Chamberss Edinburgh Journal, No. 428 | Page 2

show-dinner, or something worse. But it is still more objectionable on the score of taste than on the score of health. We find no fault with the elegances of the table, in plate, crystal, china, and so forth; but an English dinner is not an elegant meal. The guests are supposed, by a polite fiction, to have the hunger of the whole day to satisfy, and provision is made accordingly. Varieties of soup, fish, flesh, fowl, game, rich-made dishes, load the board spread for a group of well-dressed men and women, known to have already dined, and who would affect to shudder at so heavy a meal, if it was termed supper. There is a grossness in this arrangement which is strangely at variance with the real advancement of the age in refinement; but it has likewise a paralysing effect both upon the freedom and delicacy of social intercourse. These show-dinners are too costly to be numerous. Even a comparatively wealthy man is compelled to look closely to the number of his entertainments. He scrutinises the claims of his acquaintance; he keeps a debtor and creditor account of dinners with them; and if now and then he invites a guest for the sake of his social qualities, he sets him down in the bill of cost. This does away with all the finer social feelings which it should be the province of such meetings to foster and gratify, and adds a tone of moral vulgarity to the material vulgarity of the repast.
Is it impossible to bring about a reform in this important matter? Difficult, not impossible. Dinner-giving is not an integral part of the monarchy, and it might therefore be touched--if not too rudely--without a political revolution. The grand obstacle would be the unsettled claims. A has given B a show-dinner, and it is the duty of B to return it. Invitation for invitation is the law of the game. How, then, stands the account? Would it be necessary to institute a dinner-insolvency court, where all defaulters might take the benefit of the act? We think not. No creditor in his senses would refuse a handsome composition; and if it could be shewn--as it might in the present case--that the composition was in real, though not ostensible value, equivalent to the debt, hesitation would vanish. Before proceeding to shew this, we shall present what may be called the common-sense statement of the whole case:--
Mankind in their natural state dine at noon, or at least in the middle of the working-day. It is the middle meal of the day--the central of three. In our artificial system of society, it has been postponed to a late hour of the afternoon, so as either to become the second of two meals, or, where lunch is taken, the third of three. The change is not consistent with hygienic principle; for, if lunch be not taken, the interval between breakfast and dinner is too great, and in that case hunger tempts to make the meal too heavy for the exhausted powers of the stomach: if, on the contrary, lunch be taken, dinner becomes an absurdity, as in that case a meal so elaborate and heavy is not required, and cannot healthfully be partaken of at so late an hour. Nevertheless, in a plan of life which devotes the eight or nine hours after breakfast either to business or to out-door amusements, it is needless to think of reviving the old meridian dinner for any but ladies and other stay-at-home people; nor even for them, seeing that they must be mainly determined in their arrangements by those leading members of the family who have to spend that part of the day away from home.
There is a need for some reform which would at once accommodate the busy, and save the multitude from the disadvantages of heavy six-and-seven-o'clock dinners. This might be effected by arranging for only a supper at six or seven o'clock--that is, some lighter meal than dinner--leaving every one to take such a lunch in the middle of the day as he could find an opportunity of eating. Let this supper be the meal of family reunions--the meal of society. Composed of a few light tasteful dishes, accompanied by other indulgences, according to taste or inclination, and followed by coffee, it would be a cheerful and not necessarily unhealthful affair. As a meal to which to invite friends, being cheaper, it would allow of more society being indulged in than is compatible with the monstrous presentments of meat and drink which constitute the modern company dinner. It would be practically a revival of those nice supper-parties which our grandfathers indulged in after the hours of business, and of the pleasantness of which we have such glowing accounts.
That this is really the common-sense view of