Our 'Wittles'

WITH most of us, if we had the naïveté to confess, breakfast, ‘brunch’ (a slight refection consumed by the judicious between breakfast and lunch), luncheon, afternoon tea, dinner, and snack-before-bed form the most exhilarating episodes in the day’s adventures, and those with which we should be least willing to dispense. And not only this, but they form in no small degree the memorable events of our careers. That clam chowder that we had when we came East on the excursion ticket and visited Cousin Anne in Rhode Island, — do we not remember it long after the scenery and the cousinly conversation have faded from our minds? Those mountain trout that we used to catch and broil that summer in the Rockies, — are they less vivid recollections than the sunrises over snow-tipped peaks?

Which do you recall more distinctly — the Mendings at Bruges, or the gâteaux that you ate out under the awning in the shadow of the Belfry? As for me, I speak frankly in favor of the gateaux. The month that I once spent in Amsterdam was notable for many things, but chiefly for the lusciousness that adorned the board at the Pension Denys: the custardy, creamy, meringuey puddings, with gay designs in colored sugars on the top; the crescentshaped currant rolls, all flaky and crumbling, that we devoured by the basketful for breakfast ; and best of all, the shrimp pies with wonderful Babylonish gardens of pastry winding up in tier after tier of succulence. I do not meditate on Rembrandt’s dwellingplace with the tender reminiscence that I bestow upon the pink and lavender puddings; nor do I recall the Royal Palace half so accurately as I do the architecture of those shrimp pies.

In a well-known legal case of recent years, the star witness was questioned concerning an extended and luxurious tour of Europe; all that she could tell with certainty about it was that she had had, in the course of her travels, some ‘very good cheese.’ The opposing counsel was inclined to make merry over the cultural residuum of her sojourn abroad; but I regard her with sympathy and not with scorn. Good cheese assuredly is worth remembering; and whereas cathedrals are, in the larger view, pretty much alike, cheeses are not, as any one can testify.

We do not live by bread alone: cheese and caviare and frothy desserts go far (if, as I said before, we admit the truth) toward making life tolerable for us even in our woes.

There is a story of a man, desperately ill, who, having passed the crisis of his ailment, needed only, so the doctors asserted, an incentive to recover. He had had dire misfortunes and had lost all interest in living. Neither his business, nor his motor-car, nor his children, nor his wife sufficed to lure him back to the trials of temporal existence. Then some inspired relative thought of the cook-book. She put it into the hands of the sick man as he lay withering on his pillow. He turned it over languidly; then he fluttered the pages with transparent fingers; presently he asked to be propped up in bed. Before long he was whispering fervidly of what he was going to have to eat when he got well: those pig-hocks with dumplings; hot waffles and syrup; schnittbohnen with sour sauce. What were rissoles, and ramekins, and bannocks? And why had he never known about toad-in-the-hole? These were the sentiments that wooed him back to life.

It is a pretty and very human tale.

He would be a misanthrope indeed who would not wish to live long enough to try some of the dishes pictured in the women’s magazines — even though one cynic scoffingly declares (in verse) that he never can tell whether he is beholding the portrait of a salad or a hat.

I love a cook-book myself, and read it with a zest that few novels can inspire. Sometimes when I am in special need of cheering, I go to a dull and formidable corner of the great library where much of my time is spent, and take down a volume bound in calf and labeled Harleian MSS 279 and 4016, Pub. for E.E.T.S., vol. 91. I open the tome to the legend, —

HERE BEGYNNETHE A BOKE OF KOKERY

The first recipe is for ‘Hare in Wortes’; I pass that by. But I linger over the directions for concocting ‘ blaumanger’ and ‘sweteblanche,’ ‘lampreys in galentyn,’ and ‘oyle soppys.’ There is a recipe headed ‘Cabochis’ that reads, ‘Take faire Cabochis, pike [t]hem an wassh hem and parboyle . . . caste hem in a faire potte with goode fressh broth and Marybones . . . and serve it forth.’ Cabochis and Marybones would not be at all bad, eaten steaming from the ‘potte’ when one had been riding furiously about all day in cloth of gold, with a falcon on one’s wrist, hunting the ‘ffesaunte’ or the hare.

There is an expansive and simple dignity about this: ‘Take a pigge, draw him, smyte of [f] his hede, kutte him in iiij quarters, boyle him til he be ynow, take him uppe and lete cole, smyte him in peces. . .’ But this is not the last of the pigge; he must be minced and sauced and sugared and spiced and garnished, not only till he be ynow, but till he becomes — as most mediæval dishes seem to have done at last — a kind of sublimated hash. Nearly every recipe calls for the mincing process, perhaps because the utensils of the kitchen were better than those of the table. ‘Hew them smal’; ‘chop hir smal in faire peces’; ‘hakke in gobettys’; ‘choppe hem in faire colpons.’ On every page there is much mention of seasonings and ‘spycerye’: ‘peper,’ ‘gynger,’ ‘sapheron,’ ‘parcelly,’ ‘sauge,’ ‘datys,’ ‘oynones,’ ‘Rose Mary and tyme,’ — and everywhere a ‘gobet of marow.’ They must have dripped and quivered with richness, those fifteenth-century dainties. I sigh for a taste of the ‘Grete pyes,’ for which the first of the directions is, ‘Make a faire large Cofyn of fyne past.’ The lordly mince pie of our day would feel insipid and plebeian beside those ancient kings of pastry, as they are described in print for the prying spectacles of E.E.T.S.

One feels in the recipes a touch of the artistic, the reflected joy of the mediæval cook, when he seized upon a ‘ henne ’ or a ‘goos’ or a ‘ Wodekok,’ to make it ‘faire’ and appetizing for his master’s table. And how the master himself must have groaned with repletion, and praised the cook, and called loudly in Middle-English for a repetition of special successes!

I put the book back upon the shelf with a smile of brotherly affection. The Boke of Kokery makes me feel for those ancestral lovers of good eating a far closer kinship than volumes of history and socialized philosophy. The enjoyment of food and drink is a basis upon which the men of all eras may found a fellowship. From babyhood to senility this pleasure never palls. The infant,

and the old man supping his spoonfood through gums for the second time toothless, share equally in a primitive delight; and all the years between are full of successive satisfactions, sauced by hunger and dignified by the art of cookery. For the food that is set before us, blithe souls have indeed sung eulogies; but so universal a source of joy should have a more extensive anthology of praise. At least, if there be any among us who cherishes a lingering hypocrisy of indifference to the table, let him cast away his sin, and make public confession of his gratitude for the good things that a generous fortune sends him.