4: Food, drink and hospitality

A MORAL PRIMER SIMON RAVEN

Simon Raven here continues his 'substantial primer of moral and social instruction for the adolescent young.' Next week's final extract will discuss money.

Food, in the long term, is a far greater pleasure than sex. Food does not answer back, it vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up; it does not make demands or complain of your poor perform- ance. If you don't fancy it, it can be put speedily away, and if you do, you can consume as much as you wish in whatever manner you choose without being accused of mania or perversion, or consulting any humour but your own. Food, however, just like sex, can easily kill the im- moderate; and I have therefore framed the following suggestions to ensure for you all, my dear young readers, not only a full but a long life of eating.

The first thing to remember is that one large meal a day (apart, of course, from a healthy breakfast) is all that anyone can manage with enjoyment. If you have it at lunch time, though your hunger will probably be keener than in the evening, your afternoon will be ruined. So eat at night, and make up in relaxation what you lack in appetite; let dinner be the day's reward a; the end of the road. First a bath, to ease tension; then one, and only one, stiff drink; to table punctually at a pre-arranged hour, and to the devil with anyone who is late; some warm soup, which will gently prepare the stomach; and so to the real business.

But here we come to a problem. There are those who prefer that 'the real business' should consist of high quality materials plainly cooked, others who relish elaboration. Arguments abound on both sides. On the one hand, it is said, England of all countries is rich in prime meats and fishes, and it is criminal to drown their flavour in fancy sauces. On the other hand, it is urged, the saucier stands high in the hier- archy of the kitchen and the sauce is the proudest product of the culinary art. Cream, say the sauce-lovers, is the basis of all the finest cooking; and cream, the plain men reply, will harden your arteries even quicker than brandy.

To resolve the dispute, let us recollect that sauces were originally devised, in the days be- fore refrigeration, to conceal the fact that the flesh or the fish had gone bad. These days nothing goes bad—but deep freezes and mass production have rendered most things ab- solutely tasteless. Paradoxically, therefore, the sauces which were made necessary by lack of refrigeration are made just as necessary by its ubiquity. The only time you will not need them is when you succeed in obtaining fresh mater- ials; and these are becoming daily scarcer as the pre-packaging firms become daily more voracious and housewives daily more sluttish. So sauces we must have; but for the sake of your blood pressure in later years, do remem- ber that murderous ingredients, such as cream and sherry, are not obligatory : delicious simple sauces can be made, as we all know, from cockles, onions or mere bread.

And now back to the dinner table. Something has been said about food; what of the wine? For the most part, being young, you must drink what you are offered. But these two rules to help you: start slowly, as a flushed face, which will pass unnoticed later on. is unbecoming over the early courses; and secondly, if you should have to choose for yourself, drink the wines of Burgundy before those of Bordeaux.

This you should do because cheap burgundy (which is all you and your friends will be able to afford) is sometimes nasty but usually heartening, whereas cheap claret is usually nasty and always thin. By the same token, never drink champagne unless you can run to at least 70s a bottle in a restaurant or 40s retail. The champagne which you will get for under these prices will first set your chest afire and then dissolve your bowels; indeed, the only people tough enough to take it are the impoverished gentry of the English provinces, who drink it in huge quantities at shot-gun weddings.

A little more about drink in general. Try to eschew spirits until as late as possible, certainly

until you are twenty-five. I say this, not out of priggishness, but simply to increase your plea- sure. You will probably enjoy your dinner more if your precede it with a light vermouth rather than with some vicious concoction of gin (which may be necessary to jolt the middle- aged into civility but is surely dispensable by youth); and port will suit you much better to round oft the meal than cognac, as the latter plays havoc with all but the strongest heads and has accounted for the premature cracking of many maidenhoods among both sexes. (Not that I hold much with virginity, but it is more fun to lose it when fully conscious what one is about and with whom.) Furthermore, the longer you hold off spirits, the longer you will have something new to look forward to; and since alcohol, like all forms of solace, is sub- ject to the law of diminishing returns, it is as well to keep the more powerful brands of heart's-ease in reserve until really needed.

A final word on drink. It is now fashionable among some sections of the young to despise alcohol, on the ground that it is a depressant which muddles the mind, and to prefer certain drugs, for which it is claimed that they give a quicker, surer and more lucid sense of up- lift. This is to miss the point. Alcohol is only a depressant in the sense that it damps down inhibitions—with the result that care and re- straint are abandoned and social freedom achieved. To be sure, the final gift of Bacchus is oblivion; but up till then this genial god en- courages us to project our personalities out- wards and towards other people. Drugs, on the other hand, turn men in upon themselves, mak- ing them concentrate on their own mental states and processes. Now, better any amount of drunken importunity, which does at least in- volve one with one's fellows, than the sullen cowering in corners which is characteristic of the drugged. So don't go getting the idea that drink is 'square': for millennia Dionysus has been seen as a god of blitheness and beauty; whereas Morpheus, the bringer of dreams, has always been the whey-faced child of sleep.

And now, hospitality. Cocktail parties are merely unspeakable. Civilised men entertain their friends to dinner in small parties and to wine after dinner in large.

First, then, giving a dinner party. This you will almost certainly have to do in a restaurant, so bear in mind the following hints. The maxi- mum number of diners in restaurant conditions is six, the optimum four. Choose a restaurant which allows some space and air (if any such place survives apart from the Ritz) and one which provides ample chairs and not those beastly knife-edged settees. Order the food and the wine in advance, thus suiting the cost of the refreshments to your pocket and avoiding nightmare delays while somebody's girl-friend insists on having the whole menu translated to her and then makes you summon back the waiter because she has changed what she calls her mind. Give your guests a firm time to be in the bar, let us say eight for eight-thirty, and if anyone arrives after eight-thirty-five, don't offer him a drink. Go in to dine at eight-thirty on the dot (this is the least you can do for the chef) no matter how many people have not arrived, start eating at once, and have absentees' covers removed after twenty minutes. If they then turn up with a passable excuse, let them start eating at whatever stage the rest of you have reached; if they arrive giggling about how they got held up at Lord Beauregard's Pimms party, show them the door.

Food and wine should be liberal; after- dinner drinks should be limited to one with the coffee, but that one generous; and you should make it plain when the show is over by rising strongly from your chair, and never mind if somebody's girl-friend chooses that very moment to start asking for another creme de menthe. Whatever means you use to settle the bill, do it apart from your guests, if, that is, you don't want them craning their inquisitive necks to see how much it comes to.

After-dinner wine parties. Allow one and a half bottles a head of cheap, strong wine, dis- play it all on a sideboard, make it quite clear that there won't be a drop more —and keep a special reserve of a bottle a head extra for favourite friends and sexual prospects. Tell no- body about this, not even the favourite friends or sexual prospects, but tap it discreetly and in person as required. Do not provide spirits, even for the older guests, as these will only start showing off. Keep one lavatory locked, and the key in your pocket, for your own exclusive use.

If the party is a success, no one will ever leave. In this case, do not emulate a friend of mine, who goes round with pound notes bribing his guests to depart, as the guests will take the pound notes and remain. Instead, you should spread the story that a brothel offering untold variety ba's just opened its doors at such and

such an address in Islington (or Pimlico if Islington is where you live). Such is the fatuity and lewdness of the human race that this absurd tactic will actually work,, at any rate after two a.m. I once got rid of a group of friends in this way, and later heard that they went on looking for the place (so creative had been my description) for the whole of the next month.