The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Art of Entertaining, by M. E. W. Sherwood

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Title: The Art of Entertaining

Author: M. E. W. Sherwood

Release Date: December 15, 2012 [eBook #41632]

Language: English

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THE ART OF ENTERTAINING

THE

ART OF ENTERTAINING

BY

M. E. W. SHERWOOD

NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1893

Copyright, 1892,
By Dodd, Mead and Company.

All rights reserved.

University Press:
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge.

With a grateful recognition of his services to

"The Art of Entertaining,"

Both at home and abroad, and with a profound respect for his wit, eloquence, and learning, this book is dedicated

TO

THE HON. CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW,

By his Friend, the Author.

PREFACE.

In America the art of entertaining as compared with the same art in England, in France, in Italy and in Germany may be said to be in its infancy. But if it is, it is a very vigorous infant, perhaps a little overfed. There is no such prodigality of food anywhere nor a more genuinely hospitable people in the world than those descendants of the Pilgrims and the Cavaliers who peopled the North and South of what we are privileged to call the United States. Exiles from Fatherland taught the Indians the words "Welcome!" and "What Cheer?"—a beautiful and a noble prophecy. Well might it be the motto for our national shield. We, who welcome to our broad garden-lands the hungry and the needy of an overcrowded old world, can well appropriate the legend.

No stories of that old Biblical world of the patriarchs who lived in tents have been forgotten in the New World. The Western settler who placed before his hungry guest the last morsel of jerked meat, or whose pale, overworked wife broiled the fish or the bird which had just fallen before his unerring gun,—these people had mastered in their way the first principle in the art of entertaining. They have the hospitality of the heart. From that meal to a Newport dinner what an infinite series of gradations!

Perhaps we may help those on the lower rungs of the ladder to mount from one to the other. Perhaps we may hint at the poetry, the romance, the history, the literature of entertaining; perhaps with practical hints of how to feed our guests we may suggest where meat faileth to feed the soul, and where intellect, wit, and taste come in.

American dinners are pronounced by foreign critics as overdone. The great too much is urged against us. We are a wasteful people as to food; we should learn an elegant and a wise economy. In a French family, eggs and lumps of sugar are counted. Economy is a part of the art of entertaining; if judiciously studied it is far from niggardliness. Such economy leads to judicious selection.

One has but to read the Odes of Horace to learn how much of the mind can be appropriately devoted to the art of entertaining. Milton does not disdain, in Paradise Lost, to give us the menu of Eve's dinner to the Angel. We find in all great poets and historians stories of great feasts. And with us in the nineteenth century, dinner is not alone a thing of twelve courses, it is the bright consummate flower of the day, which brings us all together from our various fields of work. It is the open sesame of the soul, the hour of repose, of amusement, of innocent hilarity,—the hour which knits up the ravelled sleeve of care. The body is carefully apparelled, the mind swept and garnished, the brain prepared for fresh impress. It is said that no important political movement was ever inaugurated without a dinner, and we may fancifully state that no great poem, no novel, no philosophical treatise, but has been made or marred by a dinner.

There is much entertaining, however, which is not eating. We do not gorge ourselves, as in the days of Dr. Johnson, until the veins in the forehead swell to bursting, but perhaps we are just as far from those banquets which Horace describes,—a glass of Falernian, a kid roasted, a bunch of grapes, and a rose, with good talk afterward. We have not mingled enough of the honey of Hymettus with our cookery.

Lady Morgan described years ago a dinner at Baron Rothschild's in Paris where the fineness of the napery, the beauty of the porcelain and china, the light, digestible French dishes, seemed to her a great improvement on the heaviness of an English dinner. That one paper is said to have altered the whole fabric of English dinner-giving. English dinners of to-day are superlatively good and agreeable in the best houses, and although national English cookery is not equal to that on the other side of the Channel, perhaps we could not have a better model to follow. We can compass an "all round" mastery of the art of entertaining if we choose.

It is not alone the wealth of America which can assist us, although wealth is a good thing. It is our boundless resource, and the capability, spirit, and generosity of our people. Venice alone at one imperial moment of her success had such a chance as we have; she was free, she was industrious, she was commercial, she was rich, she was artistic. All the world paid her tribute. And we see on her walls to-day, fixed there by the pencils of Tintoretto and Titian, what was her idea of the art of entertaining. Poetry, painting, and music were the hand-maidens of plenty; they wait upon those Godlike men and those beautiful women. It is a saturnalia of colour, an apotheosis of plenty with no vulgar excess, with no slumberous repletion. "'Tis but the fool who loves excess," says our American Horace in his "Ode to an Old Punch Bowl."

When we read Charles Lamb's "Essay on Roast Pig," Brillat Savarin's grave and witty "Physiologie du Gout," Thackeray's "Fitz Boodle's Professions," Sydney Smith's poetical recipe for a salad; when we read Disraeli's description of dinners, or the immortal recipes for good cheer which Dickens has scattered through