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A Bachelor Supper
“When I was a bachelor I lived by myself And all the bread and cheese I got, I put upon the shelf; The rats and the mice, they made such a strife I was forced to go to London to buy me a wife.
The streets were so broad and the lanes were so narrow I was forced to bring my wife home in a wheelbarrow." THIS old Mother Goose rhyme was the keynote of a bachelor supper which one girl gave for her brother and a few of his friends on his birthday.
The centerpiece on the table was an arrangement of bachelors' buttons and at every place was a tiny toy wheelbarrow filled with candies, a wee dressed-up dolly dame perched atop of each load. [80] The rhyme also furnished the reason for the first course, which was most suitably bread and cheese, only the bread was in the form of buttered rounds of toast and the cheese was a delicious Welsh rarebit, accompanied by coffee or gingerale. Ice-cream in cantaloupes with a chocolate mouse nibbling at the rind followed, to be eaten with those most delicious of all cookies home-made "hermits." [81] A
A whole party built out of a nursery rhyme. The menu is short — rarebit on toast, ice cream in a melon, cookies — and every item on it is there because a line of the rhyme put it there.
- The method is the transferable partBread and cheese in the rhyme becomes buttered rounds of toast with a Welsh rarebit. The rats and mice become a chocolate mouse nibbling the rind of the melon. The wheelbarrow becomes a favour at each place. Read it as a worked example of turning a text into a table rather than as a menu to copy.
- Welsh rarebit is a sauce, not grilled cheeseCheese melted with beer or milk, mustard and seasoning, cooked to a smooth pour and sent over toast. It needs low heat and movement, and it splits if it boils. The name has survived in Britain while the dish has largely gone, so a reader who recognises the words may well produce the wrong thing.
- Bachelors’ buttons are flowersThe centrepiece is cornflowers, not haberdashery. The pun is the decoration, and it is the kind of joke the book makes constantly: find a flower whose name fits the occasion and put it in the middle of the table.
- Ice cream in a cantaloupe still worksHalf a chilled melon, seeds out, filled with vanilla ice cream. It needs a melon that will sit flat and a short time between filling and serving, and it needs nothing else added. This is the one item on the page that could go on a table tonight unaltered.
- HermitsA soft spiced cookie with molasses and raisins, baked in bars or drops and still made under that name in New England. The book calls them home-made because they were: this is not a bought biscuit, and the recipe is not given here.
- Coffee or ginger ale is the whole drinks listFor a supper given to a group of young men, that is the entire provision. Nothing else is offered and no apology is made, which tells you more about the evening the author had in mind than the food does.
The occasion is a sister giving a birthday party for her brother and his friends, at home, and organising it around a rhyme whose punchline is that an unmarried man cannot manage a household and has to go and buy a wife. The joke is on the guest of honour and his single state, and it is made with toy wheelbarrows and a dressed-up doll at every place. What the page records, apart from the teasing, is who did the work: a young woman produced an entire evening for her brother out of a stationer’s shop, a melon and a chafing dish, and the book she was reading treated that as the normal arrangement.