POST-WAR MEAL IN LONDON

Press, Volume LXXXVI, Issue 26221, 19 September 1950, Page 7

POST-WAR MEAL IN LONDON

MENU DESCRIBED BY PROFESSOR

(Special Correspondent N.Z.P.A.) (Rec. 8 p.m.) LONDON, Sept. 18. Dr. Mario Praz, an author and the professor of English language and literature at the University of Rome, has published in the Rome newspaper, “11 Tempo,” his assessment >of his first post-war meal in London. The professor, who -s still in London. wrote of the meal:— “Hors d’oeuvres —violet and orange sludge. . “Potage a la Heine —a kind of wallpaper glue. "Fillets de sole bonne femme-water-soaked cotton bundles wrapped in paste rather like he potage. only stickier, with black foreign bodies supposed to be mushrooms floating heie and there like drowned grubs. “Capon roti, sauce bordelaise —impossible to gues to what animal this purplish, fibrous, yet viscous, meat belonged. I do not think it was whale. More probably it was a sinew of Al Capone. But the possibility cannot be excluded that it was in fact a capon, a murdered and degraded capon. “Ice cream—a sliver of cold soap, melting in a stew of disintegrated plums whose stones were perhaps, aimed at an aesthetic contrast with the icy liquefaction of the soap. ’‘Coffee—an adequate substitute for the hot water with wnich the ancient Romans used to revive their stomachs when sated bv a Lanquet to prepare them for further food.”