The Pleasures of the Platter

Gastronomic Delights Which Grow Keener as Other Joys Are Taken from Us

RICHARDSON WRIGHT

AMONG my conceptions of Heaven (I have many), is a vast kitchen set on a sunwardlooking slope, where the good cooks of this world go after having served their culinary apprenticeships. It is a glazed-tile pavilion, with rows of burnished copper pots that keep themselves clean; and white-curtained, wide casements looking out over star - strewn meadows.

There you will find Br. Laurence, the same who wrote a devout book while the kettles simmered. There also you will find Peter de la Haye, master confectioner to Charles II; Bechamel, Louis XIV's chef, immortalized for morue a la creme; Vatel, cook to the Conde, who (this isn't mentioned now) slew himself in a moment of chagrin because the fish failed to arrive on time; Careme, king of pastry creators and favorite of Tallyrand; Ude, who vainly strove to teach the English how to cook in the French style; and all the other masters of the culinary arts who have concocted rare viands for the delectation of man's palate.

An International Assemblage

NOR will the conversation be limited to French. Sniffing the pots about, you will see Major Grey, K.C.B., who made the first batch of chutney, thereafter known by his name; and Mrs. Lazenby, who made Harvey's sauce; and Mr. Keeler, of marmalade fame. At another pot stands he who first introduced peroushkies into Russia; at another he who taught the Chinese how to cook rice. The negro mammy who made the first beaten biscuit will work happily side by side with the moon-faced frau from Pottstown, Pa., who first made scrappel (what a succulent breakfast dish!) and the hatchet-faced Puritan woman who baked the initial Boston bean or slid the first codfish ball into its baptismal fat.

On the verandah leading from this kitchen, lolling upon couches and crowned with bay, will be others who attained eternal fame. These are the boys of the bulldog breed who ventured into the unknown and uncharted seas of mixed dishes. Here is a Peary-looking person. You wouldn't suspect it, but he's the man who first dared serve Burgundy with pressed mallard duck, and later framed the law that gives champagne the right to go with anything. The esthetic looking man on the second couch to the left put the earliest chicken in its earliest aspic. And there you will also find included the well-known Babylonian gourmand, Nebuchadnezzar, because of his early fondness for lettuce. There are, of course, the more plebeian heroes—the initial eaters of oysters, clams, scallops, snails, mushrooms and sweetbreads; and those who first introduced the pork to the bean, who performed the nuptials between ham and eggs, who gave away liver to bacon, and presented corned beef to cabbage.

Pious folk may be shocked by this picture. But it is reasonable enough. Cooking is a good act; and we have been led to believe that Heaven is the place especially prepared for those whose lives have been given to good acts. Besides, if one of the good things of life here has been the pleasure of the platter, how shall he eat in the next life without cooks? And how will cooks concoct—without a kitchen? I ask you.

There was a time when men could speak of the pleasures of the cup; to-day we are reduced to the pleasures of the table. Now this is a solemn metamorphosis and the change will work amazing differences in our social and moral fabric.

One might recall the college years when we rallied around the brimming bowl to sing Horatian lays; and contrast them with the revels of the present when undergraduates gather round the jolly, jolly beefsteak.

Oh the jolly, jolly beefsteak!

The jolly, jolly beefsteak!

or, contrast the time when we pointed to the bibber's nose, with the present, when we point to the glutton's paunch. Hereafter we will visualize the new race of ancients recalling the good old days with—"And do you remember those mushrooms Andrew gave us?" . . . "Aye, sir, and those heavenly Brussels sprouts!"

These things, I say, are indicative of a new change in the American moral fabric. Once Americans were accused of consuming prodigious quantities of strong likker. Their new sin will be gluttony, culinary intemperance.

The before-dinner cocktail habit, which is generally attributed, to America, really came from Russia, whence much mingled good and evil have come. It was the custom, in Peter the Great's day, and in eras since, to give a guest plentiously of vodka before dining him, in hope that he would not notice the sort of meal that was to follow. Because of the cocktail, cooks shirked their responsibility and neglected their art. The past few years saw cooking in America fall to a low ebb, indeed. All manner of alleged labor-saving devices were invented whereby a cook could forget his pots. Consequently of late years we have been forced to drink heavily in order to forget the poor meal that was to follow. It is to be hoped, since drinking has been curtailed, that eating will come in again as an indoor amusement and cooking as a fine art. The lean brothers of the white lawn tie may have taken the cup from us, but we still—praise be to Allah!—retain the platter.

A Parentheses on Prohibition

AT this point let me crawl behind a picket of parentheses to set down my personal feelings about Prohibition. I object to it because it is a blow struck at a fundamental fact in Christianity. The Christian religion is based on the human principle that a man may sin, repent and be forgiven. Wine, in a man's stomach, bred forgiveness in his soul. Christianity will be in a bad way when its devotees have nothing to repent of and no incentive to forgiveness. Imagine the arid confidences of the bridegroom* to his bride, in 1955! Visualize the milk of human kindness everywhere frozen in the breast.

The pleasures of the platter fall into two classes—

(1) Common or FeriaL

(2) Ecclesiastical or Holiday.

In the one case the diner sits him down out of habit; in the other—out of conviction. Ferial dining is too common to require explanation, but ecclesiastical eating, or the following of a dietary religion, is a highly complicated process.

The dietary devotees can be grouped into two great sects—those who eat to the glory of self, and those who eat to the glory of God.

In New South Guinea dwells an educated German who wears a loin cloth, a wrist watch, and lives on cocoanuts alone. He believes that cocoanuts are the only food fit for man. Mr. Upton Sinclair once went without food for forty days on the theory that no food was fit for man. Mr. Bernard Shaw, I have been informed, had a period when he was devoted passionately to peanuts, or "monkey nuts", as they are known in England—which may account for many things. All these men have eaten for the good and to the glory of self.

Eating for the Soul

ON the other hand, we have those who eat or fast to the glory of God.

It is a solemn spectacle to see a man partake devoutly of pancakes on Shrove Tuesday and enter upon forty days of fish in sorrowing with his Lord. And what an epic figure he makes when, at Easter time, he eats ham because his Saviour is risen from the grave!

It is merely a localism when Bostonians celebrate the 4th of July by eating salmon and green peas, or when Parisian gourmands celebrate the 1st of September by crowding the exclusive bivalve bars—but there is something universal in the man who has knelt before the creche on Christmas Day rolling home to his fill of turkey.

Of course, if you don't believe in Christmas, why eat turkey? If Lent means nothing to you, why wallow in pancakes? Why gorge yourself, on Good Friday, with hot cross buns? Why eat ham at Easter? You don't eat matzoth because your cloak and suit friends are keeping the Passover.

Ecclesiastical eating without ecclesiastical faith is a hollow ceremony. And because many who thus celebrate do utterly lack faith, their ecclesiastical eating (to those devoutly minded) approaches sacrilege.

Some day I hope to write a book on the platter ecstasies. It will be called "A Handy Guide to Gastronomic Delights." In that I will speak at length of the varieties of food and the moods to eat them in; of the dental vegetables, such as artichokes and asparagus; of learning a people's genus by the sorts of sweets they eat; of the five and twenty nuances of coffee; of how to cook curry so that it doesn't taste of iodoform; of the three hundred and thirty national ways of showing gastronomic satisfaction. But there is time for only one more topic before I close this discussion of dining and dogmatics. I refer to the question of how long one should remain at the table.

In the Drinking Age one would linger at the table until one was dragged from beneath it. This habit was started by the sporting bishops and writers of the "Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese" period of literature. There is still a quaint custom in England.

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I believe, of the women leaving the table at a stage in the meal and the men remaining. This was first done by Queen Elizabeth, who objected to the high colour in Walter Raleigh's stories. The English are devout on keeping up these old customs. At Berne there was once a law against sitting at table for more than five hours, and at Basle, 10 A. M. to 6 P. M. were the legal limits set for the mid-day meal.

Once on a day it was possible for man to sit for hours over cordials. It may be that he will now sit for an equally long time over his pudding.

There is a simpler and more effective way of spreading a meal out over several hours. Read a book.

Reading with Meals

WITHIN easy reach of my dining table is a shelf of books and on that shelf I keep those that go well with meals. There is the historic pocket edition of Charles Lamb. Splashed across two pages of the essay on "The Illustrious Defunct" are coffee stains made in a low den on the Bolshaia in

Irkutsk when my Russian friend D—

pounded the table over a ribald Siberian jest and made the cups dance. "The Genteel Style in Writing" was once held open by a fork in a Blagowestchensk hotel—you can see the fork's impression to this day where the lout of a waiter pressed it in by setting a bottle on top of the open book. When dinner is going dangerously fast I take down my smudgy-faced Lamb, or my other tidbit volumes and read aloud. The meal is enriched and lengthened by the book and the book made more memorable by the meal.

There is quite a large body of this eating literature, and in using it one should choose the volume according to one's guests and the occasion itself. A book containing short pieces is desirable, and the more obscure or forbidden or forgotten, the better. For the middle-aged there are the less read parts of Leigh Hunt and perhaps Neil Lyons or John Donne for a cordial. When the minister comes to dine, read from Coventry Patmore's "The Rod, The Root and The Flower." You can be pretty safe that he never heard of it. Lusty young men might prefer the drinking ballads of Theodore Maynard. Pompous old gentlemen could be made to unbend with Clathrop's "Et Cetera", you could impress them with Erasmus's "Folly", or open the eyes of the simple minded with excerpts from W. L. George. Periodicals, too, make excellent literary beverages, especially obscure periodicals from foreign lands.

Now it is a pleasing sight to see a man beat out the rhythm of a poem with a serving spoon. There is something jovially wholesome in sending a page from Lithgow's "Rare Adventures" flooding down the table to wash away all the small talk before it. I knew a man once who galvanized a dinner party by reading excerpts from Rabelais, excerpts which he attributed to a preacher then very much in vogue.

This is the real music one should have with his meals. This is the ultimate ecstasy of the table. Whether one eats ferially or in great ecclesiastical pomp, it is the Nirvana of platter pleasures to butter one's bread with a book and wash down one's victuals with bumpers of roaring verse.