The Art of Entertaining Part 14

I have made an expedition to their splendid mountain-bound convent. It is one of the most glorious drives in Europe, and rises into Alpine grandeur and solemnity. There, amid winter's cold and summer's heat, the Chartreuse lives in severe penance, making his hospitable liqueur which enchants the world, out of the chamomile and other herbs which grow around his convent.

The best French liqueurs were made formerly at La Cote by the Visetandine nuns. Kirschwa.s.ser is made from the cherries which grow in the Alpine Tyrol, in one small province which produces nothing else.

Liqueurs were invented for Louis XIV. in his old age. A cordial was made by mixing brandy with sugar and scents.

In making a mince pie, do not forget the excellent brandy, and the dash of orange curacoa, which should be put in by the lady herself.

Else why is it that otherwise the mince pie seems to lack the inspiriting and hidden fire. We read that there is "many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip." Perhaps the cook could tell, but one may be very sure she will not.

The modern, elegant devices by which strawberries, violets, and roseleaves, orange blossoms, and indeed all berries can be candied fresh in sugar, afford a pretty pastime for amateur cooks. But if near a confectioner in the city these can be bought cheaper than they can be made. It may amuse an invalid to make them, and the art is easily learned.

The cheese _fondu_ is a great favourite at foreign desserts. It is of Swiss origin. It is a healthful, savoury, and appetizing dish, quickly dressed and good to put at the end of a dinner for unexpected guests.

Take as many eggs as there are guests, and then about a third as much by weight of the best Gruyeres cheese, and the half of that of b.u.t.ter. Break and beat up well the eggs in a saucepan, then add the b.u.t.ter and the cheese, grated or cut in small pieces; place the saucepan on the fire, and stir with a wooden spoon till it is of a thick and soft consistence; put in salt according to the age of the cheese,--fresh cheese requires the most,--and a strong dose of pepper, then bake it like macaroni and send to table hot.

One pie we have which is national; it is that made of the pumpkin, and it is notoriously good. Also we may claim the squash pie and the sweet-potato pie, both of which merit the highest encomiums.

Our fruits are so plentiful and so good that few housekeepers can fail of having a good dessert of fruits alone. But do not force the seasons. Take them as they come. When fruits are cheapest then they are best. Our peaches have more flavour than those of Europe, and our grapes are unrivalled. Of plums and pears, France has better than we can boast, but our strawberries are as good and as plentiful as in England.

In fact, all the wild berries which are now getting to be cultivated berries, like blackberries, blueberries, huckleberries, and raspberries, are better than similar fruits abroad. The wild strawberry of the Alps is, however, delicious in flavour and sweetness.

A very grand dessert is furnished with ices of every flavour, jellies holding fruit and flavoured with maraschino, all sorts of bonbons, nuts in sugar, candied grapes and oranges, fresh fruits in season, and ending with liqueurs and black coffee.

A simple pudding, or pie followed by grapes and peaches, with the cup of black coffee afterward, is the national dessert of our United States. In winter it may be enriched by a Newtown pippin or a King of Tompkins County apple, some boiled chestnuts and a few other nuts, some Florida oranges, or those delicious little mandarins, perhaps raised by the immortal Rip Van Winkle, our own Joe Jefferson, on his Louisiana estate. He seems to have infused them with the flavour of his own rare and cheerful genius. He has raised a laugh before this, as well as the best mandarin oranges. Some dyspeptics declare that to chew seven roasted almonds after dinner does them good. And the roasted almonds fitly close the chapter on desserts.

GERMAN EATING AND DRINKING.

"I wonder if Charlemagne ever drank A tankard of a.s.smanschausen. Nay!

If he had, his empire never would rank As it does with the royalist realms to-day; For the G.o.ddess that laughs within the cup Had wiled and won him from blood and war, And shown, as he drained her long draughts up, There was something better worth living for Than kingcraft keeping his gruff brow sad.

I wish from my very soul she had."

The deep, dark, swiftly flowing Rhine, its legends, its forests of silver firs and pines, its mountains crowned with castles, and its hillsides blushing with the bending vine, the convent's ancient walls, the glistening spire, the maidens with their plaited hair, and "hands that offer early flowers," all the bright, beautiful, romantic landscape, the dancing waves which wash its historic sh.o.r.es, its donjon keeps and haunted Tenter Rock, its

"Beetling walls with ivy grown, Frowning heights of mossy stone,"--

all this beauty is placed in the land of the sauer-kraut, the herring salad, the sweet stewed fruit with pork, pig and prune sauce, carp stewed in beer, raw goose-flesh or Gottingen sausages, potato sweetened, and cabbage soured,--in a land, in short, whose kitchen is an abomination to all other nations.

Not that one does not get an excellent dinner at a German hotel in a great city. But all the cooks are French. The powerful young emperor has, however, given his orders that all _menus_ shall hereafter be written in German; the language of Ude, Soyer, Valet, and Francatelli, Brillat, Savarin, and Bechamel, is to be replaced by German.

But if the viands are not good, the wines are highly praised by the _gourmet_; and as these wines are often exported, it is said that one gets a better German wine in New York than at a second-cla.s.s hotel at Bonn or Cologne or Dusseldorf,--on the same principle that fish at Newport is less fresh than at New York, for it is all bought, sent to New York, and then sent back to Newport. In other words, the exporters are careful to keep up the reputation of their exported wines.

a.s.smanschausen is a red Rhine wine of high degree; some _gourmets_ call it the Burgundy of the Rhine. This poetic beverage is found within the gorge of the Rhine.

The bend which the n.o.ble river a.s.sumes at the Rheingau is said to have the effect of concentrating the sun's rays, reflected from the surface of the water as from a mirror, upon the vine-clad slopes; and it is to this circ.u.mstance, combined with the favourable nature of the soil, and to the vineyards being completely sheltered from the north winds by the Taunus range, that the marked superiority of the wines of the Rheingau is ordinarily attributed.

"Bacharach has produced another fine wine.

'He never has been to Heaven and back Who has not drunken of Bacharach.'"

And Longfellow says:--

"At Frankfort on the Maine, And at Wurtzburg on the Stein, At Bacharach on the Rhine, Grow the three best kinds of wine."

We know but little of the superior red wines of Walporzheimer, Ahrweiler, and Bodendorfer, which come from the valley of the Ahr. The Ahr falls into the Rhine near Sinzig, midway between Coblenz and Bonn.

The wines from its beautiful vineyards are a fine deep red. The taste is astringent, somewhat like port. There is an agreeable red wine called Kreutzburger which comes from the neighbourhood of Ehrenbreitstein. Linz on the Rhine sends us a good red wine known as Dattenberger. These are all pure wines which know no doctoring.

The Liebfrauenmilch is a Riesling wine with a fine bouquet. It owes its celebrity rather to its name than its merits. It comes from the vineyards adjoining the Liebfrauen Kirche near Worms, and was named by some pious churchman.

No wines have as many poetical tributes as the Rhine wines. One of the English poets sings:--

"O for a kingdom rocky-throned, Above the br.i.m.m.i.n.g Rhine, With va.s.sals who should pay their toll In many sorts of wine.

Above me naught but the blue air, And all below, the vine, I'd plant my throne, where legends say In nights of harvest-time King Charlemagne, in golden robe,-- So runs the rustic rhyme,-- Doth come to bless the mellowing crops While bells of Heaven chime."

The Steinbergers, the Hochheimers, Marcobrunners, and Rudesheimers, sound like so many n.o.ble families. Indeed an American senator, hearing these fine names, remarked: "I have no doubt, sir, they are all very nice girls."

There is a famous Hochheimer, no less than a hundred and sixty-seven years old, the vintage of that year when the Duke of Marlborough gained the Battle of Ramillies. Let us hope that he and Prince Eugene moistened their clay and labours with some of this famous wine. These wines do not last, however. The best age is ten years, and those which have been stored in the antique vaulted cellar of the Bernardine Abbey of Eberbach, world-renowned as the Grand-ducal Cabinet wine of the ruler of Na.s.sau, are now completely run out. Even Rudesheimer of 1872 is no longer good.

It must be remembered, however, that these wines are never fortified.

To put extraneous alcohol into their beloved Rhine wine would rouse Rudolph of Hapsburg and Conrad of Hotstettin from the sleep of centuries.

The Steinberger Cabinet of 1862 is the most superb. Of Rhine wines for bouquet, refined flavour, combined richness and delicacy. We do not except Schloss Johannisberger, because that is not in the market. A Marcobrunner and a Rudesheimer are not to be despised.

Prince Metternich sent to Jules Janin for his autograph, and the witty poet editor sent a receipt for twelve bottles of Imperial Schloss Johannisberger. The Prince took the hint and had a dozen of the very best cabinet wine forwarded, every bottle being sealed and every cork duly branded with the Prince's crest! The Johannisberger wine is excessively sweet, singularly soft, and gives forth a delicious perfume, a rich, limpid, amber-coloured wine, with a faint bitter flavour; it is as beautiful to look at as it is luscious to the taste, and it possesses a bouquet which the Empress Eugenie compared to that of heliotrope, violets, and geranium leaves combined.

The refined pungent flavour of a good Hock, its slight racy sharpness, with an after almond flavour, make it an admirable appetizer. The staircase vineyards, in which the grapes grow on the Rhine, seem to catch all the revivifying influences of sunshine. Their splendid golden colour is caught from those first beams of the sun as he greets his bride, the Earth, after he has been separated from her for twelve dark hours.

Some very good wine comes from the Rochusberg, immediately opposite Rudesheim. Goethe heard a sermon here once in which the preacher glorified G.o.d in proportion to the number of bottles of good wine it was daily vouchsafed to him to stow away under his waistband.

It was here that the rascal lived who drank wine out of a boot, immortalized by Longfellow. We can hardly, however, abuse the man, for he had an incurable thirst, and no crystal goblet would have held enough for him,--not indeed the biggest German beer mug.

Longfellow, in the "Golden Legend," has a chapter devoted to wine. In this poem the old cellarer muses, as he goes to draw the fine wine for the fathers, who sit above the salt, and he utters this truth of those brothers who sit below the salt:--

"Who cannot tell bad wine from good, And are much better off than if they could."

The superior wines of the Rhine, Walporzheimer, Ahrweiler and Bodendorfer, all deserve notice.

The kind of wine to be served with a dinner must depend on the means of the host. It is to be feared that, ignorantly or otherwise, many wines with high-sounding names which are not good are offered to guests.

Mr. Evarts made a witty remark on this subject. Some one said to him, "I hear that as a great diner-out you find yourself the worse for drinking so many different sorts of wine." "Oh no," said Mr. Evarts, "I do not object to the different wines, it is the indifferent wines which hurt me!"

Savarin says, sententiously, "Nothing can exceed the treachery of asking people to dinner under the guise of friendship, and then giving them to eat or drink of that which may be injurious to health." We should think so. That was the pleasant hospitality of the Borgias. In the neighbourhood of Neuwied, the dealers are accused of much doctoring of wine. During the vintage, at night, when the moon has gone down, boats glide over the Rhine freighted with a soapy substance manufactured from potatoes, and called by its owners sugar. This stuff is thrown into the vats containing the must, water is introduced from pumps and wells, chemical ferments and artificial heat are applied.

This n.o.ble fluid is sent everywhere by land and water, and labelled as first-cla.s.s wine. It is not bad to the taste, but does not bear transportation. This adulteration chiefly affects the wines sold at German hotels.

Heinrich Heine has left us this picture of a German dinner: "I dined at the Crown at Clausthal. My repast consisted of spring greens, parsley soup, violet blue cabbage, a pile of roast veal, which resembled Chimborazo in miniature, and a sort of smoked herring called buckings, from their inventor William Buckings, who died in 1447, and who on account of that invention was so greatly honoured by Charles V.

that the great monarch in 1556 made a journey from Middelburg to Bierlied, in Zealand, for the express purpose of visiting the grave of the great fish-dryer. How exquisitely such dishes taste when we are familiar with their historical a.s.sociations."