The handbook quoted the menu of an Italian dinner given to Sr. Salvini. What more swagger language could there be, yearned Myron, than 'Animelle di Vitello alla Minuta con Tartuffi' or 'Ravioli al Brodo' or 'Zabbaglione'? He had no notion what they meant, but weren't they simply lovely words?
Later, when he learned from the handbook's dictionary of dishes that they were only veal and paste and beaten eggs and wine, he was yet not disappointed. Mighty nice things, he reflected, you could do with eggs and paste and veal; grand noble dishes to rejoice the stomach of mankind and make a hotel famous.
There were other literary novelties in the steward's handbook. The menu of a dinner given by an association of travelling-men in New York was 'written in imitation of a railroad ticket, with coupon attachments, to be read from bottom to top', and it displayed with each course quotations from the choicest poets. With the chicken and terrapin there was somewhat cryptically quoted, 'This lapwing runs away with the shell on her head', and with the liqueurs, 'Spirits, which by mine art I have from their confines call'd to enact my present fancies'.
A Pink Dinner, in Washington, had fairy lamps with pink shades, cheese sticks tied with pink ribbons, and 'menus printed on broad pink satin ribbon, fringed at either end, and bearing at the top the name of the guest for whom it was intended'.
This thirty-dollar-a-month meat-cook, aged nineteen, was exhilarated by reading about 'a tropical dinner given by a wealthy man, which cost $175.00 a cover, exclusive of wine and music. The table was arranged around a miniature lake, in which palms, lilies and ferns appeared to be growing, while tropical trees rose from the banks amid miniature parterres of flowers. Small electric lights, with varicoloured globes, were arranged about the lake, and by a unique arrangement electricity was introduced under the water of the lake and caused to dance about in imitation of varicoloured fish. A beautiful palm-leaf fan was placed on the table before each guest, and on these the plates rested.'
'Golly, it would be nice to have a chance to fix a spread like that, without having to worry about the amount of butter you used,' thought Myron.
If he felt envy or any irritation at this superb example of Conspicuous Waste, he did not know it.
Still more enticing to the folly of the young poet were the decorated dishes at the renowned reception given by the first ducal Mrs. Vanderbilt: '. . . a game pie of pheasants resting on a flat surface of wax, the entire piece upheld with deer's antlers. Underneath were two rabbits playing cards, while to the side of the players was a bridge, under which gleamed a lake of water with goldfish swimming about. One of the most artistic pieces was a two-foot salmon, resting in a wax boat, while on the back of the fish sat a cupid; the boat was supported by a Neptune at each end, seated in sea shells and driving sea horses before them. A fine piece was a flying Mercury poised upon a ham, finely ornamented with a delicate tracing of truffles.'
'Gosh almighty!' breathed Myron.
And menus presenting ortolans!
He was not quite sure what sort of a bird an ortolan was, but it sounded far-off and romantic. When he read in the dictionary of the handbook a quotation from some casual European chef to the effect that 'ortolans should not be killed with violence, like other birds, as this might crush and bruise the delicate flesh--to avoid which the usual mode is to plunge the head of the ortolan into a glass of brandy', then he felt sick.
It came to him, as he sat tilted back against the bed in a hard straight chair in his little bedroom, that all the animals and birds he cooked had to be slaughtered, bloodily, messily, cruelly; that the veal which some red-faced, grunting guest slobbered over came from a soft-eyed calf that had come frisking up to the butcher and had its head instantly crushed with a sledge hammer.
He forgot it, then, as the medical student forgets the dissecting-room with its cold hacked corpses, as all young and ambitious men forget--for else they could not endure living--the perpetual horror and cruelty of the world.
Myron had read in his handbook for many weeks before he dared to criticize it . . . the young poet had long read his Milton before it came to him to wonder whether there may not be some thumpingly dull passages in Paradise Lost. In his Book of Words Myron found the menu of an annual game dinner given by Mr. John B. Drake, once the dean of Chicago hotel-men, to the dignitaries of the city.
There were one hundred and fourteen items, including (for this must have been given back in the '8o's, when such frenzied novelties still existed) ham of black bear, leg of mountain sheep, buffalo tongue, saddle of antelope, opossum, woodchuck, wild turkey, killdeer, plover, Wilson snipe, sandhill crane, Gadwall and canvas-back and red-bill Merganser ducks, American widgeon, red-necked grebe, Dunlin sandpiper, red-winged starling, and scores of equally fantastic prey. For the first three or four readings, he was awed. The poet was privileged to peep through glass at a volume of sonnets, printed in gold on blue-dyed vellum and bound in scarlet silk--and suddenly his common sense flashed out and he wanted it bound in morocco and printed in honest black on decent white!
'This darn bill of fare is a darn sight too darn long!' he protested, feeling reckless. 'Too darn much is bad as not enough. Take a fellow, say he has ten dishes out of all this; still he'll see all these others that he didn't get, and be sore, and feel he just hasn't had anything. When I own an hotel, I'm going to keep the bill of fare small and everything awful good!'
With a pencil he cut fifty-two items out of the hundred and fourteen.
'And still it's too big,' he sighed. 'But anyway, I've saved some money for Mr. Drake and not hurt his party! Hope he remembers it on my steward's salary! . . . I wonder what the deuce American widgeon is? I wonder if I'll ever taste it? I'm going to taste an awful lot of curious new things, in a lot of curious new places, before I get through!'
The appendix to Whitehead's handbook was a section entitled 'How to Fold Napkins, with Many Handsome Styles and Diagrams Which Show How It is Done'. At that period, the great restaurants and hotel dining-rooms were prouder of nothing than of tortuously twisted napkins, stiff and white and tall, in files on the long tables, and in this appendix were revealed the secrets of the greatest conjurors in napkin-folding. There was the 'chestnut pocket', making four pockets to be stuffed with nuts; the 'mitre' with its centre and horns; the 'double horn of plenty', whose folds were to be filled with flowers, the 'bridal serviette', which looked like a model of a four-story decagonal building, and such spirited modelling in stiff linen as 'the heraldic rose and star', 'the fleur-de-lis', and 'the colonne de triomphe'.
They seemed, after the simple cocked hats which decorated the American House and the Eagle Hotel, like the masterpieces of a napkinate Michael Angelo. Myron gaped at the sketches of their frosty beauty. And here was something he could do with his fingers, forthwith.
It was difficult to start cooking Filet Mignapour aux Truffes et aux Champignons with the resources of the Eagle Hotel kitchen, but napkins were napkins, and filching half a dozen of the Sunday Dinner best ones from the pantry, Myron began trying to erect a 'Hamburg drum'. It is quite simple, if you know how. 'Fold the serviette in half lengthways. Turn down the corners, fold it in half across the centre, inwards, from A to B, keeping the corners inside. Fold it again from C to D, let down the point E, turn down the corners F and G to make a triangle. . . .'