Eating in Two or Three Languages | Page 7

the
lardings and the sweetenings and the garnishments down to the limit
that there might be a greater abundance of solid sustenance
forthcoming for their fighting forces.
I do not mean by this that there was any real lack of nourishing
provender in London or anywhere else in England that I went. The long
queues of waiting patrons in front of the butcher shops during the first
few days of my sojourn very soon disappeared when people learned
that they could be sure of getting meat of one sort or another, and at a
price fixed by law; which was a good thing too, seeing that thereby the
extortioner and the profiteer lost their chances to gain unduly through
the necessities of the populace. So far as I was able to ascertain, nobody
on the island actually suffered--except the present writer of these lines;
and he suffered chiefly because he could not restrain himself from
comparing the English foods of pre-war periods with the English foods
of the hour.

If things were thus in England, what would they be in France? This was
the question I repeatedly put to myself. But when I got to France a
surprise awaited me. It was a surprise deferred, because for the first
week of my sojourn upon French soil I was the guest of the British
military authorities at a château maintained for the entertainment of
visiting Americans who bore special credentials from the British
Foreign Office.
Here, because Britain took such good and splendid care to provide
amply for her men in uniform, there was a wide variety of good food
and an abundance of it for the guests and hosts alike. I figured, though,
that when I had passed beyond the zone of this gracious hospitality
there would be slim pickings. Not at all!
In Paris there was to be had all the food and nearly all the sorts of food
any appetite, however fastidious, might crave. This was before the
French borrowed the card system of ration control in order to govern
the consumption of certain of the necessities. Of poultry and of sea
foods the only limits to what one might order were his interior capacity
and his purse. Of red meats there was seemingly a boundless supply.
One reason for this plenitude lay in the fact that France, to a very great
extent, is a self-contained, self-supporting land, which England
distinctly is not; and another reason undoubtedly was that the French,
being more frugal and careful than their British or their American
brethren ever have been, make culinary use of a great deal of healthful
provender which the English-speaking races throw away. Merely by
glancing at the hors d'oeuvres served at luncheon in a medium-priced
café in Paris one can get a good general idea of what discriminating
persons declined to eat at dinner the night before.
The Parisian garbage collector must work by the day and not by the job.
On a piecework contract he would starve to death. And a third reason
was that all through the country the peasants, by request of the
Government, were slaughtering their surplus beeves and sheep and
swine, so there might be more forage for the army horses and more
grain available for the flour rations of the soldiers.

In Paris the bread was indifferently poor. An individual was restricted
to one medium-sized roll of bread at a meal. Butter was not by any
means abundant, and of sugar there was none to be had at all unless the
traveller had bethought him to slip a supply into the country with him.
The bulk of the milk supply was requisitioned for babies and invalids
and disabled soldiers. Cakes or pastries in any form were absolutely
prohibited in the public eating places, and, I think, in private homes as
well. But of beef and mutton and veal and fowls, and the various
products of the humble but widely versatile pig, there was no end,
provided you had the inclination plus the price.
And so, though the lack of sugar in one's food gave one an almost
constant craving for something sweet--and incidentally insured a host
of friends for anybody who came along with a box of American candy
under his arm or a few cakes of sweet chocolate in his pocket--one
might take his choice of a wide diversity of fare at any restaurant of the
first or second class, and keep well stayed.
In connection with the Paris restaurants I made a most interesting
discovery, which was that when France called up her available man
power at the time of the great mobilisation, the military heads somehow
overlooked one group who, for their sins, should have been sent up
where bullets and Huns were thickest. The slum gave up its
Apache--and a