—(twelve-and-a-half cents) each. Grapes are reared almost entirely in hot-houses, and sell in Covent Garden market at two and three dollars a pound. Pears, comparable to the Bartlett, Seckel or Flemish Beauty are nowhere to be had, and, in the same celebrated market of fruit and flowers, “American apples” were pressed upon us as the finest, and, therefore, costliest of their kind. Gooseberries are plentiful and quite cheap, as are cherries and currants. Pine-apples in England—“pines”—bring a guinea or a half-guinea apiece, being also, hot-house products.
“Do the poor eat no fruit?” I asked our Leamington fruiterer, an intelligent man whose wares were choice and varied—for that latitude.
“They are permitted to pick blackberries and sloes in the edges. Of course, pines and peaches are forbidden luxuries to people in their station.”
He might have added—“And plums at two cents, apricots at four, pears at five cents apiece, and strawberries”—charged against us by our landlady at half-a-dollar per quart in the height of the season. Tomatoes ranged from six to twelve cents apiece! asparagus was scarce and frightfully dear; green peas, as a spring luxury, were likewise intended for rich men’s tables. For Indian corn, sweet potatoes, egg-plants, Lima and string-beans, summer squash and salsify we inquired in vain. Nor had any English people to whom we named these ever seen them in their country. Many had never so much as heard that such things were, and asked superciliously—“And are they really tolerable—eatable, you know?”
Our English boarders in Lucerne smiled, indulgent of our national peculiarities,—but very broadly—at seeing us one day at the pension-table, eat raw tomatoes as salad, with oil, vinegar, pepper and salt. They were set in the centre of the board as a part of the dessert, but our instructions to the waiters broke up the order of their serving. Madame and daughters confessed, afterward, that they were not certain where they belonged, but had heard that Americans liked tomatoes, and so procured them.
Matters mended, in these respects, as we moved southward. When the weather is too hot, and the climate too unwholesome for foreigners to tarry in Southern France and Italy, the natives revel in berries, peaches and melons. We ate delicious grapes in Florence as late as the first of December, and a few in Rome. By New Year’s Day, not a bunch of fresh ones was exhibited in shops, at this time, filled with sour oranges, sweet, aromatic mandarini, mediocre apples and drying nespoli and medlars. The nespoli, let me remark, is a hybrid between the date and plum, with an added cross of the persimmon. Indeed, it resembles this last in color and shape, also, in the acerbity that mingles with the acid of the unripe fruit. When fully matured they are very good, when partially dried, not unlike dates in appearance and flavor. Medlars are popular in England, and in request in Paris. To us, they were from first to last, disagreeable. To be candid, the taste and texture of the pulp were precisely those of rotten apples. We thought them decayed, until told that they were only fully ripe. In these circumstances how tantalizing were reminiscences of Newtown and Albemarle pippins, of Northern Spy and Seek-no-further! We could have sat us down on the pavement of the Piazza di Spagna, and, hidden by mountains of intolerably tart oranges, plained as did the mixed multitude at Taberah, that our souls were dried away in remembering the winter luxuries of which we did eat freely in our own land; the Catawba, Isabella and Diana grapes, close packed in purple layers in neat boxes for family use, late pears and all-the-year-round sweet oranges; plump, paly-green Malaga and amethyst Lisbon grapes, retailed at thirty and twenty-five cents per pound. Were we not now upon the same side of the ocean with Lisbon and Malaga? It was nearly impossible to credit the scarcity of these sun bright lands in what we had so long received and enjoyed as everyday mercies to people of very moderate means.
As to bananas, we did not see a dozen in two years. I did not taste one in all that time. Desiccated tomatoes and mushrooms are sold in Italian cities by the string. Canned vegetables are an American “notion.” Brown, in the Via della Croce in Rome, had fresh oysters—American—for eighty cents a can. As the daintiest canned peas and the useful champignons are imported by United States grocers direct from France, it was odd that we could not have them, for the asking, in Switzerland and Italy. Esculents for salad grow there out of doors all winter, including several varieties not cultivated with us. Potatoes, spinach, rice, celery,—cooked and raw—onions, cabbage, cauliflower, macaroni, a root known as “dog-fennel,” and,—leading them all in the frequency of its appearing, but not, to most people’s taste, in excellence,—artichokes—are the vegetable bill-of-fare. If there are eight courses at dinner, the probability is that but two of them will be vegetables. An eight-course dinner on the Continent may be a very plain affair, important as it sounds, and the diner-out be hardly able to satisfy a healthy appetite ‘though he partake of each dish. Soup is the first course;—sometimes, nourishing and palatable,—as often, thin and poor. Fish succeeds. If it be salmon, whitebait, whitings, soles or fresh sardines, it is usually good. But, beyond Paris, we were rarely served on the Continent with any of these, except the last-named, that could be truthfully called, “fresh.” The sardines of Naples and Venice, just from the water, are simply delicious.