Europe Revised Part 7

At the next table sat an Italian countess. Anyhow they told me she was an Italian countess, and she wore jewelry enough for a dozen countesses.

Every time I beheld her, with a big emerald earring gleaming at either side of her head, I thought of a Lenox Avenue local in the New York Subway. However, it was not so much her jewelry that proved such a fascinating sight as it was her pleasing habit of fetching out a gold-mounted toothpick and exploring the most remote and intricate dental recesses of herself in full view of the entire dining room, meanwhile making a noise like somebody sicking a dog on.

The Europeans have developed public toothpicking beyond anything we know. They make an outdoor pastime and function of it, whereas we pursue this sport more or less privately. Over there, a toothpick is a family heirloom and is handed down from one generation to another, and is operated in company ostentatiously. In its use some Europeans are absolutely gifted. But then we beat the world at open-air gum-chewing--so I reckon the honors are about even.

This particular hotel, in common with all other first-cla.s.s hotels in Paris, was forgetful about setting forth on its menu the prices of its best dishes and its special dishes. I take it this arrangement was devised for the benefit of currency-quilted Americans. A Frenchman asks the waiter the price of an unpriced dish and then orders something else; but the American, as a rule, is either too proud or too foolish to inquire into these details. At home he is beset by a hideous fear that some waiter will think he is of a mercenary nature; and when he is abroad this trait in him is accentuated. So, in his carefree American way, he orders a portion of a dish of an unspecified value; whereupon the head waiter slips out to the office and ascertains by private inquiry how large a letter of credit the American is carrying with him, and comes back and charges him all the traffic will bear.

As for the keeper of a fashionable cafe on a boulevard or in the Rue de la Paix--well, alongside of him the most rapacious restaurant proprietor on Broadway is a kindly, Christian soul who is in business for his health--and not feeling very healthy at that. When you dine at one of the swagger boulevard places the head waiter always comes, just before you have finished, and places a display of fresh fruit before you, with a winning smile and a bow and a gesture, which, taken together, would seem to indicate that he is extending the compliments of the season and that the fruit will be on the house; but never did one of the intriguing scoundrels deceive me. Somewhere, years before, I had read statistics on the cost of fresh fruit in a Paris restaurant, and so I had a care. The sight of a bunch of hothouse grapes alone was sufficient to throw me into a cold perspiration right there at the table; and as for South African peaches, I carefully walked around them, getting farther away all the time. A peach was just the same as a pesthouse to me, in Paris.

Alas though! no one had warned me about French oysters, and once--just once--I ate some, which made two mistakes on my part, one financial and the other gustatory. They were not particularly flavorous oysters as we know oysters on this side of the ocean. The French oyster is a small, copper-tinted proposition, and he tastes something like an indisposed mussel and something like a touch of biliousness; but he is sufficiently costly for all purposes. The cafe proprietor cherishes him so highly that he refuses to vulgarize him by printing the asking price on the same menu. A person in France desirous of making a really ostentatious display of his affluence, on finding a pearl in an oyster, would swallow the pearl and wear the oyster on his shirtfront. That would stamp him as a person of wealth.

However, I am not claiming that all French cookery is ultra-exorbitant in price or of excessively low grade. We had one of the surprises of our lives when, by direction of a friend who knew Paris, we went to a little obscure cafe that was off the tourist route and therefore--as yet--unspoiled and uncommercialized. This place was up a back street near one of the markets; a small and smellsome place it was, decorated most atrociously. In the front window, in close juxtaposition, were a platter of French snails and a platter of sticky confections full of dark spots. There was no mistaking the snails for anything except snails; but the other articles were either currant buns or plain buns that had been made in an unscreened kitchen.

Within were marble-topped tables of the Louie-Quince period and stuffy wall-seats of faded, dusty red velvet; and a waiter in his shirtsleeves was wandering about with a sheaf of those long French loaves tucked under his arm like golf sticks, distributing his loaves among the diners. But somewhere in its mysterious and odorous depths that little bourgeois cafe harbored an honest-to-goodness cook. He knew a few things about grilling a pig's knuckle--that worthy person. He could make the knuckle of a pig taste like the wing of an angel; and what he could do with a skillet, a pinch of herbs and a calf's sweetbread pa.s.sed human understanding.

Certain animals in Europe do have the most delicious diseases anyway--notably the calf and the goose, particularly the goose of Strasburg, where the pate de foie gras comes from. The engorged liver of a Strasburg goose must be a source of joy to all--except its original owner!

Several times we went back to the little restaurant round the corner from the market, and each time we had something good. The food we ate there helped to compensate for the terrific disillusionment awaiting us when we drove out of Paris to a typical roadside inn, to get some of that wonderful provincial cookery that through all our reading days we had been hearing about. You will doubtless recall the description, as so frequently and graphically dished up by the inspired writers of travelogue stuff--the picturesque, tumbledown place, where on a cloth of coa.r.s.e linen--white like snow--old Marie, her wrinkled face abeam with hospitality and kindness, places the delicious omelet she has just made, and brings also the marvelous salad and the perfect fowl, and the steaming hot coffee fragrant as breezes from Araby the Blest, and the vin ordinaire that is even as honey and gold to the thirsty throat. You must know that pa.s.sage?

We went to see for ourselves. At a distance of half a day's automobile run from Paris we found an establishment answering to the plans and specifications. It was shoved jam-up against the road, as is the French custom; and it was surrounded by a high, broken wall, on which all manner of excrescences in the shape of tiny dormers and misshapen little towers hung, like Texas ticks on the ears of a quarantined steer. Within the wall the numerous ruins that made up the inn were thrown together any fashion, some facing one way, some facing the other way, and some facing all ways at once; so that, for the housefly, so numerously encountered on these premises, it was but a short trip and a merry one from the stable to the dining room and back again.

Sure enough, old Marie was on the job. Not desiring to be unkind or unduly critical I shall merely state that as a cook old Marie was what we who have been in France and speak the language fluently would call la limite! The omelet she turned out for us was a thing that was very firm and durable, containing, I think, leather findings, with a sprinkling of chopped henbane on the top. The coffee was as feeble a counterfeit as chicory usually is when it is masquerading as coffee, and the vin ordinaire had less of the vin to it and more of the ordinaire than any we sampled elsewhere.

Right here let me say this for the much-vaunted vin ordinaire of Europe: In the end it biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder--not like the ordinary Egyptian adder, but like a patent adder in the office of a loan shark, which is the worst stinger of the whole adder family. If consumed with any degree of freedom it puts a downy coat on your tongue next morning that causes you to think you inadvertently swallowed the pillow in your sleep. Good domestic wine costs as much in Europe as good domestic wine costs in America--possibly more than as much.

The souffle potatoes of old Marie were not bad to look on, but I did not test them otherwise. Even in my own country I do not care to partake of souffle potatoes unless I know personally the person who blew them up. So at the conclusion of the repast we nibbled tentatively at the dessert, which was a pancake with jelly, done in the image of a medicated bandage but not so tasty as one. And then I paid the check, which was of august proportions, and we came sadly away, realizing that another happy dream of youth had been shattered to bits. Only the tablecloth had been as advertised. It was coa.r.s.e, but white like snow--like snow three days old in Pittsburgh.

Yet I was given to understand that was a typical rural French inn and fully up to the standards of such places; but if the manager of a roadhouse within half a day's ride of New York or Boston or Philadelphia served such food to his patrons, at such prices, the sheriff would have him inside of two months; and everybody would be glad of it too--except the sheriff. Also, no humane man in this country would ask a self-respecting cow to camp overnight in such outbuildings as ab.u.t.ted on the kitchen of this particular inn.

I am not denying that we have in America some pretty bad country hotels, where good food is most barbarously mistreated and good beds are rare to find, but we admit our shortcomings in this regard and we deplore them--we do not sh.e.l.lac them over with a glamour of bogus romance, with intent to deceive the foreign visitor to our sh.o.r.es. We warn him in advance of what he may expect and urge him to carry his rations with him.

It is almost unnecessary to add that old Marie gave us veal and poulet roti. According to the French version of the story of the Flood only two animals emerged from the Ark when the waters receded--one was an immature hen and the other was an adolescent calf. At every meal except breakfast--when they do not give you anything at all--the French give you veal and poulet roti. If at lunch you had the poulet roti first and afterward the veal, why, then at dinner they provide a pleasing variety by bringing on the veal first and the poulet roti afterward.

The veal is invariably stringy and coated over with weird sauces, and the poulet never appears at the table in her recognizable members--such as wings and drumsticks--but is chopped up with a cleaver into cross sections, and strange-looking chunks of the wreckage are sent to you.

Moreover they cook the chicken in such a way as to destroy its original taste, and the veal in such a way as to preserve its original taste, both being inexcusable errors.

Nowhere in the larger Italian cities, except by the exercise of a most tremendous determination, can you get any real Italian cooking or any real Italian dishes. At the hotels they feed you on a pale, sad table-d'hote imitation of French cooking, invariably b.u.t.tressed with the everlasting veal and the eternal poulet roti. At the finish of a meal the waiter brings you, on one plate, two small withered apples and a bunch of fly-specked sour grapes; and, on another plate, the mortal remains of some excessively deceased cheese wearing a tinfoil shroud and appropriately laid out in a small, white, coffin-shaped box.

After this had happened to me several times I told the waiter with gentle irony that he might as well screw the lid back on the casket and proceed with the obsequies. I told him I was not one of those morbid people who love to look on the faces of the strange dead. The funeral could not get under way too soon to suit me. It seemed to me that this funeral was already several days overdue. That was what I told him.

In my travels the best place I ever found to get Italian dishes was a bas.e.m.e.nt restaurant under an old brownstone house on Forty-seventh Street, in New York. There you might find the typical dishes of Italy--I defy you to find them in Italy without a search-warrant. However, while in Italy the tourist may derive much entertainment and instruction from a careful study of table manners.

In our own land we produce some reasonably boisterous trenchermen, and some tolerably careless ones too. Several among us have yet to learn how to eat corn on the ear and at the same time avoid corn in the ear.

A dish of asparagus has been known to develop fine acoustic properties, and in certain quarters there is a crying need for a sound-proof soup; but even so, and admitting these things as facts, we are but mere beginners in this line when compared with our European brethren.

In the caskets of memory I shall ever cherish the picture of a particularly hairy gentleman, apparently of Russian extraction, who patronized our hotel in Venice one evening. He was what you might call a human hazard--a golf-player would probably have thought of him in that connection. He was eating flour dumplings, using his knife for a niblick all the way round; and he lost every other shot in a concealed bunker on the edge of the rough; and he could make more noise sucking his teeth than some people could make playing on a fife.

There is a popular belief to the effect that the Neapolitan eats his spaghetti by a deft process of wrapping thirty or forty inches round the tines of his fork and then lifting it inboard, an ell at a time. This is not correct. The true Neapolitan does not eat his spaghetti at all--he inhales it. He gathers up a loose strand and starts it down his throat.

He then respires from the diaphragm, and like a troupe of trained angleworms that entire ma.s.s of spaghetti uncoils itself, gets up off the plate and disappears inside him--en ma.s.se, as it were--and making him look like a man who is chinning himself over a set of bead portieres.

I fear we in America will never learn to siphon our spaghetti into us thus. It takes a nation that has practiced deep breathing for centuries.

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 inst.i.tution 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 cla.s.sification of defective flues.

Likewise beware of the alleged American c.o.c.ktail 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 Roast Beef Boiled Mutton Boiled Mutton Roast Beef Potatoes, Boiled Cabbage, Boiled Cabbage, Boiled Potatoes, Boiled Jam Tart Custard Custard Jam Tart Cheese Coffee Coffee Cheese TEA!

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 consequence 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 t.i.tle 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 pa.s.s 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 appet.i.te; 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 cl.u.s.ters. 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-sh.e.l.l pecan. The English postage stamp is also much tastier than ours. The s.p.a.ce 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 appet.i.te 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 a whole 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 amba.s.sadorial 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 n.o.blemen, untutored but naturally gifted, and his name was John Wesley Ba.s.s. He was the champion eater of the world, specializing particularly in eggs on the sh.e.l.l, and cove oysters out of the can, with pepper sauce on them, and soda crackers on the side.