Thought for Food
Table Talk
By EILIZAB
ET H DAVID
IF we are to believe late nineteenth and early
If we are to believe the cookery contributor (are we to? It's early to tell yet) to a recent number of one of the fashion monthlies, the wheel has turned just about half-circle and arrived at the point where it is almost essential to talk about the food and drink, because they have been chosen mainly with a view to distract- ing attention from the table decorations.
The idea is that while your guests are chatter- ing happily away about the fabulous cottage pie, you, the host, are making subtle changes in the dining-room decor. Cool and fresh it's to be for the fish, more studied and solid for the main course; for the dessert, fragile and delicate. Skilfully thought out, this writer says, such transformations can be effected without anybody noticing. This is splendidly unlike the catty Thirties, when Lady Mendl published her Recipes for Successful Dining. 'In the year 1929 I used two rock-crystal vases in which were branches of white orchids, but those days are gone I fear for ever, and a few white carnations have to suffice now . at Christmas time 1931 1 had a table of gold, hoping that it might in some way draw us all back to the old gold standard- again . . gold lame tablecloth, old white Mennecey china, many yellow roses.'
Now Lady Mendl was after all a highly suc- cessful professional decorator, and whatever her sumptuous simplicities in the matter of table decoration--a little white Ming rabbit at each guest's place, a remnant of sixteenth-century French green silk brocade used as a tablecloth, one flawless magnolia on the tea tray (the photo- graph of her butler carrying this same tray alone makes a copy of the book worth searching for), she certainly didn't seriously intend playing them down. Not for her, one feels fairly sure, would have been sables worn as a chemise, nor Savon- nerie carpets used as underfelting. Had she arranged for the sets to be changed three times during a dinner party, she would have seen to it that everybody noticed. So, quite certainly. would Mrs. Brooks, a journalist of the turn of the century who thought that the flowers, the food and the wine should he chosen to match the hostess's dress, and her contemporary, Mrs. Alfred Praga, who believed, on the contrary, that the hostess's dress should be chosen to harmonise with the food and decor.
The style of Mrs. Praga's book, Dainty Dinner Tables and How to Decorate Them (published in 1907), may be archaic, but something about the tone and even the context is curiously familiar. 'Have you ever tried a great bunch of ruddy brown-red wallflowers in an old majolica vase? Blue larkspur against a table-slip of faded mauve velvet, oh ! how unutterably delicious it is to -tired eyes. . . . For half-a-crown, one of those gigantic glazed brown earthenware jugs (filled with cream) and for 5Id. each half a dozen tiny ones to match. When the ,cream has gone till them with daffodils, set them on a table centre of tawny orange silk with a bordering of asparagus fern. Hey! how one's pen flies! . .
Keeping up with that galloping pen of hers, Mrs. Praga one day devised 'a scheme based on deep orange-hued carnations,' the table-slip to be of deep sunset yellow satin edged with ecru lace (sunset yellow, she tells us elsewhere, was a Liberty colour—in fact most of her inspira- tion came from Liberty's). At each corner, satin ribbon bows. A 'squat Nuremberg bowl for the centrepiece and eight or ten specimen glasses of the same ware to be filled with orange carna- tions and silver grasses, each guest's place was to have a boutonniere to match and each finger bowl a floating full-blown orange carnation plus a few drops of orange flower water. Menu cards of sunset yellow lettering on deep orange, salt- sticks tied with ribbons to match, table glass of brown Nuremberg throughout, liqueurs to 'be yellow Chartreuse and old Cognac. Candles deep yellow, shades orange silk, place cards written in orange on a yellow background, ices coloured yellow with saffron or turmeric and served in paper baskets of a deep orange colour. The sweets to be deep orange and the coffee served in deep brown and orange Wedgwood cups. 'if the hostess happens to be a brunette she can wear an orange gown . . . to heighten and complete the illusion.'
Really, it's too bad of her, that last line. Is it all illusion, then? Is that what the decorator- hosts and hostesses are trying to tell us? The cool, fresh fish, the fragile dessert, the gold lame, the gigantic brown earthenware cream jugs, the tawny orange silk? Didn't any of it ever exist? Not even the turmeric-flavoured ices?
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