BANQUET SERVICE.
The correct or proper manner of taking care of a number of guests that have assembled before the hour of dinner or supper has always been a puzzling problem to the novice in this line of business; but a first-class caterer will always be willing to help the host out of the dilemma, provided the host does not pretend to know more about the business than the caterer. It is a very good plan to have a colored servant at the door, another to receive the coat, hat, and cane, and give a paper check therefor, and still another to usher the guests to the reception-room, where they will find the host holding court over a bowl of lemonade or a light punch. The guests are eventually summoned to the banquet-room, but just before they enter it is “in good form” to serve them with a glass of plain Vermouth, or a Vermouth cocktail, as an appetizer. White servants are particularly to be recommended for the dining-room.
They then sit down to a repast, served in the following order (assuming of course that the table is set for a banquet):
No less than three, or more than five, oysters on the plate of each guest (with celery on table if in season). The oyster plates and forks are removed. Next serve the soups, with a grated rusk, plain roll, or French bread. Hors-d’œuvres, or whets, are now in order. Next serve the boiled releve; then the heavy entrée; after which serve the light entrée. Your guests will now expect the punch Roumaine, after which serve a good Russian cigarette (if gentlemen only). Then the roast joint; after which serve the game. Then the light salad, with a plain French dressing. Next the sweet entremet. The table should now be cleared; cheese and hard cracker offered; then the ices, with cake, etc., confectionery, dessert, coffee, liquors and cigars. The appropriate vegetables to be passed round with each joint or dish where they naturally belong.
The proper wines for above banquet are: with oysters, white Burgundies, Sauternes, and, if no other wine is at hand, a bottle of still Moselle may be served; with the soup, Sherry and Madeira; with the releves of fish, Hock wines; with the boiled joints, light Bordeaux (claret) and Burgundy wines; with the entrées, champagnes (though champagne may be served from the beginning to the end of dinner if asked for), after the last entrée serve the punch Roumaine, cardinal, etc., with cigarette if desired. A Rhenish wine may be on table to prepare the palate for the roast, and to counteract the sweetness of the punch. With the roasts and game heavy Burgundy and Bordeaux. At many English banquets port wine is sprinkled over the lettuce, and cheese and crackers are served at the same time, but it is not a modern custom. With the sweets, sherry and Madeira. A spoonful of brandy added to the coffee will aid digestion.
A pony of half green Chartreuse and S. O. P. brandy is excellent at the end of a dinner.
Serve the punch Roumaine after the last entrée, and not after the roast, as I have occasionally seen it on bills of fare.
Remember that venison cools rapidly. Iced or cold wines should not be served with it. Hot plates should not be forgotten.
Rhine wine takes kindly to boiled or roast ham.
Have you tried blanched almonds sautéed with a little butter, and seasoned with salt and pepper, and served after the cheese?
But one might suggest in this way indefinitely. The subject is inexhaustible.
Remarks on Wines.—A guest should not be censured “by looks” from the host if he refuses to drink any other wine than that served with the first course, provided it is of a good vintage and pleases his palate. Good, honest wines should be served at all large entertainments, but “private stock” and “rare vintages” should be reserved for the more private affairs, where the guests are personal friends of the host, and, though not recognized as wine-drinkers, they are good judges of and appreciate thoroughly a good glass of wine. The promiscuous gathering (with few exceptions) seldom appreciates a rare bottle of still wine. Their ideal wine is the champagne. I have often seen a bottle of splendid Chateau Yquem and Johannesberger pushed aside as “stuff” the moment the champagne appeared, and by gentlemen whom I had previously considered bon vivants. They will tell you that a wine with a deposit or crust cannot be pure, and it is only a waste of time to attempt to explain that old wines without a deposit are more or less doctored.
The host should be censured for sending his cellar curiosities to table when the majority of the guests are strangers to him.
On decanting wines, Denman has observed: “To fully develop the flavor and bouquet of any wine a little gentle warmth is necessary, and it is therefore advisable that the wines intended for immediate use should be placed in a warmer temperature than that of the cellar”; and Fin-Bee adds “that the dining-room is the proper place,” which is the custom among first-class caterers. The heavy wines should remain in the dining-room uncorked a few hours under the supervision of a trusty person, for the average waiter is partial to good wine, and can remove a bottle as dexterously as a king of legerdemain.
Francatelli insists that the different kinds of sherries, ports, Madeira, and all Spanish and Portuguese wines are improved by being decanted several hours before dinner.
His advice and suggestions are proper; but does it not please the eye—is there not an unwritten history in all the dark cobwebs, etc., that cling with a brotherly affection to the original bottle?
The favorite Hocks with Americans are P. A. Mumm’s Johannesberg, Barton & Guestier’s, Henkell & Co.’s wines, and a few other well-known reliable firms. Prince Metternich, Schloss Johannesberg wines are very good, but “Blue Seal” is held at too high a figure ($150 per case) to ever become popular.
P. A. Mumm’s Hock wines are favorites, and justly so, for they are entirely free from adulteration.
At an American banquet recently given in London, the favorite wine was Heidsieck, on the ground that it was one of the first wines to find popular favor in America. This information will, no doubt, surprise wine-drinking Americans, for if our custom-house reports of importation are reliable, we have discovered several Rheims wines that are decidedly superior to Heidsieck. The importation in 1879 of G. H. Mumm’s champagne alone was twenty-two thousand five hundred and twenty-six cases more than of any other brand.
Pommery and Cliquot (the two widows), Roederer dry, Moët & Chandon, Imperial, and a few others are all good dinner wines.
Sparkling Hock, if properly handled, is a wine that should find favor in this country, but the demand is so limited that it is very apt to spoil before the case is used up. That made from the Riesling grape is the best.
American champagnes (and it grieves me to say it) are not the proper wines to serve at a banquet or dinner. Their peculiar acrid taste does not suit a palate that has been educated on foreign wines. They may be served at a banquet given in a foreign country where every dish and every wine is purely American, or sent to the cook for his champagne(?) sauce, etc. A bottle of “Cook’s Imperial” may be served at lunch, and it is proper enough at the end of the bar where the crackers and cheese hold court. It finds favor with the youth “seeing the sights” of a great city, but not elsewhere.
Pierre Blot, in the Galaxy, observed “that American wines are just as good as foreign wines for the table and for cooking purposes. Bogus wines,” he said, “are sold to native Americans almost entirely.” Friend Blot evidently got in with the wrong crowd when he visited us.
The First Champagne.—It happened that about the year 1668 the office of cellarer was conferred upon a worthy monk named Perignon. Poets and roasters, we know, are born, and not made; and this precursor of the Moëts and Cliquots, the Heidsiecks and the Mumms of our days, seems to have been a heaven-born cellarman, with a strong head and a discriminating palate. The wine exacted from the neighboring cultivators was of all qualities, good, bad, and indifferent; and with the spirit of a true Benedictine, Dom Perignon hit upon the idea of “marrying” the produce of one vineyard with that of another. He had noted that one kind of soil imparted fragrance and another generosity, and discovered that a white wine could be made from the blackest grapes, which would keep good, instead of turning yellow and degenerating like the wine obtained from white ones. Moreover, the happy thought occurred to him that a piece of cork was a much more suitable stopper for a bottle than the flax dipped in oil which had heretofore served that purpose. The white, or, as it was sometimes styled, the gray wine of Champagne grew famous, and the manufacture spread throughout the province, but that of Hautvillers held the predominance. The cellarer, ever busy among his vats and presses, barrels and bottles, alighted upon a discovery destined to be far more important in its results. He found out the way of making an effervescent wine, a wine that burst out of the bottle and overflowed the glass, that was twice as dainty to the taste, and twice as exhilarating in its effects. It was at the close of the seventeenth century that this discovery was made, when the glory of the Roi Soleil was on the wane, and with it the splendor of the court of Versailles. The king for whose especial benefit liquors had been invented found a gleam of his youthful energy as he sipped the creamy, foaming vintage that enlivened his dreary tête-à-tête with the widow of Scarron. It found its chief patrons, however, among the bands of gay young roysterers, the future roués of the Regency, whom the Duc d’Orléans and the Duc de Vendôme had gathered round them at the Palais Royal and at Anet. It was at one of the famous soupers d’Anet that the Marquis de Sillery, who had turned his sword into a pruning-knife and applied himself to the cultivation of his paternal vineyards on the principles inculcated by the cellarer of St. Peter’s, first introduced the wine bearing his name. The flower-wreathed bottles which, at a given signal, a dozen of blooming young damsels scantily draped in the guise of Bacchanals placed upon the table were hailed with rapture, and thenceforth sparkling wine was an indispensable adjunct at all the petits soupers of the period. In the highest circles the popping of champagne-corks seemed to ring the knell of sadness, and the victories of Marlborough were in a measure compensated for by this grand discovery.—London Society.