Eating in Two or Three Languages | Page 3

heart,
I wrote an article in which I said there were only three dependable
vegetables on the average Englishman's everyday menu--boiled
potatoes, boiled cabbage, and a second helping of the boiled potatoes.
That was an error on my part; I was unintentionally guilty of the crime
of underestimation. 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, 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.
From the vegetable marrow you derive no nourishment, and certainly
you derive no exercise; for, being a soft, weak, spiritless thing, it offers
no resistance whatever, and it looks a good deal like a streak of
solidified fog and tastes like the place where an indisposed carrot spent
the night. Next to our summer squash it is the feeblest imitation that
ever masqueraded in a skin and called itself a vegetable. Yet its friends
over there seem to set much store by it.
Likewise the English cook has always gone in rather extensively for

boiling things. When in doubt she boiled. 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 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.
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.
I shall never forget the first meals I had on English soil, this latest trip.
At the port where we landed, in the early afternoon of a raw day, you
could get tea if you cared for tea, which I do not; but there was no
sugar--only saccharine--to sweeten it with, and no rich cream, or even
skim milk, available with which to dilute it. The accompanying buns
had a flat, dry, floury taste, and the portions of butter served with them
were very homoeopathic indeed as to size and very oleomargarinish as
to flavour.
Going up to London we rode in a train that was crowded and darkened.
Brilliantly illuminated trains scooting across country offered an
excellent mark for the aim of hostile air raiders, you know; so in each
compartment the gloom was enhanced rather than dissipated by two
tiny pin points of a ghastly pale-blue gas flame. I do not know why
there should have been two of these lights, unless it was that the second
one was added so that by its wan flickerings you could see the first one,
and vice versa.
During the trip, which lasted several hours longer than the scheduled

running time, we had for refreshments a few gnarly apples, purchased
at a way station; and that was all. Recalling the meals that formerly had
been served aboard the boat trains of this road, I realised I was getting
my preliminary dose of life on an island whose surrounding waters
were pestered by U-boats and whose shipping was needed for transport
service. But I pinned my gastronomic hopes on London, that city famed
of old for the plenteous prodigality of its victualling facilities. In my
ignorance I figured that the rigours of rationing could not affect London
to any very noticeable extent. A little trimming down here and there, an
enforced curtailment in this direction and that--yes, perhaps so; but
surely nothing more serious.
Immediately on arrival we chartered a taxicab--a companion and I did.
This was not so easy a job as might be imagined by one who formed
his opinions on past recollections of London, because,