You’ve reached the end of a wonderful dinner, and the table has been cleared for dessert. Slices of chocolate truffle cake are passed around, and exclamations of delight and cups of steaming coffee follow. A happy moment, to be sure, but for a certain neglected minority not a perfect one. And I don’t mean the diet-conscious, who would have preferred a fruit sorbet. No, I’m talking about that person sulking at the end of the table, picking desultorily at his piece of cake. I’m talking about me, and maybe—just maybe—you.
I’m simply not a dessert person. This doesn’t mean that I don’t occasionally enjoy it, but outside of restaurants or the sort of social event where it would be churlish to spurn it (or fail to offer it), I eat dessert maybe half a dozen times a year. Otherwise, if we’re having wine with supper, I try to save a little of it to round off the meal. And that, I once thought, was that.
Then a friend gave me, for curiosity’s sake, a British cookbook by Agnes Jekyll, D.B.E., called Kitchen Essays, with Recipes and Their Occasions, published in 1922. In it, Lady Jekyll forthrightly addresses such burning issues as what to take along for lunch on a winter motoring excursion or what to serve friends who have come up to London for the day to do their Christmas shopping. It’s fun, but not the sort of book you would think could change your life. Yet there it was—the opening sentence of Chapter XXXI, “On Savouries”: “[B]y many, a dinner which does not include both sweet and savoury is thought, even in these days of shortened meals, to be a little disappointing.”
Exactly. Who knew that the whisper of melancholy that creeps in at dinner’s end, that sense of inchoate yearning, needed only a plate of anchovy toast, even a bowl of salted nuts, to set things straight? But it really requires a little more than that. Those of us with a savory tooth want to be recognized, catered to, made to feel as welcome at the end of the meal as we are during it. A simple request, you might assume. You would be wrong.
I end most of my evenings with a midnight snack. Depending on my appetite, energy level, and the contents of the refrigerator, this might be a few slices of headcheese, a bowl of onion sesame sticks, a small posse of Swedish meatballs. But whatever it is, it is always, always savory. So, I asked myself, what if I were to push this nightly nosh (or at least part of it) back to the end of dinner? Unexpectedly, the very idea made me uneasy. Not that it seemed unappetizing. Quite the contrary. It’s just that it also seemed pure and simply & dangerous.
There is, in fact, a powerful reason why dessert and coffee bring dinner to a close. They carry within them a subtle but nonetheless unmistakable message: The meal is over. Just when your guests start to think it might be fun to broach another bottle and chat late into the night, the sweetness of the dessert nixes the first part of the plan, and the clarity-inducing effect of the caffeine summons a bleak awareness of the lateness of the hour, the demands of the following day. And out into the cold we go.
The idea of the savory course is essentially a British one (“[I]n France…a savoury course…is looked on as something barbarous, indeed almost immoral”—our friend Lady Jekyll again), and it began to find a place in polite society during the early part of the 19th century, when the fashion shifted from putting everything onto the table at once—even at the fanciest of meals—to having the dishes brought round by the servants, who waited on each of the diners individually. This newer, more civilized arrangement meant that the order in which things were to be eaten could be orchestrated by the hostess. Courses became possible and, in their delicious novelty, effloresced.
The savory is a little bite of something rich, salty, and piquant—a marrow toast, perhaps, or a stuffed egg, a talmouse (a kind of cheese tartlet), or a potted lobster. It was placed here and there in a meal that could run to as many as 12 different courses, but it eventually found its place at the very end. Very simply put, this allowed the gentlemen, if they wished, to eschew the sweet and round off the meal with something that was less cloying and led the palate more directly to the glass of brandy and the after-dinner cigar. Conversely, it was generally felt that the ladies ought to skip the savory and take the sweet. This naturally led to coffee in the drawing room, away from the fumes of alcohol and tobacco, where—as wine authority Darrell Corti recently pointed out to me—they could have first crack at the bathroom.
Perfect dinners, like perfect marriages, are all about the art of compromise, and the existence of the savory course required that the ladies tolerate this idea of separation and of their husbands rejoining them at the end of the evening redolent of drink and weed. As high society came creeping into the 20th century, the ladies began to make it clear they did not like any of these things. More and more, the savory course was treated like the husband’s bachelor friends—to be invited for dinner only when the other guests were likely to find them amusing, which as far as most hostesses were concerned, was rarely.
However, the relatively brief appearance of the savory at fashionable tables (roughly from 1870 to 1930) is no indication of how deeply ingrained it already was in British life. When men dined solely with other men, whether at private clubs, military messes, college high tables, chophouses, taverns, or residential hotels, the savory had always held its own. Unfortunately, that world is, at best, scantily documented. Those who cooked at such places were unlikely to consult cookbooks and even less likely to write them; those who dined there, although many of them were memoirists, at least of the amateur sort, rarely dwelt on—except to complain about—what they were served.
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.
What Becomes A Savory Most?
What to drink with savories? In the menus that appear at the end of Professor George Saintsbury’s 1920 Notes on a Cellar-Book, cheese-based, egg and preserved fish, and often anchovy-flavored savories are served with a wide range of wines (an 1872 Port, an 1862 Château Lafite, and a Golden Sherry, for example). Most of the wines served were old to very old even then, and relatively light-tasting. Saintsbury was giving us information about what he had served to guests some 20 years before.
Today, there is naturally an even wider range of wines to accompany a savory course, especially a cooked-cheese dish: vintage Port; full-bodied, high-alcohol Zinfandel; highly extracted Cabernets; rich Amarone; and the more intense Syrah/ Shiraz wines (but not Barolo or Barbaresco). Full-bodied rich ales and barley wine ales are also a good choice, especially aged, bottle-conditioned styles.
The notion of serving a full-bodied dry red wine rather than vintage Port is not novel. Toward the end of the 19th century, particular vintages of certain Bordeaux wines were offered on wine merchants’ lists as “after-dinner clarets.” These wines must have been a lot like what passes for Cabernet Sauvignon in California today.
Sweet wines—rich Muscats like Australian Liqueur Muscat, French Beaumes-de-Venise or Frontignan, Portuguese Setúbal, or any botrytized wine—do not make good wines for savories. However, if you have a very old sweet wine, say an old Pedro Ximénez, that, through great bottle age, has become more dry-tasting, it would serve your purpose admirably. Sherry (a Sandeman Royal Esmeralda, perhaps, or Osborne Royal Ambrosante or Amontillado AOS) and old Madeira can be put to good use so long as the wine is not piercingly dry or overly sweet. Any vintage Madeira or an Henriques & Henriques 15-year-old Bual or Verdelho goes particularly well with anchovy-flavored puff pastry savories. Nicely flavored olives make good company for Madeira, genuine old solera Palo Cortado or unsweetened Oloroso Sherry, and some of the drier styles of 20- and 30-year-old Tawny Port from Ramos Pinto; Taylor, Fladgate; Graham’s; Fonseca; or Ferreira Duque de Braganza.
California Zinfandel makers have gone back to producing wines with more than 14 percent alcohol. Rather than stick these wines with a meat course in the middle of a meal, use them as “after-dinner claret” with savories. Late harvest Zinfandels may work even better, lending fruit and fragrance to the sharpish, piquant character of, say, a well-prepared Welsh rarebit.
A cooked-cheese course with some smoked fish added or pointed up with Espelette pepper shows off remarkable reds like 1953 Pétrus, old St.-Nicolas-de-Bourgeuil from the Loire, and even certain older vintages of California Cabernet, such as Beaulieu Private Reserve, Inglenook Cask Cabernet, and some years of Louis Martini Special Selection.
For oenophiles, savories may serve a higher purpose. Gastronome and prolific wine writer André Simon defined them as “highly seasoned, small but ‘savoury’ dishes served as the last course, long after anybody was expected to be hungry, but just to help one enjoy a last or another glass of wine.” —Darrell Corti