Edward Spencer

Imitation—Dear Lady Thistlebrain—Try it on the dog—Criminality of the English Caterer—The stove, the stink, the steamer—Roasting v. Baking—False Economy—Dirty ovens—Frills and fingers—Time over Dinner—A long-winded Bishop—Corned beef.

Now for the cause, alluded to at the end of the last chapter.

Imprimis, the French invasion is due to the universal craze for imitation, which may be the sincerest form of flattery, but which frequently leads to bad results. For years past the fair sex of Great Britain have been looking to Paris for fashion in dress, as well as in cookery; whilst the other sex have long held the mistaken notion that “they manage things better in France.” The idea that France is the only country capable of clothing the outer and the inner man, artistically, has taken deep root. Thus, if the Duchess of Dulverton import, regardless of expense, a divine creation in bonnets from the Rue de Castiglione, and air the same in church, it is good odds that little Mrs. Stokes, of the Talbot Road, Bayswater, will have had the chapeau copied, at about one-twentieth of the original cost, by the next Sabbath day. Dear Lady Thistlebrain, who has such taste (since she quitted the family mangle in Little Toke Street, Lambeth, for two mansions, a castle, and a deer park), and with whom money is no object, pays her chef the wages of an ambassador, and everybody raves over her dinners. Mrs. Potter of Maida Vale sets her “gal” (who studied higher gastronomy, together with the piano, and flower-painting on satin, at the Board School) to work on similar menus—with, on the whole, disastrous results. The London society and fashion journals encourage this snobbish idea by quoting menus, most of them ridiculous. Amongst the middle classes the custom of giving dinner parties at hotels has for some time past been spreading, partly to save trouble, and partly to save the brain of the domestic cook; so that instead of sitting down to a plain dinner, with, maybe, an entrÉe or two sent in by the local confectioner—around the family mahogany tree, all may be fanciful decoration, and not half enough to eat, electric light, and À la with attendance charged in the bill.

The only way to stop this sort of thing is to bring the system into ridicule, to try it on the groundlings. A fair leader of ton, late in the sixties, appeared one morning in the haunts of fashion, her shapely shoulders covered with a cape of finest Russian sables, to the general admiration and envy of all her compeers. Thereupon, what did her dearest friend and (of course) most deadly rival do? Get a similar cape, or one of finer quality? Not a bit of it. She drove off, then and there, to her furriers, and had her coachman and footman fitted with similar capes, in (of course) cheaper material; and, when next afternoon she took the air in the park, in her perfectly appointed landau, her fur-clad menials created something like a panic in the camp of her enemy, whilst fur capes for fair leaders of “ton,” were, like hashed venison at a City luncheon, very soon “hoff.”

It is extremely probable that, could it be arranged to feed our starving poor, beneath the public gaze, on sÔles Normandes, cÔtelettes À la Reform, and salmi de gibier truffÉ; to feast our workhouse children on bisque d’ÉcrÉvisses and Ananas À la CrÉole, the upper classes of Great Britain would soon revert to plain roast and boiled.

But after all it is the English caterer who is chiefly to blame for his own undoing. How is it that in what may be called the “food streets” of the metropolis the foreign food-supplier should outnumber the purveyor of the Roast Beef of Old England in the proportion of fifty to one? Simply because the Roast Beef of Old England has become almost as extinct as the Dodo. There are but few English kitchens, at this end of the nineteenth century, in the which meat is roasted in front of the fire.

In order to save the cost of fuel, most English (save the mark!) cooking is now performed by gas or steam; and at many large establishments the food, whether fish, flesh, fowl, vegetables or pastry, all goes, in a raw state, into a species of chest of drawers made of block-tin, in which receptacle the daily luncheons, dinners, and suppers are steamed and robbed of all flavour, save that of hot tin. The pity of it! Better, far better for mankind the À la system than to be gradually “steamed” into the tomb!

It is alleged that as good results in the way of roasting can be got from an oven as from the spit. But that oven must be ventilated—with both an inlet and an outlet ventilator, for one will not act without the other. It is also advisable that said oven should be cleaned out occasionally; for a hot oven with no joint therein will emit odours anything but agreeable, if not attended to; and it is not too sweeping a statement to say that the majority of ovens in busy kitchens are foul. The system of steaming food (the alleged “roasts” being subsequently browned in an oven) is of comparatively recent date; but the oven as a roaster was the invention of one Count Rumford, at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In one of his lectures on oven-roasting, this nobleman remarked that he despaired of getting any Englishman to believe his words; so that he was evidently confronted with plenty of prejudice, which it is devoutly to be prayed still exists in English homes. For I do vow and protest that the oven odours which pervade the neighbourhood of the Strand, London, at midday, are by no means calculated to whet the appetite of the would-be luncher or diner. This is what such an authority as Mr. Buckmaster wrote on the subject of the spit versus the oven:

“I believe I am regarded as a sort of heretic on the question of roasting meat. My opinion is that the essential condition of good roasting is constant basting, and this the meat is not likely to have when shut up in an iron box; and what is not easily done is easily neglected.”

In this connection there are more heretics than Mr. Buckmaster. But if during my lifetime the days of burning heretics should be revived, I shall certainly move the Court of Criminal Appeal in favour of being roasted or grilled before, or over, the fire, instead of being deprived of my natural juices in an iron box.

Some few “roast” houses are still in existence in London, but they be few and far between; and since Mr. Cooper gave up the “Albion,” nearly opposite the stage-door of Drury Lane Theatre, the lover of good, wholesome, English food has lost one old-fashioned tavern in the which he was certain of enjoying such food.

It has been repeatedly urged in favour of French cookery that it is so economical. But economy in the preparation of food is by no means an unmixed blessing. I do not believe that much sole-leather is used up in the ordinary ragoÛt, or salmi; but many of us who can afford more expensive joints have a prejudice against “scrags”; whilst the tails of mutton chops frequently have a tainted flavour, and the drumsticks and backs of fowls are only fit to grill, or boil down into gravy. And it is not only the alien who is economical in his preparation of the banquet. Many of the dwellers in the highways and bye-ways of our great metropolis will boil down the outer skin of a ham, and place a portion thereof, together with such scraps as may also be purchased, at a penny or twopence the plateful, at the ham and beef emporium, with maybe a “block ornament” or two from the butcher’s, in a pie dish, with a superstructure of potatoes, and have the “scrap pie” cooked at the baker’s for the Sunday dinner. Poor wretches! Not much “waste” goes on in such households. But I have known the “gal” who tortured the food in a cheap lodging-house throw away the water in which a joint had just been boiled, but whether this was from sheer ignorance, or “cussedness,” or the desire to save herself any future labour in the concoction of soup, deponent sayeth not. By the way, it is in the matter of soup that the tastes of the British and French peasantry differ so materially. Unless he or she be absolutely starving, it is next to impossible to get one of the groundlings of old England to attempt a basin of soup. And when they do attempt the same, it has been already made for them. The Scotch, who are born cooks, know much better than this; but do not, O reader, if at all thin of skin, or refined of ear, listen too attentively to the thanks which a denizen of the “disthressful counthry” will bestow upon you for a “dhirty bowl o’ bone-juice.”

How many modern diners, we wonder, know the original object of placing frills around the shank of a leg or shoulder of mutton, a ham, the shins of a fowl, or the bone of a cutlet? Fingers were made before—and a long time before—forks. In the seventeenth century—prior to which epoch not much nicety was observed in carving, or eating—we read that “English gentlewomen were instructed by schoolmistresses and professors of etiquette as to the ways in which it behoved them to carve joints. That she might be able to grasp a roasted chicken without greasing her left hand, the gentle housewife was careful to trim its foot and the lower part of its legs with cut paper. The paper frill which may still be seen round the bony point and small end of a leg of mutton, is a memorial of the fashion in which joints were dressed for the dainty hands of lady-carvers, in time prior to the introduction of the carving-fork, an implement that was not in universal use so late as the Commonwealth.”

How long we should sit over the dinner-table is a matter of controversy. At the commencement of the nineteenth century, in the hard-drinking times, our forefathers were loth indeed to quit the table. But the fairer portion of the guests were accustomed to adjourn early, for tea and scandal in the withdrawing-room, the while their lords sat and quarrelled over their port, with locked doors; and where they fell there they frequently passed the night. The editor of the Almanach des Gourmands wrote: “Five hours at table are a reasonable latitude to allow in the case of a large party and recondite cheer.” But the worthy Grimod de la ReymiÈre, the editor aforesaid, lived at a period when dinner was not served as late as 8.30 P.M. There is a legend of an Archbishop of York “who sat three entire years at dinner.” But this is one of those tales which specially suited the dull, brandy-sodden brains of our ancestors. The facts are simply as follows:—the archbishop had just sat down to dinner at noon when an Italian priest called. Hearing that the dignitary was sitting at meat the priest whiled away an hour in looking at the minster, and called again, but was again “repelled by the porter.” Twice more that afternoon did the surly porter repel the Italian, and at the fourth visit “the porter, in a heate, answered never a worde, and churlishlie did shutte the gates upon him.” Then the discomfited Italian returned to Rome; and three years later, encountering an Englishman in the Eternal City, who declared himself right well known to His Grace of York, the Italian, all smiles, inquired: “I pray you, good sir, hath that archbishop finished dinner yet?” Hence the story, which was doubtless originally told by a fly-fisher.

It is not a little singular that with increasing civilisation, a gong, which is of barbaric, or semi-barbaric origin, should be the means usually employed to summon us to the dinner-table. In days of yore the horn, or cornet, was blown as the signal. Alexander Dumas tells us that “at the period when noon was the dinner hour, the horn or cornet (le cor) was used in great houses to announce dinner. Hence came an expression which has been lost; they used to say cornet (or trumpet) the dinner (cornez le diner).” And we are asked to believe that to this practice “corned” beef owes its derivation. “In days when inferior people ate little meat in the winter months save salted beef, the more usual form of the order was cornez le boeuf, or ‘corn the beef.’ Richardson errs egregiously when he insists that corned beef derived its distinguishing epithet from the grains or corns of salt with which it was pickled. Corned beef is trumpeted beef, or as we should nowadays say, dinner-bell beef.”

Well—“I hae ma doots,” as the Scotsman said. I am not so sure that Richardson erred egregiously. But after all, as long as the beef be good, and can be carved without the aid of pick and spade, what does it matter? Let us to dinner!