Here is a dinner served by him in Edinburgh at the end of the last century, which has at worst a horrid fascination to the modern and emasculated palate, but which could be and almost assuredly was enjoyable, because the host was not a cautious man:
Clear soup and then filets of whiting with a sherry (Dos Cortados, 1873); calf's head à la Terrapin and then oysters en caisses with Château La Frette, 1865; then, in proper succession, an aspic of tunny, braised beef, roast guinea fowl, apricots in jelly, velvet cream, anchovies Zadioff, and ices, accompanied by Champagne Giesler 1889, Château Margaux 1870, a La Tâche Burgundy of 1886, and an 1870 port.
This menu is impossible except in its correct classical pattern, and purely in theory, to almost any of today's gastronomical children … but it has a kind of dashing enthusiasm about it. It was not a cautious dinner! It was fun!
D is for dining out…
…. and its amenities.
A great deal has been written about the amenities of dining, pure and simple, but few writers have seen fit to comment, no matter how gastronomically, on the very important modern problem of going to a public place to eat, with “agreeable good manners” and with or without other people.
I had a happy beginning in this neglected art and much abused privilege, one that has sheathed it in unfading pleasure for me when it is well done. When I was no more than five or so, my father and mother began to prepare my spirits for Easter, or Christmas, or a birthday, and when the festival rolled around, there was I, waiting to greet it in my wide hat with ribbons, on the pink velvet seat of the region's best restaurant.
At first it was called Marcel's, I believe. By now Hollywood and its New York refugees have widened the choice if not the choiceness, and there are several eating houses within a hundred miles of me which I am delighted to be seen in. I have friends who feel the same way. The problem, given that situation, is how most smoothly to combine our presences at the same public table.
I admit that I am prejudiced about it. I seldom dine out, and because of my early conditioning to the sweet illusion of permanent celebration, of “party” and festivity on every such occasion, I feel automatically that any invitation means sure excitement, that it will be an event, whether it brings me a rained-on hamburger in a drive-in or chicken Jerusalem at Perino's. The trouble is, I am afraid, that I expect the people I dine with to feel the same muted but omnipresent delight as my own.
They seldom do. They more often than not “eat out” several times each week. They have business luncheons: in a small town, service clubs and Chamber of Commerce meetings and so on, and in a city, conferences with colleagues they must quickly dominate. In both cases, no matter what type of food they are served, they are tense, wary … and gastronomically bored to the point of coma. As for their dinners, those, too, are at best a frank mixture of business and pleasure. The attitude seems to be that all humans must eat and all humans must make money in order to eat, and therefore the two things might as well be combined.
The result of this is a common sight in any restaurant from the Black Kat on South Main to Mike Romanoff's on Rodeo Drive: carefully dressed women being very polite to other carefully dressed women while their male companions walk in invisible circles around one another, sniffing out the chances of everything from laying a new plastic tile floor in the bathroom to trading top stars for two hundred grand.
Such luncheons and dinners are why, fairly obviously, successful people have gastric ulcers. They are why I, on the other hand, may be less successful but have never been menaced by that dreadful burning thing which is laughingly called occupational but which is more likely to be known in the future as merely twentieth century: I refuse, almost categorically, to dine out. I refuse to have my child-dreams of fun and excitement turned into a routine and ungracious feeding, to the tune of wifely chitchat and the clink of unmade dollars.
Now and then I have weakened, of course, being humanly susceptible to skillful blarney.
Once an important interviewer arranged what he artfully called on the telephone a “little dinner” for me: he wanted a story and thought it might be fun if we … I was apparently bored enough with being alone to leap like a hungry trout to his fly of flattery. I primed myself happily … and waited for almost an hour after the time I'd been told I'd be called for …
The man finally arrived, tired, pale, freshly shaven but withal unkempt, and with a sidelong glint in his eye that had nothing to do with my irresistibility but was pure nervous dyspepsia. His wife, deep in mink, was bored but willing, calloused by now to one more business evening. I said ho-hum to myself, settled into the Cadillac convertible, and thought, Well, at least he's ordered a good dinner somewhere.
He shot the car irritably into high and asked, “Where'll we eat tonight?”
I had a clear and weary vision of all the other nights he had to do this, all the other authoresses he had to feed. I said nothing, feeling rebuffed and weary myself. His wife dutifully suggested a few places. Then I threw a fine conversational monkey wrench into things by saying in mild but firm self-preservation, “How about a drive-in? I absolutely refuse to stand in line, any place.”
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