MARGINAL COMMENT By HAROLD NICOLSON S OME weeks ago upon this
page I wrote my triennial, or it may be biennial, denunciation of English caterers and cooks. My thesis was that our cooks are lazy because we do not notice what we eat ; that this unawareness is due to the fact that we were taught as children that it is " greedy " to like good food ; and that the assumption that it is " wrong " to be greedy derives from our old Puritan tradition. This argument brought me several letters, some of them interesting and some of them just strange. One correspondent pointed out that, whereas it is regarded as-unbecoming to be greedy about what one eats, it is regarded as becoming to be greedy about what one drinks. Thus the parent who would reprove his sons if they complained that the soup was cold would be even more angry with them if they dropped ice into their claret. In the days before the advent of the Welfare State it was certainly regarded as inelegant not to be able to distinguish between Château Lafitte and Clos Potin ; the young gentlemen of the time were expected even to notice the difference between medicinal and vintage port ; but they would have been considered gross if they had affected equal powers of discrimination between bread—and tartar sauce. The cause of this anomaly is, I suppose, that whereas the juice of the grape is liquid and evanescent, food is regarded as a successicn of solids, being thus earthly, fleshly and to be condemned. It is certainly true that the man who would regard it as interesting and refined to discourse at length upon the respective merits of Rtidesheim and Geisberg Auslese, would, if he devoted a similarly prolonged analysis to the virtues of Hasenrticken as compared with Rable de Lievre, feel thereafter some slight sense of shame No Frenchman on the other hand would regard it as fleshly to discuss whether snipe are best cooked in red or white wine, or to argue that no well-made Pavi should contain pistachio nuts.
\ * * * * Another correspondent recounted his experience in a dining-car of British Railways. After a meal as revolting as that so cruelly described by Dr. Mario Praz, he was asked whether he would like some cheese. He enquired what cheese there was. " Blue Danish, • Sir," the waiter answered, " or mouse-trap." The point of this story is that the waiter said this with complete professional serious- ness, and appeared to be wholly unaware that a cheese which seems delectable to mice may not exert the same powers of attraction upon human beings. I have often observed in restaurants that customers will exclaim, " I think I shall have a little cheese," without examining the cheese beforehand, or even enquiring what varieties of cheese are offered to their choicp. To a foreigner this careless generalisation would appear as ungainly as if a man were to say, " I shall have some fish first and then some meat." No Frenchman would dream of ordering a Brie or a Camembert without first examining their condition and, if the, cheese were still uncut, testing . its consistency by pressing the flat of his knife upon the surface. That, in England,Awould be regarded as a greedy gesture ; and so it is. But is it really more gross to be discriminating in such matters than to swallow without noticing great chunks of chalk or soap ? Only one of my correspondents took the extreme ascetic line. He advanced the absurd contention that it was " decadent " to care about the way in which one's food was prepared, that when 'civilisations were at their zenith people were indifferent to what they ate, and that the advent of greediness was the first terrible symptom of decline. He went on to say that in fifth-century Athens, when the human spirit reached its highest elevation, the philosophers and the poets lived on garlic and dried fish. He went so far as to. quote something that I had myself, in distant ages, written upon this subject.
* * I * I certainly recall having suggesteit-on one occasion how great must have seemed the contrast between the splendour of the Acropolis, in all its symmetry of sink and blue and gold, and the foetid taverns of the town below I admit that the more eminent thinkers and poets of that sunlit et:Koch refrained, in spite of their tremendous conversational powers, from discussing how they cooked their food. I am aware that the citizens of Athens were able to sit for hours upon a stone bench listening to interminable dramatic performances with nothing for their dinner but a hard pancake seasoned with garlic or dried mullet and an occasional gulp as the lentil soup was handed round. I am aware that the Symposium was not a banquet in our degraded sense of the term. Socrates, although he ardently disliked the bohemianism of Antisthenes and the dirt of the Pythagoreans, was not, we may suppose, a delicate feeder. His mother must have been too busy with her midwifery to tend the home with any forethought and I doubt whether he ever dared to mention to Xanthippe that he preferred his giblets done in oil. But my correspondent, in contending that the supremacy of any civilisation depends upon its indifference to cooking, was forgetting that the trench genius reached its apex in the very century when French cooking first became a branch of art. Nor did he recollect that many nations, such as the Eskimos and the Tibetans„ who have resolutely refused to devote much care to the preparation and presentation of their dishes, have not, in fact, attained a level of civilisation comparable to that of Pericleai Athens or of France in the great century. Nor, if it comes to that, was he wholly correct in lauding the asceticism of Athens.
Archestratus of Gela, author of the Heduphagetica, and the Brillat-Savarin of the, day, was not merely the mentor of Epicurus but the honoured friend of Pericles' son. And Philoxenus the Leucadian, who was always issuing fresh editions of opsartusia, or cookery books, was -a contemporary of all the great and noble poets whom we associate with the blaze of Athenian genius.
I recommend to my correspondent a perusal of the Banquet of Philoxenus, since it will indicate to him that the gluttony associated with Trimalchio and the Romans of the later Empire flourished also under the statue of Athene Promachos and not far from the sacred way leading to Eleusis. It was Philoxenus who laid it down that fried vegetables should be eaten in the frying-pan and not served in a dish ; that bass and sea-trout should be served whole and never cut into slices ;that it was necessary to batter and baste the cuttlefish before he became edible ; and that red mullet had a soothing effect upon the nerves, being associated not with Aphrodite but with Artemis. Philoxenus' Banquet, even in the few remnants that have come down 'to us, does not display the distaste for nimiety, the worship of the golden mean, that we were taught to regard as the essential glory of the Attic character. The first course at his banquet consisted of an enormous conger-eel stuffed with sorb- apples. There followed a turbot " as great as a cart wheel," dressed with shark cutlets, ray and cuttle fish. The turbot was succeeded by red mullet stuffed with prawns. The meat dishes consisted of pork, kid cooked int fennel, chicken, jugged hare, partridges and pigeons. The sweet course was composed of Hymettus honey served with clotted cream as thick as cheese," and accompanied by cakes and biscuits of sesame and fennel, of almond and saffron. In the end came walnuts " sucli as children love to munch " accom- panied by biscuits of chickpeas and thistletops. After this they all poured the libation, had a brisk game of knuckle-bones, exchanged riddles and tongue-teasers, and drank copiously from " the golden forepart of fine horns." There is, in truth, a wide gulf fixed between Philoxenus' Banquet, the Symposium, and the pocket oil-flasks into which they dipped their garlic and their bread.
* * * Socrates, I admit, would have regarded such gorging as unworthy of a gentleman ; the French would have despised it as indelicate excess. Philoxenus, for all I know, may have been a sot even as he was certainly a ,most inferior poet. No true poet, not even Tennyson, can write really convincingly about food. But Philoxenus would not have written at such length about eating unless there existed in fifth century Athens a public interested in cooking And they were not decadent.
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