Large Appetites

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 312, 24 March 1928, Page 12

Large Appetites

How Europe Eats THE “BROWSING” GERMAN | Wherever one goes in Europe— Paris, Milan, Berlin or anywhere west [ of the hungry border States and north j of the Balkans—one sees a profusion j of stout bourgeois perambulating along j the boulevards and by-ways. In Europe food is the serious business and work has to accommodate itself as best it can to the recurrent and heavy demands of the European digestion. In Italy, where little pretence to elegant cookery intervenes between the Italian and his prey, there are great piles of spaghetti with grated Parmesan cheese and rivers of tomato sauce to be consumed. Whole loaves of bread disappear at a sitting. Germany is even less to be trusted in the matter of food. Any time, any place is considered a good excuse to eat anything. The Germans, if they have their way, do not dine; they browse. Between the acts in the theatre, at beer halls and railway stations, they manage to crowd into the day a number of meals that is limited solely by pocketbook and opportunity. All meals except breakfast are important in France. Breakfast is regarded as a mere appetiser to the coming gastronomic events of the day. In England, on the contrary, breakfast is no light matter. Porridge, fish, bacon and eggs, fruit, tea, toast and marmalade lie in wait for the unwary. France insists on a good lunch and on time in which to digest it. Other things can wait. There may be hors d’oeuvres, entree, vegetable, cheese or fruit, with the appropriate aperitif, table wine and liqueur, or any variation on this simple theme. You may pay anywhere from 6 francs to 600 francs. You may go to places where the bar is made of tin or to places where you are charged a liberal instalment on the war debts to have duck stewed in its own marrow, tripe manipulated in the manner of Caen, or any other of the culinary coups d’etat for which French chefs are paid more than most officials.

This is not to say that the French are unbusinesslike. Two hours pillaged from the middle of the working days are compensated by later hours in the evening. Shops stay open until 6 or 7. The French work hard —once they have eaten, none harder —but they insist on treating lunch seriously. The English have little of the Frenchman’s veneration for varied sensations in the matter of taste. Their food —except when they patronise the de luxe hotels—is generally simple, and there is a national aversion to foreign kickshaws in the matter of diet. But tea they must have. It is a token of leisure, tlie sign of a determination to take life coolly. Not even the Germans were able to stop the English tea during the war. It is a massive monument to what the exasperated French have called “le phlegme britannique.” Among the working classes there is supposed to be an unworthy craving for fish or eggs with tea. Among the middle classes there is the function known as high tea, when the entire household take seats at the dinner table and consume bread and butter with several different types of jam (but not marmalade, for that is sacred to breakfast and its consumption at tea time is a mark of the beast or of the American who knows no better), cakes in any quantity and variety, cup after cup of scalding, strong tea. There is one great distinction, however, to be observed between the French dejeuner a la fourchette and the English tea. The latter is individualistic. Time and place depend upon the individual. One man may tea at four, another at 5.30. The clock doesn’t stop for the entire nation at the same moment; each member of it stops the clock to suit himself. The result is that business continues, more or less half-heartedly perhaps, during tea-time. The ranks are decimated, but the line still holds, to use a wartime metaphor.