POETRY AND PROSE OF FOOD

'WHEN I was a boy,' wrote Thackeray in a Punch sketch, 'I had by heart the Barmecide's feast in the Arabian Nights; and the culinary passages in Scott's novels (in which works there is a deal of good eating) always were my favourites. . . . Next to eating good dinners, a healthy man with a benevolent turn of mind must like, I think, to read about them.'

However purely the aim of fiction be to hold the mirror up to nature, imagination is selective as well as limited, and no novel of contemporary life reveals its period evenly and whole, but only the particular novelist's choice and grasp of surrounding reality. Were a historian to collate the culinary passages from half a dozen novelists describing various layers of society of the same date, the typical meals of a nation in any not too remote epoch might be fairly accurately arrived at.

It is noteworthy that in poetry and romance and general literature the most memorable and attractive meals have been simple; not at all Gargantuan, rather what we should call idyllic; quite conformable to a dispensation of rationed meat. What, on the evidence of their own poets, did those wonderful Athenians eat? Principally country fare: barley-cake, all varieties of onion, grapes, figs-foods by Plato in The Laws called the gifts of Demeter and her daughter-these and olives, the special gift of Athene. Cheese was a favourite food. The Greeks loved cream. They ate cheese-cake, pancakes, eels, tunny: on high days roast thrushes; and always that honey from Hymettus and elsewhere which to this day continues to be the sweetening element in Greek receipts. In Aristophanes' comedies there is talk of pea soup, hare, tripe, lentil soup. A typical Greek meal consisted of grapes and figs, cheese wrapped in vine leaves, and yellow wine. The spirit of temperance, of moderation, was integrally Greek. It is not only the set subject of the Dialogue with Charmides but runs like a thread of gold through most of the Platonic Dialogues.

Although Dr. Blimber made the feasts of 'a Titus, a Domitian, a Nero, a Tiberius, a Caligula, a Heliogabalus' the matter of his own sorely interrupted table discourse, more recent classicists than he consider it doubtful whether outside the imperial palace the Roman public was less abstemious than Romans of

to-day, and deprecate the excessive amount of attention lavished on those orgies of waste of which Smollett in Peregrine Pickle gave so excellent a parody in the pedantic doctor's dinner, ‘in the manner of the ancients.' From them thought turns with relief to Macaulay's beautiful picture of earlier Roman evenings : When the chestnuts glow in the embers And the kid turns on the spit.

Some of the Caesars were as frugal and plain eaters as others were gastronomic maniacs. Augustus, for example. He liked (maxime appetebat, says Suetonius) coarse bread, small fishes, handmade moist cheese, and green figs. He rarely drank before dinner, but for his appetiser would eat a bit of bread soaked in water, or a slice of cucumber, or a sourish apple. Augustus ate when hungry, not necessarily at mealtimes. In this he resembled Napoleon, whose establishment was so ordered that, wherever he was, cutlets, chicken, and coffee could be forthcoming at a moment's notice.

Pierre de Ronsard, arranging an excursion into the Forêt de Gastine, sent out first for a bottle of good wine (it was to be kept cool) and, avoiding meat, which, he said-in exquisite verse— was apt to be bad in hot weather, chose rather to take with him. apricots, cream, and strawberries. As well as being Poet to the King, Ronsard was lay Superior of several Priories, and Walter Pater, in Gaston de Latour, with fancy that may well have been fact, narrates his reception of some unexpected visitors during Lent in his Priory of Croixval. For supper he gave them leek soup, hard-boiled eggs, early salad, onions, cream, and, first, a 'little' wine, afterwards an old wine accompanying a dish of streaked mille-fleurs pippins. Finally, in the hands of a cowled brother came the emblazoned grace-cup.'

His Reverence the Prior was a great gardener, and especially a great salad-grower. As he lay dying at Tours, having become so thin that to look, he said, at his own arms made him tremble, his chaplain besought him to eat. For reply the Prince of Poets' dictated as follows:

Toute la viande qui entre

Dans le goufre ingrat de ce ventre,

Incontinent sans fruict resort,

Mais la belle science exquise

Que par l'oüye j'ay apprise

M'accompagne jusqu'à la mort.

-another version, in truth, of Deuteronomy viii. 3 and St. Matthew iv. 4.

Ronsard's fruitarian picnic was the poetry of eating. Except among the moonbeams of A Midsummer Night's Dream nothing

so supersensual is to be found in Shakespeare. Indeed, because Shakespeare was overwhelmingly a dramatist, absorbed in human vicissitudes, he painted little of the still life of meals. One of his expressive touches of the kind, a glimpse into Ely Place, Holborn, in June, 1483, is where Richard of Gloucester says to Morton, Bishop of Ely:

My lord of Ely, when I was last in Holborn,
I saw good strawberries in your garden there;
I do beseech you, send for some of them,

and Morton replies:

Marry, and will, my lord, with all my heart.

Sir Thomas More, whose details came, probably viva voce, from Morton, had previously stated in his History of King Richard the Third that the Protector asked for a messe of' the Ely Palace strawberries-presumably strawberries in cream.

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Shakespeare names many several viands, as tripe, calves' feet, hot venison pasty, beef with its correlative mustard, and one gets a general impression of robust feeding with no stint of butcher's meat, yet I think there is but one complete cooked meal specified in the plays, when Shallow, urging Falstaff to stay the night at his house, orders for him 'pigeons; a couple of shortlegged hens; a joint of mutton; and any pretty little tiny kickshaws, tell William cook.' With his adorable grace, like sunshine, Shakespeare names Perdita The queen of curds and cream,' and describes Imogen, disguised as a boy, home-making in the cave.

Arviragus.

How angel-like he sings!

Guiderius. But his neat cookery! He cut our roots in characters; And sauc'd our broths as Juno had been sick

And he her dieter.

The food touches in L'Allegro, though slight, are explicit, and consequently precious. In Milton's later descriptions of meals, whether of meals got together by Eve' or offered in the Temptation in the Wilderness, his far-fetched cates that need a footnote apiece are too periphrastic to seem seductive. Thoroughly interesting, on the other hand, is Newton's statement that Milton, in Artillery Walk, used to come downstairs from his study at eight o'clock to supper, which was usually olives or some light thing.' No poet's supper could have been lighter. Most poets would have thought it too light. It is an additional note on the distance between the Puritan and worldly contemporaries to contrast this supper with the meanest recorded of Pepys's home suppers, a venison pasty baked out. But then Milton was so

1 Paradise Lost, Book V., The Argument.

tormented by gout as to tell Dr. Wright that, was he free from the pain this gave him, his blindness would be tolerable.'

It was characteristic of Herrick's delicate art, turning all it touched to favour and to prettiness, that he was a most cunning suggester of the deliciousness of food. Not born a countryman he appreciated with the sharper zest whatever in the dietary of country life was most intrinsic, most significant. Especially, in a half-awed, half-playful way, he was the suggester of a mystic exquisiteness in the foods sacred to festivals, bridals, Christmas, Twelfth Night, shearing, Harvest Home, recognising in all such foods some hint of what he finely called a present godlike power imprinted.'

Hesperides makes almost as stimulating reading as a good receipt-book. As Chaucer wrote of the daisy, endearing and idealising it for evermore, so Herrick of tarts and custards at wakes, of May-day creams and cakes, of wedding cakes, cherries, and spiced wine, even of just a pipkin of jelly, or a 'pipkinnet' with a bit of hot veal in it (veau à la casserole). As a signal instance of happy marriage between verse and drawing let Abbey's twotiered illustration for Herrick's The Bride-Cake be cited; above, Julia kneading 'the Dow '; below, Julia bending over the snowy sugar, kissing it but once or twice,' while, connecting the two episodes, a flight of Venus's doves flutters like a drift of blossoms across the page.

Upon abstinence and unselfish forms of self-denial, what poet, what clerk in orders ever spoke words that go more to the root of the matter than Herrick in the little piece he called To Keep a True Lent?

It was with

White plates and cups, clean-gleaming,
Ringed with blue lines

of breakfast that Rupert Brooke connected those other lovable things

the strong crust

Of friendly bread; and many-tasting food;

and in novels and poems generally one seems to remember a preponderance of breakfasts over dinners, suppers, and lunches. Morning freshness lends charm, the meal's brief simplicity makes it describable without risk of 'chanting to the Public the song of Simple Enumeration.'

One of the best breakfasts in poetry is described by Wordsworth in his Epistle to Sir George Beaumont. 'Snow-white' eggs, honey, 'hillocks' of wild strawberries, hot cakes, butter, cream were its constituents, each plenteous, each of the best, and each, as Wordsworth takes care to say, locally grown or made.

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A modern Kensington breakfast that yet for charm may almost compare with this Yewdale breakfast is summarised in Mr. Galsworthy's Fraternity as composed of melon and ham, the sweet scent of pinks filling the room.' Ham has always been valued by poets, and though the references are insufficient to form a separate anthology a number of lines might be collected in praise of it and cognate joints.

By this salt Westphalia gammon

Thomas Stanley, who died in 1678, swore his massive oath to Bacchus. A later rhapsodist (writing in New Orleans) speculates as to the earliest union of ham with eggs :

Which had the elder birth,

And waited, darkling, on the desolate earth,
With Ruth-like yearning sick, grief unalloyed,
Until it saw, with spirit overjoyed,

Come its affinity to fill the dearth?

Monsieur de Ronsard, cited already, often praised the association of ham with good wine. To sit in a friend's vine arbour, listening to the gurgle of a bottle, with a ham and some red roses in front of one, was, in his opinion, the best of ways to banish care.

Recorded in the second of Browning's Garden Fancies is that morning meal of great simplicity and distinction consisting of a loaf, half a cheese, and a bottle of Chablis, which, book-accompanied as it was, and consumed in a plum-tree's shade, might be paralleled with the far-famed collation underneath the Bough,' but that while the Persian had with him the Belovéd sharing his wine and loaf the younger poet, solitary, was comforted with cheese.

Among indications of that most interesting phenomenon, change in taste, we may ponder the daily breakfast described in a letter of Jane Austen's, written from her relatives, the Leighs' stately house, Stoneleigh Abbey. 'Breakfast consists of chocolate, coffee, and tea, plum cake, pound cake, hot rolls, cold rolls, bread and butter, and dry toast.'

Another of the idyllic breakfasts, the title of the novel forgotten in which it occurred, was made of a basket of grapes eaten with little freshly baked oat-cakes. Still one more, also unreferred, is of watercress and apples and young lettuces, bread, butter, salt, and a melon. Xavier de Maistre found his cafetière of coffee, his jug of cream, and his pyramid of hot, dry toast the perfect breakfast.

The dominant note of coffee in accounts, fictitious and otherwise, of Continental meals, finds its exception and equivalent in the samovar of Russia. In Russian novels set meals appear to count for little. There is always a table spread with nice trifles