Un plat est un plat
Sir: I am very sorry to see Pamela Vandyke Price's comment on the principal course of her dinner at the Aquitania Hotel, Bordeaux (June 10). Did she pile the feuillete de Charolais with vegetables of all kinds? If so, she, and her host, and the maitre d'hotel, ought to have been shot. Un plat est un plat est un Plat, as Gertrude Stein should have said. And if as I hope she did not, was the feuillete de Charolais more principal than the mousse d'homard or the salmon a l'oseille?
All over •the place people who should know better are serving something which is a meal in itself in fourth or fifth place, in absolute contradiction of Brillat-Savarin's maxim that the courses should proceed from the heaviest to the lightest. We rely on people of discrimination and influence such as Pamela Vandyke Price to defend the classical principles, and amongst these is this: in a well made menu there is no place for a main course.
D. C. Dumont 36 Regent Street, Cambridge
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