It is a favorite thesis of this department, and one confirmed and strengthened in its belief every time it crosses the Mississippi, that breakfast is not only a far more important meal in the Far West than it is in the effete precincts of the Atlantic seaboard, but that it is also a far more enjoyable one. Probably the greatest single defect of the American civilization, excepting only the wearing of trousers in public by women, is the neglect of breakfast and its decline from an institution of paramount significance to the merest parody of eating at all. No nation can long occupy a place in the sun which breakfasts off a dollop of fruit juice, a square of Melba toast, and a gulp of coffee, and the admirable fortitude of English people and institutions is splendidly maintained and exemplified by the circumstance that fish is a fixture in their breakfast menu.
In the American West, thank the gustatory gods, the general imagination isn't limited to a mere dreary brace of eggs and flitch of bacon. Meat, as God intended it should, abounds, and we have probably eaten more and better multinational steaks aboard the transcontinental trains of the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific than in all the rest of the breakfasting world put together. Aboard our own railroad car, “The Gold Coast,” Mrs. Wedritz, the housekeeper, would as soon serve beer in the hock glasses as limit the breakfast bill to a bacon-and-eggs diet. The variety of chicken à la King, liver and bacon, chipped beef in cream, broiled kidneys, mountain trout, chops, steak, broiled ham, scrapple, hashes of fish, roast beef, and corned beef, sausages, venison in season, and, of course, mounds of thin little hot cakes and mountains of other hot breads she furnishes forth would make the average New Yorker scream for the bicarb bottle.
As an occasional alternate, there appears a chicken tamale, hot enough, if accidentally dropped, to fire the tablecloth. It is Mrs. Wedritz' idea that a four-egg omelette is the merest side dish to a Kansas City T bone blood-rare, and we have never made any attempt to discourage her. Steak, omelette, a pan of lyonnaise potatoes, two halves of a Texas grapefruit, a dozen soda biscuits, and a pot of coffee capable of sustaining a sadiron on its surface, she maintains, should last a body until early luncheon if his occupation requires no physical exertion. Additional measures must, of course, be taken if he is to engage in any endeavor more strenuous than smiting the keybars of a writing machine.
A proper breakfast is, of course, one of the explanations of the greatness of the Victorian and Edwardian ages. The processed breakfast food, a sorry farrago of air and roasted butcher's paper, was unknown, and if a man wanted porridge, a soup tureen of honest oatmeal went in ahead of the kidneys and popovers. Nor had Melba toast, the quintessence of futility, made any headway in the common consciousness. A good case for meat for breakfast as the most important factor in the success of the nineteenth century could be made. Something of the great breakfast tradition still survives in the Yankee households of New England, where codfish balls and hash, baked beans, and creamed salt fish are still regular fixtures, but elsewhere in the land its like is not re-encountered until the traveler is west of Chicago.
This is a situation which might well recommend itself to the learned attention and comment of those ultimate authorities on the American civilization, Charles and Mary Beard. The nation that makes its breakfast off nothing more than toast and coffee need not worry about its future. It has none.
One of the more epic jokes of the generation, although you may not agree with this department if you are one of the school of Martini drinkers who won't touch a cocktail if it has any color to it at all, is the fix the supersophisticated, extradry Martini aficionado has gotten himself into. A Martini, as God intended, is of course three parts dry gin and one part French vermouth, and anything drier than that is just a glass of iced gin. We know any number of persons who are “in-and-outers,” that is, they want vermouth poured over the ice in the shaker and then drained off before the gin is added, but this school of cocktail fanciers has, to coin a phrase, come a cropper. Bartenders so instructed have naturally produced a very pale cocktail, and the dry Martini fancier has come to evaluate his drink by eye on the theory, once reasonably valid, that if it were devoid of any color at all it must be very dry.
To take care of this particular customer, any number of vermouth producers have evolved a wine of vermouth flavor that is practically white instead of the normal yellow-brown of true French vermouth. An economical barkeep can simply take this pale vermouth and use it in reverse proportions of three parts vermouth to one of gin and, so far as the eye of the customer is concerned, there is no way of telling. Often enough the palate of the dry Martini drinker is so far gone that he has no idea what is in his drink anyway, and the profit to the house, in light of the fact that gin is very expensive and vermouth costs almost nothing, is considerable. Having cultivated an affectation for an improperly devised drink by the terms of whose composition the customer thought he was putting one over on the house and getting an extra quantity of spirits, he has now arranged it so that the house can take him for a sucker every time he commands a very dry Martini.
For the instruction and edification of our clients, “Along the Boulevards” supports at great cost an almost universal system of correspondents which, for veracity of their dispatches and brilliance of coverage, makes such services as those maintained by the Associated Press and the Kiplinger Letters seem trifling and ineffectual by comparison. This month's dispatch from Nunnally Johnson, describing in all its terror and pathos the great Hollywood depression of 1948, follows:
“You probably know that the moving picture business is a tiny island of despairing depression in an otherwise booming national prosperity. Everywhere else men are smoking two fifty-cent cigars at a time, throwing away their Lincoln Continentals when the ash trays get full, and treating the children to triple-scoop ice cream cones three times a day. In Hollywood our tips are down to a maximum of five dollars for the shine boy.
”Herman Mankiewicz, a local quidnunc, and I the other evening found L'Aiglon, our sassiest restaurant, completely empty. Not even an agent. Poor Mike Romanoff has contracted a morganatic alliance, possibly to guarantee himself against being alone in his restaurant at mealtimes. Mike has a pathetic remnant of trade and is wisely devoting more of his time to his column, which is guaranteed to alienate, deliberately, half the people he mentions in it. An example of his critical fearlessness, proclaimed to the world through his column, which he prints on a menu the size of a pillow case, is that James Mason has no more acting talent than Richard Ney. Mike often manages to dispose of two potential customers in one sentence.
“Chasen's is the only place in this part of town doing any business at all. Dave has always been very wise. Instead of devoting himself 100 per cent to the transient gentry of the film set, he has always invited one and all, the only condition being momentary solvency. Rich persons with no recent professional credits have been pushed around in L'Aiglon and Mike's like starlets trying to get into Jack and Charlie's at dinnertime, the result being that such wealthy nobodies are now eating elsewhere, and the only pushing around that is done nowadays is when the waiters move forward in a body to pick up an unidentified tip. Meanwhile, Dave is shaking hands with people who made their money in trade, and, after a delicate frisk to see that they brought their wallets along, they are being led to the finest tables in the joint. All this has a moral.”
A number of years ago, when this department was elsewhere employed in reporting the excitements and good things of life and before GOURMET had so much as run its first issue from the presses, we first encountered that now commonly available synthesis of nectar and T.N.T. known as Southern Comfort. It was in those times a beverage and form of catastrophe more or less local to Missouri and the Middle West, and the first place we sampled it was a country roadhouse on the outskirts of St. Louis where the management would serve customers only if they were safely enclosed, quite literally, in little pagodas or gazebos made of chicken wire in the summer garden out back. When the waiter served a round, he hastily slammed and bolted the entrance to these bombproofs and retired to a safe distance to see what effect the drinks had on the customers. Very often the management found it was even worth charging a little admission for, and the neighbors were admitted to watch the patrons drink Southern Comforts much as they might be asked to view Mardi Gras at the zoo.
The public has now taken Southern Comforts in its stride, and the Southern Comfort Company of St. Louis has dreamed up another bottled product, this time of much less disaster-day potentiality, called Coffee Southern and well worth your investigation as a really attractive and adult liqueur. The only coffee liqueur we have ever before encountered that was in any way notable was a Mexican distillate served in the home of Miss Dolores del Rio, the actress, outside of Mexico City. Coffee Southern is, we are informed, of a slightly higher proof than this product of Old Mexico, but has its essential qualities, being strong of coffee, sweet without stickiness or cloying flavor, and thin in its consistency, as any masculine drink should be. It could easily lend itself to blending with after-dinner coffee, and the particularly effective Latin trick of dipping the nonbusiness end of a cigar in it and inhaling the coffee flavor with the tobacco smoke is excellent. Probably the proprietors of Coffee Southern will see to it in their promotional material that potential users are instructed in a number of ways of making the best of their product. In the meantime, it may be remarked as an excellent thing for the complete sideboard along with the sweeter and more flowery liqueurs that are already established.
A few issues of GOURMET past, this department reported to its clients on the happy circumstance that Denver, a town of many excellences but one never notable as a shrine of gastronomy, was in possession at long last of a place of true gastronomic distinction, and we beg the liberty of confirming this report as of our most recent sojourn in the home town of all those Reeds, Verners, Boettchers, Penroses, Phippses, Browns, and Weckbaughs. The Tiffin is maintained by a pair of altogether admirable entrepreneurs named Jean and Paul Shank, who call themselves “architects of appetite,” and if you can surmount this initial hurdle, you will find their menu an imposing array of just about the best home-cooked food you will encounter anywhere between the Pump Room and the Palace.
To Easterners who are well-to-do enough to throw away their Lincoln town cars as soon as the ash trays are full and who make a practice of smoking two Belinda Fancy Tales at once, but still can no longer afford red cow meat, the Tiffin menu is a symposium of beefy wonderments: juicy, thick beef tender loins, boneless New York-cut sirloins, choice boneless club steaks, double-cut prime sirloins, and the house specialty, the Tiffin famous double filet, served for one with French-fried onion rings, ＄3.50. Read it and weep. For less spacious diners there is a profusion of double racks of spring lamb, broiled live Maine lobster that is flown to the Rockies daily, lamb chops averaging the size of a filet mignon in Manhattan, and baked ham with wild cherry sauce.
All these splendid things come to the table with such an assortment of relishes, hot breads, and beautiful Colorado vegetables as most folk haven't seen since they used to spend Christmas down on the farm with grandfather, and the Tiffin makes a point of a nice oldfashioned touch that has pretty well disappeared from commercial restaurants of serving a small portion of sherbet with its entrees.
The Tiffin is an old private residence in Ogden Street, one of Denver's more conservative faubourgs, and a pleasanter place to spend Sunday afternoon waiting for the sailing of the Burlington “Zephyr,” especially if you can secure a window table on the second floor, is difficult to imagine. The Tiffin has no license, but this minor lapse can be remedied by the forethoughtful patron by a quick sneak beforehand into the Ship Tavern of the celebrated Brown Palace or the magnificent Victorian saloon of the Cosmopolitan across the street. This department personally could do without the verses which adorn the menu of the Tiffin or the knowledge that the management likes in its fonder moments to think of itself as “architects of appetite,” but this is inconsequential, and our emphatic cup of tea, to scramble a phrase, is the Tiffin's double filet with French-fried onions. Boy! It is something!
A New York lady wag of proportions far more formidable, certain informed circles incline to believe, than the much-touted Miss Dorothy Parker, who eventually became a catchall for all unidentifiable witticisms of whatever caliber, is Miss Dawn Powell, the lady novelist. A short time ago Miss Powell arrived with her frequent companion, Miss Ann Honeycutt, unannounced and without reservations for dinner, at Jack Bleeck's Artists and Writers Restaurant in Fortieth Street, hard by the Herald Tribune.
In the absence of a table for the moment, the Misses Powell and Honeycutt were prevailed upon by Gene, the maitre d'bôtel, to have a quick one at the bar while waiting. Time passed; folk came and went, pausing for converse and just one with the ladies at the bar. The minutes rolled into hours. Home and loved ones were forgotten, let alone such small matters as dinner. Suddenly Gene approached and politely announced: “Miss Powell, your table is ready!”
“Thank you, Gene,” said the little lady stiffly. “Do you want me to get under it now?”