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THE ART OF ENTERTAINING
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THE
ART OF ENTERTAINING
BY
M. E. W. SHERWOOD
This night Beneath my roof my dearest friends I entertain
Homer
NEW YORK DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1893
Copyright, 1892, By Dodd, Mead and Company.
All rights reserved.
55^^
5aittbprsitij press: John Wilson and Son, Cambridge.
With a grateful recognitioti of his services to "STfte ^rt of 3£nt£rtainin0,"
Both at home and abroad, and with a profound respect for his wit, eloquence., and learning, this book is dedicated
TO
THE HON. CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW,
By his Friend, the Author.
PREFACE.
TN America the art of entertaining as compared with the same art in England, in France, in Italy and in Germany may be said to be in its infancy. But if it is, it is a very vigorous infant, perhaps a little overfed. There is no such prodigality of food anywhere nor a more genuinely hospitable people in the world than those descendants of the Pilgrims and the Cavaliers who peopled the North and South of what we are privileged to call the United States. Exiles from Fatherland taught the Indians the words ''Welcome!" and "What Cheer?" — a beautiful and a noble prophecy. Well might it be the motto for our national shield. We, who welcome to our broad garden-lands the hungry and the needy of an overcrowded old world, can well appropriate the legend.
No stories of that old Biblical world of the patriarchs who lived in tents have been forgotten in the New World. The Western settler who placed before his hungry guest the last morsel of jerked
VI PREFACE.
meat, or whose pale, overworked wife broiled the fish or the bird which had just fallen before his unerring gun, — these people had mastered in their way the first principle in the art of entertaining. They have the hospitality of the heart. From that meal to a Newport dinner what an infinite series of gradations !
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 enter- taining ; if judiciously studied it is far from niggard- liness. 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 de- voted 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
PREFACE. Vll
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 fanci- fully state that no great poem, no novel, no philo- sophical 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
Vlll PREFACE.
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 agree- able 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 alorfe at one imperial moment of her success had such a chance as we have ; she was free, she was indus- trious, 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. ** T is 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
PREFACE. IX
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 din- ners ! 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.
PAGB
Our American Resources and Foreign Allies. 13
The Hostess 22
Breakfast o 35
The Lunch 49
Afternoon Tea 59
The Intellectual Components of a Dinner . 68
Conscientious Diners 79
Various Modes of Gastronomical Gratifica- tion 94
Soups 105
Fish 113
Salad 124
Desserts 134
German Eating and Drinking 143
The Influence* of Good Cheer on Authors
AND Geniuses 152
Bonbons 162
Famous Menus and Receipts 176
Cookeries and Wines of Southern Europe . 185
Some Oddities in the Art of Entertaining . 197
xii CONTENTS.
PAGE
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 33i
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 and
Foreign Modes of Entertaining . . . 389
THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
OUR AMERICAN RESOURCES, AND FOREIGN ALLIES.
"Let observation, with extensive view, Survey mankind from China to Peru."
THE amount of game and fish which our great country and extent of sea-coast give us, the variety of climate from Florida to Maine, from San Francisco to Boston, which the remarkable net-work of our railway communication allows us to enjoy, — all this makes the American market in any great city almost fabulously profuse. Then our steamships bring us fresh artichokes from Algiers in mid-winter, and figs from the Mediterranean, while the remarkable climate of California gives us four crops of delicate fruits a year.
There are those, however, who find the fruits of California less finely flavoured than those of the Eastern States. The peaches of the past are almost a lost flavour, even at the North. The peach of Europe is a different and far inferior fruit. It lacks that essential flavour which to the American palate tells of the best of fruits.
It may be well, for the purposes of gastronomical history, to narrate the variety of the larder in the height of the season, of a certain sea-side club-house, a few years ago :
14 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
"The season lasted one hundred and eighty days, during which time from eighty thousand to ninety thou- sand game-birds, and eighteen thousand pounds of fish were consumed, exclusive of domestic poultry, steaks and chops. On busy days twenty-four kinds of fish, all fit for epicures, embracing turbot, Spanish mackerel, sea trout ; the various kinds of bass, including that gamest of fish the black bass, bonito from the Gulf of Mexico, the purple mullet, the weakfish, chicken halibut, sole, plaice, the frog, the soft crab from the Chesapeake, were served. Here, packed tier upon tier in glistening ice, were some thirty kinds of birds in the very ecstasy of prime condition, and all ready prepared for the cook. Let us enumerate ' this royal fellowship of game.' There were owls from the North (we might call them by some more enticing name), chicken grouse from Illinois, chicken partridge, Lake Erie black and summer ducks and teal, woodcock, upland plover (by many esteemed as the choicest of morsels), dough-birds, brant, New Jersey millet, godwit, jack curlew, jacksnipe, sandsnipe, rock- snipe, humming-birds daintily served in nut-shells, golden plover, beetle-headed plover, redbreast plover, chicken plover, seckle-bill curlew, summer and winter yellow-legs, reed-birds and rail from Delaware (the latter most highly esteemed in Europe, where it is known as the ortolan), ring-neck snipe, brown backs, grass-bird, and peeps."
Is not this a hst to make " the rash gazer wipe his eye " ?
And to show our riches and their poverty in the matter of game, let us give the game statistics of France for one September. There are thirty thousand communes in France, and in each commune there were killed on the average on September i, ten hares, — total, three hun- dred thousand ; seventeen partridges, — total, five huu-
OUR AMERICAN RESOURCES, ETC. 1$
dred and ten thousand ; fourteen quail, — total, four hundred and twenty thousand; one rail in each com- mune,— thirty thousand total as to rails. That was all France could do for the furnishing of the larder; of course she imports game from Savoy, Germany, Norway, and England. And oh, how she can cook them !
Woodcock, it is said, should be cooked the day it is shot, or certainly when fresh. Birds that feed on or near the water should be eaten fresh; so should snipe and some kinds of duck. The canvasback alone bears keeping, the others get fishy.
Snipe should be picked by hand, on no account drawn ; that is a practice worthy of an Esquimaux. Nor should any condiment be cooked with woodcock, save butter or pork. A piece of toast under him, to catch his fragrant gravy, and the delicious trail should alone be eaten with the snipe ; but a bottle of Chambertin may be drunk to wash him down.
The plover should be roasted quickly before a hot fire ; nor should even a pork jacket be appUed if one wishes the dehcious juices of the bird alone. This bird should be served with water-cresses.
Red wine should be drunk with game, — Chambertin, Clos de Vougeot, or a sound Lafitte or La Tour claret. Champagne is not the wine to serve with game ; that belongs to the filet. With beef braise a glass of good golden sherry is allowable, but not champagne. The deep purple, full-bodied, velvety wines of the Cote d'Or, — the generous vintages of Burgundy, — are in order. Indeed these wines always have been in high renown. They are passed as presents from one royal personage to another, like a cordon d'honneiir. Burgundy was the wine of nobles and churchmen, who always have had enviable palates.
1 6 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
Chambertin is a lighter kind of Volnay and the vin veloute par excellence of the Cote d'Or. It was a great favourite with Napoleon I. To considerable body it unites a fine flavour and a suave bouquet of gx^2X finesse, and does not become thin with age like other Burgundies. As for the Clos de Vougeot, its characteristics are a rich ruby colour, velvety softness, a delicate bouquet, which has a slight suggestion of the raspberry. It is a strong wine, less refined in flavour than the Chambertin, and with a suggestion of bitterness. It was so much admired by a certain military commander that while marching his regiment to the Rhine he commanded his men to halt before the vineyard and salute it. They presented arms in its honour.
Chateau Lafitte, renowned for its magnificent colour, exquisite softness, delicate flavour, and fragrant bouquet, recalling almonds and violets, is one of the wines of the Gironde, and is supposed of late to have deteriorated in quality ; but it is quite good enough to command a high price and the attention of connoisseurs.
Chateau La Tour, a grand Medoc claret, derives its name from an existing ancient, massive, round tower, which the English assailed and defended by turns during the wars in Guienne. It has a pronounced flavour, and a powerful bouquet, common to all wines of the Gironde. It reminds one of the odour of almonds, and of Noyau cordials.
• These vineyards were in great repute five centuries ago ; and it would be delightful to pursue the history of the various crus, did time permit. The Cos d'Estoumet of the famous St. Estephe crus is stiU made by the peasants treading out the grapes, foule a pied, to the accompaniment of pipes and fiddles as in the days of Louis XIV.
OUR AMERICAN RESOURCES, ETC. 1/
We will mention the two premiers grands crus of the Gironde, the growth of the ancient vineyards of Leoville and the St. Julian wines, distinguished by their odour of violets.
Thackeray praises Chambertin in verse more than once : —
•* ' Oui, oui, Monsieur,' 's the waiter's answer ; ' Quel vin Monsieur desire-t-il ? ' * Tell me a good one.' — ' That I can, sir : The Chambertin, with yellow seal.'"
Then again he speaks of dipping his gray beard in the Gascon wine 'ere Time catches him at it and Death knocks the crimson goblet from his lips.
In countries where wine is grown there is little or no drunkenness. It is to be feared that drunkenness is increased by impure wines. It is shocking to read of the adulterations which first-class wines are subjected to, or rather the adulterations which are called first-class wines.
Wilkie Collins has a hit at this in his "No Name," where he makes the famous Captain Wragge say, " We were engaged at the time in making, in a small back parlour in Brompton, a fine first-class sherry, sound in the mouth, tonic in character, and a great favourite with the Court of Spain."
Our golden sherry, our Chambertin, our Chateau La- fitte is said often to come from the vineyards of Jersey City and the generous hillsides of Brooklyn ; and we might perhaps quote from the famous song of "The Canal": —
" The tradesmen who in liquor deal. Of our Canal good use can make ; And when they mean their casks to fill. They oft its water freely take. 2
1 8 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
By this device they render less The ills that spring from drunkenness ; For harmless is the wine, you '11 own. From vines that in canals is grown."
A large proportion of the so-called foreign wines sol;l in America are of American manufacture. The medium grade clarets and so-called Sauternes are made in Cali- fornia, in great quantities. Our Senator, Leland Stanford, makes excellent wines. On the islands of Lake Erie, the lake region of Central New York, and along the banks of the Ohio and Missouri Rivers, are vineyards producing excellent wines. An honest American wine is an excellent thing to drink; and yet it disgusted Commodore McVicker, who was entertained in London as President of our Yacht Club, to be asked to drink American wines. Yet the Catawbas, " dulcet, delicious and creamy," are not to be despised ; neither are the sweet and dry California growths.
The indigenous wines which come from Ohio, Iowa, Missouri and Mississippi are likely to be musty and foxy, and are not pleasant to an American taste. The Cataw- bas are pleasant, and are of three colours, — rose colour, straw colour, and colourless, if that be a colour. In taste they are like sparkling Moselle, but fuller to the palate.
The wine produced from the Isabella grape is of a decided raspberry flavour. The finest American wines are those produced from the vines known as Norton's Virginia and the Cynthiana. The former produces a well-blended, full-bodied, deep-coloured, aromatic, and almost astringent wine ; the second, — probably the finer of the two, — is a darker, less astringent, and more delicate product.
OUR AMERICAN RESOURCES, ETC. IQ
Among "the American red wines may be mentioned the product of the Schuylkill oSIuscadel, which was the only esteemed growth in the country previous to the cultivation of the Catawba grape, being in fact ambi- tiously compared to the cnis of the Gironde. It was a bitter, acidulous wine, little suited to the American palate, and invariably requiring an addition of either sugar or alcohol.
Longfellow sings of the wine of the Mustang grape of Texas and New Mexico : —
" The fiery flood Of whose purple blood Has a dash of Spanish bravado."
The Carolina Scuppernong is detestable, reminding us of the sweet and bitter medicines of childhood. The Herbemont, a rose-tinted wine is very like Spanish Manganilla.
Longfellow says of sparkling Catawba, that it *' fills the room with a benison on the giver." It has, indeed, a charming bouquet, as says the poet.
The name of Nicholas Longworth is intimately con- nected with the subject of American wines. To him will ever be given all honour, as being the father of this industry in the New World ; but the superior excellence of the California wines has driven the New York and Ohio wines, it is said, to a second place in the market.
In the expositions of 1889 at Paris, and in Melbourne, silver medals were awarded to the Inglenook wines, which are of the red claret, burgundy and Medoc type ; also white wines, — Sauterne Chasselas, and Hock, Chablis, Riesling, etc.
The right soil for the cultivation of the grape is a hard thing to find ; but Captain Niebaum, a rich California
20 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
grower, has hit the key-note, when he says, " I have no wish to make any money out of my vineyard by produc- ing a large quantity of wine at a cheap or moderate price. I am going to make a Cahfornia wine which, if it can be made, will be worthily sought for by connoissetirs ; and I am prepared to spend all the money needed to accomplish that result." He says frankly that he has not yet produced the best wine of which California is capa- ble, but that he has succeeded in producing a better wine than many of the foreign wines sold in America. He might have added that hogsheads of California grape- juice are sent annually to Bordeaux to be doctored, and returned to America as French claret.
The misfortunes of the vine-grower in Europe, the ruin of acres of grape-producing country by the phyloxera, should be the opportunity for these new vine-growers in the United States. It is only by travel, experiment, and by a close study of the methods of the foreign wine- growers that a Californian can possibly make himself a vineyard which shall be successful. He must induce Nature to sweeten his wines, and he can then laugh at the chemist.
Of vegetables we have not only all that Europe can boast, excepting perhaps the artichoke, but we have some in constant use and of great excellence which they have not. For instance, sweet corn boiled or roasted and eaten from the cob with butter and salt is unknown in Europe. They have not the sweet potato, so deli- cious when baked. They have not the pumpkin-pie although they have the pumpkin. They have egg-plant and cauliflower and beans and peas, but so have we. They have bananas, but never fried, which is a negro dish, and excellent. They have not the plantain, good
OUR AMERICAN RESOURCES, ETC. 21
baked, nor the avocado or alligator pear, which fried in butter or oil is so admirable. They have not the ochra, of which the negro cooks make such excellent gumbo soup. They have all the salads, and use sorrel much more than we do. They do not cook summer squash as we do, nor have they anything to equal it. They use vegetables always as an entree, not served with the meat, unless the vegetable is cooked with the meat, like beef stewed in carrots, turnips, and onions, veal and green peas, veal with spinach, and so on. The peas are passed as an entree, so is the cauliflower, the beet-root, and the turnips. They treat all vegetables as we do corn and as- paragus, as a separate course. For asparagus we must give the French the palm, particularly when they serve it with Hollandaise sauce ; and the Italians cook cauUflower with cheese, a ravir.
THE HOSTESS.
* A creature not too bright or good For human nature's daily food ; For transient sorrow, simple wiles, Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles.
THE " house -mother," — the mistress of servants, the wife, the mother, the hostess, — is the first person in the art of entertaining ; and considering how busy, how hard worked, how occupied, are American men, she is generally the first person singular. ( In nine Cases out of ten, American men neither know nor care much about the conduct of the house if the wife will assume it ; they only like to be made comfortable, and to find a warm, clean home, with a good dinner await- ing them. It is the wife who must struggle with the problems of domestic defeat or victory.
When Washington Irving was presented at the Court of Dresden his Saxon Majesty remarked, " Mr. Irving, with a republic so liberal, you can have no servants in America."
" Yes, Sire, we have servants, such as they are," said the amiable author of the '• Sketchbook ; " " but we do not call them servants, we call them help."
" I cannot understand that," said the king.
The king's mental position was not illogical ; for, with bis experience of the servile position of the domestic in
THE HOSTESS. 23
Europe, he could not reconcile to his mind the declara- tion of social equality in America.
The American hostess must, it would seem, for many centuries if not forever, have to struggle against this diffi- culty. As some writer said twenty years ago, of this question : " Rich as we are in money, profuse in spend- ing it to heighten the enjoyment of life, the good servant, that essential of comfort and luxury, seems beyond our reach. Superfine houses we have, and superfine furni- ture, and superfine ladies, and all the other superfineties to excess, but the skilful cook, the handy maid, and the trusty nurse we rarely possess."
Thus, afar from the great cities and even in them, we must forge the instruments with which we work, instead of finding them ready to hand, as in other countries. That is to say, the mistress of a household must teach her cook to cook, her waiter to wait, her laundress to get up fine linen. She is happy if she can get honest people and willing hands, but trained servants she durst not ex- pect away from the great centres of Hfe.
Considering what has been expected of the Amer- ican woman, has she not done rather well ? That she must be first servant-trainer, then housekeeper, wife, mother, and conversationist, that she must keep up with the always advancing spirit of the times, read, write, and cipher, be beautifully dressed, play the piano, make the wilderness to blossom as the rose, be charitable, thought- ful, and good, put the mind at its ease, strive to learn how to do all things in the best way, be a student of good taste and good manners, make a house luxurious, orna- mental, cheerful, and restful, have an inspired sense of the fitness of things, dress and entertain in perfect accord with her station, her means, and her husband's ambition,
24 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
master, unassisted, all the ins and outs of the noble art of entertaining, — has not this been something of the nature of a large contract?
^ She must go to the cooking-lecture, come home and visit the kitchen, go to the intelligence office, keeping her hand on all three. She must be the mind, while the Maggies and Bridgets furnish the hands. She must never be fussy, never grotesque ; she must steer her ship through stormy seas, and she must also learn to enjoy Wagner's music. There is proverbially no sea so dan- gerous to swim in as that tumultuous one of a new and illy regulated prosperity; and in the changeful, uncer- tain nature of American fortunes an American woman must be ready to meet any fate. .;
Judging from many specimens which we have seen, may we not claim that the American woman must be stamped with an especial distinction ? Has she not conquered her fate ?
Curiously enough, fashion and good taste seem to lackey to the American woman, no matter where she was born or where educated. In spite of all drawbacks, and the counter-currents of destiny, she is a well bred and tasteful woman. No matter what the American woman has to fight against, poverty or lack of opportunities, she is likely, if she is called upon to do so, to administer gracefully the hospitalities of the White House or to fill the difficult role of an ambassadress.
Some of them have bad taste perhaps. " What is good taste but an instantaneous, ready appreciation of the fit- ness of things ? " To most of us who observe it in others, it seems to be an instinct. We envy those few who are always well dressed, who never buy unbecoming stuffs, who have the gift to make their clothes look as if they
THE HOSTESS. 5$
had simply blossomed out of their inner consciousness, as a rose blossoms out of its calyx. Some women always dress their hair becomingly; others, even if handsome, look like beautiful frights. Some wear their clothes as if they had been hurled at them by a tornado, and remind one of the poor husband's remark, " I feel as if I had married a hurricane." The same exceptions, which only prove the rule, because you notice them, may extend to the housewives who aim at more than they can accomplish, who make their house an anguish to look at, preten- tious without beauty, overloaded or incorrect, who have not tact, who say the awkward thing. Such people exist sometimes, sinning from ignorance, but they are decidedly in the minority. The American woman is generally a success. She has fought a hard battle, but she has won. She has had her defeats, however.
Who does not remember the failure of that first dinner-party ? — when the baby began to cry so loud ; when the hostess was not dressed when the bell rang ; when the cook spilled the soup all over the range and filled the house with a bad odour; when the waitress, usually so cool, lost all her presence of mind and fell on the basement stairs, breaking all the plates ; when one failure succeeded another until the husband looked reproachfully at his wife, who, poor creature, had been working day and night to get up this dinner, who was responsible for none of the failures, and who had an attack of neuralgia afterward which lasted all winter.
Who has not read Thackeray's witty descriptions of the dinners, poor and pretentious, ordered in from the green-grocer's, and uneatable, — in London ? " If they would have a leg of mutton and an apple pudding and a glass of sherry, they could do well; but they must shine,
26 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
they must outdo their neighbours." And that is the first mistake. People with three thousand a year should not try to emulate those who have fifty thousand a year.
And Thackeray says again : *' But there is no harm done, not as regards the dinner-givers, though the dinner- eaters may have to suffer. It only shows that the former are hospitably inclined, and wish to do the very best in their power. If they do badly, how can they help it? They know no better."
The first thing at which a young housekeeper must aim is to live well every day. Her tablecloth must be fresh, her glass and silver clean ; a few flowers must be on her table to make it dainty, a few dishes well cooked, — such a table as will be well for her children and accept- able to her husband ; and then she has but to add a little more and it is fit for any guest, and any guest will be glad to join such a dinner-party.
But here I am met by the almost unanswerable argu- ment that the simplest dinner is the most difficult to find. Who knows how to cook a beefsteak, to roast a piece of mutton so that its natural juices are retained, — to roast it so that the blood shall follow the knife ; to mash potatoes and brown them ; to make a perfect rice- pudding that is said to " deserve that cordon bleu which Vatel, Ude, and Bechamel craved " ?
The young housekeeper of to-day with very modest means has, however, now to meet a condition of pros- perity which even twenty-five years ago was unknown. xAll extremes of luxury and every element of profusion is now fashionable, — one may say expected.
But agreeable young people will be entertained by the man who is worth fifty thousand dollars a day, and they will wish to return the civility. Herein lie the difiicul-
THE HOSTESS. 2/
ties in the art of entertaining ; but let them remember that there is one simple dinner which covers the whole ground, which the poor gentleman may aspire to give, and to which he might invite a prince. The essentials of a comfortable dinner are but few. The beauty of a Grecian vase without ornament is perfect. You may add cameo and intaglio, vine, acanthus leaf, satyrs, and fauns, handles of ram's horns and circlet of gems to your vase if you wish, and are rich enough, but unless the outline is perfect the splendour and the arabesque but render the vase vulgar. So with the simple dinner ; it is the Grecian vase unadorned.
Remember that rich people, stifled with luxury at home, like to be asked to these dinners. A lady in England, very much admired for her witty conversation, said she intended to devote herself to the amelioration of the condition of the upper classes, as she thought them the most bored and altogether the least attended to of any people ; and we have heard of the rich man in New York who complained that he was no longer asked to the little dinners. There is too much worship and fear of money in our country. In England and on the Continent there is no shame in acknowledging, " I cannot afford it." I have been asked to a luncheon in England where a cold joint of mutton, a few potatoes, and a plate of peaches constituted the whole repast ; and I have heard more delightful conversation and have met more agreeable people than at more expensive feasts. Who in America would dare to give such a lunch?
The simple dinner might be characterized, giving the essentials, as a soup, a fish, a roast, one entree, and a salad, an ice and fruit (simply the fruit in season), a cup Qf coffee afterward, with a glass of sherry, claret, or
28 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
champagne. Such a dinner is good enough for anybody, and is possible to the person of moderate means.
From this up to the splendid dinners of millionnaires, served on gold and silver and priceless Sevres, Dresden, Japanese, and Chinese porcelain, with flagons of ruby glass bound in gold, with Benvenuto Cellini vases, and siis^er candelabra, the ascent may be gradual. In the one the tablecloth is of spotless damask ; in the other it may be of duchesse lace over red. The very mats are mirrors, the crystal drops of the epergne flash like diamonds. It may be served in a picture-gallery. Each lady has a bouquet, a fan, a ribbon painted with her name, a basket or bonbonniere to take home v/ith her. The courses are often sixteen in number, the wines are of fabulous value, antiquity, and age. Each drop is like the River Pactolus, whose sands were of gold. The viands may come from Algiers or St. Petersburg ; strawberries and peaches in January, the roses of June in February, fruit from the Pacific, from the Gulf, artichokes from Marseilles, oranges and strawberries from Florida, game from Arizona and Chesapeake Bay, mutton and pheas- ants from Scotland, luxury from everywhere. The primal condition of this banquet is, that everything should be unusual.
But remember that, after all, it is only the Grecian vase heavily ornamented. No one person can taste half the dishes ; it takes a long time, and the room may be too hot. The limitations of a dinner should be considered. It is a splendid picture, no doubt, but it need not appall the young hostess who desires to return the civility.
A vase of flowers or a basket of growing plants can re- place the epergne. Some pretty dinner-cards may be etched by herself, with a Shakspearean quotation show-
THE HOSTESS. 29
ing a personal thought of each guest. Her spotless glass and silver, her good soup, her fresh fish, the haunch of venison roasted before a wood fire, the salad mixed by her own fair hands, perhaps a dessert over which she has lingered, a bit of cheese, a cup of coffee, a smiling host, a composed hostess, a congenial com- pany, and wit withal, — who shall say that the little dinner is not as amusing as the big dinner? To be composed : yes, that is the first thing to be remembered on the part of a young hostess. She may be essentially nervous and anxious, particularly if she is just beginning to entertain, but here she must resolutely put on a mask of composure, and assume a virtue if she have it not. Nothing is of much importance, excepting her own demeanor. A fussy hostess who scolds the servants, wrinkles her brow, or even forgets to listen to the man who is talking to her is the ruin of a dinner. The author of " Cecil " tells his niece that if stewed puppy-dog is brought to the table she must not notice it. Few hostesses are subjected to so severe an ordeal as this, but the remark contains a goodly hint.
As, however, it is a great intellectual feat to achieve a perfect little dinner with a small household and small means, perhaps that form of entertaining may be post- poned a few years. Never attempt anything which can- not be well done. There is the afternoon tea, the musical evening, the reception, the luncheon ; they are all easier to give than the dinner. The young hostess ambitious to excel in the art of entertaining can choose a thousand ways. Let her alone avoid attempting the impossible ; and let her remember that no success which is not hon- estly gained is worth a pin. If it is money, it stings ; if it is place and position, it becomes the shirt of Nessus,
30 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
But for the well mannered and well behaved American woman what a noble success, what a perfect present, what a delightful future there is ! She is the founder of the American nobility. All men bow down to her. She is the queen of the man who loves her ; he treats her with every respect. She is to teach the future citizen honour, loyalty, duty, respect, politeness, kindness, the law of love. Such a man could read his Philip Sidney and yet not blush to find himself a follower. An American woman wields the only rod of empire to which American men will bow. She should try to be an empress in the best sense of the word ; and to a young woman entering society we should recommend a certain exclusiveness. Not snobbish exclusiveness ; but it is always well to choose one's friends slowly and with due consideration. We are not the most perfect beings in all the world ; we do not wish to be intimate with too much imperfection. ( A broken friendship is a very painful thing.| We should think twice before we give an intimate friendship to any one. No woman who essays to entertain should ask everybody to her house. The respect she owes to her- self should prevent this ; her house becomes a camp unless she has herself the power of putting a coarse sieve outside the door.
We have no such inviolable virtue that we can as yet rate Dives and Lazarus before they are dead. Very rich people are apt to be very good people ; and in the realms of the highest fashion we find the simplest, best, and purest of characters. It is therefore of no consequence as to the shade of fashion and the amount of the rent- roll. It must not be supposed because some leaders of fashion are insolent that all are. A young hostess must try to find the good, true, honourable, generous, well bred^
THE HOSTESS. • $1
well educated member of society, no matter in what con- ditions of life. Read character first, and hesitate before drawing general deductions.
A hostess is the slave of her guests after she has in- vited them ; she must be all attention, and all suavity. If she has nothing to offer them but a small house, a cup of tea, and a smile, she is just as much a hostess as if she were a queen. If she offers them every luxury and is not polite, she is a snob and a vulgarian. There is no such detestable use of one's privileges as to be rude on one's ground. " The man who eats your salt is sacred." To patronize is a great necessity to some natures. There is little opportunity for it in free, brave America, but some mistaken hostesses have gone that way. Every one feels pleasantly toward the woman who invites one to her house ; there is something gracious in the act. But if, after opening her doors, the hostess refuses the welcome, or treats her guests with various degrees of cordiality, why did she ask at all ? Every young Amer- ican can become a model hostess ; she can master etiquette, and create for herself a poHte and cordial manner. She should be as serene as a summer's day ; she should keep all her domestic troubles out of sight. If she entertains, let her do it in her own individual way, — a small way if necessary. There was much in Touchstone's philosophy, — "a poor thing, but mine own." She must have the instinct of hospitality, which is to give pleasure to all one's guests ; and it seems unnecessary to say to any young American hostess, Noblesse oblige. She should be more polite to the shy, ill- dressed visitor from the country — if indeed there is such a thing left in America, where, as Bret Harte says, " The fashions travel by tele- graph " — than to the sweeping city dame, that can take care of herself. A kindly greeting to a gawky youth will
i± THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
never be forgotten; and it is to the humblest that a hostess should address her kindest attentions.
There are born hostesses, like poets, but a hostess can also be made, in which she has the advantage of the poets ; and to the very wealthy hostess we should quote this inestimable advice : —
Si tibi deficiant medici, medici tibi fiant Haec tria : mens hilaris, requies, moderata diaeta.
Horace.
Do not over-feed people. Who is it that says, "If simplicity is admirable in manners and in literary style, in the matter of dinners it becomes exalted into one of the cardinal virtues "?
The ambitious housewife would do well to remember this when she cumbers herself, and thinks too much about her forthcoming banquet. If she ignores this principle of simplicity and falls into the opposite ex- treme of ostentation and pretentiousness, she may bore her guests rather than entertain them.
It is an incontestable fact that dinners are made elabo- rate only at a considerable risk ; as they increase in size and importance, their character is likely to deteriorate. This is true not only with regard to the number of guests, but with reference to the number of dishes that go to make up a bill-of-fare.
In fact we, as Americans, generally err on the side of having too much rather than too little. The terror of running short is agony to the mind of the conscientious housewife. How much will be enough and no more? It stands to reason that the fewer the dishes, the more the cook can concentrate her attention upon them ; and here is reason for reducing the mem/ to its lowest terms. Then to consult the proper gradation.
Brillat Savarin recounts a rather cruel joke perpe-
THE HOSTESS. 33
trated on a man who was a well-known gourmand. The idea was that he should be induced to satisfy himself with the more ordinary viands, and that then the choic- est dishes should be presented in vain before his jaded appetite. This treacherous feast began with a sirloin of beef, a fricandeau of veal, and a stewed carp with stuffing. Then came a magnificent turkey, a pike, six entremets^ and an ample dish of maccaroni and Parmesan cheese. Nor was this all. Another course appeared, composed of sweetbread, surrounded with shrimps in jelly, soft roes, and partridge wings, with a thick sauce or puree of mushrooms. Last of all came the delicacies, — snipes by the dozen, a pheasant in perfect order, and with them a slice of tunny fish, quite fresh. Naturally, the gourmand was hors du combat. As a joke, it was successful ; as an act of hospitality, it was a cruelty ; as pointing a moral and adorning a tale, it may be useful.
This anecdote has its historical value as showing us that the present procession of soup, fish, roast, entree, game, and dessert was not observed one hun- dred years ago, as a fish was served after beef and after turkey.
Dr. Johnson describes a dinner at Mrs. Thrales which shows us what was considered luxurious a hundred years ago. " The dinner was excellent. First course : soups at head and foot, removed by fish and a saddle of mut- ton. Second course : a fowl they call galenan at head, a capon larger than our Irish turkeys at foot. Third course : four different ices, — pineapple, grape, raspberry, and a fourth. In each remove four dishes ; the first two courses served on massive plate."
These "gentlemen of England who live at home at ease," these earls by the king's grace, viceroys of India,
3
34 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
clerks and rich commoners, would laugh at this dinner to-day ; so would our clubmen, our diners at Delmonico's, our millionnaires. Imagine the feelings of that chef who received ten thousand a year, with absolute power of life or death, with a wine-cellar which is a fortress of which he alone knows the weakest spot, — what would he sa>' to such a dinner?
But there are dinners where the gradation is perfect, where luxury stimulates the brain as Chateau Yquem bathes the throat. It would seem as if the Golden Age, the age of Leo X. had come back; and our nine- teenth century shows all the virtues of the art of en- tertaining since the days of Lucullus, purified of the enormities, including dining at eleven in the morning, of the intermediate ages.
It must not be forgotten that this simplicity which is so commended can only be obtained by the most studied, artful care. As Gray's Elegy reads as the most consummately easy and plain poetry in the world, so that we feel that we have but to sit down at the writing- desk and indite one exactly like it, we learn in giving a little, simple, perfect dinner that its combinations must be faultless. Gray wrote every verse of his immortal poem over many times. The hostess who learns enough art to conceal art in her simple dinner has achieved that perfection in her art which Gray reached. Perfect and simple cookery are, like perfect beauty, very rare.
However, if the art of entertaining makes hostesses, hostesses must make the art of entertaining. It is for them to decide the juste milieu between the not enough and the great too much.
BREAKFAST.
Before breakfast a man feels but queasily, And a sinking at the lower abdomen Begins the day with indifferent omen.
Browning. — The Flight of the Dtuhess, And then to breakfast with what appetite you have.
Shakspeare.
BREAKFxA.ST is a hard thing to manage in America, particularly in a country-house, as people have different ideas about eating a hearty meal at nine o'clock or earlier. All who have lived much in Europe are apt to prefer the Continental fashion of a cup of tea or coffee in one's room, with perhaps an egg and a roll ; then to do one's work or pleasure, as the case may be, and to take the dejeuner a la fourchette at eleven or twelve. To most brain-workers this is a blessed boon, for the heavy American breakfast of chops, steaks, eggs, force- meat balls, sausages, broiled chicken, stewed potatoes, baked beans, and hot cakes, good as it is, is apt to render a person stupid.
It would be better if this meal could be rendered less heavy, and that a visitor should always be given the alternative of taking a cup of tea in her room, and not appearing until luncheon.
The breakfast dishes most to be commended may begin with the omelet. This the French make to per- fection. Indeed, Gustav Droz wrote a story once for the
36 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
purpose of giving its recipe. The story is of a young couple lost in a forest, who take refuge in a wood-cutter's hut. They ask for food, and are told that they can have an omelet :
" The old woman had gone to fetch a frying-pan, and was then throwing a handful of shavings on the fire.
" In the midst of this strange and rude interior Louise seemed to me so fine and delicate, so elegant, with her \orig gaitts de Suede, her little boots, and her tucked-up skirts. With her two hands stretched out she sheltered her face from the flames, and from the corner of her eye, while I was talking with the splitters, she watched the butter that began to sing in the frying-pan.
" Suddenly she rose, and taking the handle of the frying-pan from the old woman's hand, * Let me help you make the omelet,' she said. The good woman let go the pan with a smile, and Louise found herself alone in the position of a fisherman at the moment when his float begins to bob. The fire hardly threw any light ; her eyes were fixed on the liquid butter, her arms outstretched, and she was biting her lips a little, doubtless to increase her strength.
" ' It is a bit heavy for Madame's little hands,' said the old man. ' I bet that it is the first time you ever made an omelet in a wood-cutter's hut, is it not, my little lady?'
" Louise made a sign of assent without removing her eyes from the frying-pan.
" ' The eggs ! the eggs ! ' she cried all at once, with such an expression of alarm that we all burst out laugh- ing. ' The eggs ! the butter is bubbling ! quick, quick ! '
'' The old woman was beating the eggs with animation. ' And the herbs ! ' cried the old man. * And the bacon,
BREAKFAST. 37
and the salt,* said the young man. Then we all set to work, chopping the herbs and cutting the bacon, while Louisa cried, ' Quick ! quick ! '
" At last there was a big splash in the frying-pan, and the great act began. We all stood around the fire watching anxiously, for each having had a finger in the pie, the result interested us all. The good old woman, kneeling down by the dish, lifted up with her knife the corners of the omelet, which was beginning to brown.
" ' Now Madame has only to turn it,' said the old woman.
" ' A little sharp jerk,' said the old man.
" ' Not too strong,' said the young man.
" ' One jerk ! houp ! my dear,' said I.
" ' If you all speak at once I shall never dare ; besides, it is very heavy, you know — '
" ' One little sharp jerk — '
" ' But I cannot — it will all go into the fire — oh ! '
** In the heat of the action her hood had fallen ; she was red as a peach, her eyes glistened, and in spite of her anxiety, she burst out laughing. At last, after a supreme effort, the frying-pan executed a rapid move- ment and the omelette rolled, a little heavily I must confess, on the large plate which the old woman held.
" Never was there a finer-looking omelet."
This is an excellent description of the dish which is made for you at every little cabaret in France, as well as at the best hotels. That dexterous turn of the wrist by which the omelet is turned over is, however, hard to reach. Let any lady try it. I have been taken into the kitchen in a hotel in the Riviera to see a cook who was so dexterous as to turn the frying-pan over entirely, without spilling the omelet.
38 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
However, they are innumerable, the omelet family, plain, and with parsley, the fancy omelet, ana the creamy omelet. Learn to make every sort from any cooking-book, and your family will never starve.
Conquer the art of toasting bacon with a fork ; it is a fine relish for your egg, no matter how cooked. To fry good English bacon in a pan until it is hard, is to disfigure one of Fortune's best gifts.
Study above all things to learn how to produce good toast ; not all the cooks in the great kingdom or empire or republic of France (whatever it may be at this minute) can produce a good slice of toast. They call it J>ain roti, and well they may ; for after the poor bread has been burned they put it in the oven and roast it. No human being can eat it. It is taken away and grated up for sawdust.
They make delicious toast in England, and in a few houses in America. The bread should be a little stale, the slice cut thin, the fire perfect, a toasting-fork should hold it before coals, which are as bright as Juno's eyes. It should be a delicate brown, dropped on a hot plate, fresh butter put on at once, and then, ah ! 't would tempt the dying anchorite to eat. Then conquer cream toast ; and there is an exalted substance called Boston brown bread which is delicious, toasted and boiled in milk.
Muffins are generally failures in these United States. Why, after conquering the English, we cannot conquer their muffins, I do not know. They are well worth repeated efforts. We make up on our hot biscuits and rolls; and as for our waffles, griddle -cakes, and Sally Lunns, we distance competition. Do not believe that they are unhealthy ! Nothing that is well cooked is unhealthy to everybody ; and all things which are good
BREAKFAST. 39
are unhealthy to somebody. Every one must determine for himself what is healthy and unhealthy.
A foreign breakfast in France consists of eggs in some form, — frequently au beurre not?', which is butter melted in a little vinegar and allowed to brown, — a stew of vegetables and meat, a little cold meat (tongue, ham, or cold roast beef,) a very good salad, a small dish of stewed fruit 01 a little pastry, cheese, fruit, and coffee, and always red wine.
Or perhaps an omelet or egg au plat (simply dropped on a hot plate), mutton cutlets, and fried pota- toes, perhaps stewed pigeons, with spinach or green peas, or trout from the lake, followed by a beefsteak, with highly flavoured Alpine strawberries or fresh apricots or figs, then all eating is done for the day, until seven o'clock dinner. This is of course the mid-day dejeihier a la fourchette. At the earlier breakfast a Swiss hotel offers only coffee, rolls, butter, and honey.
All sorts of stews — kidney, liver, chicken, veal, and beef — are good, and every sort of httle pan-fish. In our happy country we can add the oyster stew, or the lobster in cream, the familiar sausage, and the hereditary hash ; if any one knows how to make good corned-beef hash she need not fear to entertain the king.
There are those who know how to broil a chicken, but they are few, — " Amongst the few, the immortal names which are not born to die." There are others, also few, who know how to broil ham so that it will not be hard, and on it to drop the egg so that it be like Saturn, — a golden ball in a ring of silver.
Amongst the good dishes and cheap dishes which I have seen served in France for a breakfast I recommend lambs' feet in a white sauce, with a suspicion of onion.
40 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
All sorts of fricassees and warmed over things can be made most deliciously for breakfast. Many people lite a salt mackerel or a broiled herring for breakfast; ;liese are good avant gouts, stimulating the appetite. The Danes and Swedes have every form of dried fish, and even some strange fowl served in this way. Dried beef served up with eggs is comforting to some stomachs. Smoked salmon appeals to others ; and people with an ostrich digestion like toasted cheese or Welsh rarebits. The fishball of our forefathers is a supreme delicacy if well made, as is creamed codfish ; but warmed over pie, or warmed over mutton or beef, are detestable. The appetite is in a parlous state at nine o'clock and needs to be tempted ; a bit of breakfast bacon, a bit of toast, an ^gg, and a fresh slice of melon or a cold sliced tomato in summer, voila tout! as the French say. Begin with the melon or a plate of strawberries. These early breakfasts at nine o'clock may be followed by the hot cake, but later on the dejeuner a la fourchette, which with us becomes luncheon, demands another order of meal, as we have seen, more like a plain dinner.
It is a great comfort to the housekeeper, or to the lady who has been imprisoned behind the tea and coffee pot that she may serve thence a large family, to some- times escape and have both tea and coifee served from the side tables. Of course, for a small and intimate breakfast there is nothing like the " steaming urn," and the tea made by the lady at the table ; and the Hon. Thomas H. Benton declared that he "liked to drink his tea from a cup which had been washed by a lady." Woman is the genius of the tea-kettle.
To make a good cup of coffee is a rare accomplishment. Perhaps the old method is as good as any : a small
BREAKFAST. 4 1
cupfu! of roasted and ground coffee, one third Mocha and two thirds Java, a small tgg, shell and all, broken into the pot with the dry coffee. Stir well with a spoon and then pour on three pints of boiling water ; let it boil from five to ten minutes, counting from the time it begins to boil. Then pour in a cupful of cold water, and turn a little of the coffee into a cup to see that the nozzle of the pot is not filled with grounds. Turn this back, and let the coffee stand a few minutes to settle, taking care that it does not boil again. The advantages of boiled egg with coffee is, that the yolk gives a rich flavour and good colour; also the shells and the white keep the grounds in order, settUng them at the bottom of the pot.
But the most economical and the easiest way of mak- ing coffee is by filtering. The French coffee biggin should be used. It consists of two cylindrical tin ves- sels, one fitting into the other, the bottom of the upper being a fine strainer. Another coarser strainer, with a rod coming from the centre, is placed on this. Then the coffee, which must be finely ground, is put in, and another strainer is placed on the top of the rod. The boiling water is poured on, and the pot set where it will keep hot, but not boil, until the water has gone through. This will make a clear, strong coffee with a rich, smooth flavour.
The advantage of the two strainers is, that the one coming next to the fine strainer prevents the grounds from filling up the fine holes, and so the coffee is clear, — a grand desideratum. Boiled milk should be served with coffee for an early breakfast. Clear coffee, ca/e noi'r, is served after dinner, and in France, always after the twelve o'clock breakfast.
42
For a nine o'clock breakfast the hostess shou/d also serve tea, and perhaps chocolate, if she has a large family of guests, as all cannot drink coffee for breakfast.
Pigs' feet a la poulette find favour in Paris, and are delicious as prepared there; also calf's liver i I'Alsa- cienne. Chicken livers are very nice, and cod's tongues with black butter cannot be surpassed. Mutton kidneys with bacon are desirable, and all the livers and kidneys en brochette with bacon, empaled on a spit, are excellent. Hashed lamb a la Zingara is highly peppered and very good.
Broiled fish, broiled chicken, broiled ham, broiled steak and chops are always good for breakfast. The gridiron made Saint Lawrence fit for heaven, and its qualities have been elevating and refining ever since.
The summer breakfast can be very nice. Crab, clam, lobster, — all are admirable. Fresh fish should be served whenever one can get it. Devilled kidneys and broiled bones do for supper, but fresh fish and easily digested food should replace these heavier dainties for breakfast.
Stewed fruit is much used on the Continent at an early breakfast. It is thought to avert dyspepsia. Americans prefer to eat fruit fresh, and therefore have not learned to stew it. Stewing is, however, a branch of cookery well worth the attention of a first-class housekeeper. It makes canned fruit much better to stew it with sugar. Stewed cherries are delicious and very healthy ; and all the berries, even if a little stale, can be stewed into a good dish, as can the dried fruits, like prunes, etc.
Stewed pears make an elegant dessert served with whipped cream ; but this is too rich for breakfast. Baked pears with cream are sometimes offered, and eggs in every form, — scrambled, dropped, boiled, stuffed, and
BREAKFAST. 43
even boiled hard, sliced and dressed as a salad. " What is so good as an egg salad for a hungry person? " asked a hostess in the Adirondacks who had nothing else to offer ! Eggs are the staple for breakfast.
Ham omelet with a little parsley, lamb chops with green peas, tripe a la Bourdelaise, hashed turkey, hashed chicken with cream, and breaded veal with tomato sauce, calf's brains with a black butter, stewed veal a la Chasseur, broiled shad's roe, broiled soft- shell clams, minced tenderloin with Lyonnaise potatoes, blue-fish au gratin, broiled steak with water-cress, picked-up codfish, and smoked beef in cream are of the thousand and one delicacies for the early breakfast, — if one can eat them.
It is better to eat a saucer of oatmeal and cream at nine o'clock, take a cup of tea, and do one's work ; then at twelve to sit down to as good a breakfast as possible, — a regular dejeuner a la foicrchette. The digestion is then active ; the brain after several hours work needs repose, and at one or two o'clock can go to work again like a giant refreshed.
An early breakfast with meat is thought by foreign doctors not to be good for children. But in France they give children wine at a very early age, which is rarely done in this country. At all boarding-schools and hospitals wine is given to young children. Certainly there are fewer drunkards and fewer dyspeptics in France than in America.
Brillat Savarin says of coffee, "It is beyond doubt that coffee acts upon the functions of the brain as an excitant." Voltaire and Buffon drank a great deal of coffee. If it deprives persons of sleep it should never be taken. It is to many a poison ; and hospitals are full
44 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
of men maae cripples by the immoderate stimulus of coffee. The Spanish people live and flourish on choco- late ; introduced into Spain during the seventeenth century, it crossed the Pyrenees with Anne of Austria, daughter of Philip II. and wife of Louis XIII., and at the commencement of the Regency was more in vogue than coffee.
Many modern writers advise a good cup of chocolate at breakfast as wholesome and easily digested, and it is good for clergymen, lawyers, and travellers. In America it is considered heavy and headachy ; and doubtless the climate has something to do with this. Cocoa and the lighter preparations of chocolate are good at sea, and very comforting to those who find their nerves too much on the alert to stand coffee or tea. Every one must con- sult his own health and taste in this as in all matters.
The boldest attempts to increase the enjoyments of the palate, or to tell people what they shall eat or drink, are constantly overthrown by some subtile enemy in the stomach; and breakfasts should especially be so light that they can tickle the palate without disturbing the brain. A red herring is a good appetizer.
" Meet me at breakfast alone, And then I will give you a dish Which really deserves to be known, Though 't is not the genteelest of fish. You must promise to come, for I said A splendid red herring I 'd buy. Nay, turn not aside your proud head ; You '11 like it, I know, when you try.
" If moisture the herring betray, Drain till from the moisture 't is free. Warm it through in the usual way, Then serve it for you and for me.
BREAKFAST. 45
A piece of cold butter prepare,
To rub it when ready it lies ;
Egg sauce and potatoes don't spare,
And the flavour will cause you surprise."
It is not only the man who has eaten a heavy supper the night before ; it is not only the heavy drinker, al- though brandy and soda are not the best of appetite pro- vokers, so they say ; but it is also the brainworker who finds it impossible to eat in the morning. For sleep has the effect of eating. Who sleeps, eats, says the French proverb; and we often find healthy children unwilling to eat an early breakfast. Appetites vary both in indi- viduals and at various seasons of the year. Nothing can be more unwise than to make children eat when they do not wish to do so. During the summer months we are all of us less inclined for food than when sharp set by hard exercise in the frosty air ; and we loathe in July what we like in winter.
» The heavy domestic breakfast of steak and mutton- chops in summer is often repellent to a dehcate child. The perfection of good living is to have what you want exactly when you want it. A slice of fresh melon, a plate of strawberries, a thin slice of bread and butter may be much better for breakfast in summer than the baked beans and stewed codfish of a later season. Do not force a child to eat even a baked potato if he does not like it.
It is maintained by some that a strong will can keep off sea-sickness or any other malady. This is a fallacy. No strong will can make a delicate stomach digest a heavy breakfast at nine o'clock. Therefore we begin and end with the same idea, — breakfast is a hard thing to man- age in America.
46 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
In England, however, it is a very happy-go-lucky meal ; and although the essentials are on the table, peo- ple are privileged to rise and help themselves from the sideboard. I may say that I have never seen a fashion- able EngUsh hostess at a nine o'clock breakfast, although the meal is always ready for those who wish it.
For sending breakfasts to rooms, trays are prepared with teapot, sugar, and cream, a plate of toast, eggs boiled, with cup, spoon, salt and pepper, a little pat of butter, and if desired a plate of chops or chicken, plates, knives, forks, and napkins. For an English country- house the supply of breakfast trays is like that of a hotel. The pretty little Satsuma sets of small teapot, cream jug, and sugar-bowl, are favourites.
When breakfast is served in the dining-room, a white cloth is generally laid, although some ladies prefer vari- ously coloured linen, with napkins to match. A vase of flowers or a dish of fruit should be placed in the centre. The table is then set as for dinner, with smaller plates„ and all sorts of pretty china, like an egg dish with a hen sitting contentedly, a butter plate with a recumbent cow, a sardine dish with fishes in Majolica, — in fact, any suggestive fancy. Hot plates for a winter break- fast in a plate-warmer near the table add much to the comfort.
Finger bowls with napkins under them should be placed on the sideboard and handed to the guest with the fruit. It is a matter of taste as to whether fruit pre- cedes or finishes the breakfast ; and the servant must watch the decision of the guest.
A grand breakfast to a distinguished foreigner, oi some great home celebrity at Delmonico's for instance, would be, —
BREAKFAST. 47
A table loaded with flowers. Oysters on the half-shell. Chablis.
Eggs stuffed. Eggs in black butter, {au beiirre noir).
Chops and green peas. Champagne.
Lyonnaise potatoes. Sweetbreads. Spinach.
Woodcock. Partridges.
Salad of lettuce. Claret.
Cheese /tpz/fl'z/. Dessert : Charlotte Russe. Fruit Jelly. Ices.
Liqueurs. Grapes. Peaches. Pears.
Coffee.
A breakfast even at twelve o'clock is thus made notice- ably lighter than the meal called lunch. It may be intro- duced by clam juice in cups, or bouillon, but is often served without either. These breakfasts are generally prefaced by a short reception, where all the guests are presented to the foreigner of distinction. There is no formality about leaving. Indeed, these breakfasts are given in order to avoid that.
For an ordinary breakfast at nine o'clock in a family of ten, we should say that the menu should be something as follows : The host and hostess being present, the lady makes the tea. Oatmeal and cream would then be offered; after that a broiled chicken would be placed before the host, which he carves if he can. An ome- let is placed before the lady or passed ; stewed pota- toes are passed, and toast or muffins. Hot cakes finish this breakfast, unless fruit is also added. It is con- sidered a very healthful thing to eat an orange before breakfast. But who can eat an orange well? One
48 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
must go to Spain to see that done. The senorita cuts off the rind with her silver knife. Then putting her fork into the peeled fruit, she gently detaches small slices from the pulp, leaving the core and seeds untouched ; passing the fork upward, she detaches every morsel with her pearly teeth, looking very pretty the while, and contrives to eat the whole orange without losing a drop of the juice, and lays down the core with the fork still in it.
It seems hardly necessary to say to an American lady that she should be neatly dressed at breakfast. The pretty white morning dresses which are worn in America are rarely seen in Europe, perhaps because of the dif- ference of climate. In England elderly ladies and young married women sometimes appear in very smart tea gowns of dark silk over a colour ; but almost always the young ladies come in the yachting or tennis dresses which they will wear until dinner-time, and almost al- ways in summer, in hats. In America the variety of morning dresses is endless, of which the dark jacket over a white vest, the serviceable merino, the flannel, the dark foulards, are favourites.
In summer, thin lawns, percales, Marseilles suits,
calicos, and ginghams can be so prettily made as to
rival all the other costumes for coquetry and grace.
" Still to be neat, still to be drest As she were going to a feast,"
such should be the breakfast dress of the young matron. It need not be fine ; it need not be expensive ; but it should be neat and becoming. The hair should be carefully arranged, and the feet either in good, stout shoes for the subsequent walk, or in the natty stocking and well fitting slipper, which has moved the poet to such feeling verses,
THE LUNCH.
" A Gothic window, where a damask curtain Made the blank daylight shadowy and uncertain; A slab of agate on four eagle-talons Held trimly up and neatly taught to balance ; A porcelain dish, o'er which in many a cluster Plump grapes hung down, dead ripe, and without lustre; A melon cut in thin, delicious slices, A cake, that seemed mosaic-work in spices ; Two china cups, with golden tulips sunny, And rich inside, with chocolate like honey ; And she and I the banquet scene completing With dreamy words, and very pleasant eating."
IF all lunches could be as poetic and as simple and as luxurious as this, the hostess would have little trouble in giving a lunch. But, alas ! from the slice of cold ham, or chicken, and bread and butter, has grown the grand hunt breakfast, and the ladies' lunch, most delicious of luxurious time-killers. The lunch, therefore, has become in the house of the opulent as elaborate as the dinner.
Twenty years ago in England I had the pleasure of lunching with Lord Houghton, and I well remember the simplicity of that meal. A cup of bouillon, a joint of mutton, roasted, and carved by the host, a tart, some peaches, very fine hot- house fruit, and a glass of sherry was all that was served on a very plain table to twenty guests. But what a company of wits, belles, and beauties we had to eat it ! I once lunched with Browning on a much simpler bill of fare. I have lunched at the beauti- ful house of Sir John Millais on what might have been a
4
50 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
good family dinner with us. And I have lunched in Hampton Court, in the apartments of Mr. Beresford, now dead, who was a friend of George the Fourth and an old Tory whipper-in, on a slice of cold meat, a cutlet, a gooseberry tart, and some strawberries as large as toma- toes from the garden which was once Anne Boleyn's.
What a great difference between these lunches and a ladies' lunch in New York, which, laid for twenty-eight people, offers every kind of wine, every luxury of fish, flesh, and fowl, flowers which exhibit the most over- whelming luxury of an extravagant period, fruits and bon- bons and bonboimih'es, painted fans to carry home, with ribbons on which is painted one's monogram, etc.
I have seen summer wild- flowers in winter at a ladies' lunch, as the last concession to a fancy for what is un- usual. The order having been given in September, the facile gardener raised these flowers for this especial lunch. Far more expensive than roses at a dollar apiece is this bringing of May into January. It is impossible to say where luxury should stop ; and, if people can afford it, there is no necessity for its stopping. It is only to be regretted that luxury frightens those who might like to give simple lunches.
A lunch-party of ladies should not be crowded, as handsome gowns take up a great deal of room ; and there- fore a lunch for ten ladies in a moderate house is better than a larger number. As ladies always wear their bon- nets the room should not be too hot.
The menu is very much the same as a dinner, except- ing the soup. In its place cups of bouillon or of clam juice, boiled with cream and a bit of sherry, are placed before each plate. There follows presumably a plate of lobster croquettes with a rich sauce, filet de dceuf with
THE LUNCH. 5 1
truffles and mushrooms, sweetbread and green peas, per- haps asparagus or cauliflower.
Then comes so7'bet, or Roman punch, much needed to cool the palate and to invigorate the appetite for further delicacies. The Roman punch is now often served in very fanciful frozen shapes of ice, resembling roses, or fruit of various kinds. If a lady is not near a confectioner she should learn to make this herself. It is very easy, if one only compounds it at first with care. Maraschino cordial or fine old Jamaica rum being mixed with water and sugar as for a punch, and well frozen.
The game follows, and the salad. These two are often served together. After that the ices and fruit. Cheese is rarely offered at a lady's lunch, excepting in the form of cheese straws. Chateau Yquem, champagne, and claret are the favourite wines. Cordial is offered after- ward with the coffee. A lady's lunch-party is supposed to begin at one o'clock and end at three.
It is a delightful way of showing all one's pretty things. At a luncheon in New York I have seen a tablecloth of linen into which has been inserted duchesse lace worth, doubtless, several hundred dollars, the napkins all trimmed with duchesse, worth at least twenty dollars apiece. This elegant drapery was thrown over a woollen broad- cloth underpiece of a pale lilac.
In the middle of the table was a grand epergne of the time of Louis Seize ; the glass and china were superb. At the proper angle stood silver and gold cups, orna- mental pitchers, and claret jugs. At every lady's plate stood a splendid bouquet tied with a long satin ribbon, and various small favours, as fans and fanciful menus were given.
^s the lunch went on we were treated to new surprises
52 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
of napery and of Sevres plates. The napkins became Russian, embroidered with gold thread, as the spoons and forks were also of Russian silver and gold, beautifully enamelled. Then came those embroidered with heraldic animals, — the Hon and the two-headed eagle and griffin, — the monogram gracefully intertwined.
Plates were used, apparently of solid gold and beautiful workmanship. The Roman punch was hidden in the heart of a water lily, which looked uncommonly innocent with its heart of fire. The service of this lunch was so perfect that we did not see how we were served ; it all moved as if to music. Pleasant chat was the only addi- tion which our hostess left for us to add to her hospital- ity. I have lunched at many great houses all over the world, but I have never seen so luxurious a picture as this lunch was.
It has been a question whether oysters on the half- shell should be served at a lady's lunch. For my part I think that they should, although many ladies prefer to begin with the bouillon. All sorts of hors d^osuvres, like olives, anchovies, and other relishes, are in order.
In summer, ladies sometimes serve a cold luncheon, beginning with iced bouillon, salmon covered with a green sauce, cold birds and salads, ices and strawberries, or peaches frozen in cream. Cold asparagus dressed as a salad is very good at this meal.
In English country-houses the luncheon is a very solid meal, beginning with a stout roast with hot vegetables, while chicken salad, a cold ham, and various meat pies stand on the sideboard. The gentlemen get up and help the ladies ; the servants, after going about once or twice, often leave the room that conversation may be more free.
THE LUNCH. 53
It might well improve the young housekeeper to study the question of potted meats, the preparation of Melton veal, the various egg salads, as well as those of potato, of lobster and chicken, so that she may be prepared with dishes for an improvised lunch. Particularly in the country should this be done.
The etiquette of invitations for a ladies' lunch is the
same as that of a dinner. They are sent out a fortnight
before ; they are carefully engraved, or they are written
on note paper.
Mrs. Somerville
Requests the pleasure of
Mrs. Montgomery's
Company at lunch on Thursday, 15th,
at I o'clock. R. S. V. P.
This should be answered at once, and the whole engage- ment treated with the gravity of a dinner engagement.
These lunch-parties are very convenient for ladies who, from illness or indisposition to society, cannot go out in the evening. It is also very convenient if the lady of the house has a husband who does not like society and who finds a dinner-party a bore.
The usual custom is for ladies to dress in dark street dresses, and their very best. That with an American lady means much, for an American husband stops at no expense. Worth says that American women are the best customers he has, — far better than queens. The latter ask the price, and occasionally haggle ; American women may ask the price, but the order is, the very best you can do.
Luncheons are very fashionable in England, especially on Sunday. These lunches, although luxurious, are by
54 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
no means the costly spreads which American women indulge in. They are attended by gentlemen as well as ladies, for in a land where a man does not go to the House of Commons until five in the afternoon he may well lunch with his family. What time did our fore- fathers lunch? In the reign of Francis the First the polite French rose at five, dined at nine, supped at five, and went to bed at nine. Froissart speaks of " waiting upon the Duke of Lancaster at five in the afternoon after he had supped." If our ancestors dined at nine, when did they lunch?
After some centuries the dinner hour grew to be ten in the morning, by which time they had beseiged a town and burned up a dozen heretics, probably to give them a good appetite, a sort of avant gout. The later hours now in vogue did not prevail until after the Restoration.
Lunch has remained fastened at one o'clock, for a number of years at least. In England, curiously enough, they give you no napkins at this meal, which certainly requires them.
A hunt breakfast in America is, of course, a hearty meal, to which the men and women are asked who have an idea of riding to hounds. It is usually served at little tables, and the meal begins with hot bouillon. It is a heartier meal than a lady's lunch, and as luxurious as the hostess pleases ; but it does not wind up with ices and fruits, although it may begin with an orange. Much more wine is drunk than at a lady's lunch, and yet some hunters prefer to begin the day with tea only. Every- thing should be offered, and what is not liked can be refused.
" What is hit, is History, And what is missed is Mystery."
THE LUNCH. §5
There are flimous breakfasts in London which are not the early morning meal, neither are they called luncheons. It is the constant habit of the literary world of London to have reunions of scientific and agreeable people early in the day, and what would be called a party in the evening, is called a breakfast. We should call it a reception, except that one is asked at eleven o'clock. But the greatest misnomer of all is the habit in London of giving a dinner, a ball, and a supper out of doors at five o'clock, and calling that a " breakfast." Except that the gentlemen are in morning dress and the ladies in bonnets this has no resemblance to what we call breakfast.
Breakfast at nine, or earlier, is a solemn process. It has no great meaning for us, who have our children to send to school, our husbands to prepare for business, ourselves for a busy day or a long journey. For the very luxurious it no longer exists.
Luncheon on the contrary is apt to be a lively and exhilarating occasion. It is the best moment in the day to some people. A thousand dollars is not an unusual sum to expend on a lady's lunch in New York for eighteen or twenty- five guests, counting the favours, the flowers, the wines, and the viands, and even then we have not entered into the cost of the china, the glass, porcelain, cloisomie, Dresden, Sevres, and silver, which make the table a picture. The jewelled goblets from Carlsbad, the knives and forks with crystal handles, set in silver, from Bohemia, and the endless succession of beautiful plates, — who shall estimate the cost of all this ?
As to the precedence of plates, it is meet that China, oldest of nations, should suffice for the soup. The oysters have already been served on shell-like Majolica.
56 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
England, a maritime nation surrounded by ocean, must furnish the plates for the fish. For the roast, too, what plates so good as Doulton, real English, substantial faience ?
For the Bouchers a la Reine and all the entrees we must have Sevres again.
Japanese will do for the filet aux champignons^ the venison, the pieces de resistance, as well as English. Japanese plates are strong. But here we are running into dinner; indeed, these two feasts do run into each other.
One should not have a roast at ladies' lunch, unless it be a roast pheasant.
Dresden china plates painted with fruits and flowers should be used for the dessert. On these choice plates, with perforated edges marked " x\ R " on the back, should lie the ices frozen as natural fruits. We can scarcely tell the frozen banana or peach before us, from the painted banana on our plate.
For the candied fruit, we must again have Sevres. Then a gold dish filled with rose-water must be passed. We dip a bit of the napkin in it, for in this country we do have napkins with our luncheon, and wipe our lips and fingers. This is called a trempoir.
The cordials at the end of the dinner must be served in cups of Russian gold filagree supporting glass. There is an analogy between the rival, luscious richness of the cordial and the cup.
The coffee-cups must be thin as egg-shells, of the most delicate French or American china. We make most delicate china and porcelain cups ourselves nowa- days, at Newark, Trenton, and a dozen other places.
There is a vast deal of waste in ofl"ering so much wine
THE LUNCH. 57
at a ladies' lunch. American women cannot drink much wine ; the climate forbids it. We have not been brought up on beer, or on anything more stimulating than ice- water. Foreign physicians say that this is the cause of all our woes, our dyspepsia, our nervous exhaustion, our rheumatism and hysteria. I believe that climate and constitution decide these things for us. We are not prone to over- eat ourselves, to drink too much wine ; and if the absence of these grosser tastes is visible in pale cheeks and thin arms, is not that better than the other extreme?
All entertaining can go on perfectly well without wine, if people so decide. It would be impossible, however, to make many poetical quotations without an allusion to the " ruby," as Dick Swiveller called it. Since Cleopatra dissolved the pearl, the wine-cup has held the gems of human fancy.
Champagne Cup : One pint bottle of soda water, one quart dry champagne, one wine-glass of brandy, a few fresh strawberries, a peach quartered, sugar to taste ; cracked ice.
Another recipe : One quart dry champagne, one pint bottle of Rhine wine, fruit and ice as above ; cracked ice. Mix in a large pitcher.
Claret Cup : One bottle of claret, one pint bottle of soda water, one wine-glass brandy, half a wine-glass of lemon- juice, half a pound of lump sugar, a few slices of fresh cucumber ; mix in cracked ice.
^^int Julep : Fresh mint, a few drops of orange bitters and Maraschino, a small glass of liqueur, brandy or whiskey, put in a tumbler half full of broken ice ; shake well, and serve with fruit on top with straws.
Another recipe for Miiif Julep : Half a glass of port wine, a few drops of Maraschino, mint, sugar, a thin slice of lemon, shake the cracked ice from glass to glass, add strawberry or pineapple.
58 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
Turkish Sherbets : Extract by pressure or infusion the rich juice and fine perfume of any of the odouriferous flowers or fruits; mix them in any number or quantity to taste. When these essences, extracts, or infusions are pre- pared they may be immediately used by adding a proper proportion of sugar or syrup ; and water. Some acid fruits, such as lemon or pomegranate, are used to raise the flavour, but not to overpower the chief perfume. Fill the cup with cracked ice and add what wine or spirit is preferred.
Claret Cobbler : One bottle wine, one bottle ApoUinaris or Seltzer, one lemon, half a pound of sugar ; serve with ice.
Champagne Cobbler : One bottle of champagne, one half bottle of white wine, much cracked ice, strawberries, peaches or sliced oranges.
Shej'ry Cobbler: Full wine-glass of sherry, very little brandy, sugar, sliced lemon, cracked ice. This is but one tumblerful.
Kiurunel : This liqueur is very good served with shaved ice in small green claret-cups.
Punch : One bottle Arrack, one bottle brandy, two quart bottles dry champagne, one tumblerful of orange curagoa, one pound of cracked sugar, half a dozen lemons sliced, half a dozen oranges sliced. Fill the bowl with large lump of ice and add one quart of water.
Sha7idygaff : London porter and ginger ale, half and half.
AFTERNOON TEA.
*' And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn Throws up a steamy column, and the cups That cheer but not inebriate wait on each, So let us welcome peaceful evening in."
WHATEVER objections can be urged against all other systems of entertaining, including the ex- pense, the bore it is to a gentleman to have his house turned inside out, the fatigue to the lady, the disorganiza- tion of domestic service, nothing can be said against afternoon tea, unless that it may lead to a new disease, the delirium teamens. There is danger to nervous women in our climate in too great indulgence in this delicious beverage. It sometimes murders sleep and impairs digestion. We cannot claim that it is always safer than opium. It was very much abused in England in 1678, ten years after Lords Arlington and Ossory brought it over from the meditative Dutchman, who was the first European to appreciate it. It was then called a ** black water with an acrid taste." It cost, however, in England sixty shillings a pound, so that it must have been fashionable. Pepys in his diary records that he sent for a cup of tea, a " China drink which he had not used before." He did not like it, but then he did not like the " Midsummer Night's Dream." " The most insipid, ridiculous play I ever saw in my life," he writes; so we 4o not care what he thought about a blessed cup of tea.
60 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
In the middle of the sixteenth century, with pasties and ale for breakfast, with sugared cakes and spiced wines at various hours of the day, with solid " noonings," and suppers with strong potations of sack and such possets as were the ordinary refreshments, it is not prob- able that tea would have been appreciated. The Dutch were crafty, however ; they saw that there was a common need of a hot, rather stimulating beverage, which had no intoxicating effects. They exported sage enough to pay for the tea, and got the better of even the wily Chinaman, who avowed some time after, in their trade with America, "That spent tea-leaves, dried again, were good enough for second-chop Enghshmen."
Jonas Haunay wrote a treatise against tea- drinking in Johnson's time, and that vast, insatiable, and shameless tea-drinker took up the cudgels for tea, settling it as a brain-inspirer for all time, and wrote Rasselas on the strength of it. Cobbett wrote against its use by the labouring classes, and the " Edinburgh Review " endorsed his arguments, stating that a " prohibition absolute and uncompromising of the noxious beverage was the first step toward insuring health and strength for the poor," and asserting that when a labourer fancied himself refreshed with a mess of this stuff, sweetened with the coarsest brown sugar and diluted by azure- blue milk, it was only the warmth of the water which consoled him for the moment. Cobbett claimed that the tea-table cost more to support than would keep two children at nurse.
The " Quarterly Review " in an article written perhaps by the most famous chemist of the day, said, however, that " tea relieves the pains of hunger rather by mechan- ical distention than by supplying the waste of nature by adequate sustenance," but claimed for it the power of
AFTERNOON TEA. 6 1
calm, placid, and benignant exhilaration, greatly stimulat- ing the stomach, when fatigued by digestive exertion, and acting as an appropriate diluent of the chyle. More recent inquiries into the qualities of the peculiar power of tea have tended to raise it in popular esteem, although no one has satisfactorily explained why it has become so universally necessary to the human race.
An agreeable little book called ''The Beverages We Indulge In," "The Herbs Which We Infuse," or some such title, had a great deal to do with the adoption of tea as a drink for young men who were training for a boat- race, or who desired to economize their strength for a mountain climb. But every one, from the tired washer- woman to the student, the wrestler, the fine lady, and the strong man, demands a cup of tea.
To the invalid it is the dearest solace, dangerous though it may be. Tannin, the astringent element in tea, is bad for delicate stomachs and seems to ruin appe- tite. Tea, therefore, should never be allowed to stand. Hot water poured on the leaves and poured off into a cup can hardly afford the tannin time to get out. Some tea- drinkers even put the grounds in a silver ball, perforated, and swing this through a cup of boiling water, and in this way is produced the most delicate cup of tea.
The famous Chinese lyric which is painted on almost all the teapots of the Empire is highly poetical. " On a slow fire set a tripod ; fill it with clear rain-water. Boil it as long as it would be needed to turn fish white and lobsters red. Throw this upon the delicate leaves of choice tea ; let it remain as long as the vapour rises in a cloud. At your ease drink the pure liquor, which will chase away the five causes of trouble."
The "tea of the cells of the Dragons," the purest
62 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
Pekoe from the leaf-buds of three-year-old plants, no one ever sees in Europe ; but we have secured many brands of tea which are sufficiently good, and the famous Indian tea brought in by the great Exposition in Paris in 1889 is fast gaining an enviable reputation. It has a perfect bouquet and flavour. Green tea, beloved by our grandmothers and still a favourite with some connois- seurs, has proved to have so much theine, the element of intoxication in tea, that it is forbidden to nervous people. Tea saves food by its action in preventing various wastes to the system. It is thus peculiarly acceptable to elderly persons, and to the tired labouring- woman. Doubtless Mrs. Gamp's famous teapot with which she entertained Betsy Prig contained green tea.
There is an unusually large amount of nitrogen in theine, and green tea possesses so large a proportion of it as to be positively dangerous. In the process of dry- ing and roasting, this volatile oil is engendered. The Chinese dare not use it for a year after the leaf has been prepared, and the packer and unpacker of the tea suifer much from paralysis. The tasters of tea become fre- quently great invalids, unable to eat ; therefore om favourite herb has its dangers.
More consoling is the legend of the origin of the plant. A drowsy hermit, after long wrestling with sleep, cut off his eyelids and cast them on the ground. From them sprang a shrub whose leaves, shaped like eyelids and bordered with a fringe of lashes, possessed the power of warding off sleep. This was in the third century, and the plant was tea.
But what has all this to do with that pleasant visage of a steaming kettle boihng over a blazing alcohol lamp, the silver tea-caddy, the padded cozy to keep the teapot
AFTERNOON TEA. 6^
Warm, the basket of cake, the thin bread and butter, the pretty girl presiding over the cups, the delicate china, the more delicate infusion? All these elements go to make up the afternoon tea. From one or two ladies who stayed at home one day in the week and offered this refreshment, to the many who came to find that it was a very easy method of entertaining, grew the present party in the daytime. The original five o'clock tea arose in England from the fact that ladies and gentlemen after hunting required some slight refreshment before dressing for dinner, and liked to meet for a Httle chat. It now is used as the method of introducing a daughter, and an ordinary way of entertaining.
The primal idea was a good one. People who had no money for grand spreads were enabled to show to their more opulent neighbours that they too had the spirit of hospitality. The doctors discovered that tea was healthy. English breakfast tea would keep nobody awake. The cup of tea and the sandwich at five would spoil nobody's dinner. The ladies who began these entertainments, receiving modestly in plain dresses, were not out of tone with their guests who came in walking-dress.
But then the other side was this, — ladies had to go to nine teas of an afternoon, perhaps taste something everywhere. Hence the new disease, deli7'ium teame7is. It was uncomfortable to assist at a large party in a heavy winter garment of velvet and fur. The afternoon tea lost its primitive character and became an evening party in the daytime, with the hostess and her daughters in full dress, and her guests in walking-costume.
The sipping of so much tea produces the nervous prostration, the sleeplessness, the nameless misery of our overwrought women; and thus a healthful, inexpensive
64 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
and most agreeable adjunct to the art of entertaining grew into a thing without a name, and became the large, gas- lighted ball at five o'clock, where half the ladies were in decollete dresses, the others in fur tippets. It was pro- nounced a breeder of influenzas, and the high road to a headache.
If a lady can be at home every Thursday during the season, and always at her position behind the blazing urn, and will have the firmness to continue this practice, she may create a salon out of her teacups.
In giving a large afternoon tea for which cards have been sent out, the hostess should stand by the drawing- room door and greet each guest, who, after a few words, passes on. In the adjoining room, usually the dining- room, a large table is spread with a white cloth ; and at one end is a tea service with a kettle of water boiling over an alcohol lamp, while at the other end is a service for chocolate. There should be flowers on the table, and dishes containing bread and butter cut as thin as a shaving. Cake and strawberries are always permissible. One or two servants should be in attendance to carry away soiled cups and saucers, and to keep the table look- ing fresh ; but for the pouring of the tea and chocolate there should always be a lady, who like the hostess should wear a gown closed to the throat ; for nothing is worse form now-a-days than full dress before dinner. The ladies of the house should not wear bonnets.
When tea is served every afternoon at five o'clock, whether or no there are visitors, as is often the case in many houses, the servant — who, if a woman, should always in the afternoon wear a plain black gown, with a white cap and apron — should place a small, low table before the lady of the house, and lay over it a pretty
AFTERNOON TEA. 65
white cloth. She should then bring in a large tray, upon which are the tea service, and a plate of bread and butter, or cake, or both, place it upon the table, and re- tire, — remaining within call, though out of sight, in case she should be needed. The best rule for making tea is the old-fashioned one : " one teaspoonful for each per- son and one for the pot." The pot should first be rinsed with hot water, then the tea put in, and upon it should be poured enough water, actually boiling, to cover the leaves. This decoction should stand for five min- utes, then fill up the pot with more boiling water, and pour it immediately. Some persons prefer lemon in their tea to cream, and it is a good plan to have some thin slices, cut for the purpose, placed in a pretty little dish on the tray. A bowl of cracked ice is also a pleas- ant addition in summer, iced tea being a most refresh- ing drink in hot weather. Neither plates nor napkins need appear at this informal and cosey meal. A guest arriving at this time in the afternoon should always be offered a cup of tea.
Afternoon tea, in small cities or in the country, in villages and academic towns, can well be made a most agreeable and ideal entertainment, for the official pre- sentation of a daughter or for the means of seeing one's friends. In the busy winter season of a large city it should not be made the excuse for giving up the even- ing party, or the dinner, lunch, or ball. It is not all these, it is simply itself, and it should be a refuge for those women who are tired of balls, of over dressing, dancing, visiting, and shopping. It is also very dear to the young who find the convenient tea-table a good arena for flirtation. It is a form of entertainment which allows one to dispense with etiquette and to save time.
5
66 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
Five-o'clock teas should be true to their name, nor should any other refreshment be offered than tea, bread and butter, and little cakes. If other eatables are of- fered the tea becomes a reception.
There is a high tea which takes the place of dinner on Sunday evenings in cities, which is a very pretty entertainment ; in small rural cities, in the country, they take the place of dinners. They were formerly very fashionable in Philadelphia. It gave an oppor- tunity to oifer hot rolls and butter, escalloped oysters, fried chicken, delicately sliced cold ham, waffles and hot cakes, preserves — alas ! since the days of canning, who offers the delicious preserves of the pasti^ The hostess sits behind her silver urn and pours the hot tea or coffee or chocolate, and presses the guest to take an- other waffle. It is a delightful meal, and has no proto- type in any country but our own.
It is doubtful, however, whether the high tea will ever be popular in America, in large cities at least, where the custom of seven-o'clock dinners prevails. People find in them a violent change of living, which is always a challenge to indigestion. Some wit has said that he always liked to eat hot mince-pie just before he went to bed, for then he always knew what hurt him. If any- one wishes to know what hurts him, he can take high tea on Sunday evening, after having dined all the week ac seven o'clock. A pain in his chest will tell him that the hot waffle, the cold tongue, the peach preserve, and that '' last cup of tea " meant mischief.
Oliver Cromwell is said to have been an early tea- drinker ; so is Queen Elizabeth, — elaborate old teapots are sold in London with the cipher of both ; but the report lacks confirmation. We cannot imagine Oliver
AFTERNOON TEA. 6/
drinking anything but verjuice, nor the Hon woman as sipping anything less strong than brown stout. Litera- ture owes much to tea. From Cowper to Austin Dob- son, the poets have had their fling at it. And what could the modern English novelist do without it? It has been in politics, as all remember who have seen Boston Harbor, and it goes into all the battles, and climbs Mt. Blanc and the Matterhorn. The French, who despised it, are beginning to make a good cup of tea, and Russia bathes in it. The Samovar cheers the long journeys across those dreary steppes, and forms again the most luxurious ornament of the palace. On all the high roads of Europe one can get a cup of tea, except in Spain. There it is next to impossible ; the universal chocolate supersedes it. If one gets a cup of tea in Spain, there is no cream to put in it ; and to many tea drinkers, tea is ruined without milk or cream.
In fact, the poor tea drinker is hard to please any- where. There are to the critic only one or two houses of one's acquaintance where five o'clock tea is perfect.
THE INTELLECTUAL COMPONENTS OF DINNER.
" Lend me your ears,"
'* TT has often perplexed me to imagine," writes Na- J- thaniel Hawthorne, " how an EngHshman will be able to reconcile himself to any future state of existence from which the earthly institution of dinner is excluded. The idea of dinner has so imbedded itself among his highest and deepest characteristics, so illuminated itself with intellect, and softened itself with the kindest emotions of his heart, so linked itself with Church and State, and grown so majestic with long hereditary custom and ceremonies, that by taking it utterly away. Death, instead of putting the final touch to his perfection, would leave him infinitely less complete than we have already known him. He could not be roundly happy. Paradise among all its enjoyments would lack one daily felicity in greater measure than London in the season."
No dinner would be worth the giving that had not one witty man or one witty woman to lift the conversa- tion out of the commonplace. As many more agreeable people as one pleases, but one leader is absolutely necessary.
Not alone the funny man whom the enfant terrible silenced by asking, " Mamma would like to know when you are going to begin to be funny," but those men who
INTELLECTUAL COMPONENTS OF A DINNER. 69
have the rare art of being leaders without seeming to be, who amuse without your suspecting that you are being amused ; for there never should be anything professional in dinner-table wit.
The dinner giver has often to feel that something has been left out of the group about the table ; they will not talk ! She has furnished them with food and wine, but can she amuse them? Her witty man and her witty woman are both engaged elsewhere, — they are apt to be, — and her room is too warm, perhaps. She determines that at the next dinner she will have some mechanical adjuncts, even an empirical remedy against dulness. She tries a dinner card with poetical quotations, conun- drums, and so on. The Shakspeare Club of Philadelphia inaugurated this custom, and some very witty results followed : —
"Enter Froth" (before champagne). " What is thine age ? " {Ro77ieo and Juliet) brings in the Madeira.
LOBSTER SALAD.
" Who hath created this indigest "i "
Pray you bid these unknown friends welcome, for it is a way to make us better friends. — Winter's Tale.
ROAST TURKEY.
See, here he comes swelling like a turkey cock. — Henry IV.
YORK HAMS.
Sweet stem from York's great stock. — Henry VI.
TONGUE.
Silence is only commendable in a neat's tongue dried —
Merchant of Venice. BRAISED LAMB AND BEEF.
What say you to a piece of lamb and mustard 1 — a dish that I do love to feed upon. — Taming of the Shrew.
LOBSTER SALAD.
Sallat was born to do me good. — Henry IV.
70 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
And so on. The Bible affords others, well worth quoting : —
OYSTERS.
He brought them up out of the sea. — Isaiah. And his mouth was opened immediately. — Luke i. 64.
BEAN SOUP.
" Jacob gave Esau bread and pottage of lentils."
FISH, STRIPED BASS.
We remember the fish we did eat freely. — Numbers. These with many stripes. — Deuteronomy.
STEINBERGER CABINET.
Thou hast kept the good wine until now. — Johji ii. 10.
BOILED CAPON.
Accept it always and in all places. — Acts xxiv. 3.
PIGEON BRAISE.
Pigeons such as he could get. — Leviticus.
SUCCOTASH.
' They brought corn and beans. ^Samuel.
QUAIL LARDED.
Even quail came. — Exodus. Abundantly moistened with fat. — Isaiah.
LETTUCE SALAD.
A pleasant plant, green before the sun. — Isaiah.
Pour oil upon it, pure oil, olive. — Lruiticus.
Oil and salt, without prescribing how much. — Ezra vii. 22.
ICE CREAM.
Ice like morsels. — Psalms.
CHEESE.
Carry these ten cheeses unto the captain. — Samtiel.
FRUITS. All kind of fruits. — Eccles.
COFFEE.
Last of all. — Matthew xxi. 37. They had made an end of eating. — Ainos vii. 2.
CIGARS.
Am become like dust and ashes.— y^?^ xxx. 19.
INTELLECTUAL COMPONENTS OF A DINNER. /I
And so on. Written conundrums are good stimu- lants to conversation, and dinner cards might be greatly historical, not too learned. A legend of the day, as Lady Day, or Michaelmas, is not a bad promoter of talk. Or one might allude to the calendar of dead kings and queens, or other celebrities, or ask your preferences, or quote something from a memoir, to find out that it is a birthday of Rossini or Goethe. All these might be written on a dinner card, and will open the flood gates of a frozen conversation.
Let each dinner giver weave a net out of the gossamer threads of her own thoughts. It will be the web of the Lady of Shalott, and will bid the shadows of pleasant memory to remain, not float " forever adown the river," even toward " towered Camelot " where they may be lost.
Some opulent dinner giver once made the dinner card the vehicle of a present, but this became rather burden- some. It was trying and embarrassing to carry the gifts home, and the poorer entertainer hesitated at the expense. The outlay had better come out of one's brain, and the piquing of curiosity with a contradiction like this take its place : —
" A lady gave me a gift which she had not, And I received the gift, which I took not, And if she take it back I grieve not."
But there is something more required to form the intel- lectual components of a dinner than these instruments to stimulate curiosity and give a fillip to thought. We must have variety.
Mrs. Jameson, the accomplished author of the * " Legends of the Madonna " gives the following descrip- tion of an out-of-door dinner, which should embolden the young American hostess tp go and do likewise ; — '
J2 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
" Yesterday we dined alfi-esco in the Pamfili Gardens, in Rome, and although our party was rather too large, it was well assorted, and the day went off admirably. The queen of our feast was in high good humour and irre- sistibly charming, Frattino very fascinating, T. caustic and witty, W. lively and clever, J. mild, intelligent and elegant, V. as usual quiet, sensible, and self-complacent, L. as absurd and assiduous as ever.
*' Everybody played their part well, each by a tacit convention sacrificing to the amour p7'opre of his neigh- bour, each individual really occupied with his own peculiar role^ but all apparently happy and mutually pleased. Vanity and selfishness, indifference and eninii were veiled under a general mask of good humour and good breeding, and the flowery bonds of politeness and gallantry held together those who knew no common tie of thought or interest.
" Our luxurious dinner, washed down by a competent proportion of Malvoisie and champagne, was spread upon th-^ grass, which was literally the flowery turf, being cov- ered with violets, iris, and anemones of every dye.
" For my own peculiar taste there were too many ser- vants, too many luxuries, too much fuss ; but considering the style and number of our party, it was all consistently and admirably managed. The grouping of the company, picturesque because unpremeditated, the scenery around, the arcades and bowers and columns and fountains had an air altogether poetical and romantic, and put me in mind of some of Watteau's beautiful garden pieces."
Now in this exquisite description Mrs. Jameson seems to me to have given the intellectual components of a dinner. "The hostess, good-humoured and charming, Frattino very fascinating, T. caustic and witty, W, lively
INTELLECTUAL COMPONENTS OF A DINNER. 73
and clever, J. mild, intelligent, and elegant, V. as usual quiet, sensible, and self-complacent, L. as absurd and as assiduous as ever."
There was variety for you, and the three last were un- doubtedly listeners. In the next paragraph she covers more ground, and this is most important : —
" Each by a tacit convention sacrificing to the amour propre of his neighbour."
That is an immortal phrase, for there can be no pleas- ant dinner when this unselfishness is not shown. It was said by a witty Boston hostess that she could never invite two well-known diners-out to the same dinner, for each always silenced the other. You must not have too many good talkers. The listeners, the receptive listener.^, should outnumber the talkers.
In England, the land of dinners, they have, of course, no end of public, semi-official, and annual dinners, — as those of the Royal Literary Fund, the Old Rugbians, the Artists Benevolent Fund, the Regimental dinners, the banquets at the Liberal and the Cobden Club, and the nice little dinners at the Star and Garter, winding up with the annual fish dinner.
Now of all these the most popular and sought after is the annual dinner of the Royal Academy. Few gratifi- cations are more desired by mortals than an invitation to this dinner. The president, Sir Frederic Leighton, is hantisome and popular. The dinner is representative in character ; one or more members of the Royal Family are present ; the Church, the Senate, the Bar, Medicine, Literature and Science, the Army, the Navy, the City, — ■ all these have their representatives in the company.
Who would not say that this would be the most amus- ing dinner in London? Intellect at its highesi' water
74 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
mark is present. The menic is splendid. But I have heard one distinguished guest say that the thing is over- freighted, the ship is too full, and the crowd of good things makes a surfeic.
Dinners at the Lord Mayor's are said to be pleasant iin 1 fine specimens of civic cheer, but the grand nights at the Middle Temple and others of the Inns of Court are occasions of pleasant festivity.
We have nothing to do with these, however, except to read of them, and to draw our conclusions. I know of no better use to which we can put them than the same rereading which we gave Mrs. Jameson's well-considered menu : " Each individual really occupied with his own role, but all apparently happy and mutually pleased. Variety and selfishness or indifference or ennui well veiled under a general mask of good humour and good breeding, and the flowery bands of politeness and gallantry holding to- gether those who knew no common tie of thought and interest." It requires very civilized people to veil their indifference and ennui under a general mask of good humour.
To have unity, one must first have .units ; and to make an agreeable dinner-party the hostess should invite agreeable people, and her husband should be a good host ; and here we must again compliment England. An Englishman is ch.urlish and distant, self-conscious and prejudiced everywhere else but at his own table. He is a model host, and a most agreeable guest. He is the most genial of creatures after the soup and sherry. In- deed the English dinner is the keynote to all that is best in the English character. An Englishman wishes to eat in company.
How unlike the Spaniard, who never asks you to din-
INTELLECTUAL COMPONENTS OF A DINNER. 75
ner. However courtly and hospitable he may be at other times and other hours of the day, he likes to drag his bone into a corner and gnaw it by himself.
The Frenchman, elegant, soigne^ and economical, invites you to the best-cooked dinner in the world, but there is not much of it. He prefers to entertain you at a caf6. Country life in France is delightful, but there is not that luxurious, open-handed entertaining which obtains in England.
In Italy one is seldom admitted to the privacy of the family dinner. It is a patriarchal affair. But when one is admitted one finds much that is siinpafica. The cookery is good, the service is perfect, the dinner is short, the conversation gay and easy.
In making up a dinner with a view to its intellectual components, avoid those tedious talkers who, having a theme, a system, or a fad to air, always contrive to drag the conversation around to their view, with the intention of concentrating the whole attention upon themselves. One such man, called appropriately the Bore Constrictor of conversation in a certain city, really drove people away from every house to which he was invited ; for they grew tired of hearing him talk of that particular science in which he was an expert. Such a talker could make the planet Jupiter a bore, and if the talker were of the feminine gender how one would shun her verbosity.
" I called on Mrs. Marjoribanks yesterday," said a free lance once, " and we had a little gossip about Co- pernicus." We do not care to have anything quite so erudite, for if people are really very intimate with Co- pernicus they do not mention it at dinner.
It is as impossible to say what makes the model diner-out as to describe the soil which shall grow the
76 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
best grapes. We feel it and we enjoy it, but we can give no receipt for the production of the same.
As history, with exemplary truthfulness, has always painted man as throwing off all the trouble of giving a dinner on his wife, why have not our clever women ap- preciated the power of dinner-giving in politics ? Why are not our women greater politicians? Where is our Lady Jersey, our Lady Palmerston, our Princess Belgi- oso? The Princess Lieven, wife of the Russian Am- bassador in London, was said to have held the peace of Europe in the conduct of her entrees ; and a country- woman of our own is to-day supposed to influence the policy of Germany largely by her dinners. From the polished and versatile memoirs of the Grammonts, Wal- poles, D'Azelios, Sydney Smith, and Lord Houghton, how many an anecdote hinges on the efficacy of a dinner in reconciling foes, and in the making of friends. How many a conspiracy was hatched, no doubt, behind an aspic of plover's eggs or a vol au vent de volaille. How many a budding ministry, according to Lord Lam- mington, was brought to full power over a well-ordered table-cloth. How many a war cloud dispelled by the proper temperature of the Burgundy. It is related of Lord Lyndhurst that when somebody asked him how to succeed in life, he answered, "Give good wine." A French statesman would have answered, " Give good din- ners." Talleyrand kept the most renowned table of his day, quite as much for political as hygienic reasons. At eighty years of age he still spent an hour every morning with his chef, discussing the dishes to be served at dinner. The Emperor Napoleon, who was no epicure, nor even a connoisseur, was nevertheless pleased with Talleyrand's luxurious and refined hospitality, in conse-
INTELLECTUAL COMPONENTS OF A DINNER. JJ
quence of the impression it made on those who were so fortunate as to partake of it. On the other hand, one hesitates to contemplate the indigestions and bad Enghsh cooking which must have hatched an OUver Cromwell, or still earlier that decadence of Italian cookery which made a Borgia possible.
Social leaders in all ages and countries have thus studied the tastes and the intellectual aptitudes and ca- pabilities of those whom they have gathered about their boards ; and Mythology would suggest that the petits soiipers on high Olympus, enlivened by the " inextin- guishable laughter of the gods," had much to do with the politics of the Greek heaven under Jupiter. Reading the Northern Saga in the same connection, may not the vague and awful conceptions of cookery which seem to have filled the Northern mind have had something to do with the opera of Siegfried ? Even the music of Wag- ner seems to have been inspired by a draught from the skull of his enemy. It has the fascination of clanging steel, and the mighty rustling of armour. The wind sighs through the forest, and the ice-blast freezes the hearer. The chasms of earth seem to open before us. But it has also the terror of an indigestion, and the brooding horror of a nightmare from drinking metheglia and eat- ing half-roasted kid. The political aspect of a Scandi- navian heaven was always stormy. Listen to the Trilogy.
In America a hostess sure of her soups and her en- trees, with such talkers as she could command, could influence American political movements — she might in- fluence its music — by her dinners, and become an envi- able Lady Palmerston.
Old people are apt to say that there is a decay in the art of conversation, that it is one of the lost arts. No
78 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
doubt this is in a measure true all over the world. A French salofi would be to-day an impossibility for that very reason. It is no longer the fashion to tell anec- dotes, to try to be amusing. A person is considered a prig who sits up to amuse the company. All this is bad ; it is reactionary after the drone of the Bore Constrictor. It is going on all over the world. It is part of that hurry which has made us talk slang, the jelly of speech, speech condensed and boiled down, easily transported, and warranted to keep in all climates.
But there is a very pleasant juste milieu between the stately, perhaps starchy, anecdotist of the past and the easy and witty talker of to-day, who may occasionally drop into slang, and what is more, may permit a certain slovenliness of speech. There are certain mistakes in English, made soberly, advisedly, and without fear of Lindley Murray, which make one sigh for the propri- eties of the past. The trouble is we have no standard. Writers are always at work at the English language, and yet many people say that it is at present the most irregular and least understood of all languages.
The intellectual components of a successful dinner, should, if we may quote Hawthorne, be illuminated with intellect, and softened by the kindest emotions of the heart. To quote Mrs. Jameson, they must combine the caustic and the witty, the lively and the clever, and even the absurd, and the assiduous above all. Everybody must be unselfish enough not to yawn, and never seem bored. They must be self-sacrificing, but all apparently well-pleased. The intellectual components of a dinner, like the condiments of a salad, must be of the best ; and it is for the hostess to mix them with the unerring tact and fine discrimination of an American woman.
CONSCIENTIOUS DINERS.
It is chiefly men of intellect who hold good eating in honour. The head is not capable of a mental operation which consists in a long sequence of appreciations, and many severe decisions of the judgment, which has not a well-fed brain.
Brillat Savarin.
A GOOD dinner and a pretty hostess, — for there are terms on which beauty and beef can meet much to the benefit of both, — one wit, several good talkers, and as many good listeners, or more of the latter, are said to make a combination which even our greatest statesmen do not despise. Man wants good dinners. It is woman's province to provide them ; but nature and education must make the conscientious diner.
It is to be feared that we are too much in a hurry to be truly conscientious diners. Our men have too many school-tasks yet, — politics, money-making, science, men- tal improvement, charities, psychical research, building railroads, steam monitors, colleges, and such like gauds, — too many such distractions to devote themselves as they ought to the question of entrees and entremets. They should endeavour to give the dinner a fitting place. Just see how the noble language of France, which Racine dignified and Moliere amplified, respectfully puts on its robes of state which are lined with ermine when it approaches the great subject of dinner !
8o THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
It is to be feared that we are far off from the fine art of dining, although many visits to Paris and much patronage of Le Doyon's, the Cafe Anglais, and the Cafe des Ambassadeurs, may have prepared us for the entremet and the piece de resistance. We are im- proving in this respect and no longer bolt our dinners. The improvement is already manifest in the better tempers and complexions of our people.
But are we as conscientious as the gentleman in " Punch " who rebuked the giddy girl who would talk to him at dinner? *' Do you remember, my dear, that you are in the house of the best entrees in London? I wish to eat my dinner."
That was a man to cook for i He had his appropriate calm reserve of appreciation, for the supreme de volaille. He knew how to watch and wait for the sweetbreads, and green peas. Not thrown away upon him was that last turn which makes the breast of the partridge become of a delicate Vandyck brown. How respectful was he to that immortal art for which the great French cook died, a suicide for a belated turbot.
** Ah," said Parke Godwin once, when in one of his most brilliant Brillat Savarin moods, '' how it ennobles a supper to think that all these oysters will become ideas ! "
But if a dinner is not a cookery book, neither is it a matter of expense alone, nor a payment of social debts. It is a question of temperature, of the selection of guests, of the fitness of things, of a proper variety, and of time. The French make their exquisite dinners light and short. The English make theirs a trifle long and heavy.
The young hostess, to strike the juste milieu^ must travel, reflect, and go to a cooking-school. She must
CONSCIENTIOUS DINERS. 8 1
buy and read a library of cooking- books. And when all is done and said, she must realize that a cookery-book is not a dinner. There are some natures which can absorb nothing from a cookery-book. As Lady Galway said that she had put all her wits into Bradshaw's '' Rail- way Guide " and had never got them out again, so some amateur cook remarked that she had tested her recipes with the " cook-book in one hand and the cooking-stove in the other," yet the wit had stayed away. All young housekeepers must go through the discipline — in a land where cooks are as yet scarce — of trying and failing, of trying and at length succeeding. They must go to La Belle France to learn how to make a soup, for instance. That is to say, they must study the best French authorities.
The mere question of sustenance is easy of solution. We can stand by a cow and drink her milk, or we can put some bread in our pockets and nibble it as we go along; but dinner as represented by our complicated civilization is a matter of interest which must always stand high amongst the questions which belong to social life. It is a very strange attendant circumstance that having been a matter of profound concern to mankind for so many years, it is now almost as easy to find a bad dinner as a good one, even in Paris, that head- quarters of cookery.
There would be no sense in telling a young American housekeeper to learn to make sauces and to cook like a French chef, for it is a profession requiring years of study and great natural taste and aptitude. A French chef commands a higher salary than a secretary of state or than a civil engineer. As well tell a young lady that she could suddenly be inspired with a knowledge of the
5552-
82 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
art of war or of navigation. She would only perhaps learn to do very badly what they in ten years learn to do so weil. She would say in her heart, '' For my part I am surfeited with cookery. I cry, something 7-aw if you please for me, — something that has never been touched by hand except the one that pulled it off the blooming tree or uprooted it from the honest ground. Let me be a Timon if you will, and eat green radishes and cabbages, or a Beau Brummel, asphyxiated in the consumption of a green pea; but no ragoiit, coteleitCj compote, crenie, or any hint or cooking till the remem- brance of all that I have seen has faded and the smell of it has passed away ! "
Thus said one who attended a cooking- school, had gone through the mysteries of soup-making, had learned what saute means ; had mastered ent7-emets, and entrees, and plats, and hors cTmcvres ; had learned that boudins de veau are simply veal puddings, something a little better than a veal croquette made into a little pie ; and had found that all meats if badly cooked are much alike. There is a great deal of nonsense talked about making good dishes out of nothing. A French cook is very economical, he uses up odds and ends, but he must have something to cook with.
Stone broth does not go down with a hungry man, nor bad food, however disguised with learned sauces. A little learning is a dangerous thing, and one who attempts too much will fail. But one can read, and reflect, and get the general outlines of cultivated cookery. As to cultivated cookery being necessarily extravagant, that is a mistake. A great, heavy, ill-considered dinner is no doubt costly. Almost all American housekeeping is wasteful in the extreme, but the modern vanities which
CONSCIENTIOUS DINERS. 83
depend on" the skill of the cook and the arranging mind of the housekeeper, all these are the triumphs of the present age, and worthy of deep thought and considera- tion. Let the young housekeeper remember that the pretty entrees made out of yesterday's roast chicken or turkey will be a great saving as well as a great luxury, and she will learn to make them.
Amongst a busy people like ourselves, from poorest to the richest, dinners are intended to be recreations, and recreations of inestimable value. The delightful con- trast which they offer to the labours of the day, the pleas- ant, innocent triumph they afford to the hostess, in which all may partake without jealousy, the holiday air of guests and of the dining-room, which should be fresh, well aired, filled with flowers, made bright with glass and silver, — all this refreshes the tired man of affairs and invigorates every creature. As far as possible, the discussion of all disagreeable subjects should be kept from the dinner- table. All that is unpleasant lowers the pulse and re- tards digestion. All that is cheerful invigorates the pulse and helps the human being to live a more brave and use- ful life. No one should bring an unbecoming grumpi- ness to the dinner-table. Be grumpy next day if you choose, when the terrapin may have disagreed with you, but not at the feast. Bring the best bit of news and gossip, not scandal, the choicest critique of the last novel, the cream of your correspondence. Be sympathetic, amiable, and agreeable at a feast, else it were better you had stayed away. The last lesson of luxury is the advice to contribute of- our very best to the dinners of our friends, while we form our own dinners on the plane of the highest luxury which we can afford, and avoid the great too much, Remember that in all countries the
84 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
American lavish prodigality of feasting, and the expensive garniture of hothouse flowers, are always spoken of as vul- gar. How well it will be for us when our splendid array of fish, flesh, and fowl shall have reached the benediction of good cookery ; when we know how to serve it, not with barbaric magnificence and repletion, but with a delicate sense of fitness.
Mr. Webster, himself an admirable dinner giver, said of a codfish salad that it was " fit to eat." He afterwards remarked, more gravely, — and it made him unpopular, — that a certain nomination was " not fit to be made."
That led to a discussion of the word " fit." The fitness of things, the right amount, the thing in the right place, whether it be the condiment of a salad or the nomination to the presidency, — this is the thing to consult, to think of in a dinner ; let it be " fit to be made."
An American dinner resolves itself into the following formula : —
The oyster is offered first. What can equal the Amer- ican oyster in all his salt-sea freshness, raw, on the half- shell, a perpetual stimulant to appetite, — with a slice of lemon, and a bit of salt and pepper, added to his own luscious juices, his perfect flavor? The jaded palate, worn with much abuse, revives, and stands, like Oliver, asking for more.
The soup follows. To this great subject we might de- vote a chapter. What visions of white and brown, clear and thick, fresh beef stock or the maritime delicacies of Cray fish and prawn rise before us, — in every colour, from pink or cream to the heavy Venetian red of the mulliga- tawny or the deep smoke-tints of mock turtle and terra- pin ! The subject grows too large for mere mention ; we must give a chapter to soup.
CONSCIENTIOUS DINERS. 85
When we speak of fish we reaUze that the ocean even is inadequate to hold them all. Have we not trout, sal- mon, the great fellows from the Great Lakes, and the ex- clusive ownership of the Spanish mackerel ? Have we not the fee simple of terrapin and the exclusive excellence of shad? This subject, again, requires a volume.
The roast I Ah ! here we once bowed to our great Mother England, and thought her roast beef better than ours. There are others who think that we have caught up on the roasts. Our beef is very good, our mutton does not equal always the English Southdowns ; but we are even improving in the blacknosed woolly brethren who conceal such delicious juices under their warm coats.
A roast saddle of mutton with currant jelly — but let us not linger over this thrilling theme. Our venison is the best in the world.
As for turkeys, — we discovered them, and it is fair to say that, after looking the world over, there is no better bird than a Rhode Island Turkey, particularly if it is sent to you as a present from a friend. Hang him a week, with a truffle in him, and stuff him with chestnuts.
As for chickens — there France has us at a disadvan- tage. There seems to be a secret of fowl-feeding, or rearing, in France which we have not mastered. Still we can get good chickens in America, and noble capons, but they are very expensive.
The entrees — here we must go again to those early missionaries to a savage shore, the Delmonicos. They were the high priests of the entree.
The salads — those daughters of luxury, those deli- cate expressions, in food, of the art of dress — deserve a separate chapter.
86 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
And now the sorbet cools our throats and leads us up to the game.
The American desserts are particularly rich and pro- fuse. Our pies have been laughed at, but they also are fit to eat, especially mince-pie, which is first cousin to an English plum-pudding.
Our puddings are like our Western scenery, heavy but magnificent. Our ices have reached, under our foreign imported artists, the greatest perfection. Our fruit is abundant and highly flavoured. We have not yet per- haps known how to draw the line as to desserts. The great too 7mich prevails.
Do we not make our dinners too long and too heavy? How great an artist would he be who should so gradu- ate a dinner that there would be no to-morrow in it ! We eat more like Heliogabalus than like that gourmet who took the beccafico out of the olive which had been hidden in the pigeon, which had in its turn been warmed in the chicken, which was cooked in the ox, which was roasted whole for the birthday of a king. The goitnneT discarded the rest, but ate the beccafico.
The first duty of a guest who is asked to one of these dinners is to be punctual. Who wishes to sit next to Mr. Many-Courses, when he has been kept waiting for his dinner? Imagine the feelings of an amiable host and hostess who, after taking the trouble to get up an excellent dinner, feel that it is being spoiled by the tar- diness of one guest ! They are nervously watching Mr. Many-Courses, for hungry animals are frequently snap- pish, and sometimes dangerous.
The hostess who knows how to invite her guests and to seat them afterwards is a power in the State. She helps to refine, elevate, and purify our great American con-
CONSCIENTIOUS DINERJ^. ^f
glomerate. She has not the Englishman's Bible, " The Peerage," to help her seat her guests ; she must trust to her own intelligence to do that. Our great American conglomerate repels all idea of rank, or the precedence idea, which is so well understood in England.
Hereditary distinction we have not, for although there are some families which can claim a grandfather, they are few. A grandfather is of little importance to the men who make themselves. Aristocracy in America is one of talent or money.
Even those more choice intelligences, which in older countries are put on glass pedestals, are not so elevated here as to excite jealousy. We all adore the good diner- out, but somebody would be jealous if he had always the best seat. Therefore the hostess has to contend with much that is puzzling in the seating of her guests ; but if she says to herself, " I will place those people near each other who are sympathetic," she will govern her festive board with the intelligence of Elizabeth, and the generosity of Queen Margharita.
She must avoid too many highly scented flowers. People are sometimes weary of the " rapture of roses." Horace says : " Avoid, at an agreeable entertainment, discordant music, and muddy perfume, and poppies mixed with Sardinian honey ; they give offence." Which is only another way of saying that some music may be too heavy, and the perfume of flowers too strong.
Remember, young hostess, or old hostess, that your dinner is to be made up of people who have to sit two hours chatting with each other, and that this is of itself a severe ordeal of patience.
Good breeding is said to be the apotheosis of self-
88 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
restraint, and so is good feeding. Good breeding puts nature under restraint, controls the temper, and refines the speech. Good feeding, unless it is as well governed as it should be, inflames the nose and the temper, and enlarges the girth most unbecomingly. Good breed- ing is the guardian angel of a woman. Good feeding, that is, conscientious dining, must be the patron saint of a man ! A truly well bred and well fed man is quiet in dress, does not talk slang, is not prosy, is never unbe- comingly silent, nor is he too garrulous. He is always respectful to everybody, kind to the weak, helpful to the feeble. He may not be an especially lofty character, but good feeding inducts him into the character and duties of a gentleman. He simulates a virtue if he has it not, especially after dinner. Noblesse oblige is his motto, and he feels what is due to himself.
Can we be a thorough-bred, or a thorough-fed, all by ourselves ? It is easy enough to learn when and where to leave a card, how to behave at a dinner, how to use a fork, how to receive and how to drop an acquaintance ; but what a varied education is that which leads up to good feeding, to becoming a conscientious diner. It is not given to every one, this lofty grace.
A dinner should be a good basis for a mutual under- standing. They say that few great enterprises have been conducted without it. People are sure to like each other much better after dining together. It is better to go home from a dinner remembering how clever everybody was, than to go home merely to wonder at the opulence that could compass such a pageant.
A dinner should put every one into his best talking condition. The quips and quirks of excited fancy
CONSCIENTIOUS DINErS. 89
should come gracefully, for society well arranged brings about the attrition of wits. If one is comfortable and well-fed — not gorged — he is in his best condition.
The more civilized the world gets, the more difficult it is to amuse it. It is the common complaint of the children of luxury that dinners are dull and society stupid. How can the reformer make society more amusing and less dangerous? Eliminate scandal and back-biting.
The danger and trials and difficulties of dinner-giving are manifold. First, whom shall we ask? Will they come? It is often the fate of the hostess, in the busy season, to invite forty people before she gets twelve. Having got the twelve, she then has perhaps a few days before the dinner to receive the unwelcome news that Jones has a cold, Mrs. Brown has lost a relative, and Miss Malcontent has gone to Washington. The dinner has to be reconstructed ; deprived of its original inten- tion it becomes a balloon which has lost ballast. It goes drifting about, and there is no health in it and no purpose. This is especially true also of those dinners which are conducted on debt- paying principles.
How many hard-worked, rich men in America are bored to death by the gilded and over-burdened splen- dour of their wives' dinners and those to which they are to go. They sit looking at their hands during two or three courses, poor dyspeptics who cannot eat. To re- lieve them, to bring them into communion with their next neighbour, with whom they have nothing in common, what shall one do? Oh, that depressing cloud which settles over the jaded senses of even the conscientious diner, as he fails to make his neighbour on either side say anything but yes or no !
^6 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
We must, perhaps, before we give the perfect dmner, renounce the idea that dinner should be on a commercial basis. Of course our social debts must be paid. It is a large subject, like the lighting of a city, the cleaning of the streets, and must be approached carefully, so that the lesser evil may not swamp the greater good. Do not invite twelve people to bore them.
The dinner hour differs in different cities, — from seven to half-past seven, to eight, and eight and a half; all these have their adherents. In London, many a party does not sit down until nine. Hence the necessity of a hearty meal at five o'clock tea. The royalties, all blessed with good appetites, eat eggs on toast, hot scones and other good things at five o'clock tea, and take often an avant goiit diho at seven.
In our country half-past seven is generally the most convenient hour, unless one is going to the play after- ward, when seven is better. A dinner should not last more than an hour and a half. But it does last some- times three hours.
Ladies dress for a large dinner often in low neck and short sleeves, wear their jewels, and altogether their finest things. But now Pompadour waists are allowed. For a small dinner, the Pompadour dress, half-open at the throat, with a few jewels, is in better taste.
Men should be always in full dress, — black coat, waist- coat, and trousers, and white cravat. There is no varia- tion from this dress at a dinner, large or small.
For ladies in delicate health who cannot expose throat or arms, there is always the largest liberty allowed ; but the dinner dress must be handsome.
In leaving the house and ordering the carriage, name the earliest hour rather than the latest ; it is better to
CONSCIENTIOUS DINERS. 9I
keep one's coachman waiting than to weary one's host- ess. It is quite impossible to say when one will leave, as there may be music, recitations, and so on, after the dinner. It is now quite the fashion, as in London, to ask people in after the dinner.
Everybody should go to a dinner intending to be agreeable.
" E'en at a dinner some will be unblessed, However good the viands, and well dressed ; They always come to table with a scowl, Squint with a face of verjuice o'er each dish, Fault the poor flesh, and quarrel with the fish, Curse cook, and wife, and loathing, eat and growl."
Such men should never be asked twice ; yet such were Dr. Johnson, and later on, Abraham Hayward, the Eng- lish critic, who were invited out every night of their lives. It is a poor requital for hospitality, to allow any personal ill-temper to interfere with the pleasure of the feast. Some hostesses send around the champagne early to unloose the tongues ; and this has generally a good effect if the party be dull. Excessive heat in a room is the most benumbing of all overweights. Let the hostess have plenty of oxygen to begin with.
For a little dinner of eight we might suggest that the hostess write : —
Dear Mrs. Sullivan, — Will you and Mr. Sullivan dine with us on Thursday at half-past seven to meet Mr. and Mrs. Evarts, quite informally ?
Ever yours truly,
Mary Montgomery.
This accepted, which it should be in the first person, cordially, as it is written, let us see what we would have for dinner : -^
92 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
Sherry. Soup. Sorrel, d. Pesseiice de veau.
Lobsters, saute h la Bonnefoy. Chablis.
Veal Cutlets, a la Zingara.
Fried sweet potatoes. Champagne.
Roast Red-Head Ducks. Currant jelly.
Claret. Curled Celery in glasses. Olives.
Cheese. Salad.
Frozen Pudding.
Grapes. Coffee. Liqueurs.
Or. if you please, a brown soup, a white fish or bass, boiled, a saddle of mutton, a pair of prairie chickens and salad, a plate of broiled mushrooms, a sorbet of Maraschino, cheese, ice-cream, fruit. It is not a bad "look-out," is it?
How well the Italians understand the little dinner ! They are frugal but conscientious diners until they get to the dessert?
Their dishes have a relish of the forest and the field. First comes wild boar, stewed in a delicious condiment called sour-sweet sauce, composed of almonds, pistachio nuts, and plums. Quails, with a twang of aromatic herbs, are followed by maccaroni flavoured with spiced livers, cocks' combs, and eggs called risotto, then golden /r///^^, cooked in the purest C7'u of olive oil, and quocchi cakes, of newly ground Indian corn, which is all that our roasted green corn is, without the trouble of gnawing it off the cob, — a process abhorrent to the conscientious diner unless he is alone. One should first take monastic vows of extreme austerity before he eats the forbidden fruit, onion, or the delicious corn. But when we can conquer Italian cooking, we can eat these two deliciou5
CONSCIENTIOUS DINERS. 93
things, nor fear to whisper to our best friend, nor fear to be seen eating.
The triumphs of the dolce belong also to the Italians. Their sugared fruits, ices, and pastry are all matchless ; and their wines, Chianti, Broglio, and Vino Santo, a kind of Malaga, as " frankly luscious as the first grape can make it," are all delicious.
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 chap- lets. 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 a Ic^
MODES OF GASTRONOMIC GRATIFICATION. 95
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 nowa- days, 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 metalUc 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 find- ing what time might elapse between the first glass of sherry and the final Maraschino,"
9^ THE ART OF ENTERT AlNlNC^.
However, the pleasures of a dinner may be too pro- longed. 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.
Talleyrand is said to have introduced into France the custom of taking Parmesan with the soup, and the Madeira after it.
There are many conflicting opinions about the proper place for the cheese in order of serving. The old fashion was to serve it last. It is now served with, or after, the salad. "A dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman with one eye," says an old gourmet.
" Eat cheese after fruit, to prepare the palate for fresh wine," says another.
'•After melon, wine is a felon."
If it is true that " an American devours, an English- man eats, and a Frenchman dines," then we must take the French fashion and give the cheese after the salad.
Toasted cheese savouries are very nice. The Roman punch should be served just before the game. It is a very refreshing interlude. Some wit called it at Mrs. Hayes' dinners " the life-saving station."
When the ices are removed a dessert-plate of glass, with a finger-bowl, is placed before each person, with two glasses, one for sherry, one for claret, or Burgundy ; and the grapes, peaches, pears, and other fruits are then passed.
The hostess makes the sign for retiring to a salon per-
MODES OF GASTRONOMIC GRATIFICATION. 9/
haps rich with magnificent hangings of old gold, with pictures, with vases of Dresden, of Sevres, of Kiota, with statuary, and specimens of Capo di Monti. There coffee may be brought and served by the footmen in cups which Catherine of Russia might have given to Potemkin. The gendemen, in England and America, remain behind to smoke.
There is much exquisite porcelain in use in the opulent houses of America. It is getting to be a famous fad with us, and nothing adds more to one's pleasure in a good dinner than to have it served on pretty plates. And let us learn to say ''footman," and not "waiter;" the latter personage belongs to a club or a hotel. It would prevent disagreeable mistakes if we would make this correction in our ordinary conversation.
In the arrangement of a splendid dinner let us see what should be the bill of fare.
This is hard to answer, as the delicacies vary with the season. But we will venture on one : —
Oysters on the half-shell. Sherry. Soups :
Crhne iVAsperges^ Julienne.
Fish : Chablis.
Fried Smelts, or Salmon.
Fresh Cucumbers.
Champagne. Filet de Boeiif, with Truffles Claret.
and Mushrooms.
Fried Potatoes.
Entrees :
Poulet a la Marechale. Petits Pois,
Timbale de Macaroni.
Sweetbreads. Vegetables. Artighokea.
7
98 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
Sorbet. Roman Punch.
Steinberger. Game :
Canvas-back or Wild Duck with Currant Jelly.
Quail with Water-Cresses.
Salad of Lettuce. Salad of Tomato.
Rudesheimer. Pate de foie gras.
Hot dessert :
Cabinet Pudding.
Cold dessert :
Crhne glade aiix tuttifrutti.
Marron glacis. Cakes. Preserved ginger.
Madeira. Cheese. Port.
Cafe. Cordials.
I apologize to my reader for mixing thus French and English. It is a vulgar habit, and should be avoided. But it is almost impossible to avoid it when speaking of a dinner; the cooks being French, the menus are written in French, and the names of certain dishes are usually written in French. Now all people undersitand French, or should do so. If they do not, it is very easy to learn that the " vol au vent de volaille " is simply chicken pie, that potatoes are still potatoes under what- ever alias they are served, and so on.
No such dinner as this can be well served in a private house unless the cook is a chef, a cordon bleu, — here we must use French again, — and unless the service is perfect this dinner will be a failure. It is better to order such a dinner from Delmonico's or Sherry's or from the best man you can command. Do not attempt and fail.
But the little dinners given by housekeepers whose service is perfect are apt to be more eatable and palata- ble than the best dinner from a restaurant, where all the food is cooked by gas, and tastes alike.
MODES OF GASTRONOMIC GRATIFICATION. Q^
The number of guests is determined by the size of the room. The etiquette of entering the dining-room is this : the host goes first, with the most distinguished lady. The hostess follows last, with the most distin- guished gentleman.
Great care and attention must be observed in seating the guests. This is the province of the hostess, who must consider the subject carefully. All this must be written out, and a diagram made of the table. The name of each lady is written on a card and enclosed in an envelope, on the outside of which is inscribed the name of the gentleman who has the honour to take her in. This envelope must be given each man by the servant in the dressing-room, or he must find it on the hall table. Then, with the dinner-card at each place, the guests find their own places.
The lady of the house should be dressed and in the drawing-room at least five minutes before the guests are to arrive, which should be punctually. How long must a hostess wait for a tardy guest? Only fifteen minutes.
It is well to say to the butler, " Dinner must be served at half-past seven," and the guests may be asked at seven. That generally ensures the arrival of all before the fish is spoiled. Let the company then go in to din- ner, allowing the late-comer to follow. He must come in alone, blushing for his sins. These facts may help a hostess : No great dinner in Europe waits for any one ; royalty is always punctual. In seating your guests do not put husband and wife, sisters or relatives together.
An old courtesy book of 1290 says : —
*' Consider about placing Each person in the post that befits him. Between relations it behooves To place others midway sometimes."
100 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
We should respect the superstitions of the dmner- table. No one should be helped twice to soup; it means an early death. Few are free from the feeling that thirteen is an unlucky number ; so avoid that, as no one wishes to make a guest uncomfortable. As we have said, Gasthea is an irritable muse ; she must be flattered and pam- pered. No one must put salt on another's plate. There is a strong prejudice against spilling the salt ; but evil conse- quences can be avoided by throwing a pinch of salt over the left shoulder.
These remarks may seem frivolous to those unhappy persons who have not the privilege of being superstitious. It gives great zest to life to have a few harmless supersti- tions. It is the cheese /<?;z^// of the mental faculties ; and we may add that a consideration of these maxims, handed down from a glorious past of gastronomes, con- tributes to the various modes of gastronomic gratification. We must remember that the tongue of man, by the deli- cacy of its structure, gives ample evidences of the high functions to which it is destined. The Roman epicures cultivated their taste so perfectly that they could tell if a fish were caught above or below a bridge. Organic per- fection, epicureanism, or the art of good living, belongs to man alone. The pleasure of eating is the only one, taken in moderation, which is common to every time, age, and condition, which is enjoyed without fatigue or danger, which must be repeated two or three times a day. It can combine with our other pleasures, or console us for their loss.
" Un bo7i difier, c'est un consolation pour les illusions perdusT And we have an especial satisfaction, when in the act of eating, that we are prolonging our existence, and enabling ourselves to become good citizens whilst enjoying ourselves.
MODES OF GASTRONOMIC GRATIFICATION. lOI
Thus the pleasures of the table, the act of dining, the various modes of gastronomic gratification should re- ceive our most respectful consideration. '* Let the soup be hot, and the wines cool. Let the coffee be perfect, and the liqueurs chosen with peculiar care. Let the guests be detained by the social enjoyment, and ani- mated with the hope that before the evening is over there is still some pleasure in store."
Our modern hostesses who understand the art of entertaining often have music, or some recitations, in the drawing-room after the dinner; and in England it is often made the occasion of an evening party.
Thus gourmandize is that social love of good dinners which combines in one Athenian elegance, Roman lux- ury, and Parisian refinement. It implies discretion to arrange, skill to prepare, and taste to direct. It cannot be done superficially, and if done well it takes time, ex- perience, and care. " To be a success, a dinner must be thought out."
" By right divine, man is the king of nature, and all that the earth produces is for him. It is for him that the quail is fattened, the grape ripened. For him alone the Mocha possesses so agreeable an aroma, for him the sugar has such wholesome properties."
He, and he alone, banquets in company, and so far from good living being hurtful to health, Brillat Savarin declares that the gourmets have a larger dose of vitality than other men. But they have their sorrows, and the worst of them is a bad dinner, — an ill-considered, wretch- edly composed, over-burdened repast, in which there is little enjoyment for the brain, and a constant disappoint- ment to the palate.
" Let the dishes be exceedingly choice and but few in
102 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
number, and the wines of the best quahty. Let the order of serving be from the more substantial to the Hghter." Let the eating proceed without hurry or bustle, since the dinner is the last business of the day ; and let the guests look upon themselves as travellers about to reach the same destination together.
A dinner is not, as we see, a matter of butler or chef alone. " It is the personal trouble which a host and hostess are willing to take ; it is the intimate association of a cultivated nature with the practical business of en- tertaining, which makes the perfect dinner.
*' Conviviality concerns everything, hence it produces fruits of all flavours. All the ingenuity of man has been for centuries concentrated upon increasing and in- tensifying the pleasures of the table."
The Greeks used flowers to adorn vases and to crown the guests. They ate under the vault of heaven, in gardens, in groves, in the presence of all the marvels of nature. To the pleasures of the table were joined the charms of music and the sound of instruments. Whilst the court of the king of the Phoenicians were feasting, Phenius, a minstrel, celebrated the deeds of the warriors of bygone times. Often, too, dancers and jugglers and comic actors, of both sexes and in every costume, came to engage the eye, without lessening the pleasures of the table.
We eat in heated rooms, too much heated perhaps, and brilliantly lighted, as they should be. The present fancy for shaded lamps, and easily ignitible shades, leads to im- promptu conflagrations which are apt to injure Saint Table-Cloth. That poor martyr is burned at the steak quite too often. Our dancers and jugglers are introduced after dinner, not during dinner; and we have our war-
MODES OF GASTRONOMIC GRATIFICATION. IO3
riors at the table amongst the guests. Nor do we hire Phenius, a minstrel, to discourse of their great deeds.
I copy from a recent paper the following remarks. Mr. Elbridge T. Gerry, says : *' There are in society some newly admitted members who, with the best intentions imaginable, are never able to do things in just the proper style. They are persons of wealth, fairly good breeding and possessed of a desire to entertain. With all the good-humoured witticisms that the newspapers indulge in on this subject, it is nevertheless a fact that the art of entertaining requires deep and careful study, as well as natural aptitude."
Some of the greatest authors have stated this in poetry and prose.
'^ A typical member of this new class recently gave a dinner to a number of persons in society. It was a very dull affair. There was prodigality in everything, but no taste, and no refinement. The fellow amused me by telling us he had no trouble in getting up a fine dinner ; he had only to tell his butler and chef to get up a meal for so many persons, and the whole thing was done. There are few persons fortunate enough to possess chefs and butlers of that kind ; he certainly was not. Of the persons who attended his dinner, nine out of ten were displeased and will never attend another. It does not take long for the experienced member of society to know whether a host or hostess is qualified to entertain, and the climbers soon find it a hard piece of business to secure guests."
But on the other hand, we can reason that so fond of the various modes of gastronomic gratification is the human race, that the dinner giver is a very popular variety of the genus homo ; nor does the host or hostess
104 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
generally find it a hard matter to secure guests. Indeed there is a vulgar proverb to the effect that if the Devil gives a ball, all the angels will go to it.
" If you want an animal to love you, feed it." So that the host can stand a great deal of criticism. We should, however, take a hint from the Arabs, nor abuse the salt ; it is almost worse than spilling it.
Lady Morgan described the cookery of France as being " the standard and gauge of modern civilization ; " and when, during the peace which followed Waterloo, Brillat Savarin turned his thoughts to the aesthetics of the dinner-table, he probably added more largely to the health and happiness of the human race than any other known philanthropist. We must not forget what had gone before in the developments and refinements of the reigns of Louis XIV., XV., and the Regent; we must not forget the honour done to gastronomy by such statesmen as Colbert, such soldiers as Cond^, nor by such a wit and beauty as Madame de Sevign^.
OF SOUPS.
" Oh, a splendid soup is the true pea-green,
I for it often call, And up it comes, in a smart tureen,
When I dine in my banquet hall. When a leg of mutton at home is boiled,
The liquor I always keep, And in that liquor, before 'tis spoiled,
A peck of peas I steep ; When boiled till tender they have been I rub through a sieve the peas so green.
" Though the trouble the indolent may shock,
I rub with all my power. And having returned them to the stock,
I stew them for an hour ; Of younger peas I take some more,
The mixture to improve, Thrown in a little time before
The soup from the fire I move. Then seldom a better soup is seen Than the old familiar soup pea-green."
HE best of this poetical recipe is that it is not only funny, but a capital formula.
" The giblet may tire, the gravy pall,
And the truth may lose its charm; But the green pea triumphs over them all And does not the slightest harm."
Some of us, however, prefer turtle. It would seem sometimes as if turtle soup were the synonym for a good dinner, and as if it dated back to the days of good
T
106 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
Queen Bess. But fashion did not set its seal on turtle soup until about seventy years ago ; as an entry in the " Gentleman's Magazine " mentions cahpash and cali- pee as rarities. It is now inseparable from the Lord Mayor's dinner. When we notice ninety-nine recipes for soup in the latest French cookery book, and when we see the fate of a dinner made or marred by the first dish, we must concede that it will be a stumbling-block to the young housekeeper.
Add to that the curious fact that no Irishwoman can make a good soup until she has been taught by years of experience, and we have the first problem in the danger- ous process of dinner-giving staring us in the face. A greasy, watery, ill-considered soup will take away the appetite of even a hungry man ; while a delicate white or brown soup, or the purees of peas and asparagus, may weh whet the appetite of the most pampered gourmet.
The subject of soup-making may well be studied. A good soup is at once economical and healthful, and of the first importance in the construction of a dinner. Soup should be made the day before it is to be eaten, by boiling either a knuckle of veal for a white soup, three or four pounds of beef, with the bone well cracked, for a clear consomme, or by putting the bones of fish, chickens, and meat into water with salt and pepper, and thus making an economical soup, which may, however, be very good. The French put everything into the soup pot, — bones, scraps, pot liquor, the water in which onions have been boiled, in fact in which all vegetables includ- ing beans and potatoes have been boiled ; even as a French writer says " rejected MSS. may be thrown into the soup pot ; " and the result in France is always good. It is to be observ^ed that every soup should be allowed
OF SOUPS. 107
to cool, and all the fat should be skimmed off, so that the residuum may be as clear as wine.
Delicate soups, clear consomme, and white soups a la Reifie, are great favourites in America, but in England they make a strong, savoury article, which they call gravy soup. It is well to know how to prepare this, as it makes a variety.
Cut two pounds of beef from the neck into dice, and fry until brown. Break small two or three pounds of bones, and fry lightly. Bones from which streaked bacon has been cut make an excellent addition, but too many must not be used» lest the soup be salt. SHce and fry brown a pound of onions, put them with the meat and bones and three quarts of cold water into the soup pot; let it boil up, andhaving skimmed add two large turnips, a carrot cut in slices, a small bundle of sweet herbs, and a half a dozen pepper-corns. Let the soup boil gently for four or five hours, and about one hour before it is finished add a little piece of celery, or celery-seed tied in muslin. This is a most delicious flavour. When done, strain the soup and set it away for a night to get cold. Remove the fat and next day let it boil up, stirring in two spoonfuls of corn starch, moistened with cold water. Season with salt and pepper to taste, not too salt; add forcemeat balls to the soup, and you have a whole dinner in your soup.
An oxtail soup is made like the above, only adding the tail, which is divided into joints, which are fried brown. Then these joints should be boiled until the meat comes easily off the bones. When the soup is ready put in two lumps of sugar, a glass of port wine, and pour all into the tureen.
The Julienne soup, so delicious in summer, should be a nice clear stock, with the addition of prepared vege- tables. Unless the cook can buy the excellent com-
108 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
pressed vegetables which are to be had at the Italian warehouses, it is well to follow this order : —
Wash and scrapa a large carrot, cut away all the yellow parts from the middle, and slice the red outside. Take an equal quantity of turnips and three small onions, cut in a similar manner. Put them in a stewpan with two ounces of butter and a pinch of powdered sugar, stir over the fire until a nice brown colour, then add a quart of clear, well-flavoured stock, and let all simmer together gently for three hours. When done, skim the fat off very carefully, and ten minutes before serving add a lettuce cut in shreds and blanched for a minute in boiling water. Simmer for five minutes and the soup will be ready. This is a most excellent soup if well made.
Mock-turtle soup is easily made : —
Boil the bones of the head three hours, add a piece of gravy meat cut in dice and fried brown, three onions sliced and fried brown, a carrot, a turnip, celery, and a small bundle of sweet herbs ; boil gently for three hours and take off the fat. When it is ready to be served add a glass of sherry and slices of lemon. The various parts of a calf s- head can be cooked and used as forcemeat balls, and made to look exactly like turtle. This soup is found canned and is almost as good as the real article.
Dried-pea soup, creme d'asperge, and bean soup, in fact all the pinres, are very healthful and elegant soups. The pia-ee .is the mashed mass of pea or bean, which is added to the stock.
Boil a pint of large peas in a quart of water with a sprig of parsley or mint, and a dozen or so of green onions. When the peas are done strain and rub them through a sieve, put the puree back into the liquor the peas were boiled in, add a pint of good veal or beef broth, a lump of sugar, and pepper and salt to taste. Let the soup get thoroughly hot without boiling, stir in an ounce of good butter, and the soup is ready.
OF SOUPS. 109
A plain but quick and delicious soup may be made by using a can of corn, with a small piece of pork. This warmed up quickly, with a little milk added, is very good.
As for a C7'h7ie {fasperge, it is better to employ a chef to teach the new cook.
Mulligatawny soup is a visitor from India. It should not be too strong of curry powder for the average taste. The stock should be made of chicken or veal, or the liquor in which chickens have been boiled.
Slice and fry in butter six large onions, add four sharp, sour apples, cored and quartered, but not peeled. Let them boil in a little of the stock until quite tender, then mix with them a quarter of a pound of flour, and a small teaspoonful of curry powder. Take a quart of the stock and when the SQ^p has boiled skim it ; let it simmer for half an hour, then carefully take off all the fat, strain the soup, and rub the onions through a sieve. When ready to heat the soup for the dinner-table add any pieces of meat or chicken cut into small, delicate shapes. When these have been boiled together for ten minutes the soup will be ready ; salt to taste. Boiled rice should be sent in on a separate dish.
Sorrel soup is a great favourite with the French people. We do not make enough of sorrel in this country; it adds an excellent flavour.
Carefully wash a pound of sorrel, and having picked, cut it in shreds, put it into a stewpan with two ounces of fresh butter and stir it over the fire for ten minutes. Stir in an ounce of flour, mix well together and add a pint and a half of good white stock made as for veal broth. Let it simmer for half an hour. Having skimmed the soup, stir in the yolks of three eggs beaten up in half a pint of milk or cream. Stir in a little pat of butter, and when dissolved pour the whole over thin pieces of toasted bread into the tureen.
110 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
With the large family of the broths every housewife should become acquainted. They are invaluable for the sick, especially broths of chicken and mutton. For veal broth the following is an elaborate, but excellent recipe :
Get three or four pounds of scrag, or a knuckle of veal, chopped into small pieces, also a ham bone, or slice of ham, and cover with water ; let it boil up, skim it until no more rises. Put in four or five onions, a turnip, and later a bit of celery or celery seed tied in muslin, a little salt, and white pepper. Let it boil gently for four hours ; strain the gravy and having taken off all the fat return the residue to the pot and let it boil ; then slightly thicken with corn flour, about one teaspoonful to a quart of soup ; let it simmer before serving. Three pounds of veal should make two quarts of good soup.
A sheep's-head soup is famous all over Scotland and is made as follows : —
Get the head of a sheep with the skin on, soak it in tepid water, take out the tongue and brains, break all the thin bones inside the cheek, and carefully wash it in several waters ; put it on in a quart of water with a teaspoonful of salt and let it boil ten minutes. Pour away this water and put two quarts more with one pound of a scrag of mutton ; add, cut up, six onions, two turnips, two carrots, a sprig of parsley, and season with pepper and salt. Let it boil gently for four or five hours, when the head and neck will not be too much cooked for the family dinner, and may be served either with parsley or onion sauce. It is a most savoury morsel. Strain the soup, and let it cool so as to remove every particle of fat. Rub the vegetables through a sieve to a fine puree. Mix a tablespoonful of flour in a quarter of a pint of milk; make the soup boil up and stir it in with the vegetables.
Have the tongue boiled until it is very tender, skin and trim it, have the brains also well cooked, and chop and pound them very fine with the tongue, mix them with an equal weight of sifted bread-crumbs, a tablespoonful of chopped
OF SOUPS. Ill
green parsley, pepper, salt, and egg, and if necessary a small quantity of flour to enable you to roll the mixture into little balls. Put an ounce of butter into a small frying-pan and fry the balls until a nice brown, lay them on paper before the fire to drain away all the fat, and put them into the soup after it is poured into the tureen. Scald and chop some green parsley and serve separately on a plate.
Thackeray thought so much of a boiled sheep's head that he made it the point of one of his humorous
poems.
" By that grand vow that bound thee Forever to my side, And by the ring that made thee
My darling and my bride ! Thou wilt not fail or falter
But bend thee to the task — A boiled sheep's head on Sunday Is all the boon I ask ! "
In France, cabbage is much used in soup. " Ha, what is this that rises to my touch So like a cushion — can it be a cabbage ? It is, it is, that deeply inspired flower Which boys do flout us with, but yet — I love thee, Thou giant rose, wrapped in a green surtout. Doubtless in Eden thou didst blush as bright As these thy puny brethren, and thy breath Sweetened the fragrance of her spicy air ; And now thou seemst like a bankrupt beau Stripped of his gaudy hues and essences, And growing portly in his sober garments."
The cabbage is without honour in America ; and yet if boiled in water which is thrown away, having absorbed all its grosser essences, and then boiled again and chopped and dressed with butter and cream, it is an excellent vegetable. Its disagreeable odour has led to its expulsion from many a house, but corn-beef and cab- bage are not to be despised.
112 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
Cauliflower, which Thackeray calls the " apotheosis of cabbage," is the most delicate of vegetables ; and a puree of cauliflower shall close onr chapter on soups.
Boil in salted water, using a small piece of butter, two heads of cauliflower, drain and pass them through a colander, dilute with two quarts of sauce and a quart of chicken broth, season with salt, white pepper, and grated nutmeg. Add a teaspoonful of fine white sugar, then pass the whole forcibly with a wooden presser through a fine sieve, — the finer the sieve the better the puree. Put the residue in a stewpan, set it on the fire, stir all the while till it boils, let it boil for ten minutes, strain well, add a mixture made with the yolks of six eggs and half a pint of cream, finish with four ounces of table butter, and serve with small, fried, square croutons.
A puree of celery is equally excellent ; but all these soups require an intelligent cook. It is better to have one's cook taught to make soups by an expert, for it is the most difficult of all the dishes, if thoroughly good. The plain soup, free from grease and well flavoured, is easy enough after a little training, *' but the chief ingredient of soup is brains," according to a Lon- don chef. It is, however, a good practice for an amateur cook to experiment and to try these various recipes, all of which are practicable.
FISH.
What is thy diet ? Canst thou gulf a shoal Of herrings? Or hast thou gorge and room To bolt fat porpoises and dolphins whole By dozens, e'en as oysters we consume ?
Punch. The world 's mine oyster, which I with sword will open.
Hotspur.
THE Egyptians, strange to say, did not deify fish, that important article of their food. We read of the enormous yield of Lake Moeris, which was dammed up by the great Rameses, and whose draught of fishes brought him so enormous a revenue.
One of the most fascinating of all the Egyptian Queens, Sonivaphra, received the revenues of one of these fisheries to keep her in shoe-strings, — probably another name for pin money.
And yet the Egyptians, while mummying the cats and dogs and beetles, and such small deer, made no gods of the good carp or other fish which must have stocked the river Nile. They emblazoned the crocodile on their monuments, but never a fish. It is a singular foreshadowing of that great vice of the human race, ingratitude.
The Romans were fond of fish, and the records of their gastronomy abound in fish stories. We read of Licinius Crassus, the orator, that he lived in a house of great elegance and beauty. This house was called the
8
114 THE ART Of entertaining.
" Venus of the Palatine," and was remarkable for its size, the taste of the furniture, and the beauty of the grounds. It was adorned with pillars of Hymettian marbles, with expensive vases and triclinia inlaid with brass ; his gardens were provided with fish-ponds, and noble lotus-trees shaded his walks. Abenobarbus, his colleague in the censorship, found fault with such luxury, such " corruption of manners," and complained of his crying for the loss of a lamprey as if it had been a favourite daughter !
This, however, was a tame lamprey, which used to come to the call of Crassus and feed out of his hand. Crassus retorted by a public speech against his colleague, and by his great power of ridicule turned him into de- rision, jested upon his name, and to the accusation of weeping for a lamprey, replied that it was more than Abenobarbus had done for the loss of any of his three wives !
In the sixteenth century, that golden age of the Vati- can, the splendid court of Leo X. was the centre of ar- tistic and literary life, and the witty and pleasure-loving Pope made its gardens the scene of his banquets and concerts, where he listened to the recitations of the poets who sprung up under his protection. There be- neath the shadow of the ilex and the lauristines, in a circle so refined that ladies were admitted, Leo him- self leaned on the shoulder of the handsome Raphael, who was allowed to caress and admire the Medicean white hand of his noble patron. We read that this fa- mous Pope was so fastidious as to the fish dinners of Lent, that he invented twenty different recipes for the chowder of that day ! Walking in disguise with Raphael through the fish-market, he espied a boy who, on his
FISH. 115
knees, was presenting a fish to a pretty contadina. The scene took form and immortaUty in the famous Vierge au Foissofi, in which, conducted by the Angel Gabriel, the youthful Saint John presents the fish to the Virgin and child, — a beautiful picture for the church whose patron saint was a fisherman.
Indeed, that picture of the sea of Galilee, and the sacred meaning attached to the etymology of the word " fish," has given the finny wanderer of the seas a peculiar and valuable personality. All this, with the selection by our Lord of so many of his disciples from amongst the fishermen, the many poetical associations which form around this, the cheapest and most delicate form of food with which the Creator has stocked this world of ours, would, if followed out, afford a volume of suggestion, quotation, poetry, and romance with which to embellish the art of entertaining.
Fish is now believed to produce aliment for the brain, and as such is recommended to all authors and editors, statesmen, poets and lawyers, clergymen and mathema- ticians,— all who draw on that finer fibre of the brain which is used for the production of poetry or prose.
England is famed for its good fish, as why should it not be, with the ocean around it? The turbot is, par excellence, the fish for a Lord Mayor's dinner, and it is admirable a la creme for anybody's dinner. Excellent is the whitebait of Richmond, that fnysterious little dwarf. Eaten with slices of brown bread and butter it is a very delicious morsel, and the whiting, which always comes to the table with his tail in his mouth, beautifully browned outside, white as snow within, what so excellent as a whiting, except a sole au gj-afin with sauce Tartare ?
Fresh herrings in Scotland are delicious, almost equal
Il6 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
to the red mullets which Caesar once ate at Marseilles. The fresh sardines at Nice, and all along the Mediterra- nean, are very delicate, as are the thousand shell-fish. The langoose, or large lobster of France and the Medi- terranean, is a surprise to the American traveller. Not so delicate as our American lobster, it still is ad- mirable for a salad. It is so large that the flesh — if a fish has flesh — can be sliced up and served like cold roast turkey.
The salmon, king of fish, inspires in his capture, in Scotland rivers, in Labrador, in Canada, some of the best writing of the day. William Black, in Scotland, and Dr. Wier Mitchell, of Philadelphia, can tell stories of salmon-fishing which are as brilliant as Victor Hugo's description of Waterloo, or of that mysterious jelly-fish in his novel, " The Toilers of the Sea."
The New York market boasts the red snapper, the sheepshead, the salmon, the salmon-trout, the Spanish mackerel, most toothsome of viands, the sea bass, cod, halibut, the shad, the greatest profusion of excellent oysters and clams, the cheap pan-fish, and endless eels. The French make many fine dishes of eels, as the Romans did.
To be good, fish must be fresh. It is absolutely in- dispensable, to retain certain flavours, that the fish should go from one element to another, out of the water into the fire, and on!b the gridiron or into the frying pan as soon as possible. Therefore, if the housewife has a fish seasonable and fresh, :and a gridiron, she can make a good dish for a hungry man.
We shaU begin with the cheapest of the products of the water, and although they may squirm out of our hands, try to bring to the table the despised eels,
FISH. 117
An old proverb said that matrimony was a bag in which there were ninety-nine snakes and one eel, and the young lady who put her hand into this agreeable company had small chance at the eel. It would seem at first blush as if no one would care particularly for the eel. In old England, eels were exceedingly popular, and the monks dearly loved to feed upon them. The cellar- ist of Barking Abbey, Essex, in the ancient times of monastic foundations, was, amongst other eatables, to provide stewed eels in Lent and to bake eels on Shrove Tuesday. There were artificial receptacles made for eels. The cruel custom of salting eels alive is men- tioned by some old writers.
'* When the old serpent appeared in the guise of a stewed eel it was impossible to resist him."
Eels €71 matelote should be cut in three-inch pieces, and salted ; fry an onion brown in a little dripping, add half a pint of broth to the brown onion, part of a bay leaf, six broken pepper-corns, four whole cloves, and a gill of claret. Add the eels to this and simmer until thoroughly cooked. Remove the eels, put them on a hot dish, add a teaspoonful of brown flour to the sauce, strain and pour over the eels. Spatch-cooked eels are good.
Fricasseed eels : Cut three pounds of eels into pieces of three inches in length, put them into a stewpan, and cover them with Rhine wine, or two thirds water and one third vinegar ; add fifteen oysters, two pieces of lemon, a bouquet of herbs, one onion quartered, six cloves, three stalks of celery, a pinch of cayenne pepper, and salt to taste. Stew the eels one hour, remove them from the dish, strain the liquor. Put it back into the saucepan with a gill of qream and an ounce of butter rolled in flour, simmer gently a few minutes, pour over the fish, and you have a dish for a king.
Stewed eels are great favourites with gourmets, cooked 9-S follows : —
Il8 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
Cut into three-inch pieces two pounds of medium-sized cleaned eels. Rub the inside of each piece with salt. Let them stand half an hour, then parboil them. Boil an onion in a quart of milk and remove the onion. Drain the eels from the water and add them to the milk. Season with half a teaspoonful of chopped parsley, salt and pepper, and the smallest bit of mace. Simmer until the flesh falls from the bones.
Fried eels should be slightly salted before cooking. Do not cover them with batter, but dredge them with just flour enough to absorb all moisture, then cover them v/ith boiling lard.
As for the thousand and one recipes for cooking an oyster, no one need tell an American hostess much on that subject. Raw, roasted, boiled, stewed, scalloped and baked in patties, what so savoury as the oyster? They should be bought alive, and opened with care by an expert, for the bits of shell are dangerous. If eaten raw, pieces of lemon should be served with them. Plates of majolica to hold five or seven oysters are now to be bought at all the best crockery stores.
To stew oysters well, cream and butter should be added, and the whole mixture done in a silver dish over an alcohol lamp. Broiled oysters should be dipped first in melted butter, then in bread crumbs, then put in a very fine wire gridiron, and broiled over a bright bed of coals. Scalloped oysters should be carefully dried with a clean napkin, then laid in a deep dish on a bed of crumbs and fresh butter, all softened by the liquor of the oyster ; a layer of oysters and a layer of crumbs should follow each other, with little walnuts of butter put be- tween. The mixture should be put in a very hot oven and baked a delicate brown, but not dried.
The plain fried oyster is very popular, but it should not
FISM. 1 19
be cooked in small houses just before in entertainment, as the odour is not appetizing, ^o dip them in egg batter, then in bread-crumbs, and fry them in drippings is a common and good fashion. A more elaborate fashion is to beat up the yolks of four eggs with three tablespoonfuls of sweet oil, and season them with a tea- spoonful of salt, and a saltspoonful of cayenne pepper. Beat up thoroughly, dip each oyster in this mixture and then in bread crumbs, and fry in hot oil. The best and most elegant way of cooking an oyster is, however, " a la poti letter
Scald the oysters in their own liquor, drain them, and add to the liquor, salt, half an ounce of butter, the juice of half a lemon, a gill of cream, and a teaspoonful of dissolved flour. Beat the yolk of one ^gg, and add to the sauce, stir until the sauce thickens ; place the oysters on a hot dish, pour the sauce over them, add a little chopped parsley and serve.
x\ simpler and more primitive but excellent way of cooking oysters is to clean the shells thoroughly, and place them in the coals in an open fireplace, or to roast them in hot ashes until the shells snap open.
When the oyster departs then the clam takes his place, and is delicious as an avant goiU or an appetizer at a dinner. If clams are broiled they must be done quickly, else they become hard and indigestible.
The soft-shell clam, scalloped, makes a good dish. Clean the shells well, then put two clams to each shell, with half a teaspoonful of minced celery. Cut a slice of fat bacon small, add a little to each shell, put bread crumbs on top and a little pat of butter, bake in the oven until brown. A clam broth is a delicious and healthful beverage for sick or well ; add cream and a spoonful of sherry to it, and it becomes a fabulously fine
120 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
thing. In this mixture the clams must be strained out before the cream and wine are added.
But if the clam is good what shall we say of crabs. Hard-shell crabs must be boiled about twelve minutes, drained, and set away to cool. Eaten with sandwiches and a dressing they are considered a dehcacy for supper. They can be more cooked with chopped eggs, or treated like a chicken pasty, and cooked in a paste shell they are very good.
Take half an ounce of butter, half an onion minced, half a pound of minced raw veal, and a small carrot shredded, a chopped crab, a pint of boiling cream ; sim- mer an hour, then strain into a saucepan, and what a sauce you have !
The soft-shell crab is an invalid. He is caught when he is helpless, feverish, and not at all, one would say, healthy. He is killed by the jarring of the train, by thunder, by some passing noisy cart, and some say by a fall in stocks, or a sudden change in political circles.
Such sensitive creatures must be cooked as soon as possible. It is only necessary to remove the feathery substance under the pointed sides of the shells, rinse them in cold water, drain, season with salt and pepper, dredge them in flour and fry in hot fat. Crab patties and crabs cooked in any other way than this fail to please the epicure. Nothing with so pronounced an individual- ity as a soft-shelled crab should be disguised.
A devilled crab is considered good, but it should be cooked by a negro expert from Maryland.
Scallops are essentially good in stews, or fried, and when, cut in small pieces, with a pint of milk, a little but- ter, and a little salt, they again return to their beautiful shells and are baked as a scallop, they are delicious. Put in pork fat, and fried, they are also very fine.
FISH. 121
The lobster is now considered very healthful, and as conveying more phosphorus into the human system than any other fish. Broiled, devilled, stewed, cooked in a fashion called Boiirdelaise, it is the most delicious of dishes, and as a salad what can equal it?
A baked whitefish with Bordeaux sauce is very fine.
Clean and stuff the fish with bread-crumbs, onions, butter, and sweet marjoram. Put it in a baking pan, add a liberal quantity of butter previously rolled in flour, put in the pan a pint of claret, and bake for an hour. Remove the fish and strain the gravy, put in a teaspoonful of brown flour and a pinch of cayenne pepper.
Halibut with an egg sauce and a border of parsley is a dish for a banquet, only the cook must know how to make egg sauce. Supposing we tell her?
Put two ounces of butter in a stew-pan ; when it melts, add one ounce of flour. Stir for one minute or more, but do not brown. Then add by degrees two gills of boiHng water, stirring until smooth, and boiling about two minutes. If not perfectly smooth, pass it through a sieve ; then add an- other ounce of butter cut in pieces. When the butter is melted, add three hard-boiled eggs, chopped not too fine, season with pepper and salt, and serve immediately.
This sauce is admirable for cod, and for all boiled fish.
But the " perfectest thing on earth " is a broiled fish, a shad for instance ; and one of the best preventives against burning is to rub olive oil on the fish before putting it on the gridiron. Charcoal affords the best fire, and it must be free from all smoke and flame.
A little sweet butter, half a teaspoonful of chopped parsley and the juice of a lemon should be melted together, and stand ready to be poured over the broiled fish.
Mr. Lowell, in one of his delightful, witty papers in the
122 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
Atlantic Monthly years ago, regretted that he could not find a gridiron near the St. Lawrence, although its patron saint suffered martyrdom on that excellent kitchen utensil. It is a lamentable fact that wood fires and gridirons are giving out. They contain within them- selves the merits of all the kitchen ranges, all the lost juices of that early American cookery, which one who has tasted it can never forget. Where are the broils of our childhood ?
Codfish is a family stand-by, but a tasteless fish unless covered with oysters or something very good ; but salt- codfish balls are a great luxury.
Brook trout, boiled, baked, and broiled, are all inferior to the fry. The frying-pan has to answer for a multitude of sins, but nothing so base can be found as to deprive it of its great glory in sending us a fried brook-trout. "Clean and rinse a quarter-of-a-pound trout in cold water," says one recipe.
Why not a pound -and-a-quarter trout? The recipe begins later on : after some pork has been fried in the pan, throw in ygur carefully cleaned fish, no matter what their weight may be, turn them three times most care- fully. Send to table without adding or detracting from their flavour.
This is for the sportsman who cooks his trout himself by a wood fire in the woods ; and no other man ever arrives at just that perfect way of cooking a trout. When the trout has come down from cooling springs to the hot city, it requires a seasoning of salt, pepper, and lemon- juice.
Frogs — frogs as cooked in France, grenouilles a la poiilette — are a most luxurious delicacy. They are very expensive and are to be bought at the inarche St
FISH. 123
Honore. As only the hind legs are eaten, and the price is fifteen francs a dozen, they are not often seen. We mi^ht have them in this country for the catching. Of their tenderness, succulence, and delicacy of flavour there can be no question. They are clean feeders, and un- doubtedly wholesome.
Sala, writing in " Breakfasts in Bed " does not praise bouillabaisse. He declares that the cooks plunge a roll- ing-pin in tallow and then with it stir that pot pouni of red mullet, tomatoes, red pepper, red Burgundy, oil, and garlic to which Thackeray has written so delightful a lyric. " Against fish soups, turtle, terrapin, oyster, and bisque," he says, " I can offer no objection." The Italians again have their good zuppa marinana, which is not all like the bouillabaisse , and the Russians make a very appetizing fish pottage which is called batwina, the stock of which is composed of kraus, or half-brewed barley beer, and oil. Into this is put the fish known as the sterlet of the Volga, or the sassina of the Gulf of Fin- land, together with bay leaves, pepper, and lumps of ice. Baiwina is better than bouillabaisse.
THE SALAD. " Epicurean cooks shall sharpen with cloyless sauce the appetite."
OF all the vegetables of which a salad can be made, lettuce is the greatest favourite. That lettuce which is pajiachee, says the Almanack des GoiirmandSy that is, when it has streaked or variegated leaves, is truly Mfie salade de disti7iction. We prefer in this country the fine, crisp, solid little heads, of which the leaves are bright green. The milky juices of the lettuce are sopo- rific, like opium seeds, and predispose the eater to sleep, or to repose of temper and to philosophic thought.
After, or before, lettuce comes the fragrant celery, always an appetizer. Then the tomato, a noble fruit as sweet in smell as Araby the blest, which makes an illus- trious salad. Its medicinal virtue is as great as its gastro- nomical goodness. It is the friend of the well, for it keeps them well, and the friend of the sick, for it brings them back to the lost sheep-folds of hygeia.
There are water-cress and dandelion, common mus- tard, boiled asparagus, and beet root, potato salad, beloved of the Germans, the cucumber, most fragrant and delicate of salads, a salad of eggs, of lobsters, of chickens, sausages, herrings, and sardines. Anything that is edible can be made into a salad, and a vegetable mixture of cold French beans, boiled peas, carrots and potato, onion, green peppers, and cucumber, covered with
THE SALAD. I25
fresh mayonnaise dressing, is served ice cold in France, to admiration.
To learn to make a salad is the most important of qualifications for one who would master the art of entertaining.
Here is a good recipe for the dressing : —
Two yolks of eggs, a teaspoonful of salt, and three of mus- tard, — it should have been mixed with hot water before using, — a httle cayenne pepper, a spoonful of vinegar ; pound the eggs and mix well. Common vinegar is preferred by many, but some like tarragon vinegar better. Stir this gently for a minute, then add two full spoonfuls of best oil of Lucca.
" A sage for the mustard, a miser for the vinegar, a spend- thrift for the oil, and a madman to stir " is the old saw. Add a teaspoonful of brown sugar, half a dozen little spring onions cut fine, three or four slices of beet root, the white of the egg, not cut too small, and then the lettuce itself, which should be torn from the head stock by the fingers.
Some French salad dressers <s,z.y fatiguez la salade^ which means, shake it, mix it, and bruise it; but the modern arrangement is to delicately cover the leaves with the dressing, and not to bruise them. This is an old-fash- ioned salad.
An excellent salad of cold boiled potatoes cut into slices about an inch thick, may be made with thin slices of fresh beet root, and onions cut very thin, and very little of them, with the same dressing, minus the sugar.
Francatelli speaks of a Russian salad with lobster, a German salad with herrings, and an Italian salad with potatoes ; but these come more under the head of the mayonnaises than of the simpler salads.
The cucumber comes next to lettuce, as a purely vegetable salad^ and is most desirable with fish. Pr,
126 THE ART OF ENTERTAINING.
Johnson declared that the best thing you could do with a cucumber, after you had prepared it with much care and thought, was to throw it out of the window ; but Dr. Johnson, although he could write Rasselas and a dictionary, knew nothing about the art of entertaining. He was an eater, a glutton, a gourmand, not a gou7'jiiet. Plow should he dare to speak against a cucumber salad?
Endive and chiccory should be added to the list of vegetable salads. Neither of them is good, however.
An old-fashioned French salad is made thus : " Chop three anchovies, an onion, and some parsley small ; put them in a bowl with two tablespoonfuls of vinegar, one of oil, a little mustard and salt. When well mixed, add some slices of cold roast beef not exceeding two or three inches long. Make three hours before eating. Garnish •with parsley." This is by no means a bad way of serv- ing up yesterday's roast beef.
The etymology of salad is said to be " sal," or some- thing salted. Shakspeare mentions the salad five or six times. In Henry VI., Jack Cade, in his extremity of peril when hiding from his pursuers in Ida's garden, says he has climbed over the wall to see if he could eat grass, or pick a salad, which he says " will not come amiss to cool a man's stomach in the hot weather." In An- tony and Cleopatra, the passionate queen speaks of her *' salad days" when she was "green in judgment, cool in blood." This means, however, something raw or unripe. Hamlet uses the word with the more ancient orthography of "sallet," and says in his speech to the players, " I remember when there were no sallets in these times to make them savoury." By this he meant there was nothing piquant in them, no Attic salt. One author, not so illustrious, claims that the noblest prerog-
THE SALAD. 12;;^
ative of man is that he is a cooking animal, and a salad eater.
" The Hon is generous as a hero, the rat artful as a lawyer, the dove gentle as a lover, the beaver is a good engineer, the monkey is a clever actor, but none of them can make a salad. The wisest sheep never thought of culhng and testing his grasses, seasoning them with thyme or tarragon, softening them with oil, exasperating them with mustard, sharpening them with vinegar, spirit- ualizing them with a suspicion of onions, in that no sheep has made a salad. Their only sauce is hunger.
" Salads," says this pleasant writer, "were invented by Adam and Eve, — probably made of pomegranates as to-day in Spain."
Of all salads, lobster is the most picturesque and beau- tiful. Its very scarlet is a trumpet tone to appetite. It lies embedded in green leaves like a magnificent tropical cactus. A good dressing for lobster is essence of an- chovy, mushroom ketchup, hard-boiled eggs, and a little cream.
Mashed potatoes, rubbed down with cream, or simply mixed with vinegar, are no bad substitute for eggs, and impart to the salad a new and not unpleasing flavour. French beans, the most delicate of vegetables, give the salad eater a new sensation. A dressing can be mixed in the following proportions : " Four mustard ladles of mustard, four salt ladles of salt. Three spoonfuls of best Italian oil, twelve of vinegar, three unboiled eggs. All are to be carefully rubbed together. This is for those who like sours and not sweets. An old French emigre, who had to make his living in England during the time of the Regency, a man of taste and refinement, an epicurean Marquis, carried to noblemen's houses his
12§ THE ART OF ENTERTAININC.
mahogany box full of essences, spices, and condiments, and made his salad in this way : he chopped up three anchovies with a little shallot and some parsley ; these he threw into a bowl with a little mustard and salt, two tablespoonfuls of oil, and one brimming over with vine- gar. When thoroughly merged he added his lettuce, or celery, or potato, extremely thin, short slices of best Westphalia ham, or the finest roast beef, which he had steeped in the vinegar. He garnished with parsley and a few layers of bacon. This man was called Le Roi de la salade.
A cod mayonnaise is a good dish : —
Boil a large cod in the morning. Let it cool ; then re- move the skin and bones. For sauce put some thick cream in a porcelain sauce-pan and thicken it with corn-flour which has been mixed with cold water. When it begins to boil stir in the beaten yolks of two eggs. As it cools beat it well to prevent it from being lumpy, and when nearly cold stir in the juice of two lemons, a little tarragon vinegar, a pinch of salt, and a soupqo7i of cayenne pepper. Peel and slice some very ripe tomatoes or cold potatoes, steep them in vinegar with cayenne, pounded ginger, and plenty of salt. Lay these around the fish and cover with ' cream sauce. The tomatoes and potatoes should be carefully drained before they are placed around the fish.
A salmon covered with a green sauce is a famous dish for a ball supper ; indeed, there are thirty or forty salads with a cold fish foundation.
This art of dressing cold vegetables with pepper, salt, oil, and vinegar, should be studied. In France they give you these salads to perfection at the dejeuner a la fourchette. Fillippini, of Delmonico's, in his admirable work, "The Table," adds Swedish salad. String Bean Salad, Russian Salad^ Salad Macedoine, Escarolle^ Don-
THE SALAD. I29
cetfe, Dandelioii a la coiitoise^ Baib de Capucine, Cauli- flower salad, and Salad a V Italian. I advise any young housekeeper to buy this book of his, as suggestive. It is too elaborate and learned, however, for practical application to any household except one in which a French cook is kept.
A mayonnaise dressing is a triumph of art when well made : —
A tablespoonful of mustard, one teaspoonful of salt, the yolk of three