Gourmets and Gourmands

Waipukurau Press, Volume I, 20 July 1906, Page 3

Gourmets and Gourmands

A gourmet is an amateur of all that is delicate and artistic in the pleasui es at the table, a gourmand is simply a greedv fellow with the means to gratify his* greediness. A gourmet is an epicure, a gourmand is a glutton.. There was an heroic person of mad-Victorian days who was always ready for a bet to eat a boiled leg of mutton and trimmings at a sitting, generally asking for a tart or pudding aiterwaixls, who must have been a. gourmand by nature, and the Baron de Brisse, the jolly old fellow iwho (wrote the cookery 'books, who always, because of his exceeding stoutness, took two places in a diligence, and who asked his guests when they came to dine with him to wear the loose White frocks of men-cooks in order that they might expand during dinner without inconvenience, must have been anothor* (Dumas, novelist and cook, who was by turns a gourmet and a gourmand, tells in the preface to the great Dictionary of Cookery how the Vicomte de Vieux Custel ordered and ate a dinner which cost five hundred francs (just £2O). The astonishing facts about this

dinner were that, the 24 dozen oysters with which the Vicomte began his feast onlv cost about a shilling a dozen ano that this determined gourmand, afraid that his dinner might not be satisfying enough, ordered a beefsteak and potatoes as an “extra,” which was not to be included in the £2O. He drank with ■his repast a bottle of Johannisberg, two •bottles of Burgundy, and two. half-bot-tles of other wines, and a liqueur or two with his coffee, and when he had won his bet he professed himself ready to commence another repast on the same terms. , •Rossini -was a gourmand, and dined often at the Maison Ddree, in Paris. Here the great composer used to eat tremendous meals, generally concluding them with a long tumbler of Zabajone, that wonderful, hot, sweet, frothing drink of -wine and eggs land milk native to Italy. Music and mighty eating often go together. Anyone 'who has read Mendelssohn’s letters will remember how his thoughts ran. on cakes and sausages, though cherry pie was his paiticular weakness.; and Meyerbeer not only (composed immortal works, but he brought grilled kidneys and poached eo-gs, together in a most eatable form. now and again produces men who are of the. type of Dumas, gourmets, with a leaning towards gouimandising. “Uncle” Sarcey the famous Parisian critic, loved a good dinner, and he was wont to pat a very well rounded waistcoat, and to assure his friends thfl.fr. good artolans had done that for him; and George Augustus Sala, the well-known journalist, was also of the school of Dumas, for he was an accomplished cook himself, and like the great novelist, his last book was one on cookery, “The Thorough Good Cook.” Of course the greatest offenders against the laws of moderation, were the Rorhans in the decadent period of the Empire. The gourmandism of the patricians in the days of Nero was satorised by Martial, and Juvenal later scourged with words the gluttons of the Rome of Trajan. Commodus and Heliogabulus stand first in notoriety amongst gluttonous monarchs. Heliogabulus, so Lampridius, the historian of the time, tells us, had never less than forty courses at his dinners. The brains of sixty ostriches went to one dish for this emperor, and the tongues of nightingales were the ingredients of one of his favourite pates. It is satisfactory to remember that gout and every other natural punishment for over-eating afflicted the gorging Romans. Horace, the Roman poet, had all the right feeling of a gourmet. His tastes were perhaps more highly cultivated than those of Omar Khayyam, to whom “a jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou beside me singing in the wilderness” represented the joy of life, but his catalogue of the delights of his Sabine farm are very much in the spirit of an epicure of to-day who asks a friend tired of restaurant dinners to come and eat the best of country fare at some upriver cottage, and his supper of three light dishes was exactly what a doctor of to-day would order anyone to eat whose digestion was as weak as Horace’s was.

Of latter-day writers Thackeray is always praised as a gourmet, and certainly he gave much thought to what he ate and what he drank, and his protests against too large a num'ber of guests and the stereotyped dinner at a London house still holds good, though the entrees no longer come from the pastrycooks, and boiled fowls and tongue have ceased to make an appearance. Thackeray’s essay on “Greenwich Whitebait,” his “Memorials of Gormandising,” and his account of “Some Dinners in Paris” shows that he acted up to his axiom, /‘Respect your dinner.” If no dandy is a hero to his valet, it must be sorrowfully confessed that no gourmet who keeps the larder key is respected by his cook. Hayward, the well-known lawyer and witty diner-out, who wrote “The Art of Dining,” a classic which no man but a prince amongst gourmets could have penned, acted as idol-breaker to his own fame, and was wont to say that before he wrote his articles for the “Quarterly Review,” which he subsequently, in 1852, amplified into his book he read up his subject just as he would have read a brief. Perhaps the greatest gourmets of any time w T ere the men who dined well at the celebrated restaurants of Paris, in the early days of the Second Empire. Dumas and Dr. Veron and the group who used to make the Cafe de Paris, in the Rue Taitbout, their head quarters, often relapsed from gourmets into gourmands, of which Dumas’ treble chin in the busts and pictures stand as witness, 'but the same could not be said, of the men who used to dine at the Maison Doree and the Cafe Anglais—Nester, Roqueplan, Fould, Salamanca, Delaphante, Gram'ont, Caderouse and others, who are names and nothing else nowadays.

The oil boom in Taranaki continues unabated, and is, in fact, more pronounced than ever. The best boring sites in the whole of the country from the Ngaire swamn, on the south-east slope of Mount Egmont, to Oma.ta on the north-western slope —a radius of 30 miles —have been secured under oil options. It is stated that the whole of this country is oil-bearing. Three up to date oil boring plants, at a cost of £6OOO, are to be procured in America. At a meeting of the Nelson Loyal Orange Lodge it was decided to ask all other lodges to co-operate to send a petition to the Governor to protest against Sir Joseph Ward being apPremicx* of this colony.