FullReads

Most musicians and those who enjoy listening to music, like to eat (this does not mean that people who like to eat always desire to listen to music at the same time, but nowadays one has little choice in the matter); what is more pregnant, most of them like to cook. We may include even the music critics, one of whom (Henry T. Finck) has written a book about such matters. The others eat … and expand. James Huneker devotes sixteen pages of “The New Cosmopolis” to the “maw of the monster.” And as H. L. Mencken has pointed out, “The Pilsner motive runs through the book from cover to cover.” Dinners are constantly being given for the musicians and critics to meet and talk over thirteen courses with wine. You may read Mr. Krehbiel’s glowing accounts of the dinner given to Adelina Patti (a dinner referred to in Joseph Hergesheimer’s lyric novel, “The Three Black Pennys”) on the occasion of her twenty-fifth anniversary as a singer, of the dinner to Marcella Sembrich to mark her retirement from the opera stage, and of a dinner to Teresa Carreno when she proposed a toast to her three husbands…. Go to the opera house and observe the lady singers, with their ample bosoms and their broad hips, the men with their expansive paunches … and use your imagination. Why is it, when a singer is interviewed for a newspaper, that she invariably finds herself tired of hotel food and wants an apartment of her own, where she can cook to her stomach’s content? Why are the musical journals and the Sunday supplements of the newspapers always publishing pictures of contralti with their sleeves rolled back to the elbows, their Poiret gowns (cunningly and carefully exhibited nevertheless) covered with aprons, baking bread, turning omelettes, or preparing clam broth Uncle Sam? You, my reader, have surely seen these pictures, but it has perhaps not occurred to you to conjure up a reason for them.

Edgar Saltus says: “A perfect dinner should resemble a concert. As the morceaux succeed each other, so, too, should the names of the composers.” Few dinners in New York may be regarded as concerts and still fewer restaurants may be looked upon as concert halls, except, unfortunately, in the literal sense. However, if you can find a restaurant where opera singers and conductors eat you may be sure it is a good one. Huneker describes the old Lienau’s, where William Steinway, Anton Seidl, Theodore Thomas, Scharwenka, Joseffy, Lilli Lehmann, Max Heinrich, and Victor Herbert used to gather. Follow Alfred Hertz and you will be in excellent company in a double sense. Then watch him consume a plateful of Viennese pastry. If you have ever seen Emmy Destinn or Feodor Chaliapine eat you will feel that justice has been done to a meal. I once sat with the Russian bass for twelve hours, all of which time he was eating or drinking. He began with six plates of steaming onion soup (cooked with cheese and toast). The old New Year’s eve festivities at the Gadski-Tauschers’ resembled the storied banquets of the middle ages…. Boars’ heads, meat pies, salade macedoine, coeur de palmier, hollandaise were washed down with magnums and quarts of Irroy brut, 1900, Pol Roger, Chambertin, graceful Bohemian crystal goblets of Liebfraumilch and Johannisberger Schloss-Auslese. Mary Garden once sent a jewelled gift to the chef at the Ritz-Carlton in return for a superb fish sauce which he had contrived for her. H. E. Krehbiel says that Brignoli “probably ate as no tenor ever ate before or since–ravenously as a Prussian dragoon after a fast.” Peche Melba has become a stable article on many menus in many cities in many lands. Agnes G. Murphy, in her biography of Mme. Melba, says that one day the singer, Joachim, and a party of friends stopped at a peasant’s cottage near Bergamo, where they were regaled with such delicious macaroni that Melba persuaded her friends to return another day and wait while the peasant taught her the exact method of preparing the dish. In at least one New York restaurant oeuf Toscanini is to be found on the bill. I have heard Olive Fremstad complain of the cooking in this hotel in Paris, or that hotel in New York, or the other hotel in Munich, and when she found herself in an apartment of her own she immediately set about to cook a few special dishes for herself.