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.
