Theres Pippins and Cheese to Come | Page 3

be vagrant--would drift towards family skeletons. Or maybe the domestic traits prevail and you would think of dress-clothes hanging in camphorated bags and a row of winter boots upon a shelf.
I am disqualified to pass upon the merits of a cook book, for the reason that I have little discrimination in food. It is not that I am totally indifferent to what lies on the platter. Indeed, I have more than a tribal aversion to pork in general, while, on the other hand, I quicken joyfully when noodles are interspersed with bacon. I have a tooth for sweets, too, although I hold it unmanly and deny it as I can. I am told also--although I resent it--that my eye lights up on the appearance of a tray of French pastry. I admit gladly, however, my love of onions, whether they come hissing from the skillet, or lie in their first tender whiteness. They are at their best when they are placed on bread and are eaten largely at midnight after society has done its worst.
A fine dinner is lost within me. A quail is but an inferior chicken--a poor relation outside the exclusive hennery. Terrapin sits low in my regard, even though it has wallowed in the most aristocratic marsh. Through such dinners I hack and saw my way without even gaining a memory of my progress. If asked the courses, I balk after the recital of the soup. Indeed, I am so forgetful of food, even when I dine at home, that I can well believe that Adam when he was questioned about the apple was in real confusion. He had or he had not. It was mixed with the pomegranate or the quince that Eve had sliced and cooked on the day before.
A dinner at its best is brought to a single focus. There is one dish to dominate the cloth, a single bulk to which all other dishes are subordinate. If there be turkey, it should mount from a central platter. Its protruding legs out-top the candles. All other foods are, as it were, privates in Caesar's army. They do no more than flank the pageant. Nor may the pantry hold too many secrets. Within reason, everything should be set out at once, or at least a gossip of its coming should run before. Otherwise, if the stew is savory, how shall one reserve a corner for the custard? One must partition himself justly--else, by an over-stowage at the end, he list and sink.
I am partial to picnics--the spreading of the cloth in the woods or beside a stream--although I am not avid for sandwiches unless hunger press me. Rather, let there be a skillet in the company and let a fire be started! Nor need a picnic consume the day. In summer it requires but the late afternoon, with such borrowing of the night as is necessary for the journey home. You leave the street car, clanking with your bundles like an itinerant tinman. You follow a stream, which on these lower stretches, it is sad to say, is already infected with the vices of the city. Like many a countryman who has come to town, it has fallen to dissipation. It shows the marks of the bottle. Further up, its course is cleaner. You cross it in the mud. Was it not Christian who fell into the bog because of the burden on his back? Then you climb a villainously long hill and pop out upon an open platform above the city.
The height commands a prospect to the west. Below is the smoke of a thousand suppers. Up from the city there comes the hum of life, now somewhat fallen with the traffic of the day--as though Nature already practiced the tune for sending her creatures off to sleep. You light a fire. The baskets disgorge their secrets. Ants and other leviathans think evidently that a circus has come or that bears are in the town. The chops and bacon achieve their appointed destiny. You throw the last bone across your shoulder. It slips and rattles to the river. The sun sets. Night like an ancient dame puts on her jewels:
And now that I have climbed and won this height, I must tread downward through the sloping shade And travel the bewildered tracks till night. Yet for this hour I still may here be stayed And see the gold air and the silver fade And the last bird fly into the last light.
By these confessions you will see how unfit I am to comment on the old cook book of Sir Kenelm Digby. Yet it lies before me. It may have escaped your memory in the din of other things, that in the time when Oliver Cromwell still walked the earth, there lived in England