Curious Facts

Everything below is in the book — each fact links straight to the page it comes from.

A famous recipe collection was bought off a Roman rubbish barrow, in deliberate imitation of Robert Browning. The Marchesa says she was turning over the junk stalls of the Piazza Navona when she found a little yellow paper-covered book — "innocently plagiarising that fateful walk of Browning's round the Riccardi Palace in Florence, the day when he bought for a lira the Romana homocidiorum." Browning's lira purchase became *The Ring and the Book*; hers, she notes drily, the world "will probably never fathom the full effect of." Read it in the book →
The chef who cooked the venison had been under sentence of death. M. Narcisse, presumed lost, is produced at the end of dinner by a stroke of the Marchesa's hand-bell. "Narcisse was condemned, indeed, but no one ever believed he would be executed" — and his free pardon came only when his accomplice "Mademoiselle Sidonie" was found to be a Miss Adah Levine, "who had graduated at a music-hall in East London." Read it in the book →
"Do they really use board-school children as tests to see whether toadstools are poisonous or not?". Mrs. Gradinger boasts that she can identify edible fungi "in common with every child of the intelligent working-man educated in a board school where botany is properly taught." Sir John's interjection is the book's finest piece of deadpan; she replies stiffly that nothing she said justified the inference. Read it in the book →
A guest suspects his vanished cook talked recipes in his sleep. Sir John, recognising his lost chef's sauce on the venison, casts about for an explanation: was it possible that during a nap under the verandah after lunch "in his sleep he might have murmured, in her hearing, words which gave the key of the mystery"? Read it in the book →
A landowner hopes a bottled sauce will replace his collapsing rents. "I remember that ere this fortunes have been made out of sauces," he reflects, and if properly handled it "may counteract my falling, or rather disappearing, rents." All that stands in the way: "If only I could hit upon a fetching name, and find twenty thousand pounds to spend in advertising." Read it in the book →
A fellow guest suggests the fungus enthusiast eat her own toadstools first, "pour encourager les autres". Miss Macdonnell proposes that Mrs. Gradinger "gather a few of her less deadly fungi, and cook them and eat them herself" — and adds that if she doesn't die in agonies, "we may all forswear beef and live on toadstools." Mrs. Gradinger cheerfully accepts. Read it in the book →
The cure for English fungus-phobia: an army of government toadstool inspectors. To get the nation eating wild mushrooms, the table agrees, "it will be necessary to extirpate the belief that all fungi, except the familiar mushroom, are poisonous, and perhaps to appoint an army of inspectors to see that only the right sort are brought to market" — employment, adds Lady Considine, for ambitious working-class youths, to the ratepayers' delight. Read it in the book →
The Progressive lady has a "platform intonation" that strikes terror into a dinner party. When Mrs. Gradinger is accused of conservatism she protests that "I—that is, my husband—always votes for Progressive candidates," while "dropping into her platform intonation, at the sound of which consternation arose in every breast." Read it in the book →
Italian food in Italy's grand hotels was already "mongrel French". The Marchesa's opening dinner astonishes her well-travelled guests precisely because they had never met the real thing: "all had eaten of the mongrel French dishes given at the 'Grand' hotels of the principal Italian cities," and some had gone slumming at London restaurants with Italian names over the door. Read it in the book →
The first dinner was the last free lunch. The Marchesa serves the party one meal all' Italiana before lessons begin — "the last they would taste without having participated in the preparation." From the next morning, every guest cooks what they eat. Read it in the book →
Good manners cost Mrs. Sinclair a second helping of soup — and she never forgave herself. She confesses at lunch that "my regard for manners forbade me ask for a second helping." Van der Roet's reply: "See what it is to have no manners... I plunged boldly for another portion of that admirable preparation of calf's head at dinner." Read it in the book →
The Marchesa's secret weapon was her maid. Angelina is described as "one of those marvellous Italian servants who combine fidelity with efficiency in a degree strange to the denizens of more progressive lands" — a backhanded compliment aimed squarely at English domestic service. Read it in the book →
The dramatic reveal is staged with a hand-bell and a suit of spotless white. Asked who supplied the venison sauce, the Marchesa simply "struck a hand-bell on the table. The door opened, and a little man, habited in cook's dress of spotless white, entered and came forward." The rest of the party then files out, feeling "it was unmeet that such a reunion should be witnessed by other eyes." Read it in the book →