“The Britannique was a handsome hotel on the quay, bright of aspect and many-balconied. The house had a busy look, and early as it was—not long after noon—a long table in the gaily-decorated dining-room was already laid for the table d’hôte. Thereupon Lucius beheld showy pyramids of those woolly peaches and flavourless grapes and wooden pears which seem peculiar to the soil of France—the Deadsea apples of a table d’hôte dessert. Already napkins, spread fan-shape, adorned the glasses, ranged in double line along the vast perspective of tablecloth. Waiters were hurrying to and fro across the hall, chamber-maids bawled to each other—as only French chamber-maids can bawl—on the steep winding staircase. An insupportable odour of dinner—strongly flavoured with garlic—pervaded the atmosphere. Tourists were hurriedly consulting time-tables, as if on the point of departure; other tourists, just arrived and burdened with luggage, were gazing disconsolately around, as if doubtful of finding accommodation. Habitués of the hotel were calmly smoking their midday cigarettes, and waiting for the dainty little breakfast which the harassed cook was so slow to produce through yonder hatch in the wall, to which hungry eyes glanced impatiently.”
A cook of roughly the same moment, setting down the same dish.
Pick out the finest, handling as little as may be, and pile upon a salver or flat dish, with bits of ice between them, and ornament with peach leaves or fennel sprigs. One of the prettiest dishes of fruit I ever saw upon a dessert-table was an open silver basket, wide at the top, heaped with rich red peaches and yellow Bartlett pears, interspersed with feathery bunches of green, which few of those who admired it knew for _carrot-tops_. Wild white clematis wreathed the handle and showed here and there among the fruit, while scarlet and white verbenas nestled amid the green. Send around powdered sugar with the fruit, as many like to dip peaches and pears in it after paring and quartering them.
Sources: The passage is from M. E. (Mary Elizabeth) Braddon, Lucius Davoren, free to read in full at Project Gutenberg. The recipe is from Harland, Common Sense in the Household of 1871, also free in full. Both are in the public domain in the United States. The binding above is ours — burgundy cloth, grapes stamp.