Here Let Us Feast

To quote an affirmation from the jacket of this richly stocked anthology is perhaps the most economical way of describing the author and what she has undertaken to do: “An epicure’s zestful visit to the festive boards of ancient and modern literature.” Upwards of seventy such boards or cellars are represented, lavish reminders that one of the great pleasures of human life has always been the selection, preparation, and consumption of food and drink. The reader is bound to be impressed by the list of authors who have savored this noble fact. It gives a peculiar unity to Mrs. Fisher’s listings: a gusto just as conscientiously asserted by John Evelyn in the seventeenth century as by John Steinbeck in the twentieth; the same belief in the importance of cookery held by the Atlantic s Della Lutes in her country kitchen and by André Simon of the Wine and Food Society. Mrs. Fisher has indexed her authors alphabetically, and the reader can glance at the S’s, for example, to judge the range of her choice: —

George Saintsbury, Edgar Saltus, Sir Walter Scott, Madame de Sevigue, William Shakespeare, André Simon, Sydney Smith, Tobias Smollett, John Steinbeck, G. B. Stern, James Stevens, Eugene Sue, Hubert Smith Surtees, Jonathan Swift.

Mrs. Fisher acknowledges assistance’ from a dozen or more of her friends, but even so, one can think of no other food authority of the present day who has read so widely or chosen so well. Her own comments and introductory notes are always to the point, and would make a highly readable short book in their own right. She has brought to bear just about every author who ought to have been included, and if she has omitted something from A Guide for the Greedy, by Elizabeth Robins Pennell. I am perfectly willing to write the latter off as a rival gourmet who was more or less in business for herself on this sort of thing. Any Surtees meal is worth reading, and one would have to toss a com to decide between Mrs. Fisher’s excerpt from Jorrocks Jaunts and Jollities and the buffoonish dinner in Handley Gross at which Jorroeks, the uninvited guest, ate the larder empty all by himself. The Bemehnans story “No Trouble At All is enthroned here with the great, where it belongs. Finally, let us thank Mrs. Fisher for serving forth the Doctor’s banquet from Peregrine Pickle, gamy, hot, and horrifying as ever and sadly in need of a reading by dehydrated exquisites.

CHAELES W. MORTON