Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 150.djvu/186
say nothing of maccaroni and salads.
Then, again, there are certain old-fashioned but succulent dishes which our forefathers delighted in, but which are now considered unfashionable. What can be better, for instance, than a kidney-dumpling, a home-made partridge-pie, broad beans and bacon, or a boiled edge-bone of beef? And, above all, what has this world to offer that is more delectable than the roast sucking-pig immortalised by Elia?—
“See him in his dish, his second cradle, how meek he lieth! Wouldst thou have had this innocent grow up to the grossness and indocility which too often accompany maturer swine-hood? Ten to one he would have proved a glutton, a sloven, an obstinate, disagreeable animal, wallowing in all manner of filthy conversation; from these sins he is happily snatched away—
Death came with kindly care;’
his memory is odoriferous; no clown curseth, while his stomach half rejecteth, the rank bacon; no coal-heaver bolteth him in reeking sausages; he hath a fair sepulchre in the grateful stomach of the judicious epicure, and for such a tomb might be content to die.”
There is no circumstance connected with dining for which we have all of us more reason to be thankful, than that the ponderous dinner-parties, long since satirised by Dickens, and recently condemned by Sir Henry Thompson, are rapidly becoming things of the past. Who has not groaned over the interminable length of these dreary banquets—the hot room, the crowded table, the hired waiters, the vulgar profusion, the greasy soups and indigestible entrées, the fiery sherry and the dubious champagne. Such dinners have long been banished from London society, and if they still linger, it is among the doctors and attorneys of provincial towns, who give a dinner-party once a-year after the manner of their forefathers, and sacrifice both comfort and good taste to an ostentatious display.
The conditions and accessories of a dinner, as it should be, are well laid down by Sir Henry Thompson, whose “octaves” in Wimpole Street are as famous as his blue-and-white china; but he must forgive us for observing that Brillat Savarin anticipated many of his suggestions some eighty years ago, in the fourteenth chapter of his famous ‘Physiologie.’ Taking hints from both of these high authorities, we may sum up the laws and requirements of a dinner which shall combine simplicity with excellence. The number of guests should never exceed twelve; the room should be warm, but not unduly close; the table well lighted; waiting quiet and unobtrusive; the dishes choice, but few in number; the wines of the first quality, each in its degree; “the men should be spirited without pretension, and the women pleasant without coquetry;” “nobody should leave before eleven, but everybody should be in bed before twelve: whoever,” Brillat Savarin concludes, “has been a guest at a dinner combining all these conditions, may be said to have assisted at his own apotheosis.”