Manger

“ Drinking has indeed been sung, but why, I have heard it asked, have we no ‘Eating Songs’?—for eating is, surely, a fine pleasure. Many practise it already, and it is becoming more general every day. I speak not of the finicking joy of the gourmet, but the joy of an honest appetite in ecstasy, the elemental joy of absorbing quantities of fresh, simple food—mere roast lamb, new potatoes, and peas of living green. ”

“ Hunger is a luxury to us, a piquant, flavor-giving sauce. It is well worth while to get hungry and thirsty merely to discover how much gratification can be obtained from eating and drinking. If you wish to thoroughly enjoy your dinner, take a thirty-mile country walk after breakfast and don't touch anything till you get back. How your eyes will glisten at sight of the white table-cloth and steaming dishes then! With what a sigh of content you will put down the empty beer tankard and take up your knife and fork! ”

“ By thus reducing the number and variety of my dishes at the regular meals, I only enhanced the pleasures of the palate instead of reducing them; for he who "does not eat but when he is hungry, nor drink except when he is thirsty," will enjoy the humblest meal much more than the pampered dedauchee can relish the richest feast. ”

“ Wherefore we must guard against those articles of food which persuade us to eat when we are not hungry, bewitching the appetite. For is there not within a temperate simplicity a wholesome variety of eatables? Bulbs, [456] olives, certain herbs, milk, cheese, fruits, all kinds of cooked food without sauces; and if flesh is wanted, let roast rather than boiled be set down. Have you anything to eat here? said the Lord [457] to the disciples after the resurrection; and they, as taught by Him to practise frugality, “gave Him a piece of broiled fish;” ”

“ A few men got the food for many men. The other men did other things. As you say, I talked. I talked all the time, and for this food was given me—much food, fine food, beautiful food, food that I have not tasted in sixty years and shall never taste again. I sometimes think the most wonderful achievement of our tremendous civilization was food—its inconceivable abundance, its infinite variety, its marvellous delicacy. O my grandsons, life was life in those days, when we had such wonderful things to eat. ”

“ And now learn, continues the rustic sage,
"In what way and how greatly you'll gain By using a diet both sparing and plain. First, your health will be good; for you readily can Believe how much mischief is done to a man By a great mass of dishes,—remembering that Plain fare of old times, and how lightly it sat. But the moment you mingle up boiled with roast meat, And shellfish with thrushes, what tasted so sweet Will be turned into bile, and ferment, not digest, in Your stomach exciting a tumult intestine. Mark, from a bewildering dinner how pale Every man rises up! ”

“ If the food selected by the appetite happens to be soup, or milk, or some mushy substance, get all the good taste out of it, doing all you can to accomplish this; for to get the taste out [Pg 55] of food is an assurance of digesting it, and the pleasure it gives in the process of Nature's way of getting you to do the right thing in helping her to nourish yourself properly. ”

“ There seems to me, more mere animalism in wading through a long bill of fare, eating three or four indifferently cooked vegetables, fish, meat, poultry, each second-rate in quality, or made so by bad cooking, and declaring that you have dined well, and are easy to please, than there is in taking pains to have a perfectly broiled chop, a fine potato, and a salad, on which any true epicure could dine well, while on the former fare he would leave the table hungry. ”

“ The frame of mind in which one may happen to be is also a matter of importance. If our thoughts are preëngaged, or if we are in trouble, we have no desire for food. The presence of a sprightly child, or of friends, at the board, is a true condiment. How different is the process of digestion when a meal is taken in full view of a pleasing landscape, or behind the bars of a prison-cell! ”

“ And it is an experience almost universally avowed, that the desire for food is keener, that the satisfaction in gratifying appetite is greater and more enjoyable, on the part of the general light feeder than with the almost exclusively flesh-feeder. For this designation is applicable to almost all those who compose the middle-class population of this country. They consume little bread and few vegetables; all the savory dishes are of flesh, with decoctions of flesh alone for soup. ”

“ When thou sittest down to eat, put a knife to thy throat, that is, bridle thy appetite; set not thy heart upon tasting every meat, and be careful to take food in obedience to the necessity rather than the gratification of nature. ”

“ To-day, for instance, I’ll tell you what our food was. Breakfast: good oatmeal with boiled milk and sugar, coffee, war bread, which one of the group toasted before the fire for our table, “bacon” the eternal, which is fried ham, and not very good. Lunch: a kind of meat loaf, rice, with cheese (which we have about every other day) , bread and butter, cocoa, and stewed figs, stewed without sugar. ”

“ Regular meals at, usually, unbroken intervals--dinner, never more than five hours after breakfast; luncheon, unnecessary; animal food, once certainly, in some lighter form, twice a day--are the suggestions of common sense followed out in most well-regulated households. But it is not the food which is eaten, but the food which is digested, that nourishes body and brain. ”

“ I have heard a lady say with a tone of virtuous rebuke, when the conversation turned from fashions to cooking, "I give very little time to cooking, we eat to live only"—which is exactly what an animal does. Eating to live is mere feeding. ”

“ We will take sauces, we will drink wine, we will drink beer, we will eat pie-crust, we will eat indescribable productions—we will take celery, and cheese, and ale—we will take liqueur—we will take wine and olives and more wine, and oranges and almonds, and any thing else that may present itself, and we will call all that our dinner, and for such the stomach shall accept it. We will eat more than we need, but will compel an appetite. Art against Appetite forever. ”

“ BREAKFAST, dinner, tea; in extreme cases, breakfast, luncheon, dinner, tea, supper, and a glass of something hot at bedtime. What care we take about feeding the lucky body! Which of us does as much for his mind? ”

“ Ye know of course, and ye all confess that in feasts it is not the nature of the viands, but the disposition of those who feast upon them, which usually causes the pleasure; for instance, when any one comes to the table hungry, the food will taste sweeter than any delicacy, or condiment, or a thousand exquisite preparations for the palate, although it may be the most common article of diet. ”

“ The supreme delight of eating is not in the thing ate, but in the palate of him who eats—a proposition in culinary philosophy proved by the frequent loathing of my own stomach, through a long series of ministerial dinners. ”

“ Although a meal satisfies your hunger you should have dessert, because the educated palate craves that particular spice as a proper finish. Scientists tell us that a dinner digests better because of a tasty dessert, which, they say, gives the final stimulus necessary to dispose of the food previously received. ”

“ To make this the chief element of at least three meals daily, and to despise bread and vegetables, is for them no less a sign of taste than a declaration of belief in the perfection of such food for the purposes of nutrition. ”

“ I shall admire you then only when you scorn not plain bread, when you have persuaded yourself that herbs exist not for other animals only, but for man also—if you shall recognise that vegetables are sufficient food for the stomach into which we now stuff valuable lives, as though it were to keep them for ever. For what matters it what it receives, since it will soon lose all that it has devoured? The apparatus of dishes, containing the spoils of sea and land, gives you pleasure, you say.... ”

“ At dinner the girl has had no exercise to create an appetite, and her meal is made up of pastry and dessert. ‘Remember that her muscles move the limbs, and are composed chiefly of azote, and it is the red meat, or muscle of beef or mutton, that she would eat if she had any appetite for it, that is to say, if her stomach and blood-vessels would endure it. ”

“ They had ways been accustomed to dine daily from their childhood upward, they felt hungry at the habitual dinner-hour, and they sat down to their five courses with an unquestioning acceptance of the necessity for feeding to prevent starvation. ”

“ Health and appetite impart the sweetness to sugar, bread, and meat. ”

“ Food became my favorite mind-game as my stomach gradually healed. We pursued the canteen route quite frequently throughout the day, and each time I would gaze at the treats, yearning for a taste of something. ”

“ The men eat fabulous quantities of food: some require five meals a day. I well remember my first meal in a mountain hemlock shanty. Imagine a long table of unpainted boards with X-shaped legs, and along each side of the table benches for seats. ”

“ I could eat—let me see what I could eat:—I could eat a lobster-salad, and two dozen oysters, and a lump of cake, and a wing and a leg of a chicken—if it was a spring chicken, with watercreases round it—and a Bath-bun, and a sandwich; and in fact I don't know what I couldn't eat, except just that crust in the cupboard. And I do believe I could drink a whole bottle of champagne. ”

“ Eat only to satisfy hunger, and not to qualify the palate after hunger is satisfied. Do not eat a great variety, because digestion is easier and more perfect with but few articles. Let there be a variety which is successive, and not at one meal. ”

“ To my mind there is nothing in all travelling so delightful as these eggs-and-ham interruptions that do duty for meals. Not only is the viand itself so agreeable, but its odour when cooking creates an appetite. ”

“ We gradually came down to two meals a day, and on the return journey these only consisted of eggs, bread and butter, and tea; and yet the simple life and magnificent air made one feel always extraordinarily fit and well and in good spirits. ”

“ Each day in calm contentment
Three hearty meals they made.
And daily Jack and Mrs. Sprat
Ate all the lean and all the fat,
And every day the groom and cook
The children's meal contrived to hook. ”

“ Eat very little pastry, and shun greasy foods or fat meats, like pork or bacon. Pin your faith to vegetables and fruit. A luncheon of two apples is of greater nourishment, and more, real value to good looks, than a repast of mince pie and coffee—two unspeakable horrors to any one who regards health and beauty as worth the having or the striving for. ”

“ And then, with meat well cooked and coffee in abundance, we made such a meal as can be made only by half-starved men who suddenly have come forth from the dark shadows of threatening death into the glad sunshine of safety. ”

“ Save the eating of bread, have we any practice in our lives so consistent as that of eating meat, or any from which we, perhaps wrongly, consider that we derive more benefit, or any about whose conditions, sanitary or humane, we are so careless? ”

“ Those who are engaged, either mentally or physically, throughout the evening, cannot with impunity, eat a very hearty meal previous to that effort; but after their work is done they need nourishing food, and food that is both easily digested and assimilated. ”

“ When food is well prepared it delights the eye, it intoxicates the nose, it pleases the tongue, it stimulates the appetite, and prolongs the healthy craving which it finally satisfies, even as the song of the mother charms the child which it gradually composes for slumber. ”

“ Yet none can deny but that the food itself is a partial cause; for not only new fruit, bread, or corn, but flesh of the same year, is better tasted than that of the former, more forcibly provokes the guests, and enticeth them to eat on. ”

“ Individuals who have eaten quite as many times during the day as nature requires, and who take their tea, and perhaps a little bread and butter, at six, must go at nine or ten, they think, and eat another hearty meal. ”

“ EAT regularly, sparingly, and only of easily digested food, using no highly spiced dishes, pies, pickles, little or no pork, nor ham, and no mince pies; eat slowly, and masticate food thoroughly, and never eat a full meal on going to bed. ”

“ In the indulgence of their appetites they display but few or no traits of epicurism, choosing those kinds of food that are most nutritive, without regarding their taste or flavour. In the preservation of their food, no pains are taken to render it savoury or palatable ”

“ I like to go to a place where you get something to eat besides a cup of beef tea and a cracker, or tea and bread-and-butter. It isn't the kind of supper a hungry man wants when he comes from his business. ”

“ And you make yourself so much work at your meals, using all those pitchers and plates, goblets, spoons, pepper-pots, and the rest. Then, when you eat, you crowd yourselves into one room. I eat alone. My meals are served on a tray by a pretty maid, who kneels before me as I eat, chatting and making herself interesting. ”

“ The same conditions explain why the preparation of food is so choice in the case of the upper classes and so simple in that of the lower. Further, all the accessories of the meal, which are foretastes of the actual repast, are obviously designed to awaken the curiosity and interest, and to augment the desire for food. ”

“ From all this one may infer that whoever sits down to a meal, however plentiful, when he sees it growing less would doubtless have sufficient strength to call out and plead his hunger; and much more when we baptise business with the name of diet. ”