Still, there are clues. Robin McDouall, former secretary of the Travellers Club, collected recipes for the dishes typical of that masculine world in Clubland Cooking (1974). His chapter on savories begins by acknowledging that “by tradition, clubs specialize in [them]” and proceeds to give recipes for 34, from “angels on horseback” (oysters wrapped in bacon, quickly fried, and served on toast) to “kipper toast.” Charles Graves, in Leather Armchairs: The Book of London Clubs (1963), only occasionally mentions the food (he is more interested in the quality and depth of the wine cellars). Even so, he names, among others, such notable favorites as the Savile’s homemade potted meat, the Caledonian Club’s Scotch eggs, and the namesake Bath Club savory (a plate of sautéed mushrooms, roes on toast, bacon, and bone marrow).
The most extensive account I’ve found of the British male at table was written by a Frenchman, M. Faujas de Saint-Fond, who dined one evening in 1784 with the Royal Society. Once the members had consumed a “prelude” of beefsteaks, roast and boiled beef and mutton, and plenty of potatoes and other vegetables, he reported, “the cloth was removed and a handsome and well-polished table was covered, as if by magic, with a number of fine crystal decanters filled with the best Port, Madeira, and claret; this last is the wine of Bordeaux. Several glasses, as brilliant in lustre as fine in shape, were distributed to each person and the libations began on a grand scale, in the midst of different kinds of cheese, which, rolling in mahogany boxes from one end of the table to the other, provoked the thirst of the drinkers.”
As I began to acquire a small pile of cookbooks on the subject, ranging from Savouries à la Mode (1891—and this the 12th edition), by Harriet De Salis, to Savouries: A Taste of Tradition (1982), by Theodora FitzGibbon, I found that the savory has always been so familiar to British cookery writers that they have felt no need to flesh out its physiognomy. However, even mentally pushing my midnight snack back toward the end of dinner made certain things immediately clear. Like dessert, a savory has to be sufficiently charismatic to catch and hold the interest of a jaded appetite. Unlike dessert, it should suggest that the end of the meal is going to be leisurely and undefined.
Imagine the main course followed by, say, a tin of caviar, along with a plate of crisp, thin-sliced, unbuttered toast. No confusion here for the by now somewhat tired palate. Instead, the appetite is given a little jolt of excitement. The urge to linger is almost irresistible. If you had put the caviar out at the beginning of the meal, your guests, unless inhumanly self-disciplined, would have emptied the tin in a flash…and the dinner that followed would merely have been picked at. But at the end of the meal, we can relax, nibble, and enjoy.
The real obstacle to the return of the savory is not the resistance of diners but the instinctive hostility of the cook. In Good Savouries (1944), Ambrose Heath refers to his subject as “the passion of the average Englishman and the bête noire of the ordinary housewife.” After all, home cooks often see dessert as a way to showcase their talent, whereas the savory has a sneaking resemblance to everything they’ve already slaved to prepare.
This part is easy to deal with. If there’s a savory person in the household, he or she should do the cooking here…or at least point out that many good savories are as easy to prepare as a dish of ice cream.
Where things get slippery is when the savory aspires to match that same dish of ice cream in terms of caloric extravagance—which it should never even think of doing. A dessert may be just as cloying—and, for that matter, just as boring—as most old-fashioned savories, but this is something that eaters of sweets have willed themselves not to notice. In a savory, however, such excess sticks out like a sore thumb. The trick is to seek out something quietly flirtatious: not a platter of stuffed eggs but a plate of garlic tuiles, tiny pots of hot cheese pudding, or a bowl of dukka, an Egyptian snack of hazelnuts, coriander seeds, sesame seeds, and cumin seeds coarsely ground together, mixed with enough olive oil to moisten, and served with toasted pita. And if you want to pull out all the stops, serve your guests the crown prince of Victorian savories, Scotch woodcock—a glistening amalgam of anchovy and softly scrambled eggs poured over pieces of grilled toast.
The world is awash with potential savories once you start watching for them. Recently, I was reading about a Southeast Asian dish in which a piece of beef is simmered for hours in spices and coconut milk. The result is extremely rich and spicy—in fact, perhaps too potent to appear as the main course. But when that same meat is cut into cubes and served on skewers, along with glasses of Thai iced coffee, at meal’s end ... that’s a very different matter.
On reflection, it may be that what really did the savory in was the after-dinner cigarette. Nothing could match a smoke for promoting lingering at the table. Nicotine simultaneously stimulates the brain and relaxes the body—ideal for late-evening conversation. I’ve been a nonsmoker for close to 20 years, but I still fondly recall dinners where everyone stayed at the table long after the food had been cleared, chatting away in a blue haze of tobacco smoke.
However, now that the dinner-table ashtray has gone the way of the hall spittoon, it’s high time for the savory to be welcomed back. There are few things more companionable in life than extending that feeling of warmth and fellowship that comes from sharing a good meal. And, reduced to its essence, the savory is nothing more than the seductively genial proposition that as long as the cheese box keeps rolling, dinner need never end.
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