So at the conclusion of the repast we nibbled
tentatively at the dessert, which was a pancake with jelly, done
in the image of a medicated bandage but not so tasty as one. And
then I paid the check, which was of august proportions, and we
came sadly away, realizing that another happy dream of youth had
been shattered to bits. Only the tablecloth had been as advertised.
It was coarse, but white like snow - like snow three days old in
Pittsburgh.
Yet I was given to understand that was a typical rural French inn
and fully up to the standards of such places; but if the manager
of a roadhouse within half a day's ride of New York or Boston or
Philadelphia served such food to his patrons, at such prices, the
sheriff would have him inside of two months; and everybody would
be glad of it too - except the sheriff. Also, no humane man in
this country would ask a self-respecting cow to camp overnight in
such outbuildings as abutted on the kitchen of this particular
inn.
I am not denying that we have in America some pretty bad country
hotels, where good food is most barbarously mistreated and good
beds are rare to find, but we admit our shortcomings in this regard
and we deplore them - we do not shellac them over with a glamour of
bogus romance, with intent to deceive the foreign visitor to our
shores. We warn him in advance of what he may expect and urge him
to carry his rations with him.
It is almost unnecessary to add that old Marie gave us veal and
poulet roti. According to the French version of the story of the
Flood only two animals emerged from the Ark when the waters
receded - one was an immature hen and the other was an adolescent
calf. At every meal except breakfast - when they do not give you
anything at all - the French give you veal and poulet roti. If at
lunch you had the poulet roti first and afterward the veal, why,
then at dinner they provide a pleasing variety by bringing on the
veal first and the poulet roti afterward.
The veal is invariably stringy and coated over with weird sauces,
and the poulet never appears at the table in her recognizable
members - such as wings and drumsticks - but is chopped up with a
cleaver into cross sections, and strange-looking chunks of the
wreckage are sent to you. Moreover they cook the chicken in such
a way as to destroy its original taste, and the veal in such a way
as to preserve its original taste, both being inexcusable errors.
Nowhere in the larger Italian cities, except by the exercise of a
most tremendous determination, can you get any real Italian cooking
or any real Italian dishes. At the hotels they feed you on a pale,
sad table-d'hote imitation of French cooking, invariably buttressed
with the everlasting veal and the eternal poulet roti. At the
finish of a meal the waiter brings you, on one plate, two small
withered apples and a bunch of fly-specked sour grapes; and, on
another plate, the mortal remains of some excessively deceased
cheese wearing a tinfoil shroud and appropriately laid out in a
small, white, coffin-shaped box.
After this had happened to me several times I told the waiter with
gentle irony that he might as well screw the lid back on the casket
and proceed with the obsequies. I told him I was not one of those
morbid people who love to look on the faces of the strange dead.
The funeral could not get under way too soon to suit me. It seemed
to me that this funeral was already several days overdue. That
was what I told him.
In my travels the best place I ever found to get Italian dishes
was a basement restaurant under an old brownstone house on
Forty-seventh Street, in New York. There you might find the typical
dishes of Italy - I defy you to find them in Italy without a
search-warrant. However, while in Italy the tourist may derive
much entertainment and instruction from a careful study of table
manners.
In our own land we produce some reasonably boisterous trenchermen,
and some tolerably careless ones too. Several among us have yet
to learn how to eat corn on the ear and at the same time avoid
corn in the ear. A dish of asparagus has been known to develop
fine acoustic properties, and in certain quarters there is a crying
need for a sound-proof soup; but even so, and admitting these
things as facts, we are but mere beginners in this line when
compared with our European brethren.
In the caskets of memory I shall ever cherish the picture of a
particularly hairy gentleman, apparently of Russian extraction,
who patronized our hotel in Venice one evening. He was what you
might call a human hazard - a golf-player would probably have
thought of him in that connection. He was eating flour dumplings,
using his knife for a niblick all the way round; and he lost every
other shot in a concealed bunker on the edge of the rough; and he
could make more noise sucking his teeth than some people could
make playing on a fife.
There is a popular belief to the effect that the Neapolitan eats
his spaghetti by a deft process of wrapping thirty or forty inches
round the tines of his fork and then lifting it inboard, an ell
at a time. This is not correct. The true Neapolitan does not eat
his spaghetti at all - he inhales it. He gathers up a loose strand
and starts it down his throat.
