The Art of Entertaining Part 8

She must avoid too many highly scented flowers. People are sometimes weary of the "rapture of roses." Horace says: "Avoid, at an agreeable entertainment, discordant music, and muddy perfume, and poppies mixed with Sardinian honey; they give offence." Which is only another way of saying that some music may be too heavy, and the perfume of flowers too strong.

Remember, young hostess, or old hostess, that your dinner is to be made up of people who have to sit two hours chatting with each other, and that this is of itself a severe ordeal of patience.

Good breeding is said to be the apotheosis of self-restraint, and so is good feeding. Good breeding puts nature under restraint, controls the temper, and refines the speech. Good feeding, unless it is as well governed as it should be, inflames the nose and the temper, and enlarges the girth most unbecomingly. Good breeding is the guardian angel of a woman. Good feeding, that is, conscientious dining, must be the patron saint of a man! A truly well bred and well fed man is quiet in dress, does not talk slang, is not prosy, is never unbecomingly silent, nor is he too garrulous. He is always respectful to everybody, kind to the weak, helpful to the feeble. He may not be an especially lofty character, but good feeding inducts him into the character and duties of a gentleman. He simulates a virtue if he has it not, especially after dinner. _n.o.blesse oblige_ is his motto, and he feels what is due to himself.

Can we be a thorough-bred, or a thorough-fed, all by ourselves? It is easy enough to learn when and where to leave a card, how to behave at a dinner, how to use a fork, how to receive and how to drop an acquaintance; but what a varied education is that which leads up to good feeding, to becoming a conscientious diner. It is not given to every one, this lofty grace.

A dinner should be a good basis for a mutual understanding. They say that few great enterprises have been conducted without it. People are sure to like each other much better after dining together. It is better to go home from a dinner remembering how clever everybody was, than to go home merely to wonder at the opulence that could compa.s.s such a pageant.

A dinner should put every one into his best talking condition. The quips and quirks of excited fancy should come gracefully, for society well arranged brings about the attrition of wits. If one is comfortable and well-fed--not gorged--he is in his best condition.

The more civilized the world gets, the more difficult it is to amuse it. It is the common complaint of the children of luxury that dinners are dull and society stupid. How can the reformer make society more amusing and less dangerous? Eliminate scandal and back-biting.

The danger and trials and difficulties of dinner-giving are manifold.

First, whom shall we ask? Will they come? It is often the fate of the hostess, in the busy season, to invite forty people before she gets twelve. Having got the twelve, she then has perhaps a few days before the dinner to receive the unwelcome news that Jones has a cold, Mrs.

Brown has lost a relative, and Miss Malcontent has gone to Was.h.i.+ngton.

The dinner has to be reconstructed; deprived of its original intention it becomes a balloon which has lost ballast. It goes drifting about, and there is no health in it and no purpose. This is especially true also of those dinners which are conducted on debt-paying principles.

How many hard-worked, rich men in America are bored to death by the gilded and over-burdened splendour of their wives' dinners and those to which they are to go. They sit looking at their hands during two or three courses, poor dyspeptics who cannot eat. To relieve them, to bring them into communion with their next neighbour, with whom they have nothing in common, what shall one do? Oh, that depressing cloud which settles over the jaded senses of even the conscientious diner, as he fails to make his neighbour on either side say anything but yes or no!

We must, perhaps, before we give the perfect dinner, renounce the idea that dinner should be on a commercial basis. Of course our social debts must be paid. It is a large subject, like the lighting of a city, the cleaning of the streets, and must be approached carefully, so that the lesser evil may not swamp the greater good. Do not invite twelve people to bore them.

The dinner hour differs in different cities,--from seven to half-past seven, to eight, and eight and a half; all these have their adherents.

In London, many a party does not sit down until nine. Hence the necessity of a hearty meal at five o'clock tea. The royalties, all blessed with good appet.i.tes, eat eggs on toast, hot scones and other good things at five o'clock tea, and take often an _avant gout_ also at seven.

In our country half-past seven is generally the most convenient hour, unless one is going to the play afterward, when seven is better. A dinner should not last more than an hour and a half. But it does last sometimes three hours.

Ladies dress for a large dinner often in low neck and short sleeves, wear their jewels, and altogether their finest things. But now Pompadour waists are allowed. For a small dinner, the Pompadour dress, half-open at the throat, with a few jewels, is in better taste.

Men should be always in full dress,--black coat, waistcoat, and trousers, and white cravat. There is no variation from this dress at a dinner, large or small.

For ladies in delicate health who cannot expose throat or arms, there is always the largest liberty allowed; but the dinner dress must be handsome.

In leaving the house and ordering the carriage, name the earliest hour rather than the latest; it is better to keep one's coachman waiting than to weary one's hostess. It is quite impossible to say when one will leave, as there may be music, recitations, and so on, after the dinner. It is now quite the fas.h.i.+on, as in London, to ask people in after the dinner.

Everybody should go to a dinner intending to be agreeable.

"E'en at a dinner some will be unblessed, However good the viands, and well dressed; They always come to table with a scowl, Squint with a face of verjuice o'er each dish, Fault the poor flesh, and quarrel with the fish, Curse cook, and wife, and loathing, eat and growl."

Such men should never be asked twice; yet such were Dr. Johnson, and later on, Abraham Hayward, the English critic, who were invited out every night of their lives. It is a poor requital for hospitality, to allow any personal ill-temper to interfere with the pleasure of the feast. Some hostesses send around the champagne early to unloose the tongues; and this has generally a good effect if the party be dull.

Excessive heat in a room is the most benumbing of all overweights. Let the hostess have plenty of oxygen to begin with.

For a little dinner of eight we might suggest that the hostess write:--

DEAR MRS. SULLIVAN,--Will you and Mr. Sullivan dine with us on Thursday at half-past seven to meet Mr. and Mrs. Evarts, quite informally?

Ever yours truly, MARY MONTGOMERY.

This accepted, which it should be in the first person, cordially, as it is written, let us see what we would have for dinner--

Sherry. Soup. Sorrel, _a l'essence de veau_.

Lobsters, _saute a la Bonnefoy_. Chablis.

Veal Cutlets, _a la Zingara_.

Fried sweet potatoes. Champagne.

Roast Red-Head Ducks. Currant jelly.

Claret. Curled Celery in gla.s.ses. Olives.

Cheese. Salad.

Frozen Pudding.

Grapes.

Coffee. Liqueurs.

Or, if you please, a brown soup, a white fish or ba.s.s, boiled, a saddle of mutton, a pair of prairie chickens and salad, a plate of broiled mushrooms, a _sorbet_ of Maraschino, cheese, ice-cream, fruit.

It is not a bad "look-out," is it?

How well the Italians understand the little dinner! They are frugal but conscientious diners until they get to the dessert.

Their dishes have a relish of the forest and the field. First comes wild boar, stewed in a delicious condiment called sour-sweet sauce, composed of almonds, pistachio nuts, and plums. Quails, with a tw.a.n.g of aromatic herbs, are followed by macaroni flavoured with spiced livers, c.o.c.ks' combs, and eggs called _risotto_, then golden _fritto_, cooked in the purest _cru_ of olive oil, and _quocchi_ cakes, of newly ground Indian corn, which is all that our roasted green corn is, without the trouble of gnawing it off the cob,--a process abhorrent to the conscientious diner unless he is alone. One should first take monastic vows of extreme austerity before he eats the forbidden fruit, onion, or the delicious corn. But when we can conquer Italian cooking, we can eat these two delicious things, nor fear to whisper to our best friend, nor fear to be seen eating.

The triumphs of the _dolce_ belong also to the Italians. Their sugared fruits, ices, and pastry are all matchless; and their wines, Chianti, Broglio, and Vino Santo, a kind of Malaga, as "frankly luscious as the first grape can make it," are all delicious.

VARIOUS MODES OF GASTRONOMIC GRATIFICATION.

Phyllis, I have a cask full of Albanian wine upwards of nine years old; I have parsley in the garden for the weaving of chaplets. The house s.h.i.+nes cheerfully with plate; all hands are busy. HORACE, _Ode XI_.

Some old French wit spoke of an "idea which could be canonized."

Perhaps yet we may have a Saint Table-Cloth. There have been worse saints than Saint Table-Cloth and clean linen, since the days of Louis XIII!

We notice in the old pictures of feasting that the table-cloth was of itself a picture,--lace, in squares, blocks, and stripes, sometimes only lace over a colour, but generally mixed with linen.

It was the highest ambition of the Dutch housewife to have much double damask of snowy whiteness in her table-linen chest. That is still the grand reliable table-linen. No one can go astray who uses it.

Table-linen is now embroidered in coloured cottons, or half of its threads are drawn out and it is then sewed over into lace-work. It is then thrown over a colour, generally bright red. But pale lilac is more refined, and very becoming to the lace-work.

Not a particle of coa.r.s.e food must go on that table-cloth. Everything must be brought to each guest from the broad, magnificent buffet; all must be served _a la Russe_ from behind a grand, impenetrable screen, which should fence off every dining-room from the butler's pantry and the kitchen. All that goes on behind that screen is the butler's business, and not ours. The butler is a portly man, presumably, with a clean-shaven face, of English parentage. He has the key of the wine-cellar and of the silver-chest, two heavy responsibilities; for nowadays, not to go into the question of the wines, the silver-chest is getting weighty. Silver and silver-gilt dishes, banished for some years, are now rea.s.serting their pre-eminent fitness for the dinner-table: The plates may be of solid silver; so are the high candlesticks and the salt-cellars, of various and beautiful designs after Benvenuto Cellini.

Old silver is reappearing, and happy the hostess who has a real Queen Anne teapot. The soup-tureen of silver is again used, and so are the old beer-mugs. Our Dutch ancestors were much alive to good silver; he may rejoice who, joking apart, had a Dutch uncle. I, for one, do not like to eat off a metallic plate, be it of silver or gold. It is disagreeable to hear the knife sc.r.a.pe on it, even with the delicate business of cutting a morsel of red canvas-back. Gastronomic gratification should be so highly refined that it trembles at a crumpled rose-leaf. Porcelain plates seem to be perfect, if they have not on them the beautiful head of Lamballe. n.o.body at a dinner desires to cut her head off again, or to be reminded of the French Revolution.

Nor should we hurry. A master says, "I have arrived at such a point that if the calls of business or pleasure did not interpose, there would be no fixed date for finding what time might elapse between the first gla.s.s of sherry and the final Maraschino."

However, the pleasures of a dinner may be too prolonged. Men like to sit longer eating and drinking than women; so when a dinner is of both s.e.xes it should not continue more than one hour and a half. Horace, that prince of diners, objected to the long-drawn-out meal. "Then we drank, each as much as he felt the need," meant no orgy amongst the Greeks.

But if the talk lingers after the biscuit and cheese the hostess need not interrupt it.

Talleyrand is said to have introduced into France the custom of taking Parmesan with the soup, and the Madeira after it.