Dorothy Thompson

Tacoma Daily Ledger/January 15, 1922

And That Tie, as Everybody Knows, Is Food—For All Must Eat

We were sitting in the lobby of the Ritz Hotel in Budapest, listening to the strains of a gypsy violinist. Moved perhaps by the gypsy’s mournful air, the American Red Cross commissioner, looking dreamily off into space, presently began to talk of home.

“Breakfast,” he started, “who among you can recall the American breakfast? You come downstairs fresh from your morning tub. In the dining room the table is rubbed and shining, with no covering over the good brown wood but little scalloped doilies. In the center is a glass bowl of sweet peas.

“At your place is propped the daily paper, and, oh, boy, next to it is a half a grapefruit, icy cold, with all the pulp cut away from the skin, and the juice making a little pool in the middle. You may have been the least bit groggy when you came down, but at the first cool, fresh, bitterish-sweet, tangy spoonful you begin to feel vigor and energy sparkle in your veins.

“The wife sticks in the plug of the electric percolator and before you have finished your grapefruit the coffee is cheerfully bubbling in the little glass cup at the top of the machine.

“Your wife pours it out into your cup in a shining stream. None of this thick, black stuff you get on the continent, that has to be nine-tenths diluted with hot skimmed milk. No, sir, topaz clear. The color of fine old sherry, and as full of sunshine and aroma. You put in, not milk, but pale yellow cream, and the mixture turns a golden brown.”

The captain’s voice broke a little, but he went bravely on. “Toast—square, evenly cut slices of porous white bread, with the crust shaved off. Before you, on the electric toaster, they turn from white to bisque and from bisque to pale, even tan, and then to delicate nut brown. Your slice is buttered at the exact moment—it’s crisp on the edges and hot, and moist and buttery in the center.

“And bacon. Curled, and so crisp and dry you can pick it up in your fingers.”

By this time the company was in groans, and the great financial-king-on-a-tour-of-investigation, who had just come in from Czecho-Slovakia, covered his face with his hand, not weakly, to betray his emotions.

“Yes,” ended the captain. “To those who cast scorn upon the American culture or allege its non-existence, I point to the American breakfast. The climax of the breakfast of all nations—the perfection of refinement: the final triumph of culinary art; simple but exquisite, delicate but nourishing, the well spring of the national healthiness, the …”

“When I was in America once,” observed the sole Englishman, “I spent my time in New England. I got apple pie and baked beans for breakfast.”

But the words fell on deaf ears. No one was present from New England, and the captain had touched a universal cord.

In casual journey about the world I have observed that there is no national tie so binding as that of food. A nation’s food is its greatest pride. Attack the Constitution, laws, courts, schools, what you please, of a man’s country, and probably he will agree with your criticism. But attack the national dinner table, and he takes it as a personal insult. For the honor of his national dishes an American will quarrel with an Englishman, an Englishman with a Frenchman, and a German with anyone. It is understandable, because food is associated very closely with personality. We characterize national types for better or worse by what they eat and drink. Thus, a “beef-eating Englishmen,” a “beer-guzzling German,” American children shout derisively at their Italian immigrant neighbors, “Hi, Macaroni!” and we greet our Chinese laundryman facetiously as “Old Chop Suey.”

Loyalty to the national tradition in food is the last loyalty that stays by the cosmopolitan or the internationalist. A little while ago, I met in London an American Communist on his way to Moscow. He was bitter about all things American and all things local or national. I talked to him of the superiority, taking them by and large, of the American public schools; of the marvelous technical development of the nation; of all things which I could think to be advanced and superior. He had no spark of feeling for any of them. He could not be moved to the slightest leaning toward patriotism. Then I played my last card. In unctuous tones I described a Kentucky dinner. Chicken dipped in batter, fried in butter, and served with cream gravy. Ham, smothered in brown sugar, stuck full of cloves and roasted. Sweet potatoes, carameled in honey. Hot Sally Lunn. Deep apple pie with nutmeg and homemade ice cream. He said no word, but his face flushed, and his eye now burned with pride, now flooded with yearning. If, at the moment, a neighboring orchestra had struck up “The Star Spangled Banner,” I believe he would have stood and uncovered.

Not only are we nationally conscious on the subject of food, but on this topic we are all nationally bigoted. I shall never forget coming over on an English boat from Havre to Southampton and hearing a ruddy-faced Englishman exclaim as he entered the dining salon, “Thank God, at last, for some good English food.” He bawled at the waiter, “Bring me a good cut of English beef and some decent vegetables,” and his feelings even led him so far as to remark bitterly to me, a perfect stranger, “I’m so glad to have gotten away at last from those awful horse doovers and that eternal voe.” Seldom have I seen an Englishman more moved.

To me it was a revelation. I looked at him in amazement, hardly believing my ears. Was it possible, I thought, that anyone existed in the world who seriously preferred English food to French?

I had always thought that the English stuck to their puddings and boiled vegetables and half-done bacon because they were all part of the tradition, and it behooved an Englishman to “stick it out” and “play the game” in the best Anglo-Saxon style.

But my fellow-traveler opened my eyes. He liked English cooking. He not only liked it, he thought it superior!

I thought of a little bourgeois household in Paris where I had lunched every day during the preceding month, a household where the good wife did her own cooking and served her own guests. The memory of those meals will remain with me forever. First, a piquant hors d’oeuvres or a fluffy omelet.

A little piece of meat, freshly cooked, with a delicate and elusive sauce. The French know pre-eminently that reserved food never can recapture that first fine careless rapture. Your middle class English family of three buys a six-pound joint of mutton on Saturday and serves it up in a depressing cycle for the rest of the weeks.

But in a French market you can buy not only chops and cutlets in quantities small enough for two persons, but tiny roasts of beef, mutton or veal, trimmed and rolled and ready for the oven, and just sufficient for one meal.

Then, haricots verts or choux fleurs—no uninterrupted return of the potato in a French household—boiled a bit, perhaps, at first, but afterwards sauteed to take away that pallid, watery taste. A salad, mixed as a salad should be, in a big bowl, so that every leaf is coated lightly and evenly, and no residue of dressing remains to wilt the leaf, sting the palate and offend the eye.

Salad in France is never laid on a plate and douched with dressing as—my own bigotry relaxes to permit me to confess—an American salad usually is. Fruit cooled once more by a dip into iced water: a bit of cheese; a cup of fragrant coffee; a drop of liquor.

I have no doubt my English traveler had gone through this same exquisite daily experience. But he had been impervious. His patriotic morale had not weakened. I am certain that when he sat down that night in a similar middle-class household to a piece of cold mutton, some boiled potatoes, a mess of green peas, boiled with soda to keep them green and remove all flavor, and a gooseberry tart triumphantly ruined by an accompanying sauce of Bird’s custard, he followed grace with the devout thanksgiving. “Well, Phyllis, here’s some decent food at last.”

But if it is hard to understand the English bigotry, it is even more difficult to understand the German. Of all cooking in the world, the German is worst. It starts out by being the most ill-sounding. If one must eat the flesh of pigs, let us by all means call it pork, or something equally euphemistic, and not bring the sty to the table with the word “Schweinfleisch.” 

To look at a German menu is to lose one’s appetite, or at the least, to become a vegetarian. Yet the German is as superior about his national cuisine as the Frenchman is over his, and the German bigotry not only separates him from his French neighbors, but from his Germanic cousins, the Austrians. 

Fundamentally, the German and Austrian cooking are the same, though the Austrian has been cosmopolized through Vienna. But neither a German or an Austrian would admit the similarity.

The Austrians take a dig at the Germans when they say “Deutsche Reichspatent uber Alles.” “Deutsche Reichspatent” (German Imperial) is the derisive name which the Austrian gives to the single sauce which savors all German dishes and with which he haughtily contrasts his own manifold concoctions. 

In a less delicate decision the Austrian refers to the German dishes as “G’frasat.” Probably the most accurate translation of letter and spirit is “swill.” The Germans are devotees of a certain tasteless and tremulous jelly. The Austrians shrugging their shoulders, say: “Unhappy people! They must eat that which we use for sticking up posters.” 

But the German in his turn is arrogant. Said a Berliner in my hearing as he was leaving a Vienna café: “Bei uns in Berlin moechte man es nicht als Abwarchwasser benitzen.”

Now, for a Berliner to call Vienna coffee dishwater is the final insult. For coffee in Vienna is more than a national drink. It is national cult. It is more—it is a national cult.

Palaces have been built for it: palaces where are satin-brocaded walls, deep divans, onyx-topped tables; great windows curtained in gold-colored silk. These palaces are the center of Vienna’s social, intellectual and spiritual life, and coffee-making remains one of Vienna’s most perfected cultures, coffee! One thing, and a poor one, in London. Another thing in Paris; but a manifold thing in the city on the Danube. In a Vienna café you may order “mocha,” and a thick. Turkish coffee, made on the grounds, comes to you in a little jug of burnished copper. If you say “Schwartzen,” a clear black coffee, already sweetened, appears. “Capuciner” is a little cup of coffee with hot milk, a particular and exact blending, with more coffee than milk, while “Nuss” is the same coffee, in a big can. “Schalebraun” has a shade more mile than “Capuciner”; “Schalegold” is mixed with cream and is golden brown. “Melange” is coffee and milk, but fairer than “Capuciner,” with a preponderance of milk, “Melangeschlag” has whipped cream on top, “Masagran” is cold, black coffee, with bits of ice therein: “Eis Kaffee” is frozen. “Kaffee g’spiritzt” has a dash of rum. And the real Viennese has coffee-preferences as finely drawn as a connoisseur’s for old wine.

You cannot buy a railroad ticket or post a letter or register at a hotel in Vienna without being reduced to tears or profanity, as your temperament leads you, by the red tape and inefficiency involved. 

But you can go into a Vienna café and order a “Cupuciner” and ask for your favorite newspaper and they will be set before you instanter. For the price of a coffee you have a library at your disposal.

And a fortnight later you can go into that same café and sit down and a Vienna waiter will look at you for a single second, with one concentrated clairvoyant glance, and without your saying a single word he will lay before you a “Capuciner” and the Berliner Tageblatt, the Manchester Guardian, Le Temps, the New York Herald and Simplicissimus.

That is what coffee has done for Vienna. The Berliner cries “dishwater.” And some people still speak of an Austro-German alliance!

I do not see why idealists, humanitarians, internationalists and all those who wish to usher in the brotherhood of man and the unity of nations do not attack the problem from this fundamental basis of food.

Perhaps nations are like individuals: They never become really intimate until they have eaten together. There is America to point to where Italians, slaves and Anglo-saxons live together in peace and friendliness. A country with the most varied menu in the world.

Perhaps there may be a profound significance in the efforts of the “Americanization” teacher to persuade the Italian immigrant to add apple pie to her diet, and there is certainly a significance in the fact that dozens of anglo-Saxon homes in the states are acquainted with Hungarian goulash.

An international movement for the exchange of national dishes might accomplish wonders, given a little time. Of course, it would first be necessary to analyze the results of certain national dishes before recommending them to other groups.

It is difficult for me to believe that the exquisite 12^th century city of Rothenburg am Tauber, in Germany, or that gay, flowery, charming Renaissance city of Linden in Bavaria, were built by a people who ate noodles and sausages.

I have made no investigation, but it might be discovered that the rise of the noodle accompanied the decline of art in Germany. A similar connection might be established between the Hungarian love for porkkolt, that fiery, goading combination of meat and paprika, and the Hungarian tendency to duels. Perhaps noodles and porkkolt would have to go.

But if the noodle stands the test, such an international bureau might smuggle it stealthily into France, and sneak French salads into Germany, and veal cooked in Marsala into England, and Devonshire clotted cream into Italy. Thus bit by would be established the tie that binds, the tie of a common love for a universal dish.

I remember when a Hungarian cabinet minister, wishing once to express how sympathetic the Hungarians felt toward the Americans, said: “Why, we are really a similar people. We are the only people in Europe who eat green corn on the cob and watermelon!’’

Yes, I believe the plan is a good one. I shall suggest it to the consideration of the League of Nations.