Host and guest : a book about dinners, dinner-giving, wines, and desserts / by A.V. Kirwan.

  • Kirwan, A. V. (Andrew Valentine), 1804-1870.
Date:
[1864]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Host and guest : a book about dinners, dinner-giving, wines, and desserts / by A.V. Kirwan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    larged views, the production of ingenious essays and instructive memoirs, are all owing to that elegant and agreeable body of men and women, kept toge- ther in a main degree by the exquisite attraction of petits soupers and luxurious dinners. From the moment of the Executive Directory, 1795, to the period of the 18th Brumaire, all the historians among the great cooks admit that their illustrious art was under the greatest obligations to Barras, that well-born tribune of the people, of whose family it was said, “ noble comme les Barras, aussi anciens que lesrochers de Provence.” Whether as Commissary of the government at Toulon—at whose siege, by the way, he first became acquainted with Bonaparte—or as Director, or as residing as a private gentleman at his chateau of Grosbois, Barras always exhibited those epicurean tastes which were either natural to him, or which he had acquired from a residence at the French settlement of Pondicherry. During the most ferocious periods of the Revolu- tion, there were but two splendid exceptions to the self-denying ordinances of the time. That desperate demagogue Danton loved and copiously indulged himself in morels, and is recorded to have given dinners at 400 francs a head; and Barras, when in the Directory, had his button mushrooms conveyed to him en poste from the Bouches du Rhone. Napoleon, who may be said to have succeeded to power at the epoch of the 18th Brumaire, is falsely