The Chop Out of the Window

THERE is a legend in Rome that an American lady, with that tact which endears us to foreigners, once remarked, ‘All you have to do if you want Roman Society to come to you is to hang a chop out of the window.’ This may be all very well for a simple little community like Rome, but in New York the problem is more difficult, for both hostess and diner-out. It is as one of the latter that I wish to protest against the way such things are at present conducted, and to enter a plea for social eupepsia.

As for my qualifications, I may preface my discussion with the frank and modest statement that I am an accomplished diner-out, and have practised this art in many climes and for many years. In Arabia I have dined in state with hawk-faced sheiks, expressing my pleasure, in strict accordance with the local etiquette, by eructations that drew expressions of unstinted admiration from my Syrian dragoman. I have dipped both hands in the common bowl of pilaf, have had gobbets of sheep popped into my mouth by aged, dark - brown, crime-stained fingers, and have nozzled my coffee in a way that would draw tears of jealousy from the noisiest geyser.

But enough of these more recondite phases. Let me swoop nearer home and explain the chief difficulty which besets the average diner-out; and after stating the problem, let me offer what I believe to be its triumphant, its only rational, solution.

The problem is this, — and I ask you to consider the folly of society on this point. You get a card from Mrs. Gramercy telling you that she is to be at home on Thursday the seventeenth from half-past four until seven. At the end of the invitation she gives you some indication of what you are in for: ‘Dancing,’ or, ‘Miss Vesta Tilley will recite.’ Mrs. Bronx asks you to come on after dinner, and adds, ‘To meet Prince Jinglepencil,’ or, ‘Auction,’ or, again, ‘ Mr. and Mrs. Castle will dance.’ Mrs. Lexington is to be in a hospitable frame of mind Sunday evening at ten, and thoughtfully adds, ‘Music.’ All these good ladies feel obliged to tell you at the end of engraved or written cards just what wares they are tempting you with. And yet when you are asked to dine, a much more important matter, you have n’t the remotest idea what you are going to have to eat. You may, to be sure, be told that the point of the dinner is that you are to meet the Duchess of Axminster. But you can’t eat the Duchess of Axminster and probably would n’t care to if you could, most great ladies nowadays being, well, far from tender.

I myself seem to be peculiarly unfortunate in this culinary blind-man’sbuff. Last Sunday night I dined at the Wainwarings’, and the roast was a variety of sheep — selle d’agneau à la bergère; Monday, at the Veneerings’, we again had sheep — côtelettes d’agneau aux cèpes; Tuesday, at the Buntings’, of course, gigot de mouton, sauce aigrelette. And this will be just my luck the rest of the week. Give it any festal name you please, the fact remains that sheep is sheep, beef is beef, and so on.

Now, to return to my mutton, I really like sheep, but do you suppose for a moment that if, a week before, I had known what was in store for me I should have accepted these three invitations? Not at all: the Sunday one, probably, the Tuesday one, perhaps; but the simplest consideration of eupepsia would have made me omit at least the second of the series. Again, I’m dining out Thursday, Friday, and Saturday; now, as I’ve no idea what I’m to be fed these nights, how, in the name of reason, can I intelligently order my luncheon down town or at my club for these days? If, let us say Thursday, I order half a grilled chicken, it’s a three-to-one shot that Mrs. Popham will give me a chicken Périgord that night at dinner, and I shall have to root out the truffles and confine myself to them.

This it is that drives so many agreeable men to the brink of indigestion, and leads them seriously to contemplate the horrors of a diurnal luncheon of sour milk. Another feature of the whole affair that leads to the same results is the lack of variety in the offerable dinners. For example, if the Pophams are going to give a dinner tomorrow, Popham — who ought to know better—leaves the composition of the menu either to Mrs. Popham or to his chef, if he has one. Now Mrs. Popham, and here she becomes generic, has usually but one, rarely two, and never three possible dinners in her head, — no woman has, unless she herself knows how to cook. She could plan seven dinners a week for Popham and herself without repeating herself, but when it comes to Dinners with a capital, her reason wobbles and she takes refuge in the conventional. Or suppose the menu is left to the chef: the first impulse of every known chef is not to feed the hungry but to ‘show off,’ and all chefs show off in precisely the same way.

Obviously, then, Popham, who has dined out almost as much as I have, ought to take the culinary helm into his own hands; and I feel sure Popham would do so if he were not always hoping against hope that, the next time he went out to dinner he would get something different from his own domestic fare. But he does n’t, and I am beginning to notice distinct lines of dyspepsia in Popham’s puzzled face.

Well, here is the only really rational solution of it all, and it came to me some years ago when I was once inveigled into spending a month in a small settlement on Buzzards Bay. There was a good inn there, and the summer residents had built a pleasant little casino; one saw everybody else several times a day, either at the casino or at the village post-office, and life was a simple, friendly, informal affair. As I was supposed to be writing a book, and as the colonists were chiefly Bostonians, every one of whom had an uncle, cousin, or brother who had done the same thing, I found myself in a very hospitable society. On the last day but one of my visit, Mrs. Faneuil, at the casino, fixed me with a genial eye and asked me if I would dine with her that evening.

’With great pleasure,’ I replied haltingly, ‘ but on one condition, — that you don’t have chicken!’

‘Well, I like that,’ exclaimed Mrs. Faneuil, — ‘making conditions! And, as a matter of fact, I was going to have chicken. Consider the invitation withdrawn temporarily, and explain.’

‘Dear Mrs. Faneuil,’ I replied as cheerfully as I could, ‘I have been here now thirty days at the inn. Thanks to the wholly delightful hospitality of you all, which has left its permanent mark on my heart — and, I fear, on my digestive organs — I have been asked out to dinner twenty-four times. At twenty-one of these dinners chicken was the main feature. I also struck chicken at two of my six dinners at the inn. This makes the ghastly total of chicken twenty-three nights out of a possible thirty. It’s all very well to have a chicken course every night in France, for they always give you another roast besides. But nothing but chicken for a mildly carnivorous man is awful. Each morning when I get up now, I have to check a constantly growing impulse to cluck violently.’ Hysterical sympathy by this time had suffused Mrs. Faneuil’s pink, sunburned face. ‘It’s all the local butcher’s fault,’ she gasped, ‘it’s almost the only decent thing we can get here, and when we have guests, of course we want to do the best we can for them, and without realizing it we all tragically offer the same thing. I never thought of it before but I know now how dreadfully you feel. Just wait a minute!’ And she rushed off, rippling, ‘ Toujours perdrix!’ as an ecstatic war-cry.

In five minutes she came out of the casino and rushed past me, dropping a little note in my lap. Here it is: —

‘DEAR MR. JAMES,

‘ Won’t you dine with us to-night at eight? We should so like to have you, your last evening here. As the time is so short, pray don’t trouble to answer this, for I quite count on your coming.

‘ Very sincerely yours,

‘NINA FANEUIL.’

‘Corned Beef.'

It was a perfectly bully dinner, and after all these years I still treasure her note,— a note which, it seems to me, solves one of the great problems of life triumphantly. In making this simple solution public, I feel that I am conferring a real boon on a large and harassed proportion of social mankind.

The moment society adopts my proposal, and puts down the simple magic word, ‘Beef,’ ‘Mutton,’ or the like, at the end of dinner-invitations, two things will happen. First, a man going through his invitations will be able to map out a dietetic programme which will be at once agreeable and eupeptic. Second, society will suddenly realize how restricted is the variety of food offered on what should be festive occasions, and will slowly make little experiments which I am sure will turn out delightfully.

I was discussing just this point last night with a friend of mine who is a poet of high distinction. ‘Good heavens! what a blessing you are suggesting,’ he exclaimed. ‘Just think of it, — I have never been to a dinner party where the chief dish was roast pork. I adore roast pork, and I think I ’d accept an invitation from the richest Philistines I know if such a bait were offered.’

So, too, with the exception of Mrs. Faneuil’s charming little concession to eupepsia, I have never been to a dinner party where corned beef was the ’pièce de résistance. Certain climbers doubtful of their position would of course shrink from offering a viand generally regarded as inexpensive; but if you go to the right predatory butcher you can spend any amount of money — even to mortgaging the old farm — on a costly cut of beef, and then get it saltpetred with a wonderful and special brilliancy. Just as in Pendennis Miss Fotheringay, of the Theatres Royal, Drury Lane and Crow Street, declared she would go anywhere with a gentleman who offered her lobster and champagne with honorable intentions, I myself would go anywhere to a hostess who offered me corned beef, no matter what her intentions.

Then after a while hostesses would begin gradually to learn just who likes what, and on this basis they could gather together little groups of charmingly congenial people. And we should all be in such a well-prepared, receptive state of mind and body. I, for example, having had a luncheon that would not conflict with or impair my enjoyment of Mrs. Midas’s dinner, would be in a delightful mood, and the next night Mrs.Ponsonby de Tompkins would find me even more agreeable than usual.

I do hope this plea of mine will have some effect, for as matters stand now, I shall soon be driven to buying all my own meals, and I cannot contemplate such selfishness with equanimity.