Note 19 — Chapter XVIII · TAVERNS.

A sympathetic frequenter of the “Cheshire Cheese” has sent me a glowing account of its alternations, which I can cordially endorse. “The ‘Cheese’ is really the last of our old taverns, conducted on genuine principles, which one wishes to cherish. When genial spring has brought forward vegetation the waiter’s cheerful intimation that ‘Asparagus is on, sir,’ recalls the fact forcibly to your notice. When later, ‘’Am and peas’ can be secured, the vision of early summer is perfect, and is not even disturbed by boiled beans and bacon. In the hot, sultry days, cool salads are appropriate, and when these disappear there is a closing in of daylight and a general warning that the year is past its prime. Then does the ‘Cheese’ draw its blinds and light its gas, stoke up its fires and announce its great puddings. Yet, further ahead, when raw November days come upon us, the savoury smell of Irish stew—that fine winter lining for the hungry—pervades the place, and so the season goes round. Of all the changes brought about by the rolling year, however, none is so popular as the advent of the pudding, though it means frost, and damp, and cold winds. The pudding (italics for ‘the,’ please) has no rival in size or quality. Its glories have been sung in every country, even the Fort Worth Texas Gazette having something to say on the subject. The pudding ranges from fifty to sixty, seventy, and eighty pounds weight, and gossip has it that in the dim past the rare dish was constructed to proportions of a hundredweight. It is composed of a fine light crust in a huge china basin, and there are entombed therein beefsteaks, kidneys, oysters, larks, mushrooms, and wondrous spices and gravies, the secret of which is known only to the compounder. The boiling process takes about sixteen to twenty hours, and the smell on a windy day has been known to reach as far as the Stock Exchange. The process of carving the pudding on Wednesdays and Saturdays when it is served is as solemn a ceremony as the cutting of the mistletoe with the golden sickle of the Druids. The late proprietor, Mr. Beaufoy A. Moore, could be with difficulty restrained from rising from his bed when stricken down with illness to drive to the ‘Cheese’ and serve out the pudding. No one, he believed, could do it with such judicious care and judgment as he did. The dining-room is fitted with rows of wooden benches and wooden tables without the slightest pretence of show. But the cloths are white and clean, and the cutlery bright, while the china service is of that ancient and undemonstrative blue design which delighted our forefathers, and is known as the willow pattern. The glasses are large, thick, and heavy, and might be used with effect in an argument. But the silver is silver, not Brummagem, and has seen more service than would destroy half the property of modern public-houses. On the walls hang three prominent objects (in addition to the usual advertisements of brands of champagnes and clarets), viz., a barometer, a print of Dr. Johnson, and an old oil painting by Wageman, representing the interior of the room with a gentleman trying his steak with his knife, a waiter holding up a port wine cork in the well-known attitude ‘two with you’; and a cat rubbing her oleaginous hide in anxious expectation against the leg of the settle. This picture, like one in the bar, is an heirloom, or rather a fixture, which cannot be sold, but must pass from landlord to landlord. The fireplaces are huge and commodious, capable of holding a hundredweight of coal at a time. On a cold winter’s day, when their genial warmth penetrates every portion of the room, and the merry flames dance and leap after each other up the capacious chimney space, a man listens to the howling wind without, or hears the rain pattering on the paved courts. Here gather poets, painters, lawyers, barristers, preachers, journalists, stockbrokers, musicians, town councillors, and vestrymen, with just a soupçon of sporting celebrities, and a decided dash of the impecunious ‘Have beens.’ The latter represent in the ‘Cheese’ colony the Irish division in Parliament. Up-stairs there are extensive ranges of kitchens, where burnt sacrifices are being perpetually offered up in the shape of mutton and beef; a dining room, and a smoke-room, dark-panelled and cosy, where a man may forget the world and be lost to it during a much-coveted midday rest. The privileged few who are allowed to go into the wondrous cellars—redolent of sawdust, cobweb-coated, and covered with dust—wander amidst avenues of wine-bins with wonder and astonishment at the space occupied underground as compared with the upper regions.”