Part 12

When we had finished our dinner we sat in contentment for a while on the lawn, listening to the music of the band and drinking our coffee, and then, as an aid to digestion, went in to The Hereafter side-show, almost next door, where skeletons dance and a bridge swings and rocks over a torrent of painted fire; and then on to the booths where the china of "happy homes" can be broken up at a penny a shot, where the two ladies did desperate execution against the kitchen service. And next to the revolving cylinders, where we watched enterprising young gentlemen stand on their heads involuntarily, and to the variations on hoop-la stalls, at one of which we all tried unsuccessfully to win watches. And on to the summer ballroom; and to the bowl-slide; and finally, as the supreme digestive, we all four went down the water chute, I taking the precaution of leaving my tall hat below in charge of the gate man: for one year going down this chute my Tiny Grandchild, being shot into the air by the bump on the water, descended on my hat, which I held in my hand, and turned it into a good imitation of an accordion.

XXIII

GOLDSTEIN'S

HORS D'ŒUVRE. Smoked Salmon. Solomon Gundy. Olives.

SOUPS. Frimsell. Matsoklese. Pease and beans.

FISH. Brown stewed carp. White stewed gurnet. Fried soles. Fried plaice.

ENTRÉES. Roast veal (white stew). Filleted steak (brown stew).

POULTRY. Roast capon. Roast chicken. Smoked beef. Tongue.

VEGETABLES. Spinach. Sauerkraut. Potatoes. Cucumbers. Green salad.

SWEETS. Kugel. Stewed prunes. Almond pudding. Apple staffen.

When I looked at the above I groaned aloud. Was it possible, I thought, that any human being could eat a meal of such a length and yet live? I looked at my two companions, but they showed no signs of terror, so I took up knife and fork and bade the waiter do his duty.

The _raison d'être_ of the dinner was this: Thinking of untried culinary experiences, I told one of the great lights of the Jewish community that I should like some day to eat a "kosher" dinner at a typical restaurant, and he said that the matter was easily enough arranged; and by telegram informed me that dinner was ordered for that evening at Goldstein's and that I was to call for him in the City at six.

When I and a gallant soul, who had sworn to accompany me through thick and thin, arrived at the office of the orderer of the dinner, we found a note of apology from him. The dinner would be ready for us, and his best friend would do the honours as master of the ceremonies, but he himself was seedy and had gone home.

On, in the pouring rain, we three devoted soldiers of the fork went, in a four-wheeler cab, to our fate. The cab pulled up at a narrow doorway, and we were at Goldstein's. Through a short passage we went towards a little staircase, and our master of the ceremonies pointed out on the post of a door that led into the public room of the restaurant a triangular piece of zinc, a Mazuza, the little case in which is placed a copy of the Ten Commandments. Upstairs we climbed into a small room with no distinctive features about it. A table was laid for six. There were roses in a tall glass vase in the middle of the table, and a buttonhole bouquet in each napkin. A piano, chairs covered with black leather, low cupboards with painted tea-trays and well-worn books on the top of them, an old-fashioned bell-rope, a mantelpiece with painted glass vases on it and a little clock, framed prints on the walls, two gas globes--these were the fittings of an everyday kind of apartment.

We took our places, and the waiter, in dress clothes, after a surprised inquiry as to whether we were the only guests at the feast, put the menu before us. It was then that, encouraged by the bold front shown by my two comrades, I, after a moment of tremor, told the waiter to do his duty.

I had asked to have everything explained to me, and before the _hors d'œuvre_ were brought in the master of the ceremonies, taking a book from the top of one of the dwarf cupboards, showed me the Grace before meat, a solemn little prayer which is really beautiful in its simplicity. With the Grace comes the ceremony of the host breaking bread, dipping the broken pieces in salt, and handing them round to his guests, who sit with covered heads.

Of the _hors d'œuvre_, Solomon Gundy, which had a strange sound to me, was a form of pickled herring, excellently appetising.

Before the soup was brought up, the master of the ceremonies explained that the Frimsell was made from stock, and a paste of eggs and flour rolled into tiny threads like vermicelli, while the Matsoklese had in it balls of unleavened flour. When the soup was brought the two were combined, and the tiny threads and the balls of dough both swam in a liquid which had somewhat the taste of vermicelli soup. The master of the ceremonies told me I must taste the pease and beans soup which followed, as it is a very old-fashioned Jewish dish. It is very like a rich pease-soup, and is cooked in carefully skimmed fat. In the great earthenware jar which holds the soup is cooked the "kugel," a kind of pease-pudding, which was to appear much later at the feast.

Goldstein's is the restaurant patronised by the "froom," the strictest observers of religious observances, of the Jewish community, and we should by right only have drunk unfermented Muscat wine with our repast, but some capital hock took its place, and when the master of the ceremonies and the faithful soul touched glasses, one said "Lekhaim," and the other answered the greeting with "Tavim." Then, before the fish was put on the table, the master of the ceremonies told me of the elaborate care that was taken in the selection of animals to be killed, of the inspection of the butcher's knives, of the tests applied to the dead animals to see that the flesh is good, of the soaking and salting of the meat and the drawing-out of the veins from it. The many restrictions, originally imposed during the wandering in the desert, which make shell-fish, and wild game, and scaleless fish unlawful food--these and many other interesting items of information were imparted to me.

The white-stewed gurnet, with chopped parsley and a sauce of egg and lemon-juice, tempered by onion flavouring, was excellent. In the brown sauce served with the carp were such curious ingredients as treacle, gingerbread and onions, but the result, a strong, rich sauce, is very pleasant to the taste. The great cold fried soles standing on their heads and touching tails, and the two big sections of plaice flanking them, I knew must be good; but I explained to the master of ceremonies that I had already nearly eaten a full-sized man's dinner, and that I must be left a little appetite to cope with what was to come.

Very tender veal, with a sauce of egg and lemon, which had a thin, sharp taste, and a steak, tender also, stewed with walnuts, an excellent dish to make a dinner of, were the next items on the menu, and I tasted each; but I protested against the capon and the chicken as being an overplus of good things, and the master of the ceremonies--who, I think, had a latent fear that I might burst before the feast came to an end--told the waiter not to bring them up.

The smoked beef was a delicious firm brisket, and the tongue, salted, was also exceptionally good. I felt that the last feeble rag of an appetite had gone, but the cucumber, a noble Dutch fellow, pickled in salt and water in Holland, came to my aid, and a slice of this, better than any _sorbet_ that I know of, gave me the necessary power to attempt, in a last despairing effort, the kugel and apple staffen and almond pudding.

The staffen is a rich mixture of many fruits and candies with a thin crust. The kugel is a pease-pudding cooked, as I have written above, in the pease and beans soup. The almond pudding is one of those moist delicacies that I thought only the French had the secret of making.

Coffee--no milk, even if we had wanted it, for milk and butter are not allowed on the same table as flesh--and a liqueur of brandy, and then, going downstairs, we looked into the two simple rooms, running into each other, which form the public restaurant, rooms empty at nine P.M., but crowded at the midday meal.

Mr Goldstein, who was there, told us that his patrons had become so numerous that he would soon have to move to larger premises, and may by now have done so, and certainly the cooking at the restaurant is excellent, and I do not wonder at its obtaining much patronage.

What this Gargantuan repast cost I do not know, for the designer of the feast said that the bill was to be sent to him.

I think that a "kosher" dinner, if this is a fair specimen, is a succession of admirably cooked dishes. But an ordinary man should be allowed a week in which to eat it.

XXIV

THE MITRE

AT HAMPTON COURT

We all know that in the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love, but it is not such common knowledge that in the early summer the thoughts of a man of mature age turn with equal agility to duckling and green peas. And with duckling and green peas I always associate the Mitre at Hampton Court. So it came to pass that I asked a crony of like tastes to myself to meet me on a spring Sunday at Hampton Court in the late afternoon, and suggested that we should walk in the gardens of the Palace and see the rhododendrons, which were then in great beauty, and that we should afterwards dine at the Mitre, sup green pea soup and eat duckling and green peas.

The Mitre is the most typically late Georgian, or early Victorian, inn that I know of in the neighbourhood of London, and its great attraction is that it has kept the old cookery, the old furniture, the old pictures, the old china, the old plate, and last, but not least, the old manners. It has been quite unconscious of the changes in the outside world, it knows nothing of electric light and such newfangled ideas, there are no French rolls to be found in its bread baskets, and its ducklings are spitted and roasted before an open fire, being well basted the while.

This, very briefly, is the history of the Mitre. It is the direct successor of the Toy Inn, an old house which stood on Crown property, and the lease of which expired about the year of the battle of Waterloo. The Toy was pulled down, and Mr Goodman, and Mr Sadler with him, were obliged to look for a new home in which to carry on the old traditions. This they found in three houses standing together near the wooden bridge (alas and alack that the picturesque old bridge has given place to the dull-red iron horror which was built in 1865!), and one of the charms of the Mitre is the quaint irregularity of its architecture, the brown bricks and red tiles of its face turned towards the Palace, its white face and slate roof on the river side, the great wistaria and the ivy knitting together all the various features.

And parenthetically I wish to protest against the hiding away of the Mitre from the view of the people as they cross the bridge, or of those who row or go by launch or river. Just in front of the Mitre Hotel is an eyot, which I believe is Government property. The willows on this have been allowed to grow so high that they entirely blot out the view from the river of the white face of the Mitre, and the long row of windows of its banqueting-room; and equally, of course, the trees obstruct the view of the river from the delightful little bowling-green with ivied arches which is between the hotel and the backwater. If, whoever he is, the Government official who has this eyot in his charge will walk across the Hampton Court bridge or sit for ten minutes on the lawn before the Mitre he will, I am sure, require no further prompting to order the pollarding of the trees.

Mr Goodman came to the three old houses and put up the name of the Mitre in golden letters, and gave orders that the pillars that support the great bow-window on the first floor should be painted as though they were of very variegated marble, and with him from the old inn he brought the little glass bow window which looks out from the bar parlour into the Mitre hall, and he also brought with him all the old Spode china from the Toy. Some of the original china is still preserved at the Mitre, and whenever new plates and new dishes are required Messrs Copeland, the successors to Spode, make them in the old moulds, though those moulds are now wearing out; and the plates from which the guests of to-day eat their lunches and dinners are identical with those that came across the Green from the Toy. After a while Mr Goodman moved on to the Whitehall Hotel, a big white-faced house which looks out on to the Green, and which abuts on Cardinal Wolsey's old stables, and Mr Sadler the First reigned in his stead.

It was Mr Sadler the First who bought the old Sheffield plate which makes such a brave show at the banquets at the Mitre, tureens in which the soup comes to table, and the platters on which the fish is served.

Six o'clock was the hour at which I had asked my crony to meet me on the steps of the Mitre that we might consult together as to the menu of our dinner, and I found him waiting for me chatting to Mr Sadler, the elder of the two sons of Mr Sadler the First, and in the background was Bagwell, the head waiter, who is a model to all British head waiters. He has the appearance and the comforting manner of a high dignitary of the Church, and I am quite sure would wear knee-breeches and an apron and rosetted tall hat with as good grace as any bishop in the land. The oldest inhabitants of Hampton Court, when I have sung Bagwell's praises to them, have said to me: "Ah, but you ought to have known Smith," the head waiter who flourished some thirty years ago. But to them I reply that not having known Smith it is a comfort to me to be acquainted with Bagwell. Bagwell had on a card a suggested menu for our dinner, which ran thus:--Green Pea Soup, Grilled Trout, Stewed Eels, Duckling and Green Peas and New Potatoes, cold Asparagus and Gooseberry Tart. The eels I looked upon as a superfluity, though they are one of the dishes of the house and are kept alive in the hotel in tanks until the moment comes for their sacrifice. I also parried the suggestion that sweetbreads should be included, for I hold that a duckling, if he be a good duckling, well roasted and filled with savoury stuffing, is so good a dish that he requires no supplement of any kind.

When at seven we returned from our walk through the gardens of the Palace a table had been spread for us in the bow-window, whence the view of the river, and the house-boats, and the towing path, and the walls of the Palace Gardens, and the big trees and the old gates, is a very splendid thing. A quiet-footed, quiet-mannered waiter was ready to attend on us, and on the table were the shining cruets and a little loaf and a slab of beautiful butter, and to the tick of half-past seven the soup in a plated tureen was put in front of me.

The soup was excellently hot and of a strength unusual in a vegetable soup. It had, I fancy, been laced with all manner of good things. It made an excellent commencement to the dinner. The trout, a fine salmon trout, of a beautiful pink, came straight up from the grill on a plated dish, and with it the Tartar sauce in a plated boat. When the cover was taken off from the duckling, set down before me to carve, the sweet savour of good roasting and the perfume of the stuffing gratified the sense of smell. And that duckling was as tender as a duckling should be, and the peas were large and cooked to the requisite degree of softness, and the apple sauce was excellent. That our plates were the old Spode plates, soft blue in their pattern, and that the knives and forks and spoons were all of an old pattern, were all tiny points of enjoyment. The asparagus was good green English asparagus, and the crust of the gooseberry pie was of meringue-like lightness.

At the table to one side of us in the big bow sat a couple who were also dining on duckling and drinking a bottle of champagne, for the Mitre has an excellent cellar of wines at prices far below those of London restaurants, and at the table on the other side were two ladies and three men who had been on the river and had brought river appetites and river good spirits to table with them. Farther back in the room were other little parties of diners. I had asked host Sadler some questions about the Masonic banquets which are held in the red-walled rooms the windows of which overlook the bowling-green, and after our dinner was finished he brought me a little sheaf of menus of banquets, and he also brought a bottle of the old Cognac of the house, which he was anxious that we should taste. I looked through the menus, and the following of a banquet of the Bard of Avon Lodge seemed to me to be that of a distinctly English feast. It has in it the _matelote_ of stewed eels and the braised sweetbreads for which I did not find room in our little dinner for two:

SOUP. Purée of Asparagus. Spring.

FISH. Grilled Trout. Sauce Tartare. Stewed Eels en Matelote.

ENTRÉE. Braised Sweetbreads.

REMOVES. Roast Fore Quarter of Lamb. French Beans. Ducklings. Peas. Asparagus.

SWEETS. Gooseberry Foule. Cream. Madeira Jellies. Iced Pudding.

DESSERT.

My crony and I sat sipping the old brandy, talking at intervals, and watching how the daylight gave place to the afterglow, how the people on the towpath thinned in numbers to single figures, and the homeward bound boats on the river became fewer and fewer. As the light died out the river became a sheet of dull silver, and the colour of the old brick walls of the Palace gardens and its out-buildings grew to deeper and a deeper purple, and the great trees became warm black silhouettes against the darkening sky and the lights in the house-boats moored by the bank began to throw reflections into the stream.

Everything, even a spring evening at Hampton Court, must come to an end, and at last I called for my bill. The dinner was eight shillings a head, and so moderate had we been in our summer beverages--the old brandy was host Sadler's contribution--that the total came to a sovereign.

We walked along the path up the river in the cool of the evening till we could see the lights in Garrick's Villa, and then my crony and I bade each other good-night and went our separate ways.

XXV

IN THE HANDS OF PI(E)RATES

THE CONNAUGHT ROOMS

When it was decided by the contributors to _Printer's Pie_ to entertain their editor, "The Pieman," a little committee of artists and writers, with the editor of _The Tatler_ as secretary, considered various plans for giving Mr Hugh Spottiswoode a dinner with unusual surroundings.

[Illustration]

A decision was arrived at that the contributors to the _Pie_ should become Pi(e)rates, for one night only, and in that guise should entertain the Pieman in a pirate haunt, and then the next question was the choice of a dining place and the difficult matter of finding the proprietor or manager of a restaurant who would enter thoroughly into the spirit of the burlesque and would provide a real pirate feast with blood-curdling piratical surroundings. A member of the committee suggested Mr George Harvey, who controls the Connaught Rooms in Great Queen Street, as the very man, and to the next meeting of the committee Mr George Harvey came, quiet, humorous and resourceful, and when he heard the outlines of our scheme he smiled, and said that he thought he quite understood what we wanted.

It was essential to the success of our little joke that the guest of the evening should know nothing of the reception he would get, and when the Pi(e)rates were informed that the dress of a bold buccaneer was to be the wear at dinner at the Connaught Rooms, they were entreated to keep this a secret from the Pieman. Strangely enough, the secret was kept; he had no inkling of what was going to happen to him. When, heralded by a commissionaire, he came up the grand staircase of the restaurant, faultlessly attired in his best evening clothes, he gave a jump when the Master-at-Arms of the Pirates, attired in the levee uniform of a pirate king, suddenly appeared before him with drawn cutlass and a ferocious look, and told two stalwart members of the pirate gang to "Arrest that man!"

If it would interest you to know who the pirates are, when they are not pirating, you have only to look at the contents pages of _Printer's Pie_ and you can there read the list of the authors and artists who were busy between seven and eight o'clock one Friday, in a little room in Great Queen Street, transforming themselves from fairly respectable members of society into the most shocking criminals that ever went to sea. There were pirates of all kinds, all centuries and all classes. There were gentlemen pirates with nickel-plated revolvers; one pirate of particular ferocity from the Barbary Coast had given himself an emerald-green complexion; another pirate, who feared that his good-natured face might belie his costume, carried on his breast a large placard with a photo on it for identification purposes, and the legend "I am an [adjective] pirate." Some of the pirates wore long false noses; many of them had the skull and crossbones on their jerseys; cocked hats with feathers were quite fashionable wear, and no belt had less than three pistols stuck into it. One writer of humorous short stories came as an old growler cabby, explaining that cabmen were the only pirates that he had ever met. The chairman of the dinner, who had been selected for that onerous post because, as the designer of the covers of all the _Printer's Pies_ he had always come first amongst its contributors, had added an Afghan sheepskin coat to his other piratical garment--luckily for him the night was very cold--and was attended by a minor pirate, who carried on a long stick a triangular lantern as a sign of authority.