Nausea
BY Aixmaus PEPPER
AVE you ever soaked a pound of nourishing oatmeal in salt water for nine days and then boiled and served piping hot? Well, don't. The result is porridge.
But seriously, have you ever been a gour- met? It is a testing life. I know because I've tried it; and it is, if I may say so, peculiarly fitting that at the end of this wine and food supplement a word of warning should be pronounced. What about indigestion and what about hangovers? That's what I always say. When suffering from the latter, take one ounce of cyanide mingled freely with tomato ketchup and swallow. Some brands of tomato ketchup supply cyanide already mixed in the bottle. How thoughtful of the entrepreneurs, as Bon Viveur would say (all two of her and him). But take Madame Langoustine's restaurant in the Rue de la Vache Epaisse in the ninth arron- dissement. You go there and you are greeted by the gracious, so-careful-for-her-guests'- welfare proprietress. Have you considered what that means? You have to speak French. And, as if that wasn't bad enough, she chooses your dinner for you. Do you want bubbling - hot - Helix-Pomaia- snails? Well, if you don't, you're damn well going to have them, or she'll know the reason why. You don't like snails? My dear Sir or Madam, this is a minor consideration. What matters is the bouquet (as we gour- mets call it).
And then there's wine. You might like to drink Chablis throughout a meal (so degraded are you); but you're going to have to take the proper wine with the proper
course at twice the expense of continuing with the same one the whole time. So at the end, since the Chateaux are beyond your francs, you finish with a sweet Sauterne, where you might have been happily in- haling the yin du pays. Que de miseres !
Of course, there's something in this gour- met business. It's jolly d. for impressing girls. Don't make any mistake, chums. There's nothing a girl loves more than being told what to eat in an authoritative voice. She may not actually enjoy it, but that is beside the point. As you remark, 'The supreme de gigot de volaille's pretty hot stuff here,' a shudder goes down her spine of the kind you can normally hope to produce only during'a Red Indian raid, an earthquake or atomic fission. It's the French that does it. Everyone knows that it's the wickedest of European languages with the single exception of Old Prussian (but that's extinct).
And then I'll give you the low-down on the racket. If you are a gourmet and ac- cepted as a gourmet by the boys, you can eat free practically ever afterwards. All that is required is to turn up to the Fishmongers' banquet and pass judgement on the hotnard farceur for which the Company is re- nowned. Of course, it's a good thing if you can write a book or two. You'll have to mix with publishers, which is depressing, but don't despair : they're not terribly intelli- gent, and you can get by them with 'Greek Oysters I Have Known' or 'Some Little- eaten Meals in the Fiji Islands.' That admis- sion that you've eaten human flesh (purely in the cause of gastronomy) will sell the book.
You'll have noticed that throughout this piece I've been talking gourmet talk (or eat-speak as we call it familiarly), but I'm not really one. I can't afford it. In fact, I eat in the pub round the corner, which is absolute hell. Until you have eaten their charred sausages and chewed the abomin- able s'wede (the vegetable, not the chap), you don't know what ptomaine poisoning is. Still, as Milton said, 'Good food is the precious life-blood of a master spirit.' It's a great life being a (pseudo) gourmet.
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