The Art of Entertaining Part 19

Sh.e.l.l fish afford a lubricating slime!

But then you must observe both place and time.

They're caught the finest when the moon is new; The Lucrine far excel the Baian too.

Misenum shines in cray fish; Circe most In oysters; scollops let Tarentum boast.

The culinary critic first should learn Each nicer shade of flavour to discern: To sweep the fish stalls is mere show at best

Unless you know how each thing should be drest.

Let boars of Umbrian game replete with mast, If game delights you, crown the rich repast.

SATIRES OF HORACE.

Italian cookery is excellent at its best. The same drift of talent, the same due sense of proportion which showed itself in all their art, which built St. Mark's and the Duomo, the Ducal Palace, the Rialto, and the churches of Palladio, comes out in their cookery. Their cooks are Michel Angelo and Leonardo da Vinci in a humbler sphere.

They mingle cheese in cookery, with great effect; nothing can be better than their cauliflower covered with Parmesan cheese, and baked. Macaroni in all its forms is of course admirable. They have mastered the use of sweet oil, which in their cookery never tastes oily; it is simply a lambent richness.

The great dish, wild boar, treated with a sweet and a sour sauce, with pine cones, is an excellent dish. Wild boar is a lean pork with a game flavour. All sorts of birds, especially _becafico_, are well cooked, they lose no juice or flavour over the fire.

They make a dozen preparations of Indian meal, which are very good for breakfast. One little round cake, like a m.u.f.fin, tastes almost of cocoanut; this is fried in oil, and is most delicious.

The _frittala_ is another well-known dish, and is composed of liver, bacon, and birds, all pinned on a long stick, or iron pin.

In an Italian palace, if you have the good luck to be asked, the dinner is handsome. It is served in twelve courses in the Russian manner, and if national dishes are offered they are disguised as inelegant. But at an ordinary farmhouse in the hills near Florence, or at the ordinary hotels, there will be a good soup, trout fresh from the brooks, fresh b.u.t.ter, macaroni with cheese, a fat capon, and a delicious omelette, enriched with morsels of kidney or fat bacon, a _frittala_, a bunch of grapes, a bottle of Pogio secco, or the sweet Italian straw wine.

The Italians are very frugal, and would consider the luxurious overflow of American munificent hospitality as vulgar. At parties in Rome, Naples, and Florence it is not considered proper to offer much refreshment. At Mr. Story's delightful receptions American hospitality reigned at afternoon tea, as it did in all houses where the hostess was American, but at the houses of the Princes nothing was offered but weak wine and water and little cakes.

Many travellers have urged that the cookery of the common Italian dinner is too much flavoured with garlic, but in a winter spent in travelling through Italy I did not find it so. I remember a certain leg of lamb with beans which had a slight taste of onions, but that is all. They have learned, as the French have, that the onion is to cookery what accent is to speech. It should not be _trop p.r.o.noncee_.

The lamb and pistachio nuts of the Arabian Nights is often served and is delicious.

They give you in an Italian country house for breakfast, at twelve o'clock, a sort of thick soup, very savoury, probably made of chicken with an herb like okra, one dish of meat smothered in beans or tomatoes, followed by a huge dish of macaroni with cheese, or with morsels of ham through it. Then a white curd with powdered cinnamon, sugar, and wine, a bottle of _vino santo_, a cup of coffee or chocolate, and bread of phenomenal whiteness and lightness.

Alas, for the poor people! They live on the chestnuts, the frogs, or nothing. The porter at the door of some great house is seen eating a dish of frogs, which are, however, so well cooked that they send up an appetizing fragrance more like a stew of crabs than anything else. One sees sometimes a ma.s.sive ancient house, towering up in mediaeval grandeur, with shafts of marble, and columns of porphyry, lonely, desolate, and beautiful, infinitely impressive, infinitely grand. Some member of a once ill.u.s.trious family lives within these ruined walls, on almost nothing. He would have to kill his pet falcon to give you a dinner, while around his time-honoured house cl.u.s.ter his tenants shaking with malaria,--pale, unhappy, starved people. It is not a cheerful sight, but it can be seen in southern Italy.

The prosperous Italians will give you a well-cooked meal, an immense quant.i.ty of bonbons, and the most exquisite candied fruits. Their _confetti_ are wonderful, their cakes and ices, their candied fruit, their _tutti frutti_, are beyond all others. They crown every feast with a Paradise in spun sugar.

But they despise and fear a fire, and foreigners are apt to find the old Italian palaces dreary, and very cold. A recent traveller writes from Florence: "I have been within the walls of five Italian houses at evening parties, at three of them, music and no conversation; all except one held in cold rooms, the floors black, imperfectly covered with drugget, and no fire; conversation, to me at least, very dull; the topics, music, personal slander,--for religion, government, and literature, were generally excluded from polite society. In only one house, of which the mistress was a German, was tea handed around; sometimes not even a cup of water was pa.s.sed." We learn from the novels of Marion Crawford that the Italians do not often eat in each others' houses.

Victor Emmanuel, the mighty hunter, had a mighty appet.i.te. He used to dine alone, before the hour for the State dinner. Then with sword in hand, leaning on its jewelled hilt, in full uniform, his breast covered with orders, the King sat at the head of his table, and talked with his guests while the really splendid dinner was served.

Royal banquets are said to be dull. The presence of a man so much above the others in rank has a depressing effect. The guest must console himself with the glorious past of Italy, and fix his eyes on the magnificent furniture of the table, the cups of Benvenuto Cellini, the vases of Capo di Monti, the superb porcelain, and the Venetian gla.s.s, or he must devote himself to the lamb and pistachio nuts, the _choux fleurs aux Parmesan_, or the truffles, which are nowhere so large or so fine as at an Italian dinner. Near Rome they are rooted out of the oak forests by the king's dogs, and are large and full of flavour.

King Humbert has inherited his father's taste for hunting, and sends presents of the game he has shot to his courtiers.

The housekeeping at the Quirinal is excellent; a royal supper at a royal ball is something to remember. And what wines to wash them down with!--the delicious Lacryma Christi, the Falerno or Capri, the Chianti, the Sestio Levante or Asti. Asti is a green wine, rich, strong, and sweet. It makes people ill if they drink it before it is quite old enough--but perhaps it is not often served at royal banquets.

Verdeaux was a favourite wine of Frederic the Great, but Victor Emmanuel's wine was the luscious _Monte Pulciano_.

"Monte Pulciano d'ogni vino e il Re."

The brilliant purple colour, like an amethyst, of this n.o.ble wine is unlike any other. The aromatic odour is delicious; its sweetness is tempered by an agreeable sharpness and astringency; it leaves a flattering flavour on the tongue.

These best Italian wines have a deliciousness which eludes a.n.a.lysis, like the famous Monte Beni, which old Tommaso produced in a small straw-covered flask at the visit of Kenyon to Donatello. This invaluable wine was of a pale golden hue, like other of the rarest Italian wines, and if carelessly and irreligiously quaffed, might have been mistaken for a sort of champagne. It was not, however, an effervescing wine, although its delicate piquancy produced a somewhat similar effect upon the palate. Sipping, the guest longed to sip again, but the wine demanded so deliberate a pause in order to detect the hidden peculiarities, and subtile exquisiteness of its flavour, that to drink it was more a moral than a physical delight. There was a deliciousness in it which eluded description, and like whatever else that is superlatively good was perhaps better appreciated by the memory than by present consciousness. One of its most ethereal charms lay in the transitory life of the wine's richest qualities; for while it required a certain leisure and delay, yet if you lingered too long in the draught, it became disenchanted both of its fragrance and flavour. The l.u.s.tre and colour should not be forgotten among the other good qualities of the Monte Beni wine, for "as it stood in Kenyon's gla.s.s, a little circle of light glowed on the table around about it as if it were really so much golden sunshine."

There are few wines worthy of this beautiful eloquence of Hawthorne.

The description bears transportation; the wine did not. The transportation of even a few miles turned it sour. That is the trouble with Italian wines. Monte Pulciano and Chianti do bear transportation.

Italy sends much of the latter wine to New York. Italy has, however, never produced a really good dry wine, with all its vineyards.

The dark Grignolino wine grown in the vineyards of Asterau and Monferrato possesses the remarkable quality of keeping better if diluted with fresh water.

The Falernian from the Bay of Naples, is the wine of the poets, nor need we remind the cla.s.sical scholar that the hills around Rome were formerly supposed to produce it.

The loose, volcanic soil about Mount Vesuvius grows the grapes from which Lacryma Christi is produced. It is sometimes of a rich red colour, though white and sparkling varieties are produced.

The Italians are supremely fond of _al fresco_ entertainments,--their fine climate making out-of-door eating very agreeable. How many a traveller remembers the breakfast or dinner in a vine-covered _loggia_ overhanging some splendid scene! It forms the subject of many a picture, from those which ill.u.s.trate the stories of Boccaccio up to the beautiful sketch of Ta.s.so, at the court of the Duc d'Este. The dangers of these feasts have been immortalized in verse and prose from Dante down, and Shakspeare has touched upon them twice. George Eliot describes one in a "_loggia_ joining on a garden, with all one side of the room open, and with numerous groups of trees and statues and avenues of box, high enough to hide an a.s.sa.s.sin," in her wonderful novel of Romola. In modern days, since the Borgias are all killed, no one need fear to eat out-of-doors in Italy.

Not much can be said of the cookery of Spain. In the princ.i.p.al hotels of Spain one gets all the evils of both Spanish and Gascon cookery.

Garlic is the favourite flavour, and the bad oil expressed from the olive, skin, seed and all, allowed to stand until it is rancid, is beloved of the Spanish, but hated by all other nations. I believe, however, that an _olla podrida_ made in a Spanish house is very good.

It may not be inappropriate here to give two recipes for macaroni. The first, _macaroni au gratin_ is very rarely found good in an American house:--

Break two ounces of best Italian macaroni into a pint of highly seasoned stock, let it simmer until very tender. When done, toss it up with a small piece of b.u.t.ter, and add pepper and salt to taste; put in a large meat dish, sift over it some fried bread-crumbs, and serve. It will take about an hour to cook, and should be covered with the stock all the time.

_Macaroni with Parmesan cheese_: Boil two ounces of macaroni in half a pint of water, with an ounce of b.u.t.ter, until perfectly tender. If the water evaporates add a little more, taking care that the macaroni does not stick to the stewpan, or become broken. When it is done, drain away the water and stir in two ounces of good cheese grated, cayenne pepper and salt to taste. Keep stirring until the cheese is dissolved.

Pour on to a hot dish and serve. A little b.u.t.ter may be stirred into the macaroni before the cheese, and is an improvement.

Through the Riviera, and indeed in the south of France, one meets with many peculiar dishes. No one who has read Thackeray need be reminded of _bouillabaise_, that famous fish chowder of Ma.r.s.eilles. It is, however, only our chowder with much red pepper. A cook can try it if she chooses, and perhaps achieve it after many failures.

There are so many very good dishes awaiting the efforts of a young American housewife, that she need not go out of her way to extemporize or explore. The best cook-book for foreign dishes is still the old Francatelli.

The presence in our midst of Italian warehouses, adds an infinite resource to the housewife. Those stimulants to the appet.i.te called _hors d'oeuvres_, we call them relishes, are much increased by studying the list of Italian delicacies. Anchovy or caviar, potted meat, grated tongue, potted cheese, herring salad, the inevitable olive, and many other delicacies could be mentioned which aid digestion, and make the plainest table inexpensively luxurious. The Italians have all sorts of delicate vegetables preserved in bottles, mixed and ready for use in a _jardiniere_ dressing; also the best of cheeses, _gargonzala_, and of course the truffle, which they know how to cook so well.

The Italians have conquered the art of cooking in oil, so that you do not taste the oil. It is something to live for, to eat their fried things.

Speaking of the south of Europe reminds us of that wonderful bit of orientalism out of place, which is called Algiers, and which France has enamelled on her fabulous and many-coloured shield. Algiers has become not only a winter watering-place, high in favour with the traveller, but it is a great wine-growing country. The official statement of Lieut. Col. Sir R. L. Playfair, her Majesty's consul-general, may be read with interest, dated 1889:

"Viticulture in Algeria, was in 1778 in its infancy; now nearly one hundred and twenty-five thousand acres are under cultivation with vines, and during the last year about nine hundred thousand hectolitres of wine were produced. In 1873 Mr. Eyre Ledyard, an English cultivator of the vine in Algeria, bought the property of Chateau Hydra near Algiers. He found on it five acres of old and badly planted vineyards, which produced about seven hogsheads of wine. He has extended this vineyard and carried on his work with great intelligence and industry. He cultivates the following varieties: the Mourvedie, of a red colour resembling Burgundy, Cariguan, giving a wine good, dark, and rough, Alicante or Grenache, Pet.i.t Bouschet, Cabernot and Cot, a Burgundy, Perian Lyra, Aramen, and St. Saux.

Cha.s.selas succeeds well; the grapes are exported to France for the table.

Clairette produces abundantly and makes a good dry wine. Ainin Kelb, more correctly Ain Kelb, dog's-eye, is an Arab grape which makes a good strong wine, but which requires keeping. Muscat is a capricious bearer. From the two last-named varieties, sweet as well as dry wines are produced by adding large quant.i.ties of alcohol to the juice of the grape, and thus preventing fermentation. The crops yield quant.i.ties varying from seven hundred gallons per acre in rich land to four hundred on the hillside, except Cariguan which yields more. Aramen yields as much, but the quality is inferior.

The red wines are sent to Bordeaux and Burgundy, to give strength and quality to the French clarets, as they are very useful for blending.

The dry, white wine is rather stronger and fuller than that of France or Germany, and is much used to give additional value to the thinner qualities of Rhine wine.

The cellars of Chateau Hydra, are now probably the best in the colony.

They are excavated in the soft rock here incorrectly called tufa, in reality an aggregation of minutely pulverized sh.e.l.ls; it is soft and sandy, and easily excavated. The surface becomes harder by exposure to the atmosphere, and it is not subject to crumbling.