Europe Revised — 19 - Ch. IX: The Deadly Poulet Routine, pt. 2

As I said before, the Englishman has no great variety of things to eat, but he is always eating them; and when he is not eating them he is swigging tea.

Yet in these regards the German excels him.

The Englishman gains a lap at breakfast; but after that first hour the German leaves him, hopelessly distanced, far in the rear.

It is due to his talents in this respect that the average Berliner has a double chin running all the way round, and four rolls of fat on the back of his neck, all closely clipped and shaved, so as to bring out their full beauty and symmetry, and a figure that makes him look as though an earthquake had shaken loose everything on the top floor and it all fell through into his dining room.

Your true Berliner eats his regular daily meals--four in number and all large ones; and in between times he now and then gathers a bite.

For instance, about ten o'clock in the morning he knocks off for an hour and has a few cups of hard-boiled coffee and some sweet, sticky pastry with whipped cream on it.

Then about four in the afternoon he browses a bit, just to keep up his appetite for dinner.

This, though, is but a snack--say, a school of Bismarck herring and a kraut pie, some more coffee and more cake, and one thing and another--merely a preliminary to the real food, which will be coming along a little later on.

Between acts at the theater he excuses himself and goes out and prepares his stomach for supper, which will follow at eleven, by drinking two or three steins of thick Munich beer, and nibbling on such small tidbits as a rosary of German sausage or the upper half of a raw Westphalia ham.

There are forty-seven distinct and separate varieties of German sausage and three of them are edible; but the Westphalia ham, in my judgment, is greatly overrated.

It is pronounced Westfailure with the accent on the last part, where it belongs.

In Germany, however, there is a pheasant agreeably smothered in young cabbage which is delicious and in season plentiful.

The only drawback to complete enjoyment of this dish is that the grasping and avaricious German restaurant keeper has the confounded nerve to charge you, in our money, forty cents for a whole pheasant and half a peck of cabbage--say, enough to furnish a full meal for two tolerably hungry adults and a growing child.

The Germans like to eat and they love a hearty eater.

There should never be any trouble about getting a suitable person to serve us at the Kaiser's court if the Administration at Washington will but harken to the voice of experience.

To the Germans the late Doctor Tanner would have been a distinct disappointment in an ambassadorial capacity; but there was a man who used to live in my congressional district who could qualify in a holy minute if he were still alive.

He was one of Nature's noblemen, untutored but naturally gifted, and his name was John Wesley Bass.

He was the champion eater of the world, specializing particularly in eggs on the shell, and cove oysters out of the can, with pepper sauce on them, and soda crackers on the side.

I regret to be compelled to state, however, that John Wesley is no more.

At one of our McCracken County annual fairs, a few years back, he succumbed to overambition coupled with a mistake in judgment.

After he had established a new world's record by eating at one sitting five dozen raw eggs he rashly rode on the steam merry-go-round.

At the end of the first quarter of an hour he fainted and fell off a spotted wooden horse and never spoke again, but passed away soon after being removed to his home in an unconscious condition.

I have forgotten what the verdict of the coroner's jury was--the attending physician gave it some fancy Latin name--but among laymen the general judgment was that our fellow townsman had just naturally been scrambled to death.

It was a pity, too--the German people would have cared for John Wesley as an ambassador.

He would have eaten his way right into their affections.

We have the word of history for it that Vienna was originally settled by the Celts, but you would hardly notice it now.

On first impressions you would say that about Vienna there was a noticeable suggestion--a perceptible trace--of the Teutonic; and this applies to the Austrian food in the main.

I remember a kind of Wiener-schnitzel, breaded, that I had in Vienna; in fact for the moment I do not seem to recall much else about Vienna.

Life there was just one Wiener-schnitzel after another.

In order to spread sweetness and light, and to the end, furthermore, that the ignorant people across the salted seas might know something of a land of real food and much food, and plenty of it and plenty of variety to it, I would that I might bring an expedition of Europeans to America and personally conduct it up and down our continent and back and forth crosswise of it.

And if I had the money of a Carnegie or a Rockefeller I would do it, too, for it would be a greater act of charity than building public libraries or endowing public baths.

I would include in my party a few delegates from England, where every day is All Soles' Day; and a few sausage-surfeited Teutons; and some Gauls, wearied and worn by the deadly poulet routine of their daily life, and a scattering representation from all the other countries over there.

In especial I would direct the Englishman's attention to the broiled pompano of New Orleans; the kingfish filet of New York; the sanddab of Los Angeles; the Boston scrod of the Massachusetts coast; and that noblest of all pan fish--the fried crappie of Southern Indiana.

To these and to many another delectable fishling, would I introduce the poor fellow; and to him and his fellows I fain would offer a dozen apiece of Smith Island oysters on the half shell.

And I would take all of them to New England for baked beans and brown bread and codfish balls; but on the way we would visit the shores of Long Island for a kind of soft clam which first is steamed and then is esteemed.

At Portsmouth, New Hampshire, they should each have a broiled lobster measuring thirty inches from tip to tip, fresh caught out of the Piscataqua River.

Vermont should come to them in hospitality and in pity, offering buckwheat cakes and maple sirup.

But Rhode Island would bring a genuine Yankee blueberry pie and directions for the proper consumption of it, namely--discarding knife and fork, to raise a crusty, dripping wedge of blueberry pie in your hand to your mouth, and to take a first bite, which instantly changes the ground-floor plan of that pie from a triangle to a crescent; and then to take a second bite, and then to lick your fingers--and then there isn't any more pie.

Down in Kentucky I should engage Mandy Berry, colored, to fry for them some spring chickens and make for them a few pones of real cornbread.

In Creole Louisiana they should sample crawfish gumbo; and in Georgia they should have 'possum baked with sweet potatoes; and in Tidewater Maryland, terrapin and canvasback; and in Illinois, young gray squirrels on toast; and in South Carolina, boiled rice with black-eyed peas;

and in Colorado, cantaloupes; and in Kansas, young sweet corn; and in Virginia, country hams, not cured with chemicals but with hickory smoke and loving hands; and in Tennessee, jowl and greens.

And elsewhere they should have their whacking fill of prairie hen and suckling pig and barbecued shote, and sure-enough beefsteak, and goobers hot from the parching box; and scrapple, and yams roasted in hot wood-ashes; and hotbiscuit and waffles and Parker house rolls--and the thousand and one other good things that may be found in this our country, and which are distinctively and uniquely of this country.

Finally I would bring them back by way of Richmond, and there I would give them each an eggnog compounded with fresh cream and made according to a recipe older than the Revolution.

If I had my way about it no living creature should be denied the right to bury his face in a brimming tumbler of that eggnog--except a man with a drooping red mustache.

By the time those gorged and converted pilgrims touched the Eastern seaboard again any one of them, if he caught fire, would burn for about four days with a clear blue flame, and many valuable packing-house by-products could be gleaned from his ruins.

It would bind us all, foreigner and native alike, in closer ties of love and confidence, and it would turn the tide of travel westward from Europe, instead of eastward from America.

Let's do it sometime--and appoint me conductor of the expedition!

Chapter X