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Europe Revised, a non-fiction book by Irvin S. Cobb |
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Chapter 9. The Deadly Poulet Routine |
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_ Chapter IX. The Deadly Poulet Routine Under the head of European disillusionments I would rate, along with the vin ordinaire of the French vineyard and inkworks, the barmaid of Britain. From what you have heard on this subject you confidently expect the British barmaid to be buxom, blond, blooming, billowy, buoyant--but especially blond. On the contrary she is generally brunette, frequently middle-aged, in appearance often fair-to-middling homely, and in manner nearly always abounding with a stiffness and hauteur that would do credit to a belted earl, if the belting had just taken place and the earl was still groggy from the effects of it. Also, she has the notion of personal adornment that is common in more than one social stratum of women in England. If she has a large, firm, solid mound of false hair overhanging her brow like an impending landslide, and at least three jingly bracelets on each wrist, she considers herself well dressed, no matter what else she may or may not be wearing. Often this lady is found presiding over an American bar, which is an institution now commonly met with in all parts of London. The American bar of London differs from the ordinary English bar of London in two respects, namely--there is an American flag draped over the mirror, and it is a place where they sell all the English drinks and are just out of all the American ones. If you ask for a Bronx the barmaid tells you they do not carry seafood in stock and advises you to apply at the fishmongers'--second turning to the right, sir, and then over the way, sir--just before you come to the bottom of the road, sir. If you ask for a Mamie Taylor she gets it confused in her mind with a Sally Lunn and sends out for yeastcake and a cookbook; and while you are waiting she will give you a genuine Yankee drink, such as a brandy and soda--or she will suggest that you smoke something and take a look at the evening paper. If you do smoke something, beware--oh, beware!--of the native English cigar. When rolled between the fingers it gives off a dry, rustling sound similar to a shuck mattress. For smoking purposes it is also open to the same criticisms that a shuck mattress is. The flames smolder in the walls and then burst through in unexpected places, and the smoke sucks up the airshaft and mushrooms on your top floor; then the deadly back draft comes and the fatal firedamp, and when the firemen arrive you are a ruined tenement. Except the German, the French, the Belgian, the Austrian and the Italian cigar, the English cigar is the worst cigar I ever saw. I did not go to Spain; they tell me, though, the Spanish cigar has the high qualifications of badness. Spanish cigars are not really cigars at all, I hear; they fall into the classification of defective flues. Likewise beware of the alleged American cocktail occasionally dispensed, with an air of pride and accomplished triumph, by the British barmaid of an American bar. If for purposes of experiment and research you feel that you must take one, order with it, instead of the customary olive or cherry, a nice boiled vegetable marrow. The advantage to be derived from this is that the vegetable marrow takes away the taste of anything else and does not have any taste of its own. In the eating line the Englishman depends on the staples. He sticks to the old standbys. What was good enough for his fathers is good enough for him--in some cases almost too good. Monotony of victuals does not distress him. He likes his food to be humdrum; the humdrummer the better. Speaking with regard to the whole country, I am sure we have better beef uniformly in America than in England; but there is at least one restaurant on the Strand where the roast beef is just a little bit superior to any other roast beef on earth. English mutton is incomparable, too, and English breakfast bacon is a joy forever. But it never seems to occur to an Englishman to vary his diet. I submit samples of the daily menu: LUNCHEON DINNER I know now why an Englishman dresses for dinner--it enables him to distinguish dinner from lunch. His regular desserts are worthy of a line. The jam tart is a death-mask that went wrong and in coiisequence became morose and heavy of spirit, and the custard is a soft-boiled egg which started out in life to be a soft-boiled egg and at the last moment--when it was too late--changed its mind and tried to be something else. In the City, where lunching places abound, the steamer works overtime and the stewpan never rests. There is one place, well advertised to American visitors, where they make a specialty of their beefsteak-and-kidney pudding. This is a gummy concoction containing steak, kidney, mushroom, oyster, lark--and sometimes W and Y. Doctor Johnson is said to have been very fond of it; this, if true, accounts for the doctor's disposition. A helping of it weighs two pounds before you eat it and ten pounds afterward. The kidney is its predominating influence. The favorite flower of the English is not the primrose. It is the kidney. Wherever you go, among the restaurants, there is always somebody operating on a steamed flour dumpling for kidney trouble. The lower orders are much addicted to a dish known--if I remember the name aright--by the euphonious title of Toad in the Hole. Toad in the Hole consists of a full-grown and fragrant sheep's kidney entombed in an excavated retreat at the heart of a large and powerful onion, and then cooked in a slow and painful manner, so that the onion and the kidney may swap perfumes and flavors. These people do not use this combination for a weapon or for a disinfectant, or for anything else for which it is naturally purposed; they actually go so far as to eat it. You pass a cabmen's lunchroom and get a whiff of a freshly opened Toad in the Hole --and you imagine it is the German invasion starting and wonder why they are not removing the women and children to a place of safety. All England smells like something boiling, just as all France smells like something that needs boiling. Seemingly the only Londoners who enjoy any extensive variety in their provender are the slum-dwellers. Out Whitechapel-way the establishment of a tripe dresser and draper is a sight wondrous to behold, and will almost instantly eradicate the strongest appetite; but it is not to be compared with an East End meatshop, where there are skinned sheep faces on slabs, and various vital organs of various animals disposed about in clumps and clusters. I was reminded of one of those Fourteenth Street museums of anatomy--tickets ten cents each; boys under fourteen not admitted. The East End butcher is not only a thrifty but an inquiring soul. Until I viewed his shop I had no idea that a sheep could be so untidy inside; and as for a cow--he finds things in a cow she didn't know she had. Breakfast is the meal at which the Englishman rather excels; in fact England is the only country in Europe where the natives have the faintest conception of what a regular breakfast is, or should be. Moreover, it is now possible in certain London hotels for an American to get hot bread and ice-water at breakfast, though the English round about look on with undisguised horror as he consumes them, and the manager only hopes that he will have the good taste not to die on the premises. It is true that, in lieu of the fresh fruit an American prefers, the waiter brings at least three kinds of particularly sticky marmalade and, in accordance with a custom that dates back to the time of the Druids, spangles the breakfast cloth over with a large number of empty saucers and plates, which fulfill no earthly purpose except to keep getting in the way. The English breakfast bacon, however, is a most worthy article, and the broiled kipper is juicy and plump, and does not resemble a dried autumn leaf, as our kipper often does. And the fried sole, on which the Englishman banks his breakfast hopes, invariably repays one for one's undivided attention. The English boast of their fish; but, excusing the kipper, they have but three of note--the turbot, the plaice and the sole. And the turbot tastes like turbot, and the plaice tastes like fish; but the sole, when fried, is most appetizing. I have been present when the English gooseberry and the English strawberry were very highly spoken of, too, but with me this is merely hearsay evidence; we reached England too late for berries. Happily, though, we came in good season for the green filbert, which is gathered in the fall of the year, being known then as the Kentish cobnut. The Kentish cob beats any nut we have except the paper-shell pecan. The English postage stamp is also much tastier than ours. The space for licking is no larger, if as large--but the flavor lasts. As I said before, the Englishman has no great variety of things to eat, but he is always eating them; and when he is not eating them he is swigging tea. Yet in these regards the German excels him. The Englishman gains a lap at breakfast; but after that first hour the German leaves him, hopelessly distanced, far in the rear. It is due to his talents in this respect that the average Berliner has a double chin running all the way round, and four rolls of fat on the back of his neck, all closely clipped and shaved, so as to bring out their full beauty and symmetry, and a figure that makes him look as though an earthquake had shaken loose everything on the top floor and it all fell through into his dining room. Your true Berliner eats his regular daily meals--four in number and all large ones; and in between times he now and then gathers a bite. For instance, about ten o'clock in the morning he knocks off for an hour and has a few cups of hard-boiled coffee and some sweet, sticky pastry with whipped cream on it. Then about four in the afternoon he browses a bit, just to keep up his appetite for dinner. This, though, is but a snack--say, a school of Bismarck herring and a kraut pie, some more coffee and more cake, and one thing and another--merely a preliminary to the real food, which will be coming along a little later on. Between acts at the theater he excuses himself and goes out and prepares his stomach for supper, which will follow at eleven, by drinking two or three steins of thick Munich beer, and nibbling on such small tidbits as a rosary of German sausage or the upper half of a raw Westphalia ham. There are forty-seven distinct and separate varieties of German sausage and three of them are edible; but the Westphalia ham, in my judgment, is greatly overrated. It is pronounced Westfailure with the accent on the last part, where it belongs. In Germany, however, there is a pheasant agreeably smothered in young cabbage which is delicious and in season plentiful. The only drawback to complete enjoyment of this dish is that the grasping and avaricious German restaurant keeper has the confounded nerve to charge you, in our money, forty cents for awhole pheasant and half a peck of cabbage--say, enough to furnish a full meal for two tolerably hungry adults and a growing child. The Germans like to eat and they love a hearty eater. There should never be any trouble about getting a suitable person to serve us at the Kaiser's court if the Administration at Washington will but harken to the voice of experience. To the Germans the late Doctor Tanner would have been a distinct disappointment in an ambassadorial capacity; but there was a man who used to live in my congressional district who could qualify in a holy minute if he were still alive. He was one of Nature's noblemen, untutored but naturally gifted, and his name was John Wesley Bass. He was the champion eater of the world, specializing particularly in eggs on the shell, and cove oysters out of the can, with pepper sauce on them, and soda crackers on the side. I regret to be compelled to state, however, that John Wesley is no more. At one of our McCracken County annual fairs, a few years back, he succumbed to overambition coupled with a mistake in judgment. After he had established a new world's record by eating at one sitting five dozen raw eggs he rashly rode on the steam merry-go-round. At the end of the first quarter of an hour he fainted and fell off a spotted wooden horse and never spoke again, but passed away soon after being removed to his home in an unconscious condition. I have forgotten what the verdict of the coroner's jury was--the attending physician gave it some fancy Latin name--but among laymen the general judgment was that our fellow townsman had just naturally been scrambled to death. It was a pity, too--the German people would have cared for John Wesley as an ambassador. He would have eaten his way right into their affections. We have the word of history for it that Vienna was originally settled by the Celts, but you would hardly notice it now. On first impressions you would say that about Vienna there was a noticeable suggestion--a perceptible trace--of the Teutonic; and this applies to the Austrian food in the main. I remember a kind of Wiener-schnitzel, breaded, that I had in Vienna; in fact for the moment I do not seem to recall much else about Vienna. Life there was just one Wiener-schnitzel after another. In order to spread sweetness and light, and to the end, furthermore, that the ignorant people across the salted seas might know something of a land of real food and much food, and plenty of it and plenty of variety to it, I would that I might bring an expedition of Europeans to America and personally conduct it up and down our continent and back and forth crosswise of it. And if I had the money of a Carnegie or a Rockefeller I would do it, too, for it would be a greater act of charity than building public libraries or endowing public baths. I would include in my party a few delegates from England, where every day is All Soles' Day; and a few sausage-surfeited Teutons; and some Gauls, wearied and worn by the deadly poulet routine of their daily life, and a scattering representation from all the other countries over there. In especial I would direct the Englishman's attention to the broiled pompano of New Orleans; the kingfish filet of New York; the sanddab of Los Angeles; the Boston scrod of the Massachusetts coast; and that noblest of all pan fish--the fried crappie of Southern Indiana. To these and to many another delectable fishling, would I introduce the poor fellow; and to him and his fellows I fain would offer a dozen apiece of Smith Island oysters on the half shell. And I would take all of them to New England for baked beans and brown bread and codfish balls; but on the way we would visit the shores of Long Island for a kind of soft clam which first is steamed and then is esteemed. At Portsmouth, New Hampshire, they should each have a broiled lobster measuring thirty inches from tip to tip, fresh caught out of the Piscataqua River. Vermont should come to them in hospitality and in pity, offering buckwheat cakes and maple sirup. But Rhode Island would bring a genuine Yankee blueberry pie and directions for the proper consumption of it, namely--discarding knife and fork, to raise a crusty, dripping wedge of blueberry pie in your hand to your mouth, and to take a first bite, which instantly changes the ground-floor plan of that pie from a triangle to a crescent; and then to take a second bite, and then to lick your fingers--and then there isn't any more pie. Down in Kentucky I should engage Mandy Berry, colored, to fry for them some spring chickens and make for them a few pones of real cornbread. In Creole Louisiana they should sample crawfish gumbo; and in Georgia they should have 'possum baked with sweet potatoes; and in Tidewater Maryland, terrapin and canvasback; and in Illinois, young gray squirrels on toast; and in South Carolina, boiled rice with black-eyed peas; and in Colorado, cantaloupes; and in Kansas, young sweet corn; and in Virginia, country hams, not cured with chemicals but with hickory smoke and loving hands; and in Tennessee, jowl and greens. And elsewhere they should have their whacking fill of prairie hen and suckling pig and barbecued shote, and sure-enough beefsteak, and goobers hot from the parching box; and scrapple, and yams roasted in hot wood-ashes; and hotbiscuit and waffles and Parker house rolls--and the thousand and one other good things that may be found in this our country, and which are distinctively and uniquely of this country. Finally I would bring them back by way of Richmond, and there I would give them each an eggnog compounded with fresh cream and made according to a recipe older than the Revolution. If I had my way about it no living creature should be denied the right to bury his face in a brimming tumbler of that eggnog--except a man with a drooping red mustache. By the time those gorged and converted pilgrims touched the Eastern seaboard again any one of them, if he caught fire, would burn for about four days with a clear blue flame, and many valuable packing-house by-products could be gleaned from his ruins. It would bind us all, foreigner and native alike, in closer ties of love and confidence, and it would turn the tide of travel westward from Europe, instead of eastward from America. Let's do it sometime--and appoint me conductor of the expedition! _ |
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