Eating in Two or Three Languages | Page 6

an additional edge put upon it by the privations I had undergone since landing, there was to be had no beef at all! Of a sudden this establishment, lacking its roast beef, became to me as the tragedy of Hamlet, the melancholy Dane, would be with Hamlet and Ophelia and her pa and the ghost and the wicked queen, and both the gravediggers, all left out.
When I had seated myself one of the carvers came to me and, with an abased and apologetic air, very different from his jaunty manner of yore, explained in a husky half whisper that I might have jugged hare or I might have boiled codfish, or I might have one of the awful dishes. Anyhow, that was what I understood him to say.
This last had an especially daunting sound, but I suppose I was in a morbid state, anyhow, by now; and so I made further inquiry and ascertained from him that the restrictions applying to the sale of meat did not apply to the more intimate organs of the butchered animal, such as the liver and the heart, and, in the case of a cow, the tripe. But the English, with characteristic bluntness, choose to call one of these in its cooked state an offal dish--pronounced as spelled and frequently tasting as pronounced.
As one who had primed himself for a pound or so of the rib-roast section of a grass-fed steer, I was not to be put off with one of the critter's spare parts, as it were. Nor did the thought of codfish, and especially boiled codfish, appeal to me greatly. I have no settled antipathy to the desiccated tissues of this worthy deep-sea voyager when made up into fish cakes. Moreover that young and adolescent creature, commonly called a Boston scrod, which is a codfish whose voice is just changing, is not without its attractions; but the full-grown species is not a favourite of mine.
To me there has ever been something depressing about an adult codfish. Any one who has ever had occasion to take cod-liver oil--as who, unhappily, has not?--is bound to appreciate the true feelings that must inevitably come to a codfish as he goes to and fro in the deep for years on a stretch, carrying that kind of a liver about with him all the while.
As a last resort I took the jugged hare; but jugged hare was not what I craved. At eventide, returning to the same restaurant, I was luckier. I found mutton on the menu; but, even so, yet another hard blow awaited me. By reason of the meat-rationing arrangements a single purchaser was restricted to so many ounces a week, and no more. The portion I received in exchange for a corner clipped off my meat card was but a mere reminder of what a portion in that house would have been in the old days.
There had been a time when a sincere but careless diner from up Scotland way, down in London on a visit, would have carried away more than that much on his necktie; which did not matter particularly then, when food was plentiful; and, besides, usually he wore a pattern of necktie which was improved by almost anything that was spilled upon it. But it did matter to me that I had to dine on this hangnail pared from a sheep.
A few days later I partook of a fast at what was supposed to be a luncheon, which the Lord Mayor of London attended, in company with sundry other notables. Earlier readings had led me to expect an endless array of spicy and succulent viands at any table a Lord Mayor might grace with his presence. Such, though, was not the case here. We had eggs for an entr��e; and after that we had plain boiled turbot, which to my mind is no great shakes of a fish, even when tuckered up with sauces; and after that we had coffee and cigars; and finally we had several cracking good speeches by members of a race whose men are erroneously believed by some Americans to be practically inarticulate when they get up on their feet and try to talk.
There was a touch of tragedy mingled in with the comedy of the situation in the spectacle of these Englishmen, belonging to a nation of proverbially generous feeders, stinting themselves and cutting 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