PASSING NOTES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24492, 28 December 1940, Page 4

PASSING NOTES

Whether there be war or no war, whether the gates of Janus be open or closed, never will Father Christmas mourn his revels lost. For, as someone has said, " life is too serious to be taken seriously." Add to this proposition the qualification " all the time," and we have precisely Horace's dictum: " Dulce est desipere in loco " —it is pleasant to let oneself go in the proper place. Even in Egypt there were, no doubt, some Christmas revellings. Some weeks ago there came the announcement that the Western Desert itself would see some of the appurtenances of a Christian Christmas, and specially mentioned were turkey and Christmas pudding. Italian chianti has since turned up to wash these down. Can anyone, out of his accumulated knowledge, tell us why, of all the joyous old-world paraphernalia of Christmas celebrations, the Christmas pudding has lingered longest? Ignored may be the cynic's reply that it lingers longest just because it is what it is, and the flippant addendum

Let us burden our remembrances with A heaviness that is gone.

Vanished now even from the northern winter-Christmas are most of its friends and boon companions—the candles and the yule log, the gaming and the conjuring, the dipping for nuts and apples, the "fool plough," the hot cockles, the blindman's buff, the boar's head with apple or orange in mouth, set off with rosemary.

Even the Christmas evergreens are going or are gone. Time was, well within normal memory, when George street shops were bedecked with greenery from veranda spouting to pavement. All these " have vanished in the chinks that time hath made." But changes of time and circumstances, emigrations and translations, exiles and colonisations have made scarcely a dent in the custom of the English Christmas pudding. From China to Peru, from Indus to the Polar Sea,, the Briton clings to it as to a token of his birthright. The settler in the burning heart of Australia, the perspiring official on the Niger coast, the mine manager in the Malay States, look forward to the flame arising from the Christmas puddirg, even though the temperature be 100 degrees in the shade, and he longs to take off his flesh and sit in his bones. In such places and on such occasions this product, of old England, this English nation's meat but other nations' poison,*may' be hot stuff, but it is the right stuff.

Well conceived and well timed was the hope expressed by a Daily Times correspondent, in a timely controversy arising out of a timely prizeday address, that, just as Florence Nightingale raised the status of nursing to that of an honoured profession, a new Florence Nightingale might arise to do the same for domestic service. Why have English cooking, and therefore English cooks, so woefully declined in prestige since the days when the "lady" was the breadmaker, the loaf-kneader (from Anglo-Saxon hlaefdige). Harold Nicolson's recent remarks on • the subject of English cooking suggest an answer:

Why is English cooking so expressly and so consistently bad? Not because of Puritanism, or laziness, or insensitiveness of the English palate, or the late introduction of forks into this country, but because, owing to our climate, our appetites are so good that we can and •do eat anything. Our cooks have taken advantage of this facility with a vengeance.

Which is according to economic law. The supply has sunk to the level of the demand. By no means new is Harold Nicolson's complaint. Foreign visitors to England in the seventeenth century complained that the English "married jam with grease." This we still do. Voltaire in the eighteenth century called England " a country with 50 religions and only one sauce." No wonder Adam Smith and other eighteenth century economists said that domestic service was an unproductive labour.

Beyond all doubt good cooking is an economic question of supreme national importance. The eupeptic will always outdistance the dyspeptic among nations and individuals. The weakest and most dyspeptic goes to the wall. For the mental and spiritual effects of dyspepsia are more deadly than the physical. A recent book on "The Present State of Gastronomy in' England " makes an appalling comparison of two dinner menus—one of a French village inn, the other of its English analogue. The author and a friend, on a walking tour in France, arrived one snowy day half-famished at a tiny French village:

We asked timidly at the only inn in the place if we could have something to eat. "If you had come an hour ago . " said the proprietor, apologetically, "but I'll see what I can do. It won't be much. I'm afraid." After 20 minutes appeared: 1. A bowl of delicious homemade pate. 2. Boiled perch from the local river, with the best hollandaise sauce I have ever tasted. 3. Some tender slices of veal, with salad from the garden. 4. A huge dish of spinach, in which you could taste the flavour both of the spinach and the cream—a miracle of excellence.

5. Local wine ad lib. And all this for the equivalent of half a crown.

The English menu was the production of a Sussex inn: I walked some 15 miles over the Downs in a biting wind to a fairsized Sussex town. The choice lay between a fish and chips shop, a commercial hotel which surlily offered cold ham or eggs and bacon, and the hotel recommended by the A.A. and the R.A.C. The menu here was:

1. Potage garbure composed of a proprietary preparation and hot water, with three rings of raw carrot floating on it. 2. Turbot poche, supreme. Two inches of fish, recognisable indeed as fish as opposed to meat, but not as turbot. It seemed to be smothered in stickfast from the local stationer's.

3. English roast mutton, baked or boiled potatoes, and spring greens. The latter smelt of dishcloths, and the meat was very overdone and swimming in more tepid preparation. 4. Tinned fruit and proprietary custard. «

5. Imported Cheddar cut into tubes.

Would the dinner menu of a New Zealand village inn on a tourist route, or a calling house for service cars, come even up to this? To the overseas tourist our cooking is the one black blot on our tourist service—good food poorly cooked. An innocent community are we ourselves, with simple tastes—not used to much, and therefore easily satisfied. We measure our food by quantity. One eatable is as good as another, provided -he two are of equal size and weight. We eat good square meals and yet are often undernourished. And a regular concomitant of our railway travelling,

as foreign visitors have remarked with amazement, is the rush for inter-meal food at every refreshment station. Poignantly apropos is the experience of H. G. Wells, as told in a review of his autobiography: A further handicap imposed on young H. G. Wells was that of indifferent health. It seems fairly evident that, until he was able to provide comfortably for his own needs, he was habitually undernourished. His mother " had been trained as a lady's maid, and not as a housewife." . . She was that sort of woman who is "an incorrigibly bad cook." And throughout his growing years, and for some time after that, he did not get enough of the right sort of things to eat.

Already in New Zealand there are Florence Nightingales at work. But the battle of the earlier Florence against inertia, prejudice and ineptitude is child's play compared to the difficulties of the present Florences. Is our climate too invigorating for the appreciation of good cooking? Says Brillat-Savarin, the famous French writer on gastronomy. " Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are." Which goes far to explain what is said to be the most common New Zealand matrimonial " triangle " a young wife, a hungry husband, and a tin-opener.

There may be a mysterious significance, as some commentators will have it, in the fact that Laval, Mr Facing-both-ways, has a palindromic name—that is, one that reads the same from left to. right as from right to left. This sinister as ( well as dexterous personality has already changed from Left to Right, obedient to the winds of his own self-interest. A Revolutionary Socialist at the beginning of the Great World War, before the end of it he had swung to the extreme Conservative camp Before the present war he had sought to conciliate both Mussolini and' Hitler, frankly proFascist in the sanctions days, and intriguing with Bonnet and Flandin for Nazi favours. He it was who enveigled poor old Petain into the infamous armistice, seeing in the collapse of France a rainbow-hued vision of the future of Lavai. For nothing now lay between him and the dictatorship of France but the few remaining days of a hardpressed octogenarian. What would he have called himself had all gone well? Naturally, not Fuhrer or Duce. The French equivalent seems to be Chef d'Etat. But " chef " has more meanings than one. Many sprightly comments would have circulated even through stricken Paris at the other senses of the word and Britain would have looked forward expectantly to the time when this new "chef" would deal professionally with his own goose.

As a palindrome the name " Laval" may suggest a pleasant holiday diversion, when all other pleasures, as they do at times, tend to wilt and wither. „ Palindromic surnames are rare enough to be monstrosities. Of palindromic Christian names English has but a small number, nearly all feminine: for example, Eve, Anna, Ada, Hannah. A masculine example is Bob. Is there any other? Palindromic surnames provide the acme of ingenious inutility. Few will stand a rigorous test. When Napoleon at St. Helena was asked whether he could ever have conquered England, he replied, on the spur of the moment, mind you, and in English, "Able was I ere I saw Elba." Adam, on catching his first sight of Eve, at once remembered his manners, and with the coolness and in the language of a British Israelite, introduced himself with "Madam, I'm Adam." English examples all show strain and smell strongly of the lamp. "Lewd did I live, and evil I did dwell" is good in sense but defective in the final word. The following are perfect in form but delirious in their bewildering nonsense:

Now, weep, Major-general, are negro jam pots won? No, it is opposed, art sees trade's opposition. No; it's a bar of gold, a bad log for a bastion. Paget saw an Irish tooth in a waste gap. Eureka! Till I pull up I'll take rue. In Latin and Greek, palindromes are easier, better and more common. Mention is made somewhere of a mediaeval Latinist who wrote a Latin poem of 60 lines-r-all palindromes. A good Latin example, descriptive of a Witches Sabbath, is "In girum imus noctu, non ut consumimur igni" (We go round in a circle at night, not to be consumed by fire). "Si nummi nummis" was the motto of a Roman lawyer. Freely translated it means "Give me a fee, and I'll soon set you free." In the reign, of Queen Elizabeth a lady banned from Court because of unjust suspicions, took as her seal-device the moon, partly obscured, with the palindromic motto "Ablata at alba " (retired but pure). But all these literary frivolities induce melancholy. All this idle industry, this otiosa seduitas, belongs to an age when leisure was the mother of philosophy and the nurse of literature. And when a man could call his soul his own. Civis.