COOKING AND DINING

Waipa Post, Volume 36, Issue 2148, 24 April 1928, Page 6

COOKING AND DINING

LOST ARTS IN AMERICA.

After a long stay in the United States, during which he visited many of the chief cities, Mr Padriac King has arrived at the concusion that the cooking in that country has become a lost art, and that in New Orleans and San Francisco alone can restaurants be found in which good food can be obtained “decently cooked and intelligently served.” Writing in the “National Review” for February, he deplores, not only the loss of the art of cooking, but the decadence of the art of dining in the United States. “Without a headwaiter by their side New Yorkers are unable to order the simplest kind of meal,” he says. “In the presence of a waiter, especially a head waiter, the average American, with all his reputation for courage, becomes a ‘rabbit’ .” The constant fear of the restaurant patron of New York is that he may offend the waiter. Mr King regards the American citizen not as the best fed but as the most fed. “Eating is the great American habit, but oh, what food!” he says Of all the cities he visited, Boston is placed at the bottom of the list for the cooking and service of food. This is depored, because it was in Boston that the art of game cooking reached its highest estate. To-day if a roast duck or a salmi of grouse were demanded in the city the waiter would be panic-stricken. Philadephians and New Yorkers know something about grouse, but not Bostonians. Taking the United States, State by States, Mr King arraigns the cooks and the food. Fish or clam chowder throughout the States on the North Atlantic seaboard, he says, is but a lot of chopped fish or clams and a few cube's of soggy potatoes, to which have been added hot milk and a slice or two of onion. Of all the dishes for which this section ofthe United States should be famous, fish chowder should head the list. But what one gets is a “nauseous concoction.” Boston fails in the preparation of lobster delicacies, in which it should lead. The blueberry pie, with which Boston and other New England cities reach the high-water mark, is spoiled by being served with ice cream, which violates all the tenets of gastronomy Baked beans, for which Boston was once famous, are now usually served in a boiled and “musty” state. One of the leading clauses in his indictment of the cooking of the United States is Mr King’s assertion that it is almost impossible to find a properly prepared curry. American curried chicken, as served in leading hotels, is a “gastronomic nightmare.” To make it worse properly cooked rice is difficult to find in the United States. If one asks for chutney in an, American restaurant, the waiter is apt not only tobecome annoyed, but even to look upon the diner as an escaped lunatic. He might be even so bold as to suggest that you confine yourself to the great American relish, tomato ketchup,and let it go at that. Relishes, condiments, and savouries have no appeal to the great mass of the American people, except in New Orleans, where one may find “anything in the eating line.” Mr King is just as severe in his criticism of private cooking as of restaurants. He believes that the greater proportion of the American people would starve to death if there were no such instruments as the tin-opener. Mr King’s condemnation of the cooking in the southern States, which is so highly praised in literature, is just as severe as that of the cookez'y of other parts of the United States. The visjons of snowy, white, fluffy, and flaky biscuits, he declaims, are never realised. The southern States have standardised their biscuits, just as Mr Ford has standardised the clutch on his motor car. The southern biscuit which is served piping hot,

is a most indigestiblefloury mass. It is a “potent cause of gastric disorders.” Writing of New Orleans and San Francisco, however, Mr Kink admits that the cooking is ample compensation for wha he suffered in the other cities. New Orleans cooking is both French and Spanish. Long paragraphs are devoted to the descriptions of a Greole “gumbo,” which is a mixture of chicken, ham, oysters, and crabs, cooked in butter. In San Francisco the Spanish influence prevails. In this city “Herbert’s is one of the few places in the United States where one dines without the torment of jazz. It also holds fast to the rule that no women are allowed. It isa place where man may eat. That is all.” Of prohibition, Mr King writes that the United States should not be dry from any moral point of view, but because Americans did not know how to drink. “They iced Burgundy,” he say's; “they even put chunks of ice in their champagne. They did not drink good wJne with their meals, but they drank too many stomachcorroding cocktails before meals. As Americans know so little of the art of drinking they should not be allowed any stimulants at all.”