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And Another Thing

Paul Johnson

Tuesday, 18th March 2008

Quality for dinner. Pass the Fairy Liquid, Old Boy

Orwell’s underlying thesis is that so-called luxury living in hotels and restaurants is a fraud and a pretence, everything done for appearance, no real quality. I daresay things have changed radically in the three quarters of a century since he wrote, especially in treatment of the staff, but the underlying verities remain. The way the food is handled by cooks and waiters before it emerges from the kitchen and reaches the table is described by Orwell with grim puritan horror, and he says that the more expensive the establishment and elaborate the food, the more likely it is to reflect the sweat-drenched dirt in which the staff work behind the scenes. On his last page he swears he will never patronise a luxury restaurant. I rather share his view. If possible, I like to see my food cooked, and put on the plate, and as a rule would always prefer my meals in a private house (preferably my own) than in a restaurant, especially one run by a celebrity chef — for while the cook is imperious and arrogant, and highly paid, the waiters will bear grudges and will take it out on the customers by doing nasty things to the food before it reaches them.

When I say that, for the squeamish and the imaginative, it is safer to eat in a private house than in a restaurant, I am talking about the present. In Victorian times, a big country house, or even a large London establishment, was run on lines which meant the lower servants were or felt themselves to be persecuted, overworked and underpaid. A Mayfair or Belgravia house would have a kitchen staff of a cook and assistant cook, two kitchenmaids at least, two scullery maids and a male known by the old title of a scullion. He was the equivalent of Orwell’s plongeur, doing all the heaviest work at the sink, the scullery maids helping to stack dishes and dry. These lowly people never set foot in the kitchen proper, except when specifically told to do so. The business of waiters was done by the four footmen, under the direction of the butler, who acted as maître d’hôtel. All these people were needed to serve a nine-course meal for 18 people, standard for an upper- or upper-middle-class dinner party. The frenzied work at the climax of a big dinner left all tired if not exhausted, and resentful servants could take their revenge in disgusting ways I will not elaborate. On the other hand, as Orwell writes, some servants identified with the privileged recipients of the food. This was still true up to the second world war. A memoir which recalls Cliveden in the 1930s recounts how a maidservant was made to carry into the guests a soufflé dish so hot that she burned her hands, and she complained to the butler. He said: ‘Yes, my dear, and I am sorry but you must bear it. The scars on your hands will soon heal but a soufflé, once ruined, is ruined for ever.’