The Weekly Machen
Arthur Machen’s admiration for good meat and drink is well documented, but his interest in such pleasures should not be construed as the fancies of a glutton. This accusation may better fit the showy excesses that he deplored, which has only worsened in our own day. Rather, his concern for this subject is aligned with his major themes of ecstasy and joy. The pleasing sight of vegetables and fruit simply arranged and the taste of excellent fare are symbols which point to higher things.
The Joy of Eating
by
Arthur Machen
September 25, 1912
There was once a perfect greengrocer’s shop. Not in the common streets of London; there it seems to me that all the vegetables have been placed in their bins by means of a coal-porter’s shovel. There is a grossness and a rough display of quantity about every sort of edible root and goodly green thing which is in itself highly offensive, and the fruits are stacked in great heaps as if they were coals or coke or some rough stuff which is so plentiful that no one can care for it.
Once I ate greengages. Then I gathered them in the early morning, one by one, from a little leaning tree that fronted the sun on a southern slope; I do not look at them now, when they are heaped in great hods at the dusty corner of the street.
Autumn in Touraine
The perfect greengrocer’s shop was in Chinon, in Touraine, a little town that climbs up from the Vienne river to a warm yellow rock, on which the castle walls still stand ruinous.
From the river’s bank to the sunny height the narrow, winding streets go up as in Lincoln—only it is not so long a climb—and in one of these streets, long ago, I remember finding greengrocery allied with modesty—a sight one never sees in London town.
Two bunches of green grapes hung one on each side of a purple cluster in the little window; there were three pears of delicious golden aspect, and a sunny quince reposing on a bed of French beans contrasted with a purple aubergine.
Here you had the autumn fruitage of Touraine in epitome; you were not offended with the sight of three hundred weight of grapes or pears or potatoes, heaped roughly together, shovelled in coarse, uninviting masses.
I could not help thinking of this homely and pleasant shop when I was strolling yesterday along the glittering avenues of the Grocers’ Exhibition at Islington. The method seemed to be the exact opposite of that employed by the little Chinon shop, not only in the stalls of the exhibitors, but in the efforts of the window-dressers.
If you have lemon drops, for sale, it seems, you must construct pyramids of bottles holding this one sweetmeat in your shop window; butter must not be signified by one, two, or three coy and retiring pats, hiding amongst green leaves, but by great yellow mountains, and it is necessary, it would appear, to convince the passer-by that you have raspberry jam for sale by displaying at least six dozen pots of it.
I have no doubt that it is all right, that it is “business” and the only way to sell your goods, but to me all this heaping up of stock makes no appeal. I am rather to be persuaded by a whisper than a bellow. “Pug’s Perfect Purple Plums” may be delicious, I do not doubt it—till I see this legend repeated on two dozen bottles two dozen times.
The Grocer’s Craft
Still; this is only my personal standpoint, and it is to be presumed that the grocers know their own business best. If people in general will not buy plums or butter or bacon unless the shop window shouts to them by visible evidence that vast quantities of these edibles are stored within; why, there is no more to be said; let the pyramids of tin and glass soar high and giddy to a point, let the butter swell into yellow mountains, let the brown flitch of bacon display its sturdy bulk. The grocer has been accused of lack of imagination; perhaps he would say that his customers have less, that he is obliged, as it were, to throw his goods in their faces.
But, leaving this difficult and delicate business of teaching the craftsman his craft apart, what did strike me at the Agricultural Hall Exhibition was the curious complexity of civilized diet.
I believe there is a horrid regimen of great simplicity prescribed by some doctors as an escape from gouty and rheumatic disorders. You abstain, not only from all meats and all alcohols, but from tea, coffee, and cocoa, and from most vegetables, and are left at last with a menu of nuts, dates, cheese, and milk. It is for those concerned to decide whether the pains of gout or those of savagery are the more endurable. It will be remembered that the famous Earl of Derby, on being urged to drink a certain anti-gout sherry, said: “I prefer the gout.”
And, if we are neither food fanatics nor persons under a severe medical rule, it is odd on what varieties we satisfy our hunger and our thirst, and odder still into what dreams we translate the stuff that the butcher and the vintner and the grocer sell. I am no materialist; I am far from holding that thought is but a form of butter and beef and bacon, for I know that lyric rapture and the music of the soul cannot be weighed out by pounds and ounces, or estimated in the most delicate of the scales on view at Islington.
But is it not a great marvel? You take a man fainting and disconsolate, and give him meat and drink and he will become eloquent; your beefsteak and Burgundy and coffee and tobacco smoke are returned to you, with good luck, in the shape of high thoughts and wit and poetry.
A Thought on Diet
And for such a complex being as man, as it seems to me, a complex diet is both desirable and natural. Science, of course, talks in proteids, and is always ready to show that some eminently simple and highly unattractive bill of fare is much more nourishing than the complexities of the grocer or the cook; but science, though funny and delightful, is so terribly unpractical.
The fact is that there is no more whimsical or unreliable guide than chemistry. We are most of us agreed that it cannot explain the mystery of life; but we may go much further than that, and be bold enough, to declare that it cannot even explain the mystery of breakfast and dinner.
If the race of men had been altogether unhappy, if that late folly which is called science had been their guide from the earliest times till now, it is evident that there would never have been wine, beer, tea, tobacco—or pickles.
This, it is evident, would have been an absurd state of things. The Egyptian pyramids and the plots of Shakespeare and pickled onions are all of a piece; they are all fantastical and unscientific, and all alike admirable.
For fancy, and not science, is the true and safe guide of life, both in small things and in great. In spite of all the stuff about proteids and the solemn sermons that we hear about the chemistry of nutrition, we all know that it is what we “fancy” that does us good. The hottest Indian curry, eaten with relish and with all manner of outlandish condiments is more beneficial both to body and spirit than a scientific food swallowed with disgust.
Hence, as I say, the good of spices and sauces and stimulants and sedatives, and things hot and all things sweet, and all things that the professors tell us are extremely bad for us—in fact, of the Grocers’ Exhibition.
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