Browsing and Sluicing
P. G. Wodehouse's reference to "excellent browsing and sluicing" suggests a diet not wholly in accord with ingredients approved by the Oxford Book of Health Foods, and quotations about food often indicate a degree of self-indulgence. A character in Thomas Love Peacock's 19th-century comic novel Crotchet Castle was sustained by "a well-buttered muffin, and the tonic of a small lobster", and a few years later the clerical wit Sydney Smith wrote to a friend that, "If there is a pure and elevated pleasure in this world it is a roast pheasant with bread sauce." Edna Ferber thought that, "Roast Beef, Medium, is not only a food. It is a philosophy."
Poor presentation has often been a problem. "When I ask for a watercress sandwich, I do not mean a loaf with a field in the middle of it," remonstrated Oscar Wilde, and Philip Sassoon in the 1930s commented that a dish of lobster Newburg looked "like a puree of white gloves". Sometimes the difficulty was the combination of food: the travel writer Peter Fleming, in China in 1938, reported that "Last night we went to a Chinese dinner at six and a French dinner at nine, and I can feel the sharks' fins navigating unhappily in the Burgundy."
More often, however, it is a particular kind of food that is singled out for criticism. Thomas Earle Welby described a plate of turbot as "two fishbones, two eyeballs, and a bit of black mackintosh", and Mark Twain thought that cauliflower was "nothing but cabbage with a college education." Broccoli has had a more mixed reception. The mother in E.B. White's 1928 New Yorker cartoon encouraged her child with the words, "It's broccoli, dear" (eliciting the response, "I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it"). In 1990 George Bush Senior said simply, but with evident feeling, "I'm President of the United States, and I'm not going to eat any more broccoli." A much earlier figure, however, takes us back to the spirit of Wodehouse. "Strange to see how a good dinner and feasting reconciles everybody" said Samuel Pepys in 1665.
Elizabeth Knowles
11/03/2003
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