It is more like a private club than any thing else I can compare it to, and I passed some of my pleasantest time in America at his establishment, and never bid farewell to him or his sons, or the company, without regret. There are some hotels in New York upon the English system: the Globe is the best, and I always frequented it; and there is an excellent French restaurateur’s (Delmonico’s).
Of course, where the population and traffic are great, and the travellers who pass through numerous, the hotels are large and good; where, on the contrary, the road is less and less frequented, so do they decrease in importance, size, and respectability, until you arrive at the farm-house entertainment of Virginia and Kentucky; the grocery, or mere grog-shop, or the log-house of the Far West. The way-side inns are remarkable for their uniformity; the furniture of the bar-room is invariably the same: a wooden clock, map of the United States, map of the State, the Declaration of Independence, a looking-glass, with a hair-brush and comb hanging to it by strings, pro bono publico; sometimes with the extra embellishment of one or two miserable pictures, such as General Jackson scrambling upon a horse, with fire or steam coming out of his nostrils, going to the battle of New Orleans, etcetera, etcetera.
He who is of the silver-fork school, will not find much comfort out of the American cities and large towns. There are no neat, quiet little inns, as in England. It is all the “rough and tumble” system, and when you stop at humble inns you must expect to eat peas with a two-pronged fork, and to sit down to meals with people whose exterior is any thing but agreeable, to attend upon yourself, and to sleep in a room in which there are three or four other beds; (I have slept in one with nearly twenty,) most of them carrying double, even if you do not have a companion in your own.
A New York friend of mine travelling in an Extra with his family, told me that at a western inn he had particularly requested that he might not have a bed-fellow, and was promised that he should not. On his retiring, he found his bed already occupied, and he went down to the landlady, and expostulated. “Well,” replied she, “it’s only your own driver; I thought you wouldn’t mind him.”
Another gentleman told me, that having arrived at a place called Snake’s Hollow, on the Mississippi, the bed was made on the kitchen-floor, and the whole family and travellers, amounting in all to seventeen, of all ages and both sexes, turned into the same bed altogether. Of course this must be expected in a new country, and is a source of amusement, rather than of annoyance.
I must now enter into a very important question, which is that of eating and drinking. Mr Cooper, in his remarks upon his own countrymen, says, very ill-naturedly—“The Americans are the grossest feeders of any civilised nation known. As a nation, their food is heavy, coarse, and indigestible, while it is taken in the least artificial forms that cookery will allow. The predominance of grease in the American kitchen, coupled with the habits of hearty eating, and of constant expectoration, are the causes of the diseases of the stomach which are so common in America.”
This is not correct. The cookery in the United States is exactly what it is and must be every where else—in a ratio with the degree of refinement of the population. In the principal cities, you will meet with as good cookery in private houses as you will in London, or even Paris; indeed, considering the great difficulty which the Americans have to contend with, from the almost impossibility of obtaining good servants, I have often been surprised that it is so good as it is. At Delmonico’s, and the Globe Hotel at New York, where you dine from the Carte, you have excellent French cookery; so you have at Astor House, particularly at private parties; and, generally speaking, the cooking at all the large hotels may be said to be good; indeed, when it is considered that the American table-d’hôte has to provide for so many people, it is quite surprising how well it is done. The daily dinner, at these large hotels, is infinitely superior to any I have ever sat down to at the public entertainments given at the Free-Masons’ Tavern, and others in London, and the company is usually more numerous. The bill of fare of the table-d’hôte of the Astor House is printed every day. I have one with me which I shall here insert, to prove that the eating is not so bad in America as described by Mr Cooper.
There are some trifling points relative to eating which I shall not remark upon until I speak of society, as they will there be better placed. Of course, as you advance into the country, and population recedes, you run through all the scale of cookery until you come to the “corn bread, and common doings,” (i.e. bread made of Indian meal, and fat pork,) in the Far West. In a new country, pork is more easily raised than any other meat, and the Americans eat a great deal of pork, which renders the cooking in the small taverns very greasy; with the exception of the Virginian farm taverns, where they fry chickens without grease in a way which would be admired by Ude himself; but this is a State receipt, handed down from generation to generation, and called chicken fixings. The meat in America is equal to the best in England; Miss Martineau does indeed say that she never ate good beef during the whole time she was in this country; but she also says that an American stage-coach is the most delightful of all conveyances, and a great many other things, which I may hereafter quote, to prove the idiosyncracy of the lady’s disposition; so we will let that pass, with the observation that there is no accounting for taste. The American markets in the cities are well supplied. I have been in the game market, at New York, and seen at one time nearly three hundred head of deer, with quantities of bear, racoons, wild turkeys, geese, ducks, and every variety of bird in countless profusion. Bear I abominate; racoon is pretty good. The wild turkey is excellent; but the great delicacies in America are the terrapin, and the canvas-back ducks. To like the first I consider as rather an acquired taste. I decidedly prefer the turtle, which are to be had in plenty, all the year round; but the canvas-back duck is certainly well worthy of its reputation. Fish is well supplied. They have the sheep’s head, shad, and one or two others, which we have not. Their salmon is not equal to ours, and they have no turbot. Pine-apples, and almost all the tropical fruits, are hawked about in carts in the Eastern cities; but I consider the fruit of the temperate zone, such as grapes, peaches, etcetera, inferior to the English. Oysters are very plentiful, very large, and, to an English palate, rather insipid. As the Americans assert that the English and French oysters taste of copper, and that therefore they cannot eat them, I presume they do; and that’s the reason why we do not like the American oysters, copper being better than no flavour at all.
I think, after this statement, that the English will agree with me that there are plenty of good things for the table in America; but the old proverb says, “God sends meat, and the devil sends cooks;” and such is, and unfortunately must be, the case for a long while, in most of the houses in America, owing to the difficulty of obtaining, or keeping servants. But I must quit the subject of eating, for one of much more importance in America, which is that of drinking.
I always did consider that the English and the Swiss were the two nations who most indulged in potations; but on my arrival in the United States, I found that our descendants, in this point most assuredly, as they fain would be thought to do in all others, surpassed us altogether.
Impartiality compels me to acknowledge the truth; we must, in this instance, submit to a national defeat. There are many causes for this: first, the heat of the climate, next the coldness of the climate, then the changeableness of the climate; add to these, the cheapness of liquor in general, the early disfranchisement of the youth from all parental control, the temptation arising from the bar and association, and, lastly, the pleasantness, amenity, and variety of the potations.
Reasons, therefore, are as plentiful as blackberries, and habit becomes second nature.
To run up the whole catalogue of the indigenous compounds in America, from “iced water” to a “stone fence,” or “streak of lightning,” would fill a volume; I shall first speak of foreign importations.
The Port in America is seldom good; the climate appears not to agree with the wine. The quantity of Champagne drunk is enormous, and would absorb all the vintage of France, were it not that many hundred thousand bottles are consumed more than are imported.
