Europe Revised — 15 - Ch. VIII: A Tale of a String-bean, pt. 1

A Tale of a String-bean It was at a small dinner party in a home out in Passy--which is to Paris what Flatbush is to Brooklyn--that the event hereinafter set forth came to pass.

Our host was an American who had lived abroad a good many years; and his wife, our hostess, was a French woman as charming as she was pretty and as pretty as she could be.

The dinner was going along famously.

We had hors-d'oeuvres, the soup and the hare--all very tasty to look on and very soothing to the palate.

Then came the fowl, roasted, of course--the roast fowl is the national bird of France--and along with the fowl something exceedingly appetizing in the way of hearts of lettuce garnished with breasts of hothouse tomatoes cut on the bias.

When we were through with this the servants removed the debris and brought us hot plates.

Then, with the air of one conferring a real treat on us, the butler bore around a tureen arrangement full of smoking-hot string-beans.

When it came my turn I helped myself--copiously--and waited for what was to go with the beans.

A pause ensued--to my imagination an embarrassed pause.

Seeking a cue I glanced down the table and back again.

There did not appear to be anything to go with the beans.

The butler was standing at ease behind his master's chair--ease for a butler, I mean--and the other guests, it seemed to me, were waiting and watching.

To myself I said: "Well, sir, that butler certainly has made a J. Henry Fox Pass of himself this trip!

Here, just when this dinner was getting to be one of the notable successes of the present century, he has to go and derange the whole running schedule by serving the salad when he should have served the beans, and the beans when he should have served the salad.

It's a sickening situation; but if I can save it I'll do it.

I'll be well bred if it takes a leg!"

So, wearing the manner of one who has been accustomed all his life to finishing off his dinner with a mess of string-beans, I used my putting-iron; and from the edge of the fair green I holed out in three.

My last stroke was a dandy, if I do say it myself.

The others were game too--I could see that.

They were eating beans as though beans were particularly what they had come for.

Out of the tail of my eye I glanced at our hostess, sitting next to me on the left.

She was placid, calm, perfectly easy.

Again addressing myself mentally I said: "There's a thoroughbred for you!

You take a woman who got prosperous suddenly and is still acutely suffering from nervous culture, and if such a shipwreck had occurred at her dinner table she'd be utterly prostrated by now--she'd be down and out--and we'd all be standing back to give her air; but when they're born in the purple it shows in these big emergencies.

Look at this woman now--not a ripple on the surface--balmy as a summer evening!

But in about one hour from now, Central European time, I can see her accepting that fool butler's resignation before he's had time to offer it!"

After the beans had been cleared off the right-of-way we had the dessert and the cheese and the coffee and the rest of it.

And, as we used to say in the society column down home when the wife of the largest advertiser was entertaining, "at a suitable hour those present dispersed to their homes, one and all voting the affair to have been one of the most enjoyable occasions among like events of the season."

We all knew our manners--we had proved that.

Personally I was very proud of myself for having carried the thing off so well but after I had survived a few tables d'hote in France and a few more in Austria and a great many in Italy, where they do not have anything at the hotels except tables d'hote, I did not feel quite so proud.

For at this writing in those parts the slender, sylphlike string-bean is not playing a minor part, as with us.

He has the best spot on the evening bill--he is a headliner.

So is the cauliflower; so is the Brussels sprout; so is any vegetable whose function among our own people is largely scenic.

Therefore I treasured the memory of this incident and brought it back with me; and I tell it here at some length of detail because I know how grateful my countrywomen will be to get hold of it--I know how grateful they always are when they learn about a new gastronomical wrinkle.

Mind you, I am not saying that the notion is an absolute novelty here.

For all I know to the contrary, prominent hostesses along the Gold Coast of the United States--Bar Harbor to Palm Beach inclusive--may have been serving one lone vegetable as a separate course for years and years; but I feel sure that throughout the interior the disclosure will come as a pleasant surprise.

The directions for executing this coup are simple and all the deadlier because they are so simple.

The main thing is to invite your chief opponent as a smart entertainer; you know the one I mean--the woman who scored such a distinct social triumph in the season of 1912-13 by being the first woman in town to serve tomato bisque with whipped cream on it.

Have her there by all means.

Go ahead with your dinner as though naught sensational and revolutionary were about to happen.

Give them in proper turn the oysters, the fish, the entree, the bird, the salad.

And then, all by itself, alone and unafraid, bring on a dab of string-beans.

Wait until you see the whites of their eyes, and aim and fire at will.

Settle back then, until the first hushed shock has somewhat abated--until your dazed and suffering rival is glaring about in a well-bred but flustered manner, looking for something to go with the beans.

Hold her eye while you smile a smile that is compounded of equal parts--superior wisdom, and gentle contempt for her ignorance--and then slowly, deliberately, dip a fork into the beans on your plate and go to it.

Believe me, it cannot lose.

Before breakfast time the next morning every woman who was at that dinner will either be sending out invitations for a dinner of her own and ordering beans, or she will be calling up her nearest and best friend on the telephone to spread the tidings.

I figure that the intense social excitement occasioned in this country a few years ago by the introduction of Russian salad dressing will be as nothing in comparison.

This stunt of serving the vegetable as a separate course was one of the things I learned about food during our flittings across Europe, but it was not the only thing I learned--by a long shot it was not.

For example I learned this--and I do not care what anybody else may say to the contrary either--that here in America we have better food and more different kinds of food, and food better cooked and better served than the effete monarchies of the Old World ever dreamed of.

And, quality and variety considered, it costs less here, bite for bite, than it costs there.

Food in Germany is cheaper than anywhere else almost, I reckon; and, selected with care and discrimination, a German dinner is an excellently good dinner.

Certain dishes in England--and they are very certain, for you get them at every meal--are good, too, and not overly expensive.

There are some distinctive Austrian dishes that are not without their attractions either.

Speaking by and large, however, I venture the assertion that, taking any first-rate restaurant in any of the larger American cities and balancing it off against any establishment of like standing in Europe, the American restaurant wins on cuisine, service, price, flavor and attractiveness.

Centuries of careful and constant press-agenting have given French cookery much of its present fame.

The same crafty processes of publicity, continued through a period of eight or nine hundred years, have endowed the European scenic effects with a glamour and an impressiveness that really are not there, if you can but forget the advertising and consider the proposition on its merits.

Take their rivers now--their historic rivers, if you please.

You are traveling--heaven help you--on a Continental train.

Between spells of having your ticket punched or torn apart, or otherwise mutilated; and getting out at the border to see your trunks ceremoniously and solemnly unloaded and unlocked, and then as ceremoniously relocked and reloaded after you have conferred largess on everybody connected with the train, the customs regulations being mainly devised for the purpose of collecting not tariff but tips--between these periods, which constitute so important a feature of Continental travel--you come, let us say, to a stream.

It is a puny stream, as we are accustomed to measure streams, boxed in by stone walls and regulated by stone dams, and frequently it is mud-colored and, more frequently still, runs between muddy banks.

In the West it would probably not even be dignified with a regular name, and in the East it would be of so little importance that the local congressman would not ask an annual appropriation of more than half a million dollars for the purposes of dredging, deepening and diking it.

But even as you cross it you learn that it is the Tiber or the Arno, the Elbe or the Po; and, such is the force of precept and example, you immediately get all excited and worked up over it.

English rivers are beautiful enough in a restrained, well-managed, landscape-gardened sort of way; but Americans do not enthuse over an English river because of what it is in itself, but because it happens to be the Thames or the Avon--because of the distinguished characters in history whose names are associated with it.