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At Table with the Clergy: Protestant

Far less can be said of the Protestant clergy on the score of cookery or with respect to the improvement of the vine and the invention of beverages. Nearly all clerical roads lead through Rome, it would seem, in so far as relates to gastronomy. Moreover, in Protestant countries at least among the lesser lights of the church-it is rather the rector who is fêted than who does the fêting, and who, even were he inclined to asceticism, would scarcely be allowed to practise it by his parishioners. In one of his essays, "The Country Sunday," Richard Jefferies tells how the chapel pastor is entertained at table in Wiltshire: "There is no man so feasted as the chapel pastor. He dines every Sunday, and at least once a week besides, at the house of one of his stoutest upholders.

After dinner the cognac bottle is produced, and the pastor fills his tumbler half full of spirit, and but lightly dashes it with water. It is cognac, and not brandy, for your chapel minister thinks it an affront if anything more common than the best French liquor is put before him; he likes it strong, and with it his long clay pipe. Very frequently another minister, sometimes two or three, come in at the same time, and take the same dinner, and afterwards form a genial circle with cognac and tobacco, when the room speedily becomes full of smoke and the bottle of brandy soon disappears. In these family parties there is not the least approach to over-conviviality; it is merely the custom, no one thinks anything of a glass and a pipe; it is perfectly innocent; it is not a local thing, but common and understood. The consumption of brandy and tobacco and the good things of dinner, tea, and supper (for the party generally sit out the three meals) must in a month cost the host a good deal of money, but all things are cheerfully borne for the good of the church. Never were men feasted with such honest good-will as these pastors; and if a budding Paul or Silas happens to come along who has scarce yet passed his ordination, the youthful divine may stay a week if he likes, and lick the platter clean."

One also remembers the curates' dinner as described in "The Professor" by that keen observer, Charlotte Brontë: "The curates had good appetites, and though the beef was tough, they ate a great deal of it. They swallowed, too, a tolerable allowance of the 'flat beer, while a dish of Yorkshire pudding and two tureens of vegetables disappeared like leaves before locusts. The cheese, too, received distinguished marks of their attention; and a 'spice-cake,' which followed by way of dessert, vanished like a vision and was no more found." Anthony Hayward, in "The Art of Dining," tells the story of the phenomenal appetite of a chaplain during the Old Bailey sittings, when it was the custom to serve two dinners (exact duplicates) a day, the first at three o'clock, the second at five: "The first course was rather miscellaneous, varying with the season, though marrow-puddings always formed a part of it; the second never varied and consisted exclusively of beefsteaks. As the judges relieved each other, it was impracticable for them to partake of both; but a little chaplain whose duty it was to preside at the lower end of the table was never absent from his post. This invaluable public servant persevered from a sheer sense of duty till he had acquired the habit of eating two dinners a day, and practised it for nearly ten years without any perceptible injury to his health. We had the pleasure of witnessing his performance at one of the five o'clock dinners, and can assert with confidence that the vigour of his attack on the beefsteaks was wholly unimpaired by the effective execution a friend assured us he had done on them two hours before."