M is for monastic …
… and for what happens when men become monks—at table, I hasten to add!
It seems to me that too much has been written about the dogged pleasures that lean be savored by a knowing gourmet who sits down alone to his own idea of culinary excellence. Lucullus is called on far too often to bolster such solitary morale, and many a man who secretly yearns to join the nearest roistering group has smugly comforted himself by remembering how, one rare time when the great Roman general dined alone, he chided his chef for a slight feeling of hit-or-miss slapdashery in the menu. “But, My Lord (or Your Excellency or however anyone as rich as Lucullus was addressed some two thousand years ago) has no guests tonight,” the poor dolt stammered, “and therefore…”
And then enough was said, when the fabulously skilled gastronomer shrugged coldly and remarked, “But tonight…tonight Lucullus dines with Lucullus!”
Yes, what comfort that cruel reproach has been to countless lonely but still normally hungry souls! They have sat back in world-wide beaneries, called everything from Twenty One to Ye Kats Meow, and hoped devoutly that they looked as blandly gourmandish as they wished they felt.
Some cities make this solitary public act much easier than do others. It is apparently impossible for a man to dine
alone with dignified enjoyment in Los Angeles, for example—perched at a drugstore counter which automatically cancels out the dignity, if not the enjoyment. I have yet to see any normal southern California male go willingly by himself to an eating house and consume an intelligent meal easily and pleasurably.
On the other hand, San Francisco has many restaurants where men seem to go, not merely to stanch the sounds of their immediate appetite, but to sit alone and savor without chitchat what has been set before them. There arc places like Sam’s and Jack’s and Tadich’s, often with mousy-looking, curtained booths upstairs which, in the main, are not filled with the expected willing damsels and their expectant hungry escorts, but instead with calm-faced lawyers and bankers and vintners and sea captains, sitting miraculously by themselves, reading Elizabethan sermons and sonnets or studying the intricacies of a cracked crab shell.
When I was last in Paris and last in London, they were like that and will be again, I think.
But no matter how much help a place may give, men dining alone in public do not often find the Lucullan ease and elegance they wish for, and as for their private gastronomical patterns, they are fantastic! For one famed celibate whose Filipino houseboy understands not only the intricacy of a soufflé au Grand Marnier but also the precise and precious moment at which to serve it, there are a hundred, a thousand, myriad men who are caught in the drab toils of modern monies and cannot afford such escapism.
They must live alone, for one reason or another. They learn countless ugly little tricks for such existence, which add to the hateful pattern. They gradually forget Lucullus and lean on One Good Meal a Week, with the rest filled in by snatched bottles of milk and grabbed drugstore ham-on-ryes. Now and then they let a girl grill them a steak in her kitchenette, which they would not let her pay for in a restaurant, for obtusely virile reasons.
But in general they prefer, in a strange, proud monasticism, to survive in solitude. Quite often they find themselves, like a friend of mine aptly named Monk, in much that position.
He was about twenty-eight, which sounds young to some of us, but he was much older than must of the students in the university where he was writing his doctor’s thesis. He had very little money, and thanks to family troubles and an occasional irrefutable urge for pretty girls, he found himself living on a food-purse which dwindled within a few months from seventy-five cents a day to about twelve. This happened to him in 1939, when the sum meant twice as much as ten years later, but even so, he was hard put to it to sleep, for the way his innards cried out and warbled to him in the night.
He was not alone in his hunger: thereare many such students, who later grow fat as college presidents, and they tipped him off to the timeworn tricks of serving at fraternity banquets and eating the scraps and suchlike. But Monk was finicky, and out of pure finickiness, his belly protested at such untidy snatchings.
Then he made a deal with a hash house for one meal a day, everything he could eat, in return for washing plates. It was not right: the black greasiness underfoot wiped out any pleasure he may have found in the sparkling counter cops of the little joint, and again he was racked with sickness.
This time it seemed to color not only his fresh eagerness for life, but also his politics and even his lovemaking, and he realized that he must ignore the common ways of such poverty as his and devise his own plan. He was an intelligent man, although dulled and warped by hunger, and deliberately he lived another week on scraps, to save a dollar or so and buy himself one pot, one plate, one spoon, and one fork. He did not need a knife, recognizing fatalistically that he would never cook anything that needed to be cut, anything like a steak, a chop…
He arranged to use the back of his landlady’s stove two or three times a week. She would have been more than glad to see him in her kitchen every day, but by now his monastic approach to life had spread from the table to the bed.
He made himself a stew on Saturdays and Wednesdays. It had good things in it, which he bought just at closing time in the big public markers. It smelled good. It tasted good. He did not languish on it, but grew strong and sparkling.
The important part of the story is not that he nourished, but that he stopped. One day he realized, alone in his odorous little back room with his empty plate before him, that he had at first, a few weeks earlier, eaten nicely from it with his fork. Then he had spooned up his food, for a few more weeks. And then, one day after he had done with the spoonings, he found himself very neatly, very thoroughly licking the plate clean, to save the bother of washing it three flights below!
He was flabbergasted. He sat back and thought about it. In some ways this licking was a logical act: no other soul but him would eat from the plate, and therefore it was not contaminated by his dog-like behavior, it saved some of his jealously husbanded strength for his studies and such secret washing protected him from the sly-eyed woman in the kitchen. But even so he was horrified.
He took the plate up quietly and broke it over his knee.
He went down to the kitchen and gave the rest of his stew to a family of blue-green kittens which had lately emerged from the back alley.
Then he took $3.11, which he had counted on for the rest of the month, gastronomically, and he called his favorite girl, who was majoring in dramatic diction but who enunciated his own language with great clarity,
And the next morning he felt so much more, energetic than he had for several months that he applied for, and immediately got, a fat job as laboratory assistant. What happened to him later really should not happen to a rising physicist, but at least it had very little to do with monasticism, culinary or otherwise!
N is for nautical…
…and inevitably for nostalgic, in my own alphabet. Dinners aboard ship have a special poignancy for me, partly because I have not sailed anywhere since I went with the “Normandie” on her last fateful crossing, and therefore they are all remembered, but mostly because I have always been in love at sea, so that each bite I took was savored with an intensity peculiar to the moment. I think I am not alone in this particular juxtaposition of two words for N.
The first time I ever rode a ship it was deep down in the shuddering guts of it, so that dining-room silver and china jingled tinnily on the calmest day…another alliterative coupling of two words: S was now for Student Third, rather than Steerage It was smart to hop the Atlantic thus cheaply and uncomfortably in 1929, and a great many bored travelers who could afford A-deck accommodations titillated themselves by rubbing elbows with broken-down fan-dancers and students in the renovated holds of a dozen enormous liners (mine was the “Berengaria”).
I myself was happily dazed with love, but I do remember one priest, one dancer, three medical students, and, most of all, one incongruously proper, middle-class, plump Englishwoman who had nothing to do with anyone at all and seemed nonexistent except three times a day, in the dining room. Then it was at she became immortal, at least for me.
Then it was that with one blind, regal stare she picked up the large menu, handed it to the apparently hypnotized waiter, who hovered over her and ignored the seven other passengers at our table, and said, “Yes.”
It seems to me, when I try to be reasonable about it, that she must surely have said, “Yes…pastries.” Or “Yes…soups.” But all I can remember is Yes.” All I can remember is sitting for long periods watching her, when I should rightly have been playing shuffle-board or any other of the games of my first honeymoon, while she ate slowly, silently, right through the menu.
Surely it must have been all the soups, one meal, and then all the roasts, another. No human being could eat every dish mentioned on a ship’s carte du jour, even in Student Third, where kippered snacks and spiced onions took the place of First Class caviar and bouchées à la Pompadour. But as far as I can say, that woman did. What is more, the waiter seemed to enjoy it almost as much as she and would hover breathlessly behind her with a dish of apple trifle and a plate of plum-heavies while she chewed through her chocolate sponge with hand and cut at the crust of an apricot tart with the other.
One day of comparative roughness, when the silver and china clashed noisily to the ocean’s roll instead of jingling to the engines’ shuddering, I sat almost alone in the room with this relentless eater, feeling that for once in my life I was in the presence of what Rabelais would have called a gastrolater…Insensitive to the elements, unthinking of ordinary human misery, uncaring of her own final end to such appetite, she was wrapped in a worship of her belly. “Yes,” she said simply, and sat back for her high priest to attend her.
I was awed. Naive as I was then in the ways of transatlantic liners, I knew our fare was nothing, compared to what lent on six or seven decks higher up. I wished with a kind of horror that I would meet this immortal again…in First.
I was to learn, somewhat regretfully, that the more people paid for their fares, the less they ate of the fare’s fare and the fewer times they strolled biliously into the luxurious dining room on B-deck, to peck at the fantastically generous and rich food provided for their amusement. Instead they paid even more than they would on dry land, once having got onto the most crowded and, therefore, most desirable ships, for the privilege of avoiding almost all of their fellow passengers by dining in some small and quire often stuffy and viewless restaurant called a “club.” It was ridiculous, but I must admit it could be fun.
One ship I crossed on several times boasted a tiny room where each day a luncheon was devoted to a country:
Monday it would be Sweden, Tuesday China, and so on. I never ate such good national dishes in my life, anywhere. I never ate so much, either. The sea change worked its magic, and I sat for three or four hours every midday meal, savoring everything with a capacity which is unknown to me now, but which there in the elegant little dining room had nothing gluttonous about it, nor gross. Smoked eel and akvavit, hong yang mei ping and tiger-bone wine…what was in the glasses tipped over so slightly this way and that, and our hearts felt the tide’s pull.
And in the main dining salon, dully benighted souls ate their way stodgily, or so we believed in our own tight, supercilious little sea-going island, through one endless meal after another, while decks below them still other human beings, less monied, less well aired, but in some cases equally blessed by good digestion, had to forego caviar for kippers in what was, even so, a gastronomical spree.
The truth is that no matter what cabin a passenger pays for, on a luxury line, he feels that he has simply bought his passage and is getting his meals free. After all, that is the way it is on planes! And when he is confronted with a dinner carte as big as the front page of his home-town Times, with no prices visible, he can treat it only according to his lights…
Perhaps he has known slow, true hunger. Then he does one of two things: he either shudders away from such a vulgar show and asks for dry toast and tea, or he does in his own limited way what my Gargantuan fellow passenger did on the “Berengaria,” and eats imperturbably from the “free” radis et céleris frais to the “free” café turque. If he is somewhat further removed from the pangs and passions of his belly, by politics or the stock market or even marriage, he becomes more exacting.
And now I think of one of the worst times I ever had on a ship, when I was finagled into introducing a Very Rich Passenger to my friends, the purser and the master chef, and then was invited to a few exquisite little dinners with this Very Rich Passenger, arranged, of course, with great to-do by the purser himself and the master chef himself. These were the kind of dinners for which, almost literally, one bird was scuffed inside another and another and roasted, and then we ate the innermost truffle-stuffed olives, with my two friends beaming and gleaming proudly. Then at the last I had to listen to the miserable story of how the Very Rich Passenger skipped ship, on the harbor tender, and did not pay a single tip. I wanted to evaporate with embarrassment, being a firm believer in friendship and in tipping, and being a practitioner of both. I still dread meeting my two friends again.
But I comfort myself with the thought of countless other people who have gone back and forth on ocean liners, reveling with far-from-innocent pleasure in the somewhat decadent excesses of the transatlantic fare and paying proper fees for those excesses to the servitors who made them possible.
I see them emerging, as I myself have done, from bedrooms lined with rare woods and heavy with the scent of jungle flowers, in fair gowns and knife-sharp creases, only a little tipsy from the sea’s roll and that last cocktail. I see them happily wandering the length of long buffets set with rubs of caviar in snow and thick yellow casseroles of truffle-black pâté from Strasbourg. I see them ordering from a hundred knowingly selected ocean-going wines…
It is a shame that I must confess I seldom figured in this pretty picture: early in my travelings I found that for my own peace of mind I must shun most of my fellow prisoners. I could not cope with the horrendous strata of behavior, there at sea level where so many social inhibitions went overboard. There was the protocol of stuffiness on one hand and licentiousness on the other…
I worked out my own pattern, dictated by my glandular condition of the moment, and it was something like this when, in 1940, I ceased for a time my interurban voyages:
I slept and read, rolling with the ship like a delicately balanced log, until noon. Then after various sybaritic dabblings I went to the bar, not the main one but a tiny place familiar with leather chairs and peanuts in bowls and a discreetly gossipy man named some variation of Fritz to pour fine beer or make impeccable Martinis. I took beer, and could have been in the Lausanne-Palace, or the Ritz, or…or…There was a dignity about the very banality of the place. I sensed it and sat back recognizing Fritz and watching his ears prick to gossip and his busy eyes flicker cynically over the sleep-fattened ‘faces in front of him.
Then I went to lunch, not in the dining salon, of course, but in a little restaurant where I had engaged my table before the ship sailed. I ate and drank and ate and drank, and in a drugged way it was fun.
I always skipped tea, just as I had skipped breakfast and the midmorning comsommé-and-crackers, even though tea had a ghoulishly interesting concert with it, at which the captain now and then tangoed carefully with one of the three richest women present, and then, even more carefully, with the current femme fatale. I hated teas, tangoes, and, in a lesser way, the lethal women, and instead went to the movies, where I lazily watched ten-year-old and tomorrow’s cinema seductions and sipped a mild Pernod-with-water.
The ritual of dressing was a pleasure so removed from the present that I look back on it with much the same helpless emotion I feel about a ten-pound tin of caviar a friend brought me to Dijon from Moscow in 1931: I can only dream of its present impossibility, as I do of the hot water and the countless towels and the dreamy leisure…
Before dinner, ordered in advance from a sheet which had nothing to do with the vulgar printed menu of the main dining salon, I drank either champagne or two very dry Martinis, depending on whether the captain’s chart marked the wind velocity at three or seven. The little bar—I never went into the main bar!—was full and amusing.
Dinner in the club, which suddenly might sprout orchids on its walls or pine branches from the Black Forest, behind which tired, invisible cabin boys tootled bird whistles—dinner, indeed, was exquisite.
And then, after dancing perhaps, or talking in the bar, my bar, came the best part of the pattern, when I went to my cabin and there, in the soft light by my bed, saw the same curiously exciting and satisfying thing each night: a split of my favorite champagne in a little silver bucket, and a silver plate of the thinnest sandwiches in the world, made knowingly of unbuttered fine bread, slivered breast of chicken, and cayenne pepper generously within the whole. I really do not understand what chord it was that always vibrated in my nature at this sight, but hum and twang it did, inevitably…and still does, in my mind.
I have forgotten what it used to cost, in those happily vanished days, to lunch and dine and sup thus fastuously, but it was one-tenth of what it cost the steamship company to put on so sumptuous a show…one-tenth or one-fiftieth. And I wonder now what it would cost to make me young enough again to love it, and all the silken extravagance it meant, instead of the forthright reconditioned steerage I first sailed in. I think back on it with no regret, but still with a real nostalgia.
I would like to be a lithe, eager twenty, in some ways, and sit across from an immortal, big-bosomcd, implacable gastrolater who could say “Yes!” and mean just that. I would, but less so, like to be a suave thirty…the caviar was so good then and so plentiful, and I do so love caviar.
Nostalgia hits all my five senses and colors and perfumes my thoughts and makes me touch and hear and bite them. Still I remain upright and cogent, in the face of such a backlog of remembrance, knowing that I, like many another honest gastronomer, can safely lean in secret, now and then, on such things the word “nautical.”
O is for ostentation…
…and how dignity is most often lacking in it, but need not be, at table anywhere.
While it is very true that rich amphitryons (and that is indeed an ostentatious way of saying hosts!) are more apt to strut and to attempt bedazzlement than poor ones, I think it quite possible for a bowl of soup and a crust of bread to be served with the pompous affectation that in any social level spells real ostentation.
In a subtle reversing of the law, it is a poor man who might more easily be ostentatious if he pretended riches and served forth a truffled turkey rather than a stew, to impress me for no matter what venal reason; but a rich man who with great show invited me to sup on pottage would be equally suspect. In either case my gastronomical suspicions, dormant somewhere between my heart and my stomach, would be roused to the lasting damage of my innocent appetite. Why, I would ask willy-nilly, is the stage thus set for me? Why has the delicate peace of a friendly table been thus threatened?
More often than not, ostentatious dining has little dignity about it, although such a combination is possible. I can think of one good literary proof of this apparent contradiction: the unforgettable dinner in Alice Adams, by Booth Tarkington. There, the fact that Mrs. Adams served wilted canapés of caviar, without cocktails in that prohibition day and without warning her husband of even what to call them, could be a perfect example of undignified ostentation if it were not for her true nobility, her enormous generosity in wishing, by this puny attempt at worldliness, to work a miracle for her daughter Alice. She failed, in a masterpiece of misery-at-table, but her innate goodness kept her effort from vulgarity.