LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
BEEF AND TWO VEG.
SIR,—Mr. Nicolson's Marginal Comment in your issue of October loth on English restaurants today, is marred by his attribution of a general decline in English cooking to the Puritan Commonwealth : I would deny both the alleged decline and the reason. I am prepared to main- tain against all comers that English cooking up to the outbreak of the First World War (and during the earlier inter-war period) was equal to the best to be found in the world. I agree that excellence was not so prevalent as in France or rtaly ; it was indeed confined to the country houses of the lesser nobility and landed gentry and to the opulent suburbs of the wealthier bourgoisie in • the neighbourhood of all our great cities. It was also found to be in our London clubs and the older universities. It was rare among the greater nobility, where magnifi- cence supervened and personal attention was lacking, and unknown among the lower bourgoisie and proletariat, where ignorant profusion and mutilation were rampant. It must be that Mr. Nicolson was nur- tured in one or other of these unappetising milieus : or perhaps he has oscillated from one extreme in his gilded youth to the other in his labouring maturity.
It was also largely dependent, as Mrs. Beeton testifies, upon superb and lavish materials, both primary and ancillary : Mr. Nicolson is again wrong in doubting this. I defy any nation to display anything superior or even equal to our English beef and Welsh mutton ; our birds, wild and domestic, our fish, especially salmon, sole and kipper ; our vegetables ; our cheese (of which stilton is the acknowledged king) ; our delectable fruit (excelled only in Brittany).
Has Mr. Nicolson ever tasted our roast beef, cooked on a spit before a fire of coals' with its Yorkshire pudding and baked potatoes ? Has he sat down to a roast grouse with its accompaniments, elemental, invariable and inevitable (this glory, unique in its exact sense to Britain, can be enjoyed undimmed in these dark days) ? Could any country approach our York ham ? And what about baked apple-dumplings, gooseberry-tart and treacle-tart ?
He might say that the menu was not sufficiently varied : true, in those days of little artificial freezing, it followed the sublime repetition of nature's seasons, which give all the variet" a man should desire. Much of this cooking was untransferable to a restaurant ; it depended partly upon being eaten at the right moment. But I would remind him that in every big town there was to be found a grill where (barbarous habit perhaps) you chose your meal and watched it cooking. What foieign restaurant could excel that chop or steak with its kidney, tomato or mushroom, and the stilton cheese and cottage loaf to follow ? And what of those famed metropolitan steak puddings ; did these descend from " our puritan conception of cooking " ? There were (and indeed are) certain old-fashioned inns with a mid-day meal . . . I remember one in the unlikely town of Warrington, where the dining room was presided over by an elderly stout lady and the food was glorious and a discerning public knew it.
My old friend Mario Praz is justly merry at the expense of our restaurant cooking today : our simple cuisine was not adaptable and the ignorance of the lower bourgoisie has triumphed, without the profusion. But I hope he re-members meals during his Liverpool days in those opulent houses in Woolton and Sefton Park, when Reynoldses, Rathbones, Bolts, Legges and many others gave dinner parties which were colossal in quantity and relishing in quality —Your obedient
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