The child of the well-to-do, hedged in by nurses and governesses, seldom knows much of its parents’ activities. I have only the vaguest recollection of the way in which my father and mother spent their days. I know that my father was a director on the principal charitable boards of New York — the Blind Asylum and the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum among others; and that during Lent a ladies’ “sewing class” met at our house to work with my mother for the poor. I also recall frequent drives with my mother, when the usual afternoon round of card-leaving was followed by a walk in the Central Park, and a hunt for violets and hepaticas in the secluded dells of the Ramble. In the evenings my parents went occasionally to the theatre, but never, as far as I remember, to a concert, or any kind of musical performance, until the Opera, then only sporadic, became an established entertainment, to which one went (as in eighteenth century Italy) chiefly if not solely for the pleasure of conversing with one’s friends. Their most frequent distraction was dining out or dinner giving. Sometimes the dinners were stately and ceremonious (with engraved invitations issued three weeks in advance, soups, “thick” and “clear,” and a Roman punch half way through the menu), but more often they were intimate and sociable, though always the occasion of much excellent food and old wine being admirably served, and discussed with suitable gravity.
My father had inherited from his family a serious tradition of good cooking, with a cellar of vintage clarets, and of Madeira which had rounded the Cape. The “Jones” Madeira (my father’s) and the “Newbold” (my uncle’s) enjoyed a particular celebrity even in that day of noted cellars. The following generation, interested only in champagne and claret, foolishly dispersed these precious stores. My brothers sold my father’s cellar soon after his death; and after my marriage, dining in a nouveau riche house of which the master was unfamiliar with old New York cousinships, I had pressed on me, as a treat not likely to have come the way of one of my modest condition, a glass of “the famous Newbold Madeira.”
My mother, if left to herself, would probably not have been much interested in the pleasures of the table. My father’s Dutch blood accounted for his gastronomic enthusiasm; his mother, who was a Schermerhorn, was reputed to have the best cook in New York. But to know about good cooking was a part of every young wife’s equipment, and my mother’s favourite cookery books (Francatelli’s and Mrs. Leslie’s) are thickly interleaved with sheets of yellowing note paper, on which, in a script of ethereal elegance, she records the making of “Mrs. Joshua Jones’s scalloped oysters with cream,” “Aunt Fanny Gallatin’s fried chicken,” “William Edgar’s punch,” and the special recipes of our two famous negro cooks, Mary Johnson and Susan Minneman. These great artists stand out, brilliantly turbaned and ear-ringed, from a Snyders-like background of game, fish and vegetables transformed into a succession of succulent repasts by their indefatigable blue-nailed hands: Mary Johnson, a gaunt towering woman of a rich bronzy black, with huge golden hoops in her ears, and crisp African crinkles under vividly patterned kerchiefs; Susan Minneman, a small smiling mulatto, more quietly attired, but as great a cook as her predecessor.
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