Europe Revised — 16 - Ch. VIII: A Tale of a String-bean, pt. 2

Hades gets much of its reputation the same way.

I think of one experience I had while touring through what we had learned to call the Dachshund District.

Our route led us alongside a most inconsequential-looking little river.

Its contents seemed a trifle too liquid for mud and a trifle too solid for water.

On the nearer bank was a small village populated by short people and long dogs.

Out in midstream, making poor headway against the semi-gelid current, was a little flutter-tailed steamboat panting and puffing violently and kicking up a lather of lacy spray with its wheelbuckets in a manner to remind you of a very warm small lady fanning herself with a very large gauze fan, and only getting hotter at the job.

In America that stream would have been known as Mink Creek or Cassidy's Run, or by some equally poetic title; but when I found out it was the Danube--no less--I had a distinct thrill.

On closer examination I discovered it to be a counterfeit thrill; but nevertheless, I had it.

What applies in the main to the scenery applies in the main to the food.

France has the reputation of breeding the best cooks in the world--and maybe she does; but when you are calling in France you find most of them out.

They have emigrated to America, where a French chef gets more money in one year for exercising his art--and gets it easier--than he could get in ten years at home--and is given better ingredients to cook with than he ever had at home.

The hotel in Paris at which we stopped served good enough meals, all of them centering, of course, round the inevitable poulet roti; but it took the staff an everlastingly long time to bring the food to you.

If you grew reckless and ordered anything that was not on the bill it upset the entire establishment; and before they calmed down and relayed it in to you it was time for the next meal.

Still, I must say we did not mind the waiting; near at hand a fascinating spectacle was invariably on exhibition.

At the next table sat an Italian countess.

Anyhow they told me she was an Italian countess, and she wore jewelry enough for a dozen countesses.

Every time I beheld her, with a big emerald earring gleaming at either side of her head, I thought of a Lenox Avenue local in the New York Subway.

However, it was not so much her jewelry that proved such a fascinating sight as it was her pleasing habit of fetching out a gold-mounted toothpick and exploring the most remote and intricate dental recesses of herself in full view of the entire dining room, meanwhile making a noise like somebody sicking a dog on.

The Europeans have developed public toothpicking beyond anything we know.

They make an outdoor pastime and function of it, whereas we pursue this sport more or less privately.

Over there, a toothpick is a family heirloom and is handed down from one generation to another, and is operated in company ostentatiously.

In its use some Europeans are absolutely gifted.

But then we beat the world at open-air gum-chewing--so I reckon the honors are about even.

This particular hotel, in common with all other first-class hotels in Paris, was forgetful about setting forth on its menu the prices of its best dishes and its special dishes.

I take it this arrangement was devised for the benefit of currency-quilted Americans.

A Frenchman asks the waiter the price of an unpriced dish and then orders something else; but the American, as a rule, is either too proud or too foolish to inquire into these details.

At home he is beset by a hideous fear that some waiter will think he is of a mercenary nature; and when he is abroad this trait in him is accentuated.

So, in his carefree American way, he orders a portion of a dish of an unspecified value; whereupon the head waiter slips out to the office and ascertains by private inquiry how large a letter of credit the American is carrying with him, and comes back and charges him all the traffic will bear.

As for the keeper of a fashionable cafe on a boulevard or in the Rue de la Paix--well, alongside of him the most rapacious restaurant proprietor on Broadway is a kindly, Christian soul who is in business for his health--and not feeling very healthy at that.

When you dine at one of the swagger boulevard places the head waiter always comes, just before you have finished, and places a display of fresh fruit before you, with a winning smile and a bow and a gesture, which, taken together, would seem to indicate that he is extending the compliments of the season and that the fruit will be on the house; but never did one of the intriguing scoundrels deceive me.

Somewhere, years before, I had read statistics on the cost of fresh fruit in a Paris restaurant, and so I had a care.

The sight of a bunch of hothouse grapes alone was sufficient to throw me into a cold perspiration right there at the table; and as for South African peaches, I carefully walked around them, getting farther away all the time.

A peach was just the same as a pesthouse to me, in Paris.

Alas though!

no one had warned me about French oysters, and once--just once--I ate some, which made two mistakes on my part, one financial and the other gustatory.

They were not particularly flavorous oysters as we know oysters on this side of the ocean.

The French oyster is a small, copper-tinted proposition, and he tastes something like an indisposed mussel and something like a touch of biliousness; but he is sufficiently costly for all purposes.

The cafe proprietor cherishes him so highly that he refuses to vulgarize him by printing the asking price on the same menu.

A person in France desirous of making a really ostentatious display of his affluence, on finding a pearl in an oyster, would swallow the pearl and wear the oyster on his shirtfront.

That would stamp him as a person of wealth.

However, I am not claiming that all French cookery is ultra-exorbitant in price or of excessively low grade.

We had one of the surprises of our lives when, by direction of a friend who knew Paris, we went to a little obscure cafe that was off the tourist route and therefore--as yet--unspoiled and uncommercialized.

This place was up a back street near one of the markets; a small and smellsome place it was, decorated most atrociously.

In the front window, in close juxtaposition, were a platter of French snails and a platter of sticky confections full of dark spots.

There was no mistaking the snails for anything except snails; but the other articles were either currant buns or plain buns that had been made in an unscreened kitchen.

Within were marble-topped tables of the Louie-Quince period and stuffy wall-seats of faded, dusty red velvet; and a waiter in his shirtsleeves was wandering about with a sheaf of those long French loaves tucked under his arm like golf sticks, distributing his loaves among the diners.

But somewhere in its mysterious and odorous depths that little bourgeois cafe harbored an honest-to-goodness cook.

He knew a few things about grilling a pig's knuckle--that worthy person.

He could make the knuckle of a pig taste like the wing of an angel; and what he could do with a skillet, a pinch of herbs and a calf's sweetbread passed human understanding.

Certain animals in Europe do have the most delicious diseases anyway--notably the calf and the goose, particularly the goose of Strasburg, where the pate de foie gras comes from.

The engorged liver of a Strasburg goose must be a source of joy to all--except its original owner!

Several times we went back to the little restaurant round the corner from the market, and each time we had something good.

The food we ate there helped to compensate for the terrific disillusionment awaiting us when we drove out of Paris to a typical roadside inn, to get some of that wonderful provincial cookery that through all our reading days we had been hearing about.

You will doubtless recall the description, as so frequently and graphically dished up by the inspired writers of travelogue stuff--the picturesque, tumbledown place, where on a cloth of coarse linen--white like snow--old Marie, her wrinkled face abeam with hospitality and kindness, places the delicious omelet she has just made, and brings also the marvelous salad and the perfect fowl, and the steaming hot coffee fragrant as breezes from Araby the Blest, and the vin ordinaire that is even as honey and gold to the thirsty throat.

You must know that passage?

We went to see for ourselves.

At a distance of half a day's automobile run from Paris we found an establishment answering to the plans and specifications.

It was shoved jam-up against the road, as is the French custom; and it was surrounded by a high, broken wall, on which all manner of excrescences in the shape of tiny dormers and misshapen little towers hung, like Texas ticks on the ears of a quarantined steer.

Within the wall the numerous ruins that made up the inn were thrown together any fashion, some facing one way, some facing the other way, and some facing all ways at once; so that, for the housefly, so numerously encountered on these premises, it was but a short trip and a merry one from the stable to the dining room and back again.