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About The Sunday Oregonian. (Portland, Ore.) 1881-current | View Entire Issue (Nov. 12, 1922)
THE SUNDAY OREGONIAN, FORTLAND, NOVEMBER 12, 1923 Observations by an Epicure on Art of Dining in Many Lands BY J. K. MUMFORD. GF COURSE, when you talk about eating, which some 18th century mollycoddle maintained was a dis gusting but necessary physical process that ought to be carried on in the privacy of one's apartment, just like taking a bath, there's always the gray routine of "'home cooking." Just breakfast, dinner and supper, which within limits of the butcher's imagination are always alike. Outside the gladsome circumference of town, where the foreign cook has shed a little hilarious variety, the "home cook ing" bugaboo persists. And it ia going to die hard. Up in Greene county, where they are still dodging the draft in the revolutionary war, there's a nice girl -who goes out sewing by the day. A sum mer boarder who liked her brought her to New York to make a few things for the children and see the sights. Among the Btrange things she discovered was a fruit salad. She went home and tried it on iher antediluvian dad. The old man looked It over, and tried a stingy taste. "M-m. Tastes like potater bugs. Cook me a piece of ham." There was a mind and a palate that would never remember, in the last weary days of existence, one meal of vittles as any different from another. To a gas tronomic intelligence like that there could fce no high lights to dot the path alcng which it had journeyed for its threescore and ten. The menus of Marguery's to him would have been nothing but an entomo logical collection, and one shudders to think how his home trained palate would have rebelled at the marvels of cookery in the "Yellow Canary Bird" in Barcelona that dingy oratory of two little rooms, up grinding stairs behind a green grocer's Ehop, where two women weave subtle magic in saucepans and the king of Spain and his most epicurean nobles go to forget the "cares of the state." But to the criminally vagrant nature that for the preservation of sanity must Tefuse to swing like a pendulum in on the 7:32 and out on the 6:21, with chick en on Sunday there are bound to be a few square meals in the course of a dusty and damned existence the memory of which brings back an illusion of perfect peace. For such one would be content to subsist on Persian sheet bread and ka naut water for the remainder of his days. But what is sauce for "the goose is cer tainly not sauce for the gander despite the rhythmic charm of the proverb. The dinner which to one person is a very pharos of gastronomic joy leaves another with everything to be desired. Mind and heart the esthetic sensibilities and the ear and the eye are so inseparably tuned to the harmonies that titillate the palate that half the savor of the viand is in the tales told over it or the color of the lights or the music out yonder where the moon light sifts down through the palm trees or the eyes that laugh over the rim of the opposite wine glasn. This eating is a complicated business. You may think it's the vittles, but is it? A cookery fan will tell you yes, but he can't prove it. ' Cookery and the judgment thereof are counted among the illuminati of the table as an exact science. But the trouble with it is that wherever it is a science it Is French, and whether in Tiflis or Hong kong or Paris or San Francisco it differs only in service and in degree. The instruc tion is the same. The difference is in personality. Even the setting doesn't change. The Louis Seize dining room has chased itself around the world with the spread of "civilization," along with Aris tide, who is the Raphael of butter and .garlic the two keys to the mystery of the cuisine. Ingenious as be the sym phonies in flavor, sauve as are the se quences and luring as are the vintage bridges on which one passes from dream to dream in the perfect French dinner, I doubt if the connoisseur who has eaten his last one can tell you which of them all was the masterpiece. They are all too sophisticated for any single one to make an enduring dent in the memory. If it does, then it was probably thewoman or the languishing moan of the cello or the moon and the little breeze that ruffled the water below the verandah and brought opalescent pictures of the thing you wished you might have done. There's this to be said, that the subtle and pene trating harmonies of the "perfect" French dinner, if you'll bring yourself in tune, will find the finest that is in you and lead it out for an hour to brighten an otherwise monotonous life. I'll send you home knowing how it used to feel to wear eatin breeches and a powdered wig and Tuffles, but no one save a palate wor shiper at a dinner of that order ever thought mainly about the food. Perhaps that's the beauty of it. I have spent fool ish years trying to get a little way under the surface of French culinary artistry, but so base is the metal of most of us I cannot remember a sole in any one of half a dozen gastronomic shrines of Paris that was ever cozened or coaxed into a flavor like to that of a panful of small mouth bass fried by a French Canadian guide on a tree-shaded island in the St. Lawrence many years gone by. Now that I think oi it, that might have been the woman, too, and the little breeze playing over the river's ripples and youth and the long, long day of dreams. Th,e palate is an emotional thing withal. From Kent to the Black Sea. And mutton which the aristocracy in Holland scorn to eat, holding it only, fit victual for the poor mutton has memo ries. I have sat in tremulous agony at tie table of a Kentish squire, where half a dozen country families in the persons of men and women -wise in Southdown flavor held a veritable clinic over a saddle of the host's best springling and wondered why no American could ever possess a palate sensitized to the point of finding a taint of coarse pasture in a Nelson Morris leg of lamb. I have auto Intoxicated myself after meatless days on the mutton of the Tersian uplands, cooked over charcoal in a brazier, with strange Iranian herbs and reverently observed communion on baby lamb in food palaces that shall be nameless, when even seven dollars a portion could not silence the 1 1 '''' J ' ' ' j I ari . whoseasonea and baked that menu- ' ' still small voice that at every mouthful charged me with infanticide. I have shared with the now unpopular Mr. Kip ling the glorious sense of satiety that only seasoned mutton fat can give. But to recall all these requires an effort. Why, if baby lamb is worth seven dol lars an ounce, or if the mists of the channel off Dover and Folkestone send up a microscopic insect that fastens on the pasture grasses and gives the flavor to the Southdown, why should "mutton" the name or taste of it invariably bring a picture of a little cabin looking out across the sea to the Rehe Perce, burly and red in the slant light of a de clining sun, and the deep forest darken ing with oncoming night, and the restless waters, stretching awayKJike the endless and silent years? And why cannot all the cooks, with all their legerdemain and all their condiments, recall or counter feit the celestial taste of one huge Canada lamb that perished years and years ago? And what has mutton to do with senti ment or pressed flowers in old books? This isn't at all as absurd as it seems. It is simply a way of- finding out what the real reason is for one dinner being better than another, and being remembered when ten thousand others are forgotten,' or summoned to remembrance only by an effort of the will or a ransacking of the memory. There was, for example, a marvelous dinner in a house looking out upon the Black sea where it washes the shores of Russia. By turning up the tension screw of memory it is not impossible to recall that the turbot was as royal as the caviar, that the grouse was never equaled by sea or land and that, best of all, were the little Black sea crayfish miniature lob sters, sweeter than the chestnuts which we gathered in boyhood and which now are no more. I shall die wondering if I happen to think of it what that Russian chef, whose employer had won him away from the -Grand Duke Michael, did to those crayfish to make them taste like the Kreisler Humoresque. But these de tails do not come spontaneously. The first thing I always recall when that most delicious of Russian dinners comes to my mind is that the butler had a heard as long and as imposing as that of Fath All Shah. From caviar to coffee those portentous Russian whiskers seemed to overhang the feast like a great golden canopy, and I have always been sure that if he had been shaved before bringing in the zakouska that dinner would have gone down the ages as a masterpiece of culinary architecture. It was so small, so balanced, ' so complete so everything. But it is the whiskers that make it memo rable now not the food, nor yet the wondrous Caucasian wines that for bou quet have not their betters in the world. Once more is there any reason why, when I saw the "sets" for the Fairbanks picture of "Robin Hood," I bethought me of two boys with single-barreled shotguns stealing through a hemlock swamp on a morning after the first light snow, get ting, if I remember, two rabbits, three partridges, two gray squirrels and a cou ple of vagrant pigeons? Association of ideas has no confederate so potent as the palate. At 14 I read Scott's novels as a thirsty man drinks. There was the hut of Friar Tuck, and the game pasty. Well, the bag of that morning's hunt was made into a mighty pie, with pojk and things, and a yellow crust two inches thick, and baked next day in a great earthen dish. And to this day I have never doubted what the filip was that the lusty Friar's pasty gave to the palate of his visitor. I Can taste it yet, as plainly as he did. But it cost "Doug" Fairbanks a million dol lars or so to remind me of it. And what anatomist is going to identify the brain cells that can bring back to the palate, after more years than one cares to re member, the vagrant but heavenly flavor of a pie? If remembrance is the test of culinary skiU the dead and gone old wom an, who seasoned and baked that monu ment was a greater cook than Paris ever knew. In the light of these ,and many other illustrative reflections that arise at the mention of "dinner" it is difficult for a conscientious chronicler of.. vittles to, sit down and Underwood a catalogue of menus he has fought through the world around and crown some gorgeous one of them as the "best dinner in the world." There are so many faces to food, so many confusing factors in time, and place and people, association, in short, all of which are more potent than the herbs and the spices. And there's the hunger, which for two centuries we have been told was the best sauce, and the wine about which as a collateral fine art- America sneaking a drink of "hooch" for the sheer kick in it is rapidly forgetting the little it ever knew. No. I doubt if anyone can do it and feel sure when it is done that he has told the truth. I call to mind a delightful add pen niless old gentleman for whom in boyhood it was my prized privilege to buy drinks. Immaculate and courteous, with an old school courtesy, he h,ad a way of being at the one best thirst parlor at the psycho logical and unscheduled moment when I CHEEK-By Henry C. Rowland -Continued From Page 5.) sesses me, or whether he wires me to quit work and clear out." "He may run down himself," said Ali son. . Richard shook his head. "I don't think so. He's a hard, bitter" old heathen, in fidel and rank materialist, but with some vein of sentiment that led him to bury his wife here, consecrate the island as her tomb, then never visit it again. I'm rather afraid I've played a wrong bet. It was an appalling bit of cheek when you come to think of it." "Perfectly outrageous," Allison agreed. "You see," said Richard, "I had. reck oned a little on the soft stratum being washed out of him by the flight of,time, just ag it gets washed out of these rocks. But perhaps he's more oak than ada mant, and instead of getting petrified he may have got softer still in that one ten der spot. If so, then there may be a pic turesque ruin here to commemorate the vanity of human presumption." "And all of this terrible work for nothing," Alison almost sobbed. "Why couldn't they have let you alone at any rate. It would have been better to have finished even If dispossessed afterward than to be driven off and leave the poor old house the way it stands." "Why, that's precisely the way I feel about it," Richard answered. "I'd rather like for once in' my life to finish some thing that I'd started even if the result wasn't a brilliant success so far as my efforts were concerned." "How about your fiancee?" Alison could not help but ask. Richard's face hardened again. "Well, let's say that our relations are glightly strained," said he. Alisen, closely watching his face, di vined something that he was holding back. Perhaps it was purely feminine in tuition, or perhaps something in the slumbrous burning of his eyes. "Was it about the place, or was it about (the undertaking itself?" she asked with her characteristic directness. "Or was it some gossip about my having been seen helping you here?" Richard did not hesitate. "The latter," He said. "It was all my fault. I shouldn't have let you." ' "O, dear!" cried Alison. "Then she's jealous?" "Call it that," said Richard. "I told her that you were a little girl, the daugh ter of the distinguished astronomer who lived across on the mainland, and in your idle moments you often paddled over to see how I was getting on. But the trou passed by.. The inquiry as to what he would have brougnt always the uniform response, delivered with the same unction and with a studied little formula of dra matic appreciation. With a smile like a sunrise he surveyed the merchandise in all its glistening bottles and rubbed his hands, which had never been marred by toil,' and sighed: "Well, I don't know. They're all so good." That's the inevitable reaction to the question, "What is the best dinner in the world?" It depends a lot more on who eats' it and where than it does on what fills the , blissful distance between the cocktail and the final sigh of content. The world is very wide, and in It there are many crooks. Under the most solemn oath I could not say, when it comes to dishes, whether the most satisfying to the inmost fiber of one's bodily fabric was the fragrant "hoppin' John" which the negroes make in the south, an in spired harmony of cow peas, rice and pig tails, which white folks scorn to know anything about and which to the epicure of the Paix would be a barbarous-thing, ble was that she had got a good close-up of you in the canoe, so that my 'little girl', description met with a silvery laugh. A bell scooped from a block of ice could not have been more coldly musical. You see, Alison, the trouble was that I'd al ways thought of you as the little girl that I'd described until you said good-by to me the other day. So my own words may have lacked conviction." "Has she broken off with you?" Alison murmured. "Not yet," said Richard. "She's wait ing to see which way Uncle Jonathan jumps." Alison turned this in her mind without comment, then said, "Somehow I have hopes for Uncle Jonathan." "So has my beautiful fiancee," Richard said dryly, "and so have I, in spite of the sneering whispers of old man Gloom, who has sat here with me on the job since you quit. But the devil of it is that, finished or unfinished, I seem to have lost my in terest in this castle by the sea. It is ery far from Spain." Alison cupped her resolute chin in the hollow of her hands and stared at him fixedly. . "Still, you're going on with it," said she. "Yes, I'm going on with it, but there's h momentary check for lack of cement. I was just about to start over with my scow to see if what I ordered had been left by the last boat when you came." "It's there," said Alison. "I saw it on the wharf last night. You'd better go before it begins to get dark." Richard decided to follow this sugges tion. Alison watched him put off in the dory with the barge in tow. Then, rather than return to a long evening with a book while her fattier worked in his study, sh6 walked over to the bold promontory on which was placed the cairn and cross. She was in a soft but melancholy mood tnd one requiring solitude and medita tion. She seated herself in a little niche at the foot of the cairn, and scarcely had she done so when her eye was caught by a white speck far out in the mouth of the estuary and evidently moving in from the open sea. Alison did not notice this par ticularly until presently, looking again, she was surprised to see from the lessened distance how rapidly it was approaching and now revealed as a trim white sea going speed launch, or, rather, yacht, of some 60 feet or more. It glowed a rosy white in the reflected rays of the setting sun, its bright work sparking in points of flame, a band of white across its bows almost an offense to propriety, or the Italian fritton misto, which is virtuous in varying degrees. I have eaten it times enough in Italy when it was as common place as tripe. But once on Staten island it reached a climax that told what art could do. But was it art? There again are the confusing collaterals. I will simply leave it to you. There was a little hotel, which might have been anywhere in Tuscany, and the waiter brought the fritto. Many people don't know the fritto. Their Italian horizon is Dounded by spaghetti. For the fritto you must have veal. If the average Italian were firmly convinced that there was going to be no veal in heaven I hon estly, think he'd give up going to mass. BuH after the veal there's the mushroom and there are mushrooms and mushrooms, most of them, I make bold to say, spoiled in the cooking. Then there are hearts of artichokes and the calf's brains, and cel ery and sweetbreads and some more things besides, all dipped in a batter and fried to the color of a soleil d'or. And and long, oily undulations in its wake. Alison was admiring it abstractedly when suddenly her heart gave a suffo cating leap, for the fast little cruiser rounded a buoy, then headed directly for Mary's island, as though fixing its course by the granite cross at the foot of which she sat. And in that second the radio of her magnetic mood told Alison that here could be none other than Uncle Jonathan, retired millionaire contractor and builder of great dams and bridges, come to shat ter to its solid foundation the little home which she and Richard had consecrated in perpetuity to the memory and mortal remains of the wife of his youth? Peeping from behind the cairn, Alison saw Uncle Jonathan step out of the boat and mount the ladder of the temporary jetty. His harsh voice reached her through the perfect stillness. "Go back alongside and come when I signal," and as the boat pulled off he started up the sloping rocks toward the rough walls that seemed to rise in un protected but defiant fashion, passed round the corner of them and was hid from Alison's view. For several minutes Alison sat there trying to make up her mind what she had better do. She did not believe that he would discover her canoe left in a niche cf the cliffs fringed with dwarfed spruces. It occurred to Alison that it would be an added misfortune were he to discover her presence there, as this must destroy the impression of Richard's working in lonely solitude, consigning himself to a volun tary exile until his bold purpose might-be achieved. She decided that she had better keep out of sight. But as this conclusion became fixed in Alison's mind, the impulse to dispute it surged up within her. The girl's combat ive nature, hitherto latent for lack of necessity for its expression, now flamed its protest at Richard being tried and condemned without even so much as a hearing or any opportunity to defend his position. She determined to defend it for him, come what might of it. Her pride forbade her cringing there behind the cairn while her friend was being silently condemned. Alison drew a deep breath, ran her fingers through her thick, lustrous hair, drew down her blouse, then sprang up and stepped out from behind the cairn to confront a grim, craggy figure whose presence there was entirely outside her calculations. Evidently Uncle ' Jonathan had passed round the bouse and made his way directly to the cairn, his rubber-shod deck shoes making no sound upon the age-worn rampart of quartz and granite. (Copyright, 1923, by Henry C. Rowland.) (Concluded next week.) a buerre noir to anoint it, and again buerre noir sometimes covers a multitude ot sins. J There was an unwonted air of grandeur, about the waiter when he brought it in, a triumphant prominence of the chest, a victorious liberality in his smile, an ex travagant flourish in his bow. One knew by instance that something had been ac complished. And it had. Wine will do much, but the simple bottle of Capri Rouff, not Scala which bore the fritto company could not have made any differ ence. When the fritto was finished I went into the kitchen, where the artist smiled rosy and proud among her pots and pans of copper, and offered her my tribute. good, but It wasn't the cooking. Mr Vanderbilt's farm is just over back here, and twice a week he sends the steward down to get the meats for the town house. Our butcher does the killing. They take out a roast and some chops and he brings the rest of the carcass right to us. It's the ve al that makes the fritto not the cook ing." Thus ever the artiste "Well," she went on, "those calves are registered Guernseys and they're fed for six weeks on certified milk and game chickens' eggs. Yes, the fritto ought to bo good." The fritto certainly was all that fritto could be, but in the years of cold, un biased Judgment that have intervened, and with what I call "palate memories" blurred a bit by other and widely varied masterpieces, 1 have come to wonder whether my recollection of that delectable dish Js colored somewhat by the con scipusness that while Mr. Vanderbilt was eating roast and chops in Fifth avenue, seasoned, I'll warrant, by no such youth ful appetite and no such worshiped com pany as mine, I was reveling in the far tastier morsels of his Guernsey, which must have cost him and as a city farmer I know whereof I speak at least J 50 a pound. But one thing leads to another. It is a saying hi New York that "when Greek meets Greek they start a restaurant," and well, punishment for sins takes va rious forms. It will make some demand on the average New York imagination and credulity to believe that there was ever a meal in Greece that was beautiful as the "September Morn." And fittingly enough a breakfast. Does One "Eat" the Landscape? The ship that was taking me and some other freight to Batum on the way to the middle of Asia cast anchor in the gray of the morning off the venerable village of Patrasso, to lighter some dribblings of cargo. I paddled ashore, merely to get the feel of the ground and to pass the few iiuurs ui waning, a nuuuie oi sieepy eyed people stood stupidly on the beach, and one ancient "hack," drawn there by the slender chance' of a fare. A young man came up and, finding I was an Amer ican, told me was a correspondent of the New York Herald. The world is very small. We took the ancient hack and went trundling out over the long road that skirts the bend of the bay. And as we rode the day began to paint the sky with rose tints. Against that illimitable back ground of rose and misty blue, fresh with 'rmen, brown, bare-legged, were hauling" a close-meshed seine along the beach for the tiny fishes which are the Mediter ranean's priceless contribution to the joy , of -nations little fingerlings with the color ot opais ana me aencacy oi a pis tache nut. And they sang, as Greeks for ever sing. The picture was worth the journey. But there was more to come, and I find as the years go by more exquisite by far. We came at last to a little house, clus tering amid many vines, looking out upon the sea. There was an arbor in front and under it tables. We disembarked and sat at one. Around the corner of the house came a girl a marvelously beautiful girl, even at 5:30 of a spring morning. Sappho, uurumg auu &iugm&, waa caajf iu un derstand. She had a smile as rosy as the We wanted breakfast. She vanished in her smile somehow; she didn't seem merely to go. When she came back sne Dore a salver with a cool, misty bottle of wine, and all about It were heaped roses that reflected the color of her lips and of the sky. She brought grapes, with the sprinkle of the dew still on them, cool from the night just gone. She brought the little opales cent fishes which had just left the sea, and an omelette tender as a farewell, and yel-. low toast, and a tiny cheese, which never was elsewhere, and fruits preserved in honey I'm sure it was of Hymette and a thimble of Turkish coffee, such as keeps., the languor in the eyes of the odalisques in Stamboul. And everything was gar nished with flowers, and the roses were over our heads, and roses on her lips . and forget-me-nots and larkspur in the blue of her eyes and then we got into the old hack and rode back to the ship I have wondered ever since if that breakfast was really as wonderful a breakfast as it seemed to me then- f wanted to make sure, and who is so likely to know these mystic and intangib'e things as a poet? So one day I told the story to Bliss Carman. He listened with the ascetic gravity of an Aztec idol, and from out the recesses of his poet's soul came the answer, like a solemn echo of judgment: "We don't have any Hebes. in New Canaan." Now what is one to believe? You go' through life, a dingy life, catching through rifts in the murk a- memory here - and there of the scents of Araby, tasting now and then some flavor in which are mingled all the niceties of all the world's kitchens, and lo, some brutal singer or songs comes along and puts it all in the corned-beef and cabbage class. When it comes to putting an absolute value to a dish or a dinner one feels, after all, lik-e the familiar rooster, who, leaning against a barn door in the rain, wet and draggled, with head and tail alike cast down, ex claimed in anguish of spirit: "An eg? yesterday, a feather duster tomorrow What's the use?"