MARGINAL COMMENT By HAROLD NICOLSON I N the News 'Chronicle the
other day Mr. A. J. Cummings printed an important story about food. I have mislaid my copy of the newspaper and I trust he will forgive me if I do not quote him textually. The point of the story was that, in some English restaurant or dining-car, a friend of his was given soup. " Waiter," he enquired, " what is this soup called ?" Thick, Sir," the waiter answered. Behind this simple dialogue stretches a whole hinterland of civilisation. Only in England, Scotland, Wales, and possibly Ireland, could such an answer be given or accepted. The story has three terrible implications. It implies that the cook in preparing the soup was concerned with its consistency only and was indifferent to its components or flavour., It implies that the waiter was so uninterested in his profession that to him soup was no more than liquid matter in a plate. And it implies that the consumer in this country is so ignorant of, or indiffer- ent to, the art of cooking that without one word of protest or investigation he will swallow whatever is put before him. Of these implications it is perhaps the third which is the most distressing. If the consumer in this country were as informed and exacting as the consumers in other countries, then our cooks would take more trouble and our waiters would be more alert. The miserable state of our cooking is due, not so much to those who prepare or serve, as to those who eat, the food. It is little use for the Travel Association, or those who are responsible for seeing that the Festival of Britain attracts dollars to this island, to urge our hotel proprietors to raise the standard of our cooking, if the ordinary customer fails to notice or to mind whether his food is palatable or disgusting. It is to the citizens rather than to the cooks of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland that we must look for some mitigation of this national disgrace. * * * * I have often wondered why it is that the British, who in other respects are not an austere or ascetic race, should in this matter be as barbaric as the Laplander in his iglu. I have heard it said that the re,a,son why cooking with us is a process rather than an art is that we possess such wonderful raw material that there is no need for this material to be disguised or elaborated by any of the culinary devices practised by those whose mutton is revolting and whose beef is poor. I do not accept this explanation. In Elizabethan days English cooks were famed for their ingenuity and our early Empire was due to the ardouF of those pioneers who sought for cinnamon and nutmeg wherewith to season the often decaying dishes of the time. Moreover our vegetables are not in any way superior to those obtained abroad, and yet we persist in cooking these vegetables in a way destructive of their flavour and wholly incomprehensible to the foreign mind. I have heard it said also that to disparage English cooking is an unpatriotic action and that any of our " good plain cooks " can produce master- pieces of which Vatel and Béchamel, Richaud and Merillion would not hive been ashamed. This agreeable fantasy is, I regret to state, untrue. The decline in English cooking, a decline from which it has not recovered, coincides with the advent of the Commonwealth. Robert May, whose Accomplisht Cook appeared in 1665, expressly regrets the pre-revolution days " wherein were .produced the triumphs and trophies of cookery." Historically viewed therefore, our parsnips and our boiled potatoes are relics of the \days of puritanism and should be conderrmed as such by all clear headed men. * * * * In the newspaper 11 Tempo on September 14th Dr. Mario Praz, Professor of English Literature at the University of Rome, described in terms of vehemence and' accuracy the items of an ordinary English meal as served in a London restaurant. The hors d'oeuvres, he said, were " violet and orange sludge." The soup " a kind of wallpaper glue." The fish (it was called " Filets de sole bonne femme ") consisted of " water-soaked, cottony bundles wrapped in paste rather like the soup only stickier, with black foreign bodies supposed to be mushrooms floating here and there like drowned grubs." We know that fish over here ; we have enjoyed it again and again. Then came chicken. " Impossible," writes Dr. Praz, "to guess to what animal this purplish, fibrous yet viscous meat belonged. I do not think it was a whale, more probably it was a sinew of Al Capone, but the possibility cannot be excluded that it was in fact chicken—a murdered and de- graded chicken." Dr. Praz was then given as pudding what we call Ice Cream." He failed to appreciate it. He describes it as " a slice of cold soap melting in a stew of dis- integrated plums, whose bony stones were perhaps aimed at an aesthetic contrast with the icy liquefaction of the soap." He finished his meal, since he is a brave man and possesses an enquiring mind, with coffee. Most English men and women, however patriotic they may be, will admit that coffee is not one of the highest achievements of the British genius. Dr. Praz is almost rude about our coffee. " An adequate sub- stitute," he calls it, " for the hot water with which the ancient Romans used to relieve their stomachs when sated • by the banquet to prepare them for further food." Now since Italy was the home of cooking, and since it was Catherine de Medicis who imported that excellent art into France (intulit agresti Latio), and since Dr. Praz is an anglophile who much admires our literature, we should pay attention to what he says. Can any honest reader assert that his description of an English restaurant meal is a travesty of the facts ? No.
I will admit that the efforts of our caterers to ape French fashions without possessing their taste or knowledge leads to results as deplorable as those enumerated by Dr. Praz. He might have enjoyed his meal more if it had been prepared in a straightforward English way. But we shall never improve our cooking until our citizens take some interest in what they eat. The vestigial remnants of puritanism inhibit us from such enjoyment. The Englishman who would have no reti- cence at all in talking about golf, boat-sailing, or any other pastime, is ashamed to talk about his meals. Even those who consider it respectable to discuss vintages will hesitate to tell one about a sauce. Yet of all human pleasures, as has well been remarked, the pleasures of eating are the only ones which are renewed three times a day. One has only to write those' words to feel that there is something gross about being what we call " greedy." The French do not look upon the problem from so crude an angle. They start from the assumption that the absorption of food by the human animal is an inelegant process and they seek to refine that process by turning this physical act into an art. When I was in France the other day I took with me an excellent little book entitled Guide Gastronomique. It gave a list of all the restaurants and hotels which are scattered so lavishly across that lovely land. The best ones were marked by three asterisks and the ordinary eating places with only one. You were informed of the specialities provided by each district. There were certain restaurants whose splendour was such that they were given no asterisks at a11, but described as Temples Gastronomiques. They were regarded as places of pilgrimage to which any devout gastronome should resort. I could afford to visit only one of these temples and my pilgrimage was richly rewarded. ,Stich refinement appears to the Englishman ridiculous if not revolting. It all comes from our puritan conception of cooking as a necessity rather than an art. I see no austere beauty in our attitude : I find it downright stupid.
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