The Cafeteria Triumphant

Announcing the Death of Good Cooks, Good Sauces, Good Cooking All Over America

HENDRIK WILLEM VAN LOON

ANTHELME BRILLAT-SAVARIN was a fugitive from the French Reds. Penniless and without a friend, he landed, in 1793, during the French Reign of Terror, in New York.

Yonder, in that glorious French city across the ocean, the guillotine was playing a staccato accompaniment to the wails and shrieks of its unwilling victims.

Here, in New York, in the dark pit of a third rate theatre, this former mayor of Belley was playing the fiddle in the orchestra. A terrible fate for the man whose word had been law' in a million kitchens of the old regime. But a live fiddler was better than a dead gastronomist.

In the year 1794, Robespierre went the way of all Revolutionary flesh. But Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the French mayor-gastronomist, returned to his native country from America. He had learned a lesson. Henceforth he left politics and economics alone. He devoted himself to a nobler task and, a year before his death (in 1825, to be precise) he presented the w'orld with a most nefarious book; a treatise on the art of dining.

This book is openly sold in all our stores. It can be had for the asking in any public library.

That merely goes to show that we need a more efficient censorship and a more elaborate system of police supervision.

For it is the work of a pagan.

It pronounces a good sauce the highest creation of man.

And it invokes the name of the Good Lord to promulgate the heresy that the destiny of nations depends upon the way they eat.

When the first copy of this Physiology of • Taste reached our happy shores I do not know. Enough to state that the results were disastrous to the democratic simplicity of a virgin republic.

French pastry cooks were encouraged to open restaurants in the cities of the Atlantic seaboard. Promising young slaves were sent to France to learn the culinary secrets of Rechaud and Merillion and were then turned loose in the kitchens of Savannah and Richmond.

The sacred cod became morue a la meunière and little children learned to weep over the sad, sad story of M. Vatel, cuisinier extraordinaire to the great Conde, who had killed himself with a toasting fork when the fish for His Excellency's table was late in arriving and dinner jumped from soup to roast without an ichthyological intermezzo.

But though the mills of the Puritans grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small.

It is the year of grace 1925.

Another year and we shall celebrate the centenary of M. Savarin's much lamented demise. And cooking in these United States is dead.

Let the blue and Puritanical uplifters intone a trifold hosannah.

What a century of disdain failed to accomplish, three years of prohibition have done. The good cooks are all gone and good cooking has been made an impossibility.

Lieb Vaterland, viagst ruhig sein.

(Whoever cooked without some ccine?)

This little German interlude serves a purpose.

Why not be honest about ourselves? We render lip service to dear France. Meanwhile we flatter the Teuton by an imitation and adoption of all his most unpleasant qualities.

"Allons, enfants de la patrie" is a noble motto. But, done into the modern vernacular, it sounds like the "Ganzes Regiment, Paradeschritt . . . Marsch!" of the reforming drillmaster.

I like my food elaborate but my speech plain.

If we are to have a Neu Deutschland on these shores, let us call the thing by its name. And if it is to be Blutzvurst instead of Oeufs a la Bechamel, let us add another amendment to the constitution which says, "All good cooking is verboten."

The bootleggers can then take the business in hand and save us from a terrible catastrophe.

You think that I exaggerate.

Yes, my friends, during the last eighteen months, 134,872 French cooks have left this country. The remaining three are kept here because they can't leave Sing Sing.

Can you imagine what will happen when thev too speed eastward past the Statue ot Liberty?

The exodus of good cooks has been steady since the autumn of the year 1918.

A Frenchman will not live without his wine. Hang him and you hang him with a bottle ol wine in his pocket. Bury him and a vine will sprout on his grave. Tell him that he must drink sarsaparilla and he leaves a ten thousand dollar job in the Ritz (with sarsaparilla) to take a four hundred dollar job in Neuilly (with wine).

An Italian is the same, but two thousand years of despotism have taught him to disregard all law and he would just as soon plant his vineyard in the grounds of the White House as in his own little garden. He stays, but he is a very inferior cook, who loves violent effects and spoils his culinary symphonies by fortissimos of cheese and furiosos of garlic.

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There remain the Swedes, who, trained in the school of Bernadotte, have become veritable virtuosi of the hors d'oeuvre and can do more things with a dead fish than seem possible.

But of w hat avail is good will and industry when materials are lacking?

Rembrandt could not paint pictures without paint.

Rodin could not make statues without some sort of marble or bronze.

Paderewski could not play Chopin on a tin pan.

How, then, could we expect our poor cooks to produce decent meals without the aid of those materials which hitherto reached our land in bottles and jugs?

We could not and we cannot and we should not. It is impossible.

Good cookery, in the old and reprehensible meaning of the word, will soon be a thing of the past, like New Year's parties and women with hair.

Good restaurants are already closing their doors at a gratifying speed.

"The pleasant hours" spent around the festive board will soon be shortened to the "useful ten minutes" devoted to the absorption of calories.

Another hundred years and the cafeteria will have conquered the land.

Thank God, we shall all be dead.