Irvin S. Cobb

“ It is more than just cheese. I should call it mother-of-cheese. It is to other and lesser cheeses as civet cats are to canary birds—if you get what I mean; and in its company the most boisterous Brie or the most vociferous Camembert you ever saw becomes at once deaf and dumb. ”

“ But of beef and mutton and veal and fowls, and the various products of the humble but widely versatile pig, there was no end, provided you had the inclination plus the price.
And so, though the lack of sugar in one's food gave one an almost constant craving for something sweet—and incidentally insured a host of friends for anybody who came along with a box of American candy under his arm or a few cakes of sweet chocolate in his pocket—one might take his choice of a wide diversity of fare at any [42] restaurant of the first or second class, and keep well stayed. ”

“ But it takes a lot of retouching to restore to a piece of boiled meat the juicy essences that have been simmered and drenched out of it. Since the English people, with such admirable English thoroughness, cut down on fats and oils and bacon garnishments, so that the greases might be conserved for the fighting forces; and since they have so [22] largely had to do without imported spices and condiments, because the cargo spaces in the ships coming in were needed for military essentials, the boiled dishes of England appear to have lost most of their taste. ”

“ In Paris the bread was indifferently poor. An individual was restricted to one medium-sized roll of bread at a meal. Butter was not by any means abundant, and of sugar there was none to be had at all unless the traveller had bethought him to slip a supply into the country with him. The bulk of the milk supply was requisitioned for babies and invalids and disabled soldiers. Cakes or pastries in any form were absolutely prohibited in the public eating places, and, I think, in private homes as well. ”

“ I should have added a fourth to the list of stand-bys—to wit: the vegetable marrow. For some reason, possibly because they are a stubborn and tenacious race, the English persist in looking upon the vegetable marrow as an object designed for human consumption, which is altogether the wrong view to take of it. As a foodstuff this article hasn't even the merit that attaches to stringy celery. You do not derive much nourishment from stale celery, [21] but eating at it polishes the teeth and provides a healthful form of exercise that gives you an appetite for the rest of the meal. ”

“ A man who knew not the salmon in his native state, or ordering salmon in France, would get the idea that the salmon was bowlegged and that the breast had been sold to some one else, leaving only the hind quarters for him.
Harking back to lobsters, I am reminded of a tragedy to which I was an eyewitness. Nearly every night for a week or more two of us dined at the same restaurant on the Rue de Rivoli. On the occasion of our first appearance here we were confronted as we entered by a large table bearing all manner of special delicacies and cold dishes. ”

“ You can do a lot of browsing about at an English table these days and come away ostensibly filled; but inside you there will be a persistent unsatisfied feeling, all the same, which is partly due, no doubt, to the lack of sweetening and partly due to the lack of fats, but due most of all, I think, to a natural disappointment in the results. In the old times a man didn't feel that he had dined well in England unless for an hour or two afterward he had the comfortable gorged sensation of a python full of pigeons. ”

“ Our soldiers, returning home, are going to demand a tastier and more diversified fare than many of them enjoyed before they put on khaki and went overseas; and they are going to get it, too. Remembering what they had to eat under French roofs, they will never again be satisfied with meats fried to death, with soggy vegetables, with underdone breads.
Sometimes as we went scouting about on our roving commission to see what we might see, at mealtime we would enter a [55] community too small to harbour within it any establishment calling itself a hotel. ”

“ Nor did the thought of codfish, and especially boiled codfish, appeal to me greatly. I have no settled antipathy to the desiccated tissues of this worthy deep-sea voyager when made up into fish cakes. Moreover that young and adolescent creature, commonly called a Boston scrod, which is a codfish whose voice is just changing, is not without its attractions; but the full-grown species is not a favourite of mine. ”

“ So I presume that very shortly thereafter the head waiters began offering dog biscuits to American guests. I knew they would do so, [53] just as soon as a dog biscuit cost more than a lobster did.
Until this trip I never appreciated what a race of perfect cooks the French are. I thought I did, but I didn't. One visiting the big cities or stopping at show places and resorts along the main lines of motor and rail travel in peacetime could never come to a real and due appreciation of the uniformly high culinary expertness of the populace in general. ”

“ As a last resort I took the jugged hare; but jugged hare was not what I craved. At eventide, returning to the same restaurant, I was luckier. I found mutton on the menu; but, even so, yet another hard blow awaited me. By reason of the meat-rationing arrangements a single purchaser was restricted to so many ounces a week, and no more. The portion I received in exchange for a corner clipped off my meat card was but a mere reminder of what a portion in that house would have been in the old days. ”

“ So we started in with oysters. Personally I have never cared deeply for the European oyster. In size he is anæmic and puny as compared with his brethren of the eastern [27] coast of North America; and, moreover, chronically he is suffering from an acute attack of brass poisoning. The only way by which a novice may distinguish a bad European oyster from a good European oyster is by the fact that a bad one tastes slightly better than a good one does. ”

“ The suggestion formed in my mind during those weeks I spent in London, when the resident population first went on the food-card system. You had to have a meat card, I think, to buy raw meat in a butcher shop, and you had to have another kind of meat [17] card, I know, to get cooked meat in a restaurant; and you had to have a friend who was a smuggler or a hoarder to get an adequate supply of sugar under any circumstances. ”

“ Even the kidney, the same being the thing for which an Englishman mainly raises a sheep and which he always did know how to serve up better than any one else on earth, somehow doesn't seem to be the kidney it once upon a time [20] was when it had the proper sorts of trimmings and sauces to go with it.
At this time England is no place for the epicure. In peacetime English cooks, as a rule, were not what you would call versatile ”

“ Likewise, one could no longer obtain cheese in a first-grade Paris restaurant or aboard a French dining car, though cheese was to be had in unstinted quantity in the rural districts and in the Paris shops; and, I believe, it was also procurable in the cafés [52] of the Parisian working classes, provided it formed a part of a meal costing not more than five francs, or some such sum. In a first-rate place it was, of course, impossible to get any sort of meal for five francs, or ten francs either; especially after the ten per cent luxury tax had been tacked on. ”

“ On a full Southern breakfast and a wonderful French luncheon and dinner a grown man can get through the day very, very well indeed, as I bear witness.
Howsomever, as spring wore into summer and summer ran its course, I began to long with a constantly increasing longing for certain distinctive dishes to be found no [64] where except in my native clime ”

“ They called the corned beef Canned Willie; and the stew was known affectionately as Slum, and the doughnuts were Fried Holes. When the adjutant, who had been taking French lessons, remarked "What the la hell does that sacré-blew cook mean by serving forty-fours at every meal?" you gathered he was getting a mite tired of baked army beans. And if the lieutenant colonel asked you to pass him the Native Sons you knew [19] he meant he wanted prunes. It was a great life, if you didn't weaken—and nobody did. ”

“ She believed us, of course, to be rich—in the eyes of the European peasant all Americans are rich—and she was poor and hard put to it to earn her living; but here was a [62] chance for her to show in her own way a sense of what she, as a Frenchwoman, felt for America. Somehow, the more you see of the French, the less you care for the Germans.
Moving on up a few miles nearer the trenches, we would run into our own people ”

“ In connection with the Paris restaurants I made a most interesting discovery, which was that when France called up her available man power at the time of the great mobilisation, the military heads somehow overlooked one group who, for their sins, should have been sent up where bullets and Huns were thickest. ”

“ Stress of war had not caused these gentry to forget or forgo a single one of the ancient wiles that for half a century their kind has practised upon American tourists and others who didn't care what else they did with their money so long as they were given a chance to spend it for something they didn't particularly want. ”

“ The day I land is going to be a great day for some of the waiters and a hard day on some of the cooks. Persons who happen to be near by when I am wrestling with my first ear of green corn will think I am playing on a mouth organ. ”