_ Chapter VIII. A Tale of a String-bean
It was at a small dinner party in a home out in Passy--which is to Paris what Flatbush is to Brooklyn--that the event hereinafter set forth came to pass. Our host was an American who had lived abroad a good many years; and his wife, our hostess, was a French woman as charming as she was pretty and as pretty as she could be.
The dinner was going along famously. We had hors-d'oeuvres, the soup and the hare--all very tasty to look on and very soothing to the palate. Then came the fowl, roasted, of course--the roast fowl is the national bird of France--and along with the fowl something exceedingly appetizing in the way of hearts of lettuce garnished with breasts of hothouse tomatoes cut on the bias.
When we were through with this the servants removed the debris and brought us hot plates. Then, with the air of one conferring a real treat on us, the butler bore around a tureen arrangement full of smoking-hot string-beans. When it came my turn I helped myself --copiously--and waited for what was to go with the beans. A pause ensued--to my imagination an embarrassed pause. Seeking a cue I glanced down the table and back again. There did not appear to be anything to go with the beans. The butler was standing at ease behind his master's chair--ease for a butler, I mean--and the other guests, it seemed to me, were waiting and watching. To myself I said:
"Well, sir, that butler certainly has made a J. Henry Fox Pass of himself this trip! Here, just when this dinner was getting to be one of the notable successes of the present century, he has to go and derange the whole running schedule by serving the salad when he should have served the beans, and the beans when he should have served the salad. It's a sickening situation; but if I can save it I'll do it. I'll be well bred if it takes a leg!"
So, wearing the manner of one who has been accustomed all his life to finishing off his dinner with a mess of string-beans, I used my putting-iron; and from the edge of the fair green I holed out in three. My last stroke was a dandy, if I do say it myself. The others were game too--I could see that. They were eating beans as though beans were particularly what they had come for. Out of the tail of my eye I glanced at our hostess, sitting next to me on the left. She was placid, calm, perfectly easy. Again addressing myself mentally I said:
"There's a thoroughbred for you! You take a woman who got prosperous suddenly and is still acutely suffering from nervous culture, and if such a shipwreck had occurred at her dinner table she'd be utterly prostrated by now--she'd be down and out--and we'd all be standing back to give her air; but when they're born in the purple it shows in these big emergencies. Look at this woman now--not a ripple on the surface--balmy as a summer evening! But in about one hour from now, Central European time, I can see her accepting that fool butler's resignation before he's had time to offer it!"
After the beans had been cleared off the right-of-way we had the dessert and the cheese and the coffee and the rest of it. And, as we used to say in the society column down home when the wife of the largest advertiser was entertaining, "at a suitable hour those present dispersed to their homes, one and all voting the affair to have been one of the most enjoyable occasions among like events of the season." We all knew our manners--we had proved that.
Personally I was very proud of myself for having carried the thing off so well but after I had survived a few tables d'hote in France and a few more in Austria and a great many in Italy, where they do not have anything at the hotels except tables d'hote, I did not feel quite so proud. For at this writing in those parts the slender, sylphlike string-bean is not playing a minor part, as with us. He has the best spot on the evening bill--he is a headliner. So is the cauliflower; so is the Brussels sprout; so is any vegetable whose function among our own people is largely scenic.
Therefore I treasured the memory of this incident and brought it back with me; and I tell it here at some length of detail because I know how grateful my countrywomen will be to get hold of it--I know how grateful they always are when they learn about a new gastronomical wrinkle. Mind you, I am not saying that the notion is an absolute novelty here. For all I know to the contrary, prominent hostesses along the Gold Coast of the United States --Bar Harbor to Palm Beach inclusive--may have been serving one lone vegetable as a separate course for years and years; but I feel sure that throughout the interior the disclosure will come as a pleasant surprise.
The directions for executing this coup are simple and all the deadlier because they are so simple. The main thing is to invite your chief opponent as a smart entertainer; you know the one I mean--the woman who scored such a distinct social triumph in the season of 1912-13 by being the first woman in town to serve tomato bisque with whipped cream on it. Have her there by all means. Go ahead with your dinner as though naught sensational and revolutionary were about to happen. Give them in proper turn the oysters, the fish, the entree, the bird, the salad. And then, all by itself, alone and unafraid, bring on a dab of string-beans.
Wait until you see the whites of their eyes, and aim and fire at will. Settle back then, until the first hushed shock has somewhat abated--until your dazed and suffering rival is glaring about in a well-bred but flustered manner, looking for something to go with the beans. Hold her eye while you smile a smile that is compounded of equal parts--superior wisdom, and gentle contempt for her ignorance--and then slowly, deliberately, dip a fork into the beans on your plate and go to it.
Believe me, it cannot lose. Before breakfast time the next morning every woman who was at that dinner will either be sending out invitations for a dinner of her own and ordering beans, or she will be calling up her nearest and best friend on the telephone to spread the tidings. I figure that the intense social excitement occasioned in this country a few years ago by the introduction of Russian salad dressing will be as nothing in comparison.
This stunt of serving the vegetable as a separate course was one of the things I learned about food during our flittings across Europe, but it was not the only thing I learned--by a long shot it was not. For example I learned this--and I do not care what anybody else may say to the contrary either--that here in America we have better food and more different kinds of food, and food better cooked and better served than the effete monarchies of the Old World ever dreamed of. And, quality and variety considered, it costs less here, bite for bite, than it costs there.
Food in Germany is cheaper than anywhere else almost, I reckon; and, selected with care and discrimination, a German dinner is an excellently good dinner. Certain dishes in England--and they are very certain, for you get them at every meal--are good, too, and not overly expensive. There are some distinctive Austrian dishes that are not without their attractions either. Speaking by and large, however, I venture the assertion that, taking any first-rate restaurant in any of the larger American cities and balancing it off against any establishment of like standing in Europe, the American restaurant wins on cuisine, service, price, flavor and attractiveness.
Centuries of careful and constant press-agenting have given French cookery much of its present fame. The same crafty processes of publicity, continued through a period of eight or nine hundred years, have endowed the European scenic effects with a glamour and an impressiveness that really are not there, if you can but forget the advertising and consider the proposition on its merits.
Take their rivers now--their historic rivers, if you please. You are traveling--heaven help you--on a Continental train. Between spells of having your ticket punched or torn apart, or otherwise mutilated; and getting out at the border to see your trunks ceremoniously and solemnly unloaded and unlocked, and then as ceremoniously relocked and reloaded after you have conferred largess on everybody connected with the train, the customs regulations being mainly devised for the purpose of collecting not tariff but tips--between these periods, which constitute so important a feature of Continental travel--you come, let us say, to a stream.
It is a puny stream, as we are accustomed to measure streams, boxed in by stone walls and regulated by stone dams, and frequently it is mud-colored and, more frequently still, runs between muddy banks. In the West it would probably not even be dignified with a regular name, and in the East it would be of so little importance that the local congressman would not ask an annual appropriation of more than half a million dollars for the purposes of dredging, deepening and diking it. But even as you cross it you learn that it is the Tiber or the Arno, the Elbe or the Po; and, such is the force of precept and example, you immediately get all excited and worked up over it.
English rivers are beautiful enough in a restrained, well-managed, landscape-gardened sort of way; but Americans do not enthuse over an English river because of what it is in itself, but because it happens to be the Thames or the Avon--because of the distinguished characters in history whose names are associated with it.
Hades gets much of its reputation the same way.
I think of one experience I had while touring through what we had learned to call the Dachshund District. Our route led us alongside a most inconsequential-looking little river. Its contents seemed a trifle too liquid for mud and a trifle too solid for water. On the nearer bank was a small village populated by short people and long dogs. Out in midstream, making poor headway against the semi-gelid current, was a little flutter-tailed steamboat panting and puffing violently and kicking up a lather of lacy spray with its wheelbuckets in a manner to remind you of a very warm small lady fanning herself with a very large gauze fan, and only getting hotter at the job.
In America that stream would have been known as Mink Creek or Cassidy's Run, or by some equally poetic title; but when I found out it was the Danube--no less--I had a distinct thrill. On closer examination I discovered it to be a counterfeit thrill; but nevertheless, I had it.
What applies in the main to the scenery applies in the main to the food. France has the reputation of breeding the best cooks in the world--and maybe she does; but when you are calling in France you find most of them out. They have emigrated to America, where a French chef gets more money in one year for exercising his art --and gets it easier--than he could get in ten years at home--and is given better ingredients to cook with than he ever had at home.
The hotel in Paris at which we stopped served good enough meals, all of them centering, of course, round the inevitable poulet roti; but it took the staff an everlastingly long time to bring the food to you. If you grew reckless and ordered anything that was not on the bill it upset the entire establishment; and before they calmed down and relayed it in to you it was time for the next meal. Still, I must say we did not mind the waiting; near at hand a fascinating spectacle was invariably on exhibition.
At the next table sat an Italian countess. Anyhow they told me she was an Italian countess, and she wore jewelry enough for a dozen countesses. Every time I beheld her, with a big emerald earring gleaming at either side of her head, I thought of a Lenox Avenue local in the New York Subway. However, it was not so much her jewelry that proved such a fascinating sight as it was her pleasing habit of fetching out a gold-mounted toothpick and exploring the most remote and intricate dental recesses of herself in full view of the entire dining room, meanwhile making a noise like somebody sicking a dog on.
The Europeans have developed public toothpicking beyond anything we know. They make an outdoor pastime and function of it, whereas we pursue this sport more or less privately. Over there, a toothpick is a family heirloom and is handed down from one generation to another, and is operated in company ostentatiously. In its use some Europeans are absolutely gifted. But then we beat the world at open-air gum-chewing--so I reckon the honors are about even.
This particular hotel, in common with all other first-class hotels in Paris, was forgetful about setting forth on its menu the prices of its best dishes and its special dishes. I take it this arrangement was devised for the benefit of currency-quilted Americans. A Frenchman asks the waiter the price of an unpriced dish and then orders something else; but the American, as a rule, is either too proud or too foolish to inquire into these details. At home he is beset by a hideous fear that some waiter will think he is of a mercenary nature; and when he is abroad this trait in him is accentuated. So, in his carefree American way, he orders a portion of a dish of an unspecified value; whereupon the head waiter slips out to the office and ascertains by private inquiry how large a letter of credit the American is carrying with him, and comes back and charges him all the traffic will bear.
As for the keeper of a fashionable cafe on a boulevard or in the Rue de la Paix--well, alongside of him the most rapacious restaurant proprietor on Broadway is a kindly, Christian soul who is in business for his health--and not feeling very healthy at that. When you dine at one of the swagger boulevard places the head waiter always comes, just before you have finished, and places a display of fresh fruit before you, with a winning smile and a bow and a gesture, which, taken together, would seem to indicate that he is extending the compliments of the season and that the fruit will be on the house; but never did one of the intriguing scoundrels deceive me. Somewhere, years before, I had read statistics on the cost of fresh fruit in a Paris restaurant, and so I had a care. The sight of a bunch of hothouse grapes alone was sufficient to throw me into a cold perspiration right there at the table; and as for South African peaches, I carefully walked around them, getting farther away all the time. A peach was just the same as a pesthouse to me, in Paris.
Alas though! no one had warned me about French oysters, and once--just once--I ate some, which made two mistakes on my part, one financial and the other gustatory. They were not particularly flavorous oysters as we know oysters on this side of the ocean. The French oyster is a small, copper-tinted proposition, and he tastes something like an indisposed mussel and something like a touch of biliousness; but he is sufficiently costly for all purposes. The cafe proprietor cherishes him so highly that he refuses to vulgarize him by printing the asking price on the same menu. A person in France desirous of making a really ostentatious display of his affluence, on finding a pearl in an oyster, would swallow the pearl and wear the oyster on his shirtfront. That would stamp him as a person of wealth.
However, I am not claiming that all French cookery is ultra-exorbitant in price or of excessively low grade. We had one of the surprises of our lives when, by direction of a friend who knew Paris, we went to a little obscure cafe that was off the tourist route and therefore--as yet--unspoiled and uncommercialized. This place was up a back street near one of the markets; a small and smellsome place it was, decorated most atrociously. In the front window, in close juxtaposition, were a platter of French snails and a platter of sticky confections full of dark spots. There was no mistaking the snails for anything except snails; but the other articles were either currant buns or plain buns that had been made in an unscreened kitchen.
Within were marble-topped tables of the Louie-Quince period and stuffy wall-seats of faded, dusty red velvet; and a waiter in his shirtsleeves was wandering about with a sheaf of those long French loaves tucked under his arm like golf sticks, distributing his loaves among the diners. But somewhere in its mysterious and odorous depths that little bourgeois cafe harbored an honest-to-goodness cook. He knew a few things about grilling a pig's knuckle--that worthy person. He could make the knuckle of a pig taste like the wing of an angel; and what he could do with a skillet, a pinch of herbs and a calf's sweetbread passed human understanding.
Certain animals in Europe do have the most delicious diseases anyway--notably the calf and the goose, particularly the goose of Strasburg, where the pate de foie gras comes from. The engorged liver of a Strasburg goose must be a source of joy to all--except its original owner!
Several times we went back to the little restaurant round the corner from the market, and each time we had something good. The food we ate there helped to compensate for the terrific disillusionment awaiting us when we drove out of Paris to a typical roadside inn, to get some of that wonderful provincial cookery that through all our reading days we had been hearing about. You will doubtless recall the description, as so frequently and graphically dished up by the inspired writers of travelogue stuff--the picturesque, tumbledown place, where on a cloth of coarse linen--white like snow--old Marie, her wrinkled face abeam with hospitality and kindness, places the delicious omelet she has just made, and brings also the marvelous salad and the perfect fowl, and the steaming hot coffee fragrant as breezes from Araby the Blest, and the vin ordinaire that is even as honey and gold to the thirsty throat. You must know that passage?
We went to see for ourselves. At a distance of half a day's automobile run from Paris we found an establishment answering to the plans and specifications. It was shoved jam-up against the road, as is the French custom; and it was surrounded by a high, broken wall, on which all manner of excrescences in the shape of tiny dormers and misshapen little towers hung, like Texas ticks on the ears of a quarantined steer. Within the wall the numerous ruins that made up the inn were thrown together any fashion, some facing one way, some facing the other way, and some facing all ways at once; so that, for the housefly, so numerously encountered on these premises, it was but a short trip and a merry one from the stable to the dining room and back again.
Sure enough, old Marie was on the job. Not desiring to be unkind or unduly critical I shall merely state that as a cook old Marie was what we who have been in France and speak the language fluently would call la limite! The omelet she turned out for us was a thing that was very firm and durable, containing, I think, leather findings, with a sprinkling of chopped henbane on the top. The coffee was as feeble a counterfeit as chicory usually is when it is masquerading as coffee, and the vin ordinaire had less of the vin to it and more of the ordinaire than any we sampled elsewhere.
Right here let me say this for the much-vaunted vin ordinaire of Europe: In the end it biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder--not like the ordinary Egyptian adder, but like a patent adder in the office of a loan shark, which is the worst stinger of the whole adder family. If consumed with any degree of freedom it puts a downy coat on your tongue next morning that causes you to think you inadvertently swallowed the pillow in your sleep. Good domestic wine costs as much in Europe as good domestic wine costs in America--possibly more than as much.
The souffle potatoes of old Marie were not bad to look on, but I did not test them otherwise. Even in my own country I do not care to partake of souffle potatoes unless I know personally the person who blew them up. So at the conclusion of the repast we nibbled tentatively at the dessert, which was a pancake with jelly, done in the image of a medicated bandage but not so tasty as one. And then I paid the check, which was of august proportions, and we came sadly away, realizing that another happy dream of youth had been shattered to bits. Only the tablecloth had been as advertised. It was coarse, but white like snow--like snow three days old in Pittsburgh.
Yet I was given to understand that was a typical rural French inn and fully up to the standards of such places; but if the manager of a roadhouse within half a day's ride of New York or Boston or Philadelphia served such food to his patrons, at such prices, the sheriff would have him inside of two months; and everybody would be glad of it too--except the sheriff. Also, no humane man in this country would ask a self-respecting cow to camp overnight in such outbuildings as abutted on the kitchen of this particular inn.
I am not denying that we have in America some pretty bad country hotels, where good food is most barbarously mistreated and good beds are rare to find, but we admit our shortcomings in this regard and we deplore them--we do not shellac them over with a glamour of bogus romance, with intent to deceive the foreign visitor to our shores. We warn him in advance of what he may expect and urge him to carry his rations with him.
It is almost unnecessary to add that old Marie gave us veal and poulet roti. According to the French version of the story of the Flood only two animals emerged from the Ark when the waters receded--one was an immature hen and the other was an adolescent calf. At every meal except breakfast--when they do not give you anything at all--the French give you veal and poulet roti. If at lunch you had the poulet roti first and afterward the veal, why, then at dinner they provide a pleasing variety by bringing on the veal first and the poulet roti afterward.
The veal is invariably stringy and coated over with weird sauces, and the poulet never appears at the table in her recognizable members--such as wings and drumsticks--but is chopped up with a cleaver into cross sections, and strange-looking chunks of the wreckage are sent to you. Moreover they cook the chicken in such a way as to destroy its original taste, and the veal in such a way as to preserve its original taste, both being inexcusable errors.
Nowhere in the larger Italian cities, except by the exercise of a most tremendous determination, can you get any real Italian cooking or any real Italian dishes. At the hotels they feed you on a pale, sad table-d'hote imitation of French cooking, invariably buttressed with the everlasting veal and the eternal poulet roti. At the finish of a meal the waiter brings you, on one plate, two small withered apples and a bunch of fly-specked sour grapes; and, on another plate, the mortal remains of some excessively deceased cheese wearing a tinfoil shroud and appropriately laid out in a small, white, coffin-shaped box.
After this had happened to me several times I told the waiter with gentle irony that he might as well screw the lid back on the casket and proceed with the obsequies. I told him I was not one of those morbid people who love to look on the faces of the strange dead. The funeral could not get under way too soon to suit me. It seemed to me that this funeral was already several days overdue. That was what I told him.
In my travels the best place I ever found to get Italian dishes was a basement restaurant under an old brownstone house on Forty-seventh Street, in New York. There you might find the typical dishes of Italy--I defy you to find them in Italy without a search-warrant. However, while in Italy the tourist may derive much entertainment and instruction from a careful study of table manners.
In our own land we produce some reasonably boisterous trenchermen, and some tolerably careless ones too. Several among us have yet to learn how to eat corn on the ear and at the same time avoid corn in the ear. A dish of asparagus has been known to develop fine acoustic properties, and in certain quarters there is a crying need for a sound-proof soup; but even so, and admitting these things as facts, we are but mere beginners in this line when compared with our European brethren.
In the caskets of memory I shall ever cherish the picture of a particularly hairy gentleman, apparently of Russian extraction, who patronized our hotel in Venice one evening. He was what you might call a human hazard--a golf-player would probably have thought of him in that connection. He was eating flour dumplings, using his knife for a niblick all the way round; and he lost every other shot in a concealed bunker on the edge of the rough; and he could make more noise sucking his teeth than some people could make playing on a fife.
There is a popular belief to the effect that the Neapolitan eats his spaghetti by a deft process of wrapping thirty or forty inches round the tines of his fork and then lifting it inboard, an ell at a time. This is not correct. The true Neapolitan does not eat his spaghetti at all--he inhales it. He gathers up a loose strand and starts it down his throat. He then respires from the diaphragm, and like a troupe of trained angleworms that entire mass of spaghetti uncoils itself, gets up off the plate and disappears inside him--en masse, as it were--and making him look like a man who is chinning himself over a set of bead portieres. I fear we in America will never learn to siphon our spaghetti into us thus. It takes a nation that has practiced deep breathing for centuries. _