The Art of Entertaining Part 15

It is impossible in translation to give Heine's intense ridicule and scorn. He was a Frenchman out of place in Germany. He revolted at things German, but endeared himself to his people by his wit, universality of talent, and sincerity. The world has thanked him for his "Reisebilder." Heine gives us new ideas of the horrors of German cookery when he talks of Gottingen sausages, Hamburg smoked beef, Pomeranian goose-b.r.e.a.s.t.s, ox-tongues, calf's brains in pastry, gudgeon cakes, and "a wretched pig's-head in a wretcheder sauce, which has neither a Grecian nor a Persian flavour, but which tasted like tea and soft soap."

He cannot leave Gottingen without this description: "The town of Gottingen, celebrated for its sausages and its university, belongs to the King of Hanover, and contains nine hundred and ninety-nine dwellings, divers chambers, an observatory, a prison, a library, and a council chamber where the beer is excellent."

German sausages are very good. Even the great Goethe, in dying, remembered to send a sausage to his aesthetic love of a lifetime, the Frau Von Stein.

Thackeray, who was keenly alive to the horrors of German cookery, says that whatever is not sour is greasy, and whatever is not greasy is sour. The curious bill of fare of a middle-cla.s.s German table is something like this: They begin with a pudding. They serve sweet preserved fruit with the meat, generally stewed cherries. They go on with dreadful dishes of cabbage and preparations of milk, curdled, soured, and cheesed.

Dr. Lieber, the learned philologist, was eloquent on the subject of the coa.r.s.eness of the German appet.i.te. He had early corrected his by a visit to Italy, and he remarked, with his usual profundity, that it was "the more incomprehensible as nature had given Germany the finest wines with which to wash down the worst cookery."

A favourite dish is potato pancakes. The raw potatoes are sc.r.a.ped fine, mixed with milk, and then treated like flour cakes, served with apple or plum sauce.

Sauer-kraut is ridiculed, but it is only cabbage cut fine and pickled.

There are two delicious dishes in which it plays an important part: one is roast pheasant cut fine and cooked with sauer-kraut and champagne; the other is sauer-kraut cooked in the _croute_ of a Strasbourg _pate de foie gras_.

Favourite Austro-Hungarian dishes are _bachhendl_, baked spring-chicken,--the chicken rolled into a paste of egg flour and then baked. It is rather dry to eat, but just the thing with a bottle of Hungarian wine. Also a beefsteak with plenty of _paprika_, or Hungarian red pepper, Brinsa cheese, pot cheese, made in the Carpathian mountains and baked in a hot oven.

Brook trout is never fried, but boiled in water, and then served surrounded by parsley in melted b.u.t.ter.

In eastern Russia grows a pea, the gray pea, which is boiled and eaten like peanuts by peeling off the hard skin, or boiled with some sort of sour-sweet sauce, which softens the skin. This pea is such a favourite with the Lithuanians that it is made the subject of poetry.

Venison, and hare soup, are deliciously gamey bouillons, which are made of the soup bone of the roast. The Polish soup _barscz_ is made of bouillon with the juice of red beets, little _saucissons_, and specially made pastry, with highly spiced forced-meat b.a.l.l.s swimming in it.

Lettuce salad is prepared in Germany with sour cream.

A favourite drink is warm beer,--beer heated with the yolk of an egg in it.

"Fill me once more the foaming pewter up!

Another board of oysters, ladye mine!

To-night Lucullus with himself shall sup.

Those mute inglorious Miltons are divine; And as I here in slippered ease recline, Quaffing of Perkins's Entire my fill, I sigh not for the lymph of Aganippe's rill."

Beer is the amber inspiration of the Germans, and plays its daily, hourly part in their science of entertaining.

And the pea which can be skinned, which is such a favourite with the Lithuanians, has also been immortalized by Thackeray:--

"I give thee all! I can no more, Though poor the offering be; Stewed duck and peas are all the store That I can offer thee!-- A duck whose tender breast reveals Its early youth full well, And better still, a pea that peels From fresh transparent sh.e.l.l."

But it must not be supposed that rich German citizens of the United States do not know how to give a good dinner. Cosmopolitan in everything else, these, the best colonists whom Europe has sent to us, make good soldiers, good statesmen, and good entertainers. They do not insist that we shall eat pig and prune sauce. No, they give us the most affluent bill of fare which the market affords. They give us a fine dining-room in which to eat it, and they offer as no other men can "a tankard of a.s.smanschausen."

They give us, as a nation, a valuable present in mineral water. The Apollinaris bubbling up near the Rhine seems sent by Heaven to avert that gout and rheumatism which are the terrible after-dinner penalties of those who like too well the n.o.ble Rhine wines.

THE INFLUENCE OF GOOD CHEER ON AUTHORS AND GENIUSES.

"The ancient poets and their learned rhymes We still admire in these our later times, And celebrate their fames. Thus, though they die Their names can never taste mortality.

These had their helps. They wrote of G.o.ds and kings, Of temples, battles, and such gallant things.

And now we ask what n.o.ble meat and drink Can help to make man work, to make him think."

"Pray, on what meat hath this our Caesar fed?"

We should have a higher estimate of the value of a knowledge of cookery and of all the arts of entertaining, did we sufficiently realize that the style of Carlyle was owing to dyspepsia! At the age of fifteen he entered Edinburgh University in order to fit himself for the pulpit. He studied for many months to that end, but his vocation refused to be clear. The ministry grew alien to his mind. Finally he shut himself up, and as he himself says, wrestled with the Lord and all the imps of darkness. Carlyle believed in a personal Devil, not tasting food or sleeping for three days and nights, and then terminated the struggle by resolving to pursue literature. What mental revolution he underwent, he says he never could understand; all that he knew was that he came out with that "dommed dyspepsia,"--his Scotch way of p.r.o.nouncing a stronger word.

Some writer says that this anecdote solves the problem of Carlyle. The force, earnestness, and eloquence of his writings were born of a fine, free intellect. Then came despondency, rage, and bitterness, springing from dyspepsia, which had been his haunting demon from the first, releasing him at intervals only to a.s.sail and torture him the "more for each surcease."

Most of his works come under the head of the Literature of Dyspepsia, and can be as plainly traced to it as to the growth of his understanding or the sincerity of his convictions. Who does not recognize, in the oddities of the trials and spiritual agonies of Herr Teufelsdrockh, the author himself under a thin disguise, and the promotings and promptings, and phenomena of censuring indigestion? All through the "Sartor Resartus" it is evident that the gastric juices of the ill.u.s.trious iconoclast are insufficient; that while he is railing at humanity he is suffering from gastritis, while he is prophesying that the race will come to naught but selfishness and stupidity he is undergoing gastrodynia, or, as it is commonly called, stomachic cramp.

I do not know who wrote that masterly criticism, but evidently some man who had had a good dinner.

But Carlyle gets better and writes his n.o.ble essay on Robert Burns, the life of John Sterling, Oliver Cromwell's letters and speeches.

Then he is at his best; sees man as a brother, handicapped with circ.u.mstances, riveted to temperament perhaps, but in spite of all shortcomings and neglected opportunities, still a brother, demanding respect, deserving of help. How different Carlyle would have been, as a man and as a writer, with nutritive organs capable of continually and regularly performing their functions. Dyspepsia was his worst enemy, as it has been that of many of his readers. Every mouthful he ate must have been a gastric Nemesis for sins of opinion, and of heresies against humanity. His very style is the result of indigestion,--an excess of ill-chosen, ill-prepared German fare in a British stomach, affording a strange sustenance, which, like some diseases, keep a man alive, but which pain while they sustain.

What a different genius was Prescott, who had a good dinner every day of his life, who was brought up from boyhood in a luxurious old Boston household where was the perfection of cookery!

Sydney Smith sent word to Prescott after he wrote "Ferdinand and Isabella,"--

"Tell Prescott to come here and we will drown him in turtle soup."

"Say that I can swim in those seas," was Prescott's witty rejoinder.

Mr. Prescott was fifty-three years of age when he visited England; he was extremely handsome, courteous, and very much a man of the world.

"We grow like what we eat. Bad food depresses, Good food exalts us like an inspiration."

Mr. Prescott had been inspired by good food, as any one can see who reads that n.o.ble work "Ferdinand and Isabella." In England this accomplished man was received by Lady Lyell, to whom he was much attached. The account of English hospitality which he gives throws a rosy light on the history of the art of entertaining:

"I returned last night from the Horners, Lady Lyell's parents and sisters, a very accomplished and happy family circle. They have a small house, with a pretty lawn stretching between it and the Thames, that forms a silver edging to the close-shaven green. The family gather under the old trees on the little shady carpet, which is sweet with the perfume of flowery shrubs. And you see sails gliding by and stately swans, of which there are hundreds on the river. The next Sunday, after dinner, which we took at four o'clock, we strolled through Hampton Court and its royal park. The next day we took our picnic at Box Hill. On Friday to dinner at Sir Robert Peel's and to an evening party at Lady S----'s. I went at eleven and found myself in a brilliant saloon filled with people amongst whom I did not recognize a familiar face. You may go to ten parties in London, be introduced to a score of persons in each, and on going to the eleventh not see a face that you have ever seen before, so large is the society of the great metropolis. I was soon put at my ease, however, by the cordial reception of Lord and Lady C----, who introduced me to a great number of persons."

This alone would prove how great was Prescott's popularity, for in London, people, as a rule, are not introduced.

"In the crowd I saw an old gentleman, nicely made up, stooping a good deal, covered with orders, and making his way easily along, as all, young and old, seemed to treat him with deference. It was the Duke of Wellington, the old Iron Duke. He likes the attention he receives in this social way. He wore round his neck the order of the Golden Fleece, on his coat the order of the Garter. He is, in truth, the lion of England, not to say of all Europe."

This beautiful little _genre_ picture of the Iron Duke was written in the year 1850. Forty years later General Grant was received at Apsley House by the son of the great Duke of Wellington, the second Duke, who opened the famous Waterloo room and toasted the modest American as the greatest soldier of modern times. Mr. Prescott goes on to say,--

"We had a superb dinner at Sir Robert Peel's, four and twenty guests.

It was served in the long picture-gallery. The windows of the gallery look out upon the Thames, its beautiful stone bridges with lofty arches, Westminster Abbey with its towers, and the living panorama on the water. The opposite windows look on the green gardens behind the Palace of Whitehall, which were laid out by Cardinal Wolsey, and near the spot where Charles I. lived, and lost his life on the scaffold.

The gallery is full of masterpieces, especially Dutch and Flemish, amongst them the famous _Chapeau de Paille_, which cost Sir Robert over five thousand pounds. In his dining-room were also superb pictures, the famous one by Wilkie, of John Knox preaching, which did not come up to the idea I had formed of it from the engraving. There was a portrait of Dr. Johnson by Reynolds, the portrait owned by Mrs.

Thrale and engraved for the Dictionary; what a bijou!

"We sat at dinner looking out on the moving Thames. We dined at eight, but the twilight lingers here until half-past nine at this summer season. Sir Robert was exceedingly courteous to his guests, told some good stories, showed us his autographs, amongst which was the celebrated one written by Nelson, in which he says, 'If I die "Frigate" will be found written on my heart.'"

Mr. Prescott's letter to his daughter points out the strange difference between the life of a girl in England and a girl here.

"I think on reflection, dear Lizzy, that you did well not to come with me. Girls of your age [she was then nineteen] make no great figure in society. One never, or very rarely, meets them at dinner parties, and they are not so numerous at evening parties as with us, unless it be at b.a.l.l.s. Six out of seven women you meet are over thirty, and many of them over forty or fifty, not to say sixty; the older they are, the more they are dressed and diamonded. Young girls dress less, and wear very little ornament indeed."

What a commentary this is on our American way of doing things,--where young girls rule society, put their mothers in the background, and wear too fine clothes.