Could Cover a Garden With Slices of Ham

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 751, 26 August 1929, Page 11

Could Cover a Garden With Slices of Ham

Slicers Were Expert In “Old VauxhalV' DINER WHO “ATE PENNIES” Ham has long been a much-sought-after article of diet with European races, and the art of cutting it was brought to a high pitch of efficiency long before the modern siicer was invented. Lecturing on old “Vauxlmll Gardens," London, to a Vauxhall audience at Devonport on Saturday evening. Professor J. C. Sperrin-Johnson caused merriment by recounting that in the gardens the price of food was'a stock criticism. The satirists, he said, had preserved the story of an outspoken man who, with his wife and daughter, had been Inveigled into visiting the pleasure haunt. The family desired refreshments, and like many a modern family thought it would like cold ham. The wafer-like slices supplied riled the man so much that he loudly remarked as he ate: “There goes twopence”; “there goes threepence”; and so on. His wife and daugher were greatly embarrassed by the tittering of adjacent restaurant patrons. A humorous critic estimated that the ham slicers at the Garden’s kitchen were so expert at slicing ham that they could cover the whole of the 11 acres of the Garden with slices cut from one ham.