AT TABLE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXV, Issue 19838, 7 January 1928, Page 1 (Supplement)

AT TABLE.

BX KOTARE.

THE DEGENERATE PRESENT.

Man is alleged to be what he eats. According to his diet so is he. Oliver Wendell Holmes had a chest labelled pier crust, to which he committed the essays he wrote after ho had partaken of pie. He knew pie did not adapt itself readily to his digestive processes; he had no illusions on what was in store for him. Medical man and philosopher though he was, he could not resist the appeal of a crisp pie-crust. The best he could do Avas to protect his public. Hence the chest. The articles written under the depressing influence of the undigested pie took a very gloomy view of creation. This was certainly not the best of all possible worlds. On the contrary, it was a miserable affair that struggled hopelessly on from one nothingness to another. Normally he was the cheeriest man alive. But thrust a piece of pie into the mechanism and the sun vanished from the heaven and there came a mist and a weeping rain.

Perhaps a better statement of the case would be that man sees the world as his digestion lets him. I understand that modern medical science has diagnosed Thomas Carlyle's complaint as a duodenal ulcer. The grim sage of Chelsea would have lived happily and genially, his gifted wife would have spent her days in peace and content, if a modern surgeon could have had an hour rearranging his internal economy. Quien sabe ? Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler, in her brilliant novel, "The Farringdons," now, alas, forgotten, pictures a venerable farmer who always begins to worry about his soul when he has partaken of certain rich meats in which his soul He seeks solitude and meditation, punctuating his introspection with anguished groans, while his practical wife in the next room gets ready some carbonate of soda.

Most people habitually overeat at Christmas. And the Christmas fare is particularly rich in indigestible elements. It shows how hard a custom dies. Here in the sweltering heat of midsummer we settle down to oleaginous dishes that require the snow on the ground and the thermometer down about zero if an oufc raged digestive system is to be tempted to make the required effort. Still it is worth it. What would Christmas be without plum pudding V And no doubt if serves a useful purpose in inducing a suitable frame of mind to approach the New Year. I wonder how many New Year resolutions have their origin in the unwonted richness of the Christmas fare. Various Diets. " Upon what meat does this our Caesar feed that he is grown so great?" Cassius seems to think there is something in the theory that man is what he efcts. Bernard Shaw, On a vegetarian diet, wields the deftest rapier of our time. But the ancient Greeks, if Homer is a safe gjuide, despised all vegetables, except the lawless" onion, which was always taken in company with mitigating draughts of wine. And only the direst poverty would lead a Greek to eat fish. One of New Zealand's pioneers told me that in the early days when flesh food was scarce a visit was made every year to the hapuka beds. It was a sort of family picnic. The , huge fish were split and dried and smoked. From the rafters of the kitchen and the barn hung suspended the pioneer's counterpart of the later hams and flitches of bacon, and a mighty appetising dish the smoked groper made. My informant told me that nothing he has ever tasted since came near the delights of this pioneer delicacy. And we are still drawing largely on the magnificent physical fitness of the earlier generations.

Are We Abstemious? My own observations lead me to conclude that the people of our own race are on the whole singularly abstemious. I have watched diners in foreign restaurants who put out of sight a meal that made me shudder with apprehension. I have seen a small Italian begin a meal with a bowl of minestrone whose counterpart had me beaten before I had appreciably lowered by Plimsoll line or the high-water mark on the side of the bowl. And while I was rapt m admiration at his feat, he ordered a dish of macaroni that would have given Porthos something to think about. The soup had simply whetted his appetite. I watched the macaroni plentifully dosed with Parmesan cheese, act as chaser to the minestrone. And then came a Gargantuan plate of strawberries. I have never seen a more seraphic look of perfect content than adorned the diner's face when the last strawberry went to its appointed place. I fear that in our appetites we grow lilliputian. This glory has departed from our race. Our fathers were a hardier tribe. I fancy that the abundance of food and the increase in the number of meals rather cramp our style. We eat so often that we cannot eat so much at a sitting. Where there was one meal in the day we could spread ourselves, and do full honour to the cook. Look, for examplo, at the meals Mrs. Pepys and her maid used to provide when the sociable Samuel had company to dinner. The Old Way. " Very merry at, before, and after dinner, and the more for that my dinner was great, and most neatly dressed by our own only maid. We had a fricassee of rabbits and chickens, a leg of mutton boiled, threi carps in a dish, a great dish of a side of lamb, a dish of roasted pigeons, a dish of four lobsters, three tarts, a lamprey pie (a most rare pie), a dish of anchovies, good wine of several sorts, and all things mighty noble and to my great content." And how many accounted for this giant's meal ? There were eight of them all told, and only three men among them. In spite of everything, Pepys was very merry after dinner, which is perhaps the greatest miracle of all. We note that the next day Pepy3 went to church. Presumably the dinner was having its revenge, for the service did not please him " To church," he reports, " where a simple bawling young Scot preached," The Pepfs family would scarcely be in a fit condition to appreciate nice points of doctrine. We simply can't do this sort of thing to-day. We seem to have lost not only the desire but the physical elasticity to accommodate such meals. Even the pirates of the Spanish mam laid great stress on their meals. And they were epicures who knew what was what. Many a galleon was accounted a worthy prize because it was laden with the choice sweetmeats the New World produced for the jaded palates of tllie Old. Hear the dainty Dampier, who links the Spanish Main with Australia: ahe flesh of the flamingo is lean and black, yet good meat, tasting neither fishy nor unsavoury. A dish of flamingoes' tongues is fit for a prince's table; they arc large and have a knob of fat at the root which is an excellent bit." Take it all round we are degenerate i sons of the mighty trenchermen who were our lathers..