Eating in Two or Three Languages | Page 2

contents, with a family of goldfish swimming round and round in it, as happy as you please.
"'So then, all in a flash, the answer came and I knew the secret of what the provincials in that section of Europe do with water. They loan it to magicians to keep goldfish in. But I prefer to drink a little of it while I am eating and to eat a good deal while I am drinking it; both of which, I may state, I am now doing to the best of my ability, and without let or hindrance, Herb.'"
To be exactly correct about it, I began mapping out this campaign long before I took ship for the homeward hike. The suggestion formed in my mind during those weeks I spent in London, when the resident population first went on the food-card system. You had to have a meat card, I think, to buy raw meat in a butcher shop, and you had to have another kind of meat card, I know, to get cooked meat in a restaurant; and you had to have a friend who was a smuggler or a hoarder to get an adequate supply of sugar under any circumstances. Before I left, every one was carrying round a sheaf of cards. You didn't dare go fishing if you had mislaid your worm card.
The resolution having formed, it budded and grew in my mind when I was up near the Front gallantly exposing myself to the sort of table-d'h?te dinners that were available then in some of the lesser towns immediately behind the firing lines; and it kept right on growing, so that by the time I was ready to sail it was full sized. En route, I thought up an interchangeable answer for two of the oldest conundrums of my childhood, one of them being: "Round as a biscuit, busy as a bee; busiest thing you ever did see," and the other, "Opens like a barn door, shuts like a trap; guess all day and you can't guess that." In the original versions the answer to the first was "A watch," and to the second, "A corset"--if I recall aright But the joint answer I worked out was as follows: "My face!"
Such was the pleasing program I figured out on shipboard. But, as is so frequently the case with the most pleasing things in life, I found the anticipation rather outshone the realisation. Already I detect myself, in a retrospective mood, hankering for the savoury rago?ts we used to get in peasant homes in obscure French villages, and for the meals they gave us at the regimental messes of our own forces, where the cooking was the home sort and good honest American slang abounded.
They called the corned beef Canned Willie; and the stew was known affectionately as Slum, and the doughnuts were Fried Holes. When the adjutant, who had been taking French lessons, remarked "What the la hell does that sacr��-blew cook mean by serving forty-fours at every meal?" you gathered he was getting a mite tired of baked army beans. And if the lieutenant colonel asked you to pass him the Native Sons you knew he meant he wanted prunes. It was a great life, if you didn't weaken--and nobody did.
But, so far as the joys of the table are concerned, I think I shall be able to wait for quite a spell before I yearn for another whack at English eating. I opine Charles Dickens would be a most unhappy man could he but return to the scenes he loved and wrote about.
Dickens, as will be recalled, specialised in mouth-watering descriptions of good things and typically British things to eat--roast sucking pigs, with apples in their snouts; and baked goose; and suety plum puddings like speckled cannon balls; and cold game pies as big round as barrel tops--and all such. He wouldn't find these things prevailing to any noticeable extent in his native island now. Even the kidney, the same being the thing for which an Englishman mainly raises a sheep and which he always did know how to serve up better than any one else on earth, somehow doesn't seem to be the kidney it once upon a time was when it had the proper sorts of trimmings and sauces to go with it.
At this time England is no place for the epicure. In peacetime English cooks, as a rule, were not what you would call versatile; their range, as it were, was limited. Once, seeking to be blithesome and light of 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