INTERNATIONAL MEALS

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXVI, Issue 145, 4 June 1936, Page 10

INTERNATIONAL MEALS

The World at Our Door

FOOD GROWS MORE VARIED An English statesman of years ago used to breakfast on chops and port. Goodness knows what that led up to in the way of lunch and dinner, says a London contemporary. What a shock those people would have it they could study tne modern English menu I It has not only changed considerably, but it has enlarged enormously in its choice. Its dullness is vanishing and variety is becoming the spice of our eating.

Thirty or 40 years ago, they say, London lived largely on mutton pies. To-day mutton pies have taken several paces back into obscurity, but a thousand new disnes have stepped up and filled the ranks in the menus. W e are international eaters nowadays. In the restaurants w© can order American waffles, sweet potatoes, corn, tomato juice, blue point oysters, grape fruit, Boston beaus, patent breakfast foods ana hot dogs. Lots of Londoners eat bamboo shoots and chop sueys at the Chinese restaurants. Macaroni and spaghetti arc common foods and in tho towns where 20 years ago there was nothing but the “market ordinary” you can get a Wiener Schnitzel to-day. The canning industry brings us food from all over the world. A salmon that has leapt in the river gorges of the Rocky Mountains is served up with the aid of a tili-opener at an Epping Forest picnic, and tropical fruits that we had heard of only through the learned Papa of the Swiss Family Robinson arrive both fresh and in cans. Cold-storage equipment and speedy forms of transport like the aeroplane are adding scores of items to out lengthened menu every year. You could plan a dozen grand banquets each with different courses of which our grandparents had never heard. “When we opened our first tea shop m Piccadilly in 1894,” said a famous London caterer recently, “we had the unheard of number of 66 varieties on our tariffs. To-day there arc more than lol). “The old favourite mutton pies and chicken patties figured largely thyn, and there were only two sweets, apple pie and prunes and cream. In England to-day, too, we are eating 261 b. of fruit per head per year more than wo did even ten years ago.”