The Weekly Machen
The following article is the ninth in a series by Arthur Machen for The Daily Express.
Anything Good Enough!
Why Do We Put Up with Restaurant Rubbish?
by
Arthur Machen
October 10, 1918
On the whole I do not think that food in England is much nastier during the war than it was before the war.
It must be understood that I am not speaking of the cosmopolitan cookery of the Hôtel Glorieux and its splendid marble companions; I have in mind the plain roast and boiled and chop and steak which are the portion of most of us; the mid-day meat for which we paid half a crown before the war, for which we now pay five shillings.
Food is not nastier than it was; because nastiness is not like parallel lines. It cannot be prolonged to infinity. It has its ne plus ultra. Take the roast fowl of the tavern, I met it not long ago. I had a leg of it on my plate. Now I am not a comparative anatomist, but I know that the body of the common hen has a skin stretched over it. There was no skin on the leg before me. Furthermore, the flesh was of an off, dull red colour. Furthermore, it fell from the bone into distinct dry particles at the touch of the knife. Furthermore, it had no taste whatever.
Now the mystery of that leg of roast fowl is no mystery to me. That bird had been stewed for hours for soup. It came up out of the pot pale and skinless and worthless. The cook then put it into the oven to acquire a roasted aspect; hence the dull red blush.
That is what our “good, plain, old-fashioned English cookery” has come to. We eat this rubbish and pay pretty heavily for it, and, worse still, even boast that “we don’t care much what we eat; anything is good enough for us.”
Anything good enough! What would be thought of a chemist, conducting a series of most complicated and delicate experiments, who filled his retorts at random, observing casually: “Any old acids and alkalis are good enough for me, and road sweepings will do all right”?
Previous: Sacred Turnip
Next: Little Men and Little Pleasures
darklybrightpress.com 
That’s a pretty swingeing anaphora – those three ‘Furthermores’! (Perhaps even a specific play with the “Ceterum” – or “Ceterum autem” – “censeo Carthaginem esse delendam” probably familiar to many of his readers?) And part of this very interesting glimpse of his conviction that the only big wartime change for the worse in ‘dining-out’ “mid-day meat” was inflationary.
LikeLike