History of meals
Grand old sit-downs
Jonathan Keates
So that's it then, say the pundits and media oracles, dinner this summer is a defi- nite no-no. The thing to do instead, it seems, is to 'graze' with your chums at odd hours of the night on austere combinations of shredded leaves, slivered fish and cheese shavings accompanied by chaste dribbles of the greenest oil and pointilliste applica- tions of balsamic vinegar. Farewell to those grand old sit-downs, with their potentially perilous hangings-about — the Germans rather nicely refer to them as 'art pauses' — between courses whose subsequent appearance is greeted with dutiful rapture by the chorus of diners. Away with that end-of-the-meal battlefield look to the table, littered with crumpled napkins, drawn corks and half-gnawed crusts. Who in any case needs mahogany flaps and ball- and-claw legs when they can have Welsh slate worktops or their own knees?
We've seen this anti-prandial movement stirring for some years, as the fashionable dining hour has pushed itself, especially during the summer months, almost to mid- night and an American insistence on the feel-good possibilities of a gargantuan breakfast has asserted itself, as though the very act of nocturnal eating were an after- hours indecency on a par with homosexual cruising in public places. Diners are made to resemble guilty, reckless Medea in Ovid's Metamorphoses: 'I see what is virtu- ous and worthy, but I choose to follow evil instead.'
Those of us who sneak off this summer to real dinners in darkened rooms behind heavily barred shutters may feel heartened by a backward glance at those ages when dining bore no such taint of criminality. Consider, for example, King Edward VII's coronation festivities in August 1902. While 50,000 of his poorest subjects sat down to the monarch's bounty of a feast consisting of roast beef 'and sauce', pota- toes, 'bread ad lib', plum pudding, cheese, chocolate, tobacco, ale and 'temperance cordials', the newly crowned Tum-Tum and his court prepared to banquet at Bucking- ham Palace off more exotic dishes. Oeufs l'imperatrice were followed by Edward's favourite grilled cutlets, roast duck, lob- sters with remoulade sauce, cold meats in aspic, salad and — in Queen Alexandra's honour — the Danish pudding known as ROW GroOd, which is presumably the same as the north German Rote Griitze, a sort of fool made of assembled summer berries.
This, however, was modest compared to what the assembled royalty had embarked upon two weeks earlier, when the main- stays of the occasion had been `Hanche de Venaison de Sandringham, Sauce aigre doux' and cold saddle of lamb a I'andalouse, preceded by clear turtle soup, whitebait, cold trout and quails in aspic. While the 1868 Johannisburg and the 1875 Chambertin enhanced eupeptic pleasure, aided by Still Sillery and a 30-year-old Château Latour, down went the Ortolans sur Canapes, the Salade a la Bagration and the Argenteuil asparagus with sauce mous- seline. The ices and wafers may look like a modest final flourish, but pudding, even ROW GroOd, might have meant an extra week at Marienbad or a spell of colonic irrigation with Sister Agnes.
Three centuries earlier, dining in sum- mer had been a moral imperative, at least according to Sir John Harington, Queen Elizabeth's godson, translator of Ariosto and inventor, so it is claimed, of a proto- type of the flushing lavatory. Yet even he became a trifle slippery as to the exact time of feasting. 'I would not that you should observe a certaine houre, either for dinners or suppers, as I have told you before, lest that daily custome should be altered into nature: and after this intermission of this custome of nature, hurt may follow.'
It had been in his grandparents' time, around the end of the Wars of the Roses in the 1480s, that dinner, with its appropriate mice-en-scene of white napery, wooden trenchers, giant salt cellars and what are nowadays tautologically called 'bread rolls', known in those days simply as `whyte payn', became seriously festive and elaborate. The new art of printing produced a rash of eti- quette manuals for the occasion. Waiters, referred to as 'sewers', were schooled in the mysteries of the three courses, the first with its %ravine of the wilde swyne', `suche potage as the cooke hath made of herbs', and leche lombard', a bladder crammed with pork, eggs, dates and currants, the sec- ond of fowl, including stork, crane and bus- tard, and the third of roast house martin, freshwater crayfish, baked quinces and sage fritters.
Each course was accompanied by its `semely soteltee', a device made of pastry and sugar featuring anything from 'Maiden Mary that Holy Virgyne' to the image of Summer himself, 'A roughe, a red, angry sire, An hasty man standynge in fyre', and the accompanying wines for the season were as dulcet as their names: Vernagelle, Raspise, Muscadelle of Grew, Rompney of Modon, Malmsey, Caprik and Clarey. At the sideboards meanwhile, the sewers showed off their carving skills as the books somewhat peevishly directed: Tyfte that swanne', 'Alaye that fesande', 'Unjoynte that bytterne', 'Mynce that plover', `Untache that curlewe'. They had to be ready, what was more, for the menu to change at midsummer. After St John the Baptist's day out went the young geese, the pigeons and the thekyns rosted', in came herons with salt and ginger, 'wortes, gruell and fourmenty' and 'pestelles of porke with grene sauce'.
No tastefully bottled mineral water, no seared tuna, no radicchio, not a hint of soya milk or tofu, and 'grazing' absolutely forbidden. Bliss! Remember it, doomed diners, and reclaim your territory among the Beetonian fruit pyramids and gleaming epergnes, for dinner, in summer or winter, looks scarcely likely to outlast the millenni- um.
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