Irvin Cobb - Cobb's Bill-of-Fare

Upon a certain gladsome occasion a certain man went into a certain restaurant in a certain large city, being imbued with the idea that he desired a certain kind of food. Expense was with him no object. The coming of the holidays had turned his thoughts backward to the care-free days of boyhood and he longed for the holidaying provender of his youth with a longing that was as wide as a river and as deep as a well.

"Me, I have tried it all," he said to himself. "I have been down the line on this eating proposition from alphabet soup to animal crackers. I know the whole thing, from the nine-dollar, nine-course banquet, with every course bathed freely in the same kind of sauce and tasting exactly like all the other courses, to the quick lunch, where the only difference between clear soup and beef broth is that if you want the beef broth the waiter sticks his thumb into the clear soup and brings it along.

"I have feasted copiously at grand hotels where they charge you corkage on your own hot-water bottle, and I have dallied frugally with the forty-cent table d'hote with wine, when the victuals were the product of the well-known Sam Brothers—Flot and Jet—and the wine tasted like the stuff that was left over from graining the woodwork for a mahogany finish.

"I now greatly desire to eat some regular food, and if such a thing be humanly possible I should also prefer to eat it in silence unbroken except by the noises I make myself. I have eaten meals backed up so close to the orchestra that the leader and I were practically wearing the same pair of suspenders. I have been howled at by a troupe of Sicilian brigands armed with their national weapons—the garlic and the guitar. I have been tortured by mechanical pianos and automatic melodeons, and I crave quiet. But in any event I want food. I cannot spare the time to travel nine hundred miles to get it, and I must, therefore, take a chance here."

So, as above stated, he entered this certain restaurant and seated himself; and as soon as the Hungarian string band had desisted from playing an Italian air orchestrated by a German composer he got the attention of an omnibus, who was Greek, and the bus enlisted the assistance of a side waiter, he being French, and the side waiter in time brought to him the head waiter, regarding whom I violate no confidence in stating that he was Swiss. The man I have been quoting then drew from his pockets a number of bank notes and piled them up slowly, one by one, alongside his plate. Beholding the denominations of these bills the head waiter with difficulty restrained himself from kissing the hungry man upon the bald spot on his head. The sight of a large bill invariably quickens the better nature of a head waiter.

"Now, then," said the enhungered one, "I would have speech with you. I desire food—food suitable for a free-born American stomach on such a day as this. No, you needn't wave that menu at me. I can shut my eyes and remember the words and music of every menu that ever was printed. I don't know what half of it means because I am no court interpreter, but I can remember it. I can sing it, and if I had my clarinet here I could play it. Heave the menu over the side of the boat and listen to me. What I want is just plain food—food like mother used to make and mother's fair-haired boy used to eat. We will start off with turkey—turkey a la America, understand; turkey that is all to the Hail Columbia, Happy Land. With it I want some cramberry sauce—no, not cranberry, I guess I know its real name—some cramberry sauce; and some mashed potatoes—mashed with enthusiasm and nothing else, if you can arrange it—and some scalloped oysters and maybe a few green peas. Likewise I want a large cup of coffee right along with these things—not served afterward in a misses' and children's sized cup, but along with the dinner."

"Salad?" suggested the head waiter, reluctantly withdrawing his fascinated vision from the pile of bills. "Salad?" he said.

"No salad," said the homesick stranger, "not unless you could chop me up some lettuce and powder it with granulated sugar and pour a little vinegar over it and bring it in to me with the rest of the grub. Where I was raised we always had chewing tobacco for the salad course, anyhow."

The head waiter's whole being recoiled from the bare prospect. He seemed on the point of swooning, but looked at the money and came to.

"Dessert?" he added, poising a pencil.

"Well," said the man reflectively, "I don't suppose you could fix me up some ambrosia—that's sliced oranges with grated cocoanut on top. And in this establishment I doubt if you know anything about boiled custard, with egg kisses bobbing round it and sunken reefs of sponge cake underneath. So I guess I'd better compromise on some plum pudding; but mind you, not the imported English plum pudding. English plum pudding is not a food, it's a missile, and when eaten it is a concealed deadly weapon. I want an American plum pudding. Mark well my words—an American plum pudding.

"And," he concluded, "if you can bring me these things, just so, without any strange African sauces or weird Oriental fixings or trans-Atlantic goo stirred into them or poured on to them or breathed upon them, I shall be very grateful to you, and in addition I shall probably make you independently wealthy for life."

It was quite evident that the head waiter regarded him as a lunatic—perhaps only a lunatic in a mild form and undoubtedly one cushioned with ready money—but nevertheless a lunatic. Yet he indicated by a stately bow that he would do the best he could under the circumstances, and withdrew to take the matter up with the house committee.

"Now this," said the man, "is going to be something like. To be sure the table is not set right. As I remember how things used to look at home there should be a mustache cup at Uncle Hiram's plate, so he could drink his floating island without getting his cream-separators mussy, and there ought to be a vinegar cruet at one end and a silver cake basket at the other and about nine kinds of pickles and jellies scattered round; and in the center of the table there should be a winter bouquet—a nice, hard, firm, dark red winter bouquet—containing, among other things, a sheaf of wheat, a dried cockscomb and a couple of oak galls. Yet if the real provender is forthcoming I can put up with the absence of the proper settings and decorations."

He had ample leisure for these thoughts, because, as you yourself may have noticed, in a large restaurant when you order anything that is out of the ordinary—which means anything that is ordinary—it takes time to put the proposition through the proper channels. The waiter lays your application before the board of governors, and after the board of governors has disposed of things coming under the head of unfinished business and good of the order it takes a vote, and if nobody blackballs you the treasurer is instructed to draw a warrant and the secretary engrosses appropriate resolutions, and your order goes to the cook.

But finally this man's food arrived. And he looked at it and sniffed at it daintily—like a reluctant patient going under the ether—and he tasted of it; and then he put his face down in his hands and burst into low, poignant moans. For it wasn't the real thing at all. The stuffing of the turkey defied chemical analysis; and, moreover, the turkey before serving should have been dusted with talcum powder and fitted with dress-shields, it being plainly a crowning work of the art preservative—meaning by that the cold-storage packing and pickling industry. And if you can believe what Doctor Wiley says—and if you can't believe the man who has dedicated his life to warning you against the things which you put in your mouth to steal away your membranes, whom can you believe?—the cranberry sauce belonged in a paint store and should have been labeled Easter-egg dye, and the green peas were green with Paris green.