Foreign News: Winter Pudding Season

The Cheshire Cheese, famed London eating house, where luscious mutton chops, sizzling steaks, lean cold lamb, stodgy but satisfying beefsteak puddings and, last but by no means least, palate-tickling lark puddings are served to as many U. S. men and women in London as are wont to drink at the Ritz Bar in Paris—this old London “coffee house” celebrated last week the opening of the winter pudding season with its 152nd annual dinner.

This dinner calls for an elaborate ritual. First one of the guests must “call the pudding down” and another guest must “lead the pudding in.” After that it is carved and eaten with rare old liquers to “wash it down.”

This year T. P. (“Tay Pay”) O’Connor, 79, M. P. and a veteran of Fleet Street (which in London parlance is synonymous for journalism), was one of the guests of honor. As he strode into the low, planked ceilinged room in which a table was set for 50, he noted the portrait of Samuel Johnson by Sir Joshua Reynolds that adorns a space above the fireplace and he noted, too, the heavily timbered windows that shut out much of what little light streams in from the narrow Wine Office Court, a lane hardly more than three feet wide, on which the Cheshire Cheese abuts.

The droning babble of the assembled men was halted as the guests sat themselves at their appointed places. Then an 87-year old guest, who had been a pannier boy at the Cheshire Cheese in 1855 and who had eaten his first dinner there 70 years ago, “led the pudding in,” after it had been duly “called down.” He then instructed “Tay Pay” how to carve it.

The Cheshire Cheese was brought into existence some 250 years ago, not long after one Pasque Rossee, Greek servant to a retired Turkish coffee merchant, opened London’s first Coffee House in 1652. It is recorded that Shakespeare frequented it often.

Ben Jonson was another Elizabethan who ate at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, as it was then called. Once a dispute arose as to who could most quickly make the best couplet. Poet Joshua Sylvester took up the challenge and penned:

I, Sylvester,

Kiss’d your sister.

To which Ben Jonson retorted with:

I, Ben Jonson,

Kiss’d your wife.

“But that’s not a rhyme!” roared Sylvester.

“No,” said Jonson, “but it’s true.”

And it is recorded that in later days Charles II supped there with his mistress, Nell Gwyrme, on a mutton chop.

Other famed-people who ate there were Voltaire, Bolingbroke, Pope, Congreve. But, perhaps, none were so famed in his day as Samuel Johnson, who was wont to congregate there with his cronies Oliver Goldsmith & Thomas Chatterton. The Doctor always made for the left hand room and sat at a table near the window—a table and seat that is now pointed out with great pride to visitors. It is related that he would sit there for hours looking at the buxom dairymaids making cheese, afterwards explaining the merits of his famed dictionary to his friends. Exhausting this subject for the time being, he would rise and say to Boswell: “Come, let us walk along Fleet Street.”