Europe Revised — 17 - Ch. VIII: A Tale of a String-bean, pt. 3

Sure enough, old Marie was on the job.

Not desiring to be unkind or unduly critical I shall merely state that as a cook old Marie was what we who have been in France and speak the language fluently would call la limite!

The omelet she turned out for us was a thing that was very firm and durable, containing, I think, leather findings, with a sprinkling of chopped henbane on the top.

The coffee was as feeble a counterfeit as chicory usually is when it is masquerading as coffee, and the vin ordinaire had less of the vin to it and more of the ordinaire than any we sampled elsewhere.

Right here let me say this for the much-vaunted vin ordinaire of Europe: In the end it biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder--not like the ordinary Egyptian adder, but like a patent adder in the office of a loan shark, which is the worst stinger of the whole adder family.

If consumed with any degree of freedom it puts a downy coat on your tongue next morning that causes you to think you inadvertently swallowed the pillow in your sleep.

Good domestic wine costs as much in Europe as good domestic wine costs in America--possibly more than as much.

The souffle potatoes of old Marie were not bad to look on, but I did not test them otherwise.

Even in my own country I do not care to partake of souffle potatoes unless I know personally the person who blew them up.

So at the conclusion of the repast we nibbled tentatively at the dessert, which was a pancake with jelly, done in the image of a medicated bandage but not so tasty as one.

And then I paid the check, which was of august proportions, and we came sadly away, realizing that another happy dream of youth had been shattered to bits.

Only the tablecloth had been as advertised.

It was coarse, but white like snow--like snow three days old in Pittsburgh.

Yet I was given to understand that was a typical rural French inn and fully up to the standards of such places; but if the manager of a roadhouse within half a day's ride of New York or Boston or Philadelphia served such food to his patrons, at such prices, the sheriff would have him inside of two months; and everybody would be glad of it too--except the sheriff.

Also, no humane man in this country would ask a self-respecting cow to camp overnight in such outbuildings as abutted on the kitchen of this particular inn.

I am not denying that we have in America some pretty bad country hotels, where good food is most barbarously mistreated and good beds are rare to find, but we admit our shortcomings in this regard and we deplore them--we do not shellac them over with a glamour of bogus romance, with intent to deceive the foreign visitor to our shores.

We warn him in advance of what he may expect and urge him to carry his rations with him.

It is almost unnecessary to add that old Marie gave us veal and poulet roti.

According to the French version of the story of the Flood only two animals emerged from the Ark when the waters receded--one was an immature hen and the other was an adolescent calf.

At every meal except breakfast--when they do not give you anything at all--the French give you veal and poulet roti.

If at lunch you had the poulet roti first and afterward the veal, why, then at dinner they provide a pleasing variety by bringing on the veal first and the poulet roti afterward.

The veal is invariably stringy and coated over with weird sauces, and the poulet never appears at the table in her recognizable members--such as wings and drumsticks--but is chopped up with a cleaver into cross sections, and strange-looking chunks of the wreckage are sent to you.

Moreover they cook the chicken in such a way as to destroy its original taste, and the veal in such a way as to preserve its original taste, both being inexcusable errors.

Nowhere in the larger Italian cities, except by the exercise of a most tremendous determination, can you get any real Italian cooking or any real Italian dishes.

At the hotels they feed you on a pale, sad table-d'hote imitation of French cooking, invariably buttressed with the everlasting veal and the eternal poulet roti.

At the finish of a meal the waiter brings you, on one plate, two small withered apples and a bunch of fly-specked sour grapes; and, on another plate, the mortal remains of some excessively deceased cheese wearing a tinfoil shroud and appropriately laid out in a small, white, coffin-shaped box.

After this had happened to me several times I told the waiter with gentle irony that he might as well screw the lid back on the casket and proceed with the obsequies.

I told him I was not one of those morbid people who love to look on the faces of the strange dead.

The funeral could not get under way too soon to suit me.

It seemed to me that this funeral was already several days overdue.

That was what I told him.

In my travels the best place I ever found to get Italian dishes was a basement restaurant under an old brownstone house on Forty-seventh Street, in New York.

There you might find the typical dishes of Italy--I defy you to find them in Italy without a search-warrant.

However, while in Italy the tourist may derive much entertainment and instruction from a careful study of table manners.

In our own land we produce some reasonably boisterous trenchermen, and some tolerably careless ones too.

Several among us have yet to learn how to eat corn on the ear and at the same time avoid corn in the ear.

A dish of asparagus has been known to develop fine acoustic properties, and in certain quarters there is a crying need for a sound-proof soup;

but even so, and admitting these things as facts, we are but mere beginners in this line when compared with our European brethren.

In the caskets of memory I shall ever cherish the picture of a particularly hairy gentleman, apparently of Russian extraction, who patronized our hotel in Venice one evening.

He was what you might call a human hazard--a golf-player would probably have thought of him in that connection.

He was eating flour dumplings, using his knife for a niblick all the way round; and he lost every other shot in a concealed bunker on the edge of the rough; and he could make more noise sucking his teeth than some people could make playing on a fife.

There is a popular belief to the effect that the Neapolitan eats his spaghetti by a deft process of wrapping thirty or forty inches round the tines of his fork and then lifting it inboard, an ell at a time.

This is not correct.

The true Neapolitan does not eat his spaghetti at all--he inhales it.

He gathers up a loose strand and starts it down his throat.

He then respires from the diaphragm, and like a troupe of trained angleworms that entire mass of spaghetti uncoils itself, gets up off the plate and disappears inside him--en masse, as it were--and making him look like a man who is chinning himself over a set of bead portieres.

I fear we in America will never learn to siphon our spaghetti into us thus.

It takes a nation that has practiced deep breathing for centuries.

Chapter IX