CHAPTER XVI FOOD

The subject of diet—he prefers to call it diet—is apparently one of unlimited interest to the Englishman. Meet him where you will, he is ever ready to discuss, first, the weather, and then the things—that is to say, the kinds of food—that agree with him. Indeed, you could almost stake your life on extracting from any strange Englishman you happen to come across some such statement as, "I can't abide eggs," or, "Veal always makes me bilious," within ten minutes of opening up a conversation with him. The Englishman's house, we are told, is his castle; and the Englishman's hobby, surely, is his digestion. In point of fact, ninety-nine per cent. of adolescent and adult English people[Pg 154] suffer from chronic indigestion in a more or less severe form. Flatulence, heartburn, colic, and "liver" are the Englishman's mortal heritage. He is invariably troubled with some of them, and quite commonly with all. If you relieved him of them he would scarcely thank you, because he has nursed them from his youth up, and what he really wants is amelioration, and not cure. Probably this is the reason why in the midst of his wails and his unholy talk about diet he continues to feed in precisely the grossest, greasiest, and least rational manner that generations of bad feeders have been able to develop.

Of mornings, if you sojourn with an English family, you will be invited to breakfast at half-past eight. Promptly at that hour they serve a sort of sickly oatmeal soup, compounded apparently of milk and sugar, which they call porridge. Then follow thick and piping-hot coffee with 'am and eggs, fish, or a chop, and bread and butter and marmalade as a sort of wind-up. The man who tackles this menu goes to business belching like a[Pg 155] torn balloon. By eleven o'clock, however, he is ready for a little snack—oysters and chablis, prawns on toast, a mouthful of bread and cheese and a bottle of Bass, or something of that kind. Then at half-past one there is lunch, practically a dinner of several courses, or a cut from the joint, accompanied by what the English euphoniously term "two veg." At tea-time your Englishman must needs lave himself in a dish of Orange-Pekoe or Bohea, to the accompaniment of lumps of cake. And at long and last comes dinner, the crowning guzzle of the Englishman's day, and a function usually spread over a couple of hours. It will be perceived that this gustatory programme or routine has been copied from the French. The French put away two good meals per diem, one at noon and the other in the evening, and there is no reason why the English should not do the same. When you come to think of it, dinner in the middle of the day is a low, under-bred, undistinguished arrangement; also not to dine at night is to run the risk of not losing one's[Pg 156] figure, and of having the neighbours say that one cannot afford it.

The French programme would be all very well if it were carried out on French lines all through. But it is not. When you say "soup" in a French restaurant, it means that you will be served with half a dozen table-spoonfuls of consommé, or petite marmite, or bisque, as the case may be. When the Englishman says "soup," he means enough thick stock to wash a bus down. What is more, he gets it and swallows it. And it is so all down the menu—too much of everything, and don't you think you can put me off with your blooming hom?opathic portions. A liberal table, no stint, good food, and plenty of it, is one of the bulwarks of English respectability. That bad digestion and talks about diet follow is nobody's fault.

This profusion—this overfood, as it were—has been brought to its noblest expression by the English aristocracy, whose tables literally groan with costly viands, whose spits are always turning, and whose scullions and[Pg 157] kitchen wenches are as an army. It is related that when a certain duke found it necessary to retrench, and was advised by his family solicitor to get rid of his fifth, sixth, and seventh cooks, his grace remarked, "But ——, So-and-so, a man must have a biscuit!" And the English middle class of course faithfully imitates to the best of its powers the English upper class, and so on through the grades. Among all classes there is a rooted prejudice against food that happens to be cheap. To this day people who eat escallops are rather looked down upon, for no other reason than that oysters run you into half a crown a dozen, while you can get excellent escallops at ninepence. So the herring, the whiting, and other kinds of cheap fish are considered little better than offal by persons who can afford to pay for sole and salmon. Turtle soup is infinitely to be preferred to any other soup in the world because it is dearer, and champagne is drunk, not because people like it, but because it looks swagger and testifies to the possession of[Pg 158] means. These gustatory idiosyncrasies are purely English, and obviously they are the offspring of the English love of display and superfluity.

Among the lower classes the general feeding, though cheaper, is just as wasteful and just as gross. Excluding bread, it consists chiefly of inferior cuts of butcher's meat with charcuterie and dried fish thrown in. It has been complained against the Scot that he is none too clean a feeder, delighting hugely in inferior meats. Haggis is held forth as a great exemplar in point. But it cannot be denied that throughout England the one kind of emporium for the sale of comestibles which flourishes and is unfailingly popular is the pork or ham-and-beef shop. And here what do you obtain? Why, exactly the meats which gentlemen of the type of Mr. Henley describe as offal. They include, in addition to pork in and out of season, pig's feet, pig's heads, pig's liver and kidneys, pig's blood sausages, the "savoury duck" or mess of seasoned remnants, tripe boiled and raw, and[Pg 159] chitterlings. So that the haggis of Scotland is fairly well balanced. I am not suggesting for a moment that the English display other than a proper judgment in devouring these dainties. But if they will favour the pork shop and its contents, they can scarcely expect to be set down for an angel-bread and manna-eating people.

Perhaps the chief scandal about English feeding lies in the condition of the English hotels. On the Continent an hotel is an establishment for the accommodation of travellers requiring food and rest. In England an hotel is an establishment for the accommodation of landlords and waiters. "High class cuisine," says the tariff card, also "wines and spirits of the best selected quality." Yet one's experience tells one that, though the bill will be heavy, neither the cuisine nor the wines will be more than passable, much less high class. A menu which is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, bad cooking, careless service, and a general lack of finish, are the things one may expect[Pg 160] at an English hotel with the tolerable certainty of not being disappointed. To complain is to draw forth the ill-disguised contempt of bibulous head-waiters and the stiff apologies of haughty proprietors. But beyond that mortal man will never get, because the English hotel is an immemorial and conservative institution, and as wise in its own conceit as the ancient sphinx. Of late and in London attempts have been made to organise hotels adapted to the best kind of requirement. So far as I am aware, only two of them have really succeeded, and the charges at both places are quite prohibitive.

Closely identified, one might almost say affiliated, to the English hotel is the English railway-buffet, of which so much has been said in song and story. The sheer horribleness of the "refreshments" here provided has passed into a proverb. The English themselves admit that if you wish to know the worst about refreshments, you should drink the railway-buffet tea and partake of the[Pg 161] railway-buffet sandwich. They also admit that for abominations in the way of a?rated waters, milk, beer, and whisky, pastry, cakes, hard-boiled eggs, cold meats, boiled chicken and ham, and chops and steaks from the grill, the railway-buffet takes the palm; and they admit further that the Hebes who dispense these comestibles to the hungry and howling mob have the manners of duchesses. Yet the English without their railway-buffets would be an utterly woebegone and miserable people. Put an Englishman down at a strange railway-station with a half-hour wait before him. He has but one resort: he inquires right off for the buffet, and there he gorges and swizzles till the warning bell advises him of the departure of his train. If there is no buffet, he becomes a dejected, pallid man, and threatens to write to the newspapers. So long as the railway-buffets continue to exist, the English digestion can never aspire to perfection, even though English feeding and cooking outside railway-stations became ideal; for a single[Pg 162] "meal" of railway-buffet viands would permanently disorganise the digestive capabilities of the most ostrichy ostrich that ever walked on two legs.